What I did
Today I went in and basically changed everything:
After watching the Lynda tutorial on site customization, there were a ton of things I wanted to try out. Deciding on a theme took a while, but I finally narrowed it down to a few (Intergalactic, Modularity lite, Parament, and Piano black). They all ended up having a minimalist feel to them–which I really like–but some of them just didn’t give me enough customization options. I ended up choosing “Piano Black” because it seemed to be a good compromise between form and function.
I added a few widgets, but I feel like they will be more applicable once I have some more content on the site. I also experimented with header photos on the main page and ended up choosing a cropped version of my online identity image.
Perhaps most obviously, though, I changed the blog title to “Sympathetic Resonances.”
Why I did it
After thinking for a while, I decided that I wanted to expound upon the theme I established in my online identity image–where I tied my love of music and space together. My new title, “Sympathetic Resonances” builds on this and actually has three separate meanings: Sympathetic resonance is a musical term used to describe vibrations induced in one object by another (e.g. one guitar string “excites” another because of similar frequency characteristics). Sympathetic resonance also describes the periodic gravitational pulls exerted between moons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance for more info). Finally, I looked at sympathetic resonance from a design perspective; Nothing exists in a vacuum and we are constantly being influenced by the world around us. Just like one string vibrates off of another, others’ designs give me inspiration. In this way, I think my new title is a pretty solid fit.
All of the other choices I made reflect this theme: I added my guitar image to the header to tie music back in and I used piano black as my theme (both for its musical title and its inky black space-like colors).
Though I’m really pleased with how my blog is coming along, I really dislike the fonts in it. I’m still trying to figure out how (or if) I can change the settings. Hopefully I won’t have to pick a new theme, but I suppose that will be a topic for my next post.
