When Adrian and I decided to set up this site, we both agreed that we wanted to have a simple and out-of-the-box solution that could easily be implemented and styled. WordPress seemed like a no-brainer for us, though despite not having used it before, immediately it became clear that it was very well suited to our needs. After finally deciding on a theme (there were so many wonderful designs to chose from), I then needed to personalise it to make it feel more like ours and my priority was to sort out the banner. The Graphene Theme allows you to plonk a customised banner at the top and so I wanted to have something that was eye-catching, simple and didn’t take too long to create.
While looking at colour schemes for Ade Squared, I stumbled across a wonderful site called Colour Lovers that allows you to create patterns, colour schemes and also combine them and share them; a social network for colour and pattern lovers if you will. And so, after a good couple of hours browsing the site and picking out ten designs (I was in my element!), I set to work cropping and creating the banners for Ade Squared in Pixelmator (another great discovery). The banners are set to display randomly, but if you don’t want to keep hitting refresh, the designs are below:
Colour Lovers is definitely a website that I will go back to in the future, especially for colour scheme guidance and it was a wonderful discovery and a procrastinator’s heaven. The dimensions of the banner are 1000×120 in accordance with the margins that I had set for the theme and I think it works really well and feels like I have put my own stamp on the site.
AdeSquared 