My brother Kenneth and I are both bloggers. He doesn’t blog as much as I do, but only writes posts when he feels that need to share his thoughts. We’ve got different blogging styles, which I find amazing. He’s younger, but his vocabulary is wider than mine.

Anyway, this post isn’t really about him and his writing style , but the design I made for his new blog. I also purchased a domain for him – WhatTheFat.net – for his own personal space on the web.

The Domain / Blog Title

I remember Kenneth coming up to me one night telling me he wants to start a blog where he’ll write about his struggles in losing weight. After some wordplays, we finally decided on WTF – What The Fat. I immediately imagined how I wanted the design to look like.

He was publishing on Blogger, but I later decided to move his blog to WordPress. It was after he decided to convert it to his own personal blog instead of just focusing on his weight loss journey. I moved all his old posts and, voila! Here’s the final layout:

The Colors

He wanted me to use the colors of his old blog. He prefers an earthy color palette and so I ended up using tan, beige, dark browns and gray.

The red color came from my idea for the header, using it to emphasize on the letter F. So, the color was used for parts of the theme that needed to be highlighted like the post title and sidebar titles.

The Header

The layout of the blog title on the header was conceptualized the moment we decided on that title. The rest of the concept came to me when he decided to make What The Fat his personal blog.

Again, the F is in red color to make it pop. And, if you look closely, the background of the header is actually filled with words starting with the letter F and are related to his weight loss journey and what Kenneth goes through in his personal life.

The Sidebars

To continue with the concept of the letter F being one of the main focus points of the whole design, I made the sidebar titles like this:

Well, the hard part is thinking of other words for Sponsors (Face Time), Archives.(Fast Rewind), etc. But, I think we did a good job coming up with alternate words for the widget titles, don’t you agree?

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the end result of my design. My bro loved it, too! I just wish he’d get to blog more often.

Check out my brother Kenneth’s blog – What The Fat.

What do you think of What The Fat’s design?

Share your thoughts at the comments section.
I KINDA only welcome constructive criticism. LOL

I’m still not done with the blog design for Joy of Notepad Corner. After her, I’ve got 2 more blogs on queue for makeovers. Then, I’ll post my rates and officially offer my services to all bloggers out there.

There’s a new food blogger in town – Karl aka as Santelmo over at Pinoy Muffin Top. I was able to convince him to start a food blog and, as a gift, I promised to design a blog theme for him. It was more of a Blogger blog theme makeover actually.

This was how his blog looked before the makeover:

He was using a free Blogger template for food blogs. I actually found the colors and the background image appealing so I incorporated some of it on his new theme.

Karl wanted a clean layout. So, I used a li’l minimalistic approach in the whole design process, most especially because I was designing for a guy.

( details on the makeover after the jump )

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Eihdra of One Proud Momma was the grand prize winner of my Make a Wish blog contest over at Just Another Pixel. Among her prizes, she won a custom blog design or makeover. But, for some reason, the sponsor disappeared on us. Since I already got familiarized with WordPress after putting up my first self-hosted WP blog (Pinay Reviewer), I decided to complete her blog’s makeover myself.

After the contest, Eihdra and I became friends. And, I was happy to complete the makeover for her. She had a LONGGGGGGG list of things she wanted me to do with her blog (she’s very aware of this, she even blogged about it *lol*) and I gladly accepted the challenge.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Almost everything on her list of ideas, I was able to accomplish. I’m pretty happy with the outcome. And I’m so glad Eihdra loved it.

Details of the Blog Makeover

She wanted pink and purple and I’m glad she loved how I combined those colors for her blog’s layout. She also likes butterflies so I added that pink butterfly on her blog header (rather subtly), and on her sidebar and blog title designs, including her post signature.

I found 2 images that suited what I wanted to do with the header. There were a lot of space on the header so I decided to add that RSS email subscription on there, which I feel added more fun to the whole layout/design, don’t you think?

This is my first WordPress blog makeover project (I didn’t count my WP blogs, of course) and I feel that I’m now ready to do more blog makeovers. It’s fun designing for other people, really.

A couple of people already asked me about my blog makeover rates. Well, honestly, I don’t have a rates list prepared yet. I’ve been really busy with all the changes happening in our computer shop business so I might postpone posting that ’til December. I want to offer affordable blog makeovers for bloggers out there so keep posted for that. For now, if you are interested, please, contact me with your details.

Yes! I have decided on blankpixels.com‘s final design and theme! After months of contemplating on my own blog’s design, I finally chose this theme and just made some tweaks to satisfy my color choices.

I was actually thinking of coming up with my own layout, but I’ve been REALLY busy. I did some searching for themes that I’ll fall in love with, but this was the only one that inspired me. Let me tell you more about how I decided on this theme:

Arthemia Theme

When i saw this theme designed by Michael Hutagalung, I fell in love with it. I was initially looking for a dark theme, but I loved the combination of dark gray, very light gray and white. I was actually looking for a black and white theme, but couldn’t find any that looked as clean, simple and yet beautiful as this one. Plus, when I saw this, I immediately knew what I wanted to do to tweak it.

That’s how this theme initially looked like. I changed the colors, removed the advertising on top to give way to a larger header.

I’m still not done adding widgets on the sidebars and footer. But, I’m done with tweaking this theme.

The Header

When I decided to change the niche of this blog to a general geek blog, I already had a header design in mind. And, I found just the right vector for it. I just changed the colors of the hair of that geeky girl to match my hair color.

I love the simplicity of the header I made. It’s simple yet fun. Well, that’s my opinion. *LOL*

I really need to finish the whole layout now. I still have no posts under Headlines and Features (this post will be the first). And I need to find other widgets that I’ll place on the footer. I can’t wait to finally post some more geeky stuff on here! Keep posted!

What do you think of my blog’s theme?!