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This past week, I had the pleasure of working with my newest cyberfriend, Joni Liebel, on some blog header designs for her two sites and I thought they might make a good spotlight topic.

The first one, JoniLiebel.com, is her coaching site.

It's sometimes hard for me, when I come across a site like this, to know what kind of input I should offer. There are a couple of things I just didn't like, so rather than just come right out and say so, I usually send some feelers out to see how committed they are to the design and how open they are to suggestions.

I first learned this lesson when I was just getting started as a sign maker, I made the mistake of disparaging the design of the owners daughter. While it may have been amateurish from a sign guy perspective it was nevertheless a work of art to the owner, who abrubtly left my shop red-faced and never returned.

Note to self: Keep mouth shut.

I sent Joni an email with my initial suggestions and quickly found that she was the kind of person I love to work with. She listened carefully and was open to my suggestions and seemed to trust my ability to design something she'd like.

I set up a test site for her to look at the design ideas I came up with for her blog. I uploaded a fresh copy of the Celestial Aura theme because I had never used it before and immediately liked the 880px default width because the existing 1000px fixed width really bothered me.

I suggested a photo would be a good idea, putting a face to the name and she agreed. In fact, she had just had some photographs taken (something more than 100 of them) and she was in the process of editing a few. She mentioned that she liked a classic typeface, so I put together this mockup for her using one of the pictures I picked out.

I used a gaussian blur of one of my photographs of fall foliage for the background. She liked it. Now to make it work with her theme.

I liked the new blue navbar and thought the background should probably stay blue to match. I had a seamless background I got from istockphoto that was feminine looking and even though it was green, I could do an overlay on the existing blue background and voila, a seamless blue background.

Now to figure out how to make it work with the theme. The header background actually matched the green better, but I decided to change the background color instead. I zoomed in on the image more and texturized the stripe.

Here is the completed blog.

Aarrrggghh. This is a problem. Sometimes a background doesn't realize that it's supposed to be in the background…time for a quick change.

Joni actually wanted me to go with a white background, but I like my backgrounds to have a bit of movement, so I washed out the color to show a hint of blue.

What do you think?

Roy