Blog Spotlight: Barefoot Blonde

This blog was created by Amber Fillerup Clark, and the content is geared towards women who are mostly young mothers. The author creates a wide range of content such as lifestyle, beauty, tips to new moms, fashion, travel, and more. To be completely honest, I found this website when I was searching around for inspiration and don’t normally follow this blog. I did really like some of the design elements she uses however, so I thought I would still share.

To start, I really like the way she categorizes her blog posts. Each category features a three column design where the picture is the main background. The pictures are faded until you hover over them, and they become more clear. This is an easy html design that any beginner can utilize. I have a similar design on my websites I created, however I really like the size of her images and the faded effect. This element takes a simple design layout and makes it a little more interesting and catches the viewer’s eye.

Another thing I liked about her website is that she features a section of commonly asked questions on her about page. I’ve never seen this before and I really liked this idea! I’m not quite sure how to do this in html, but it seems similar to a dropdown navigation bar. If I were the author of this blog however, I would choose a different color than this orange, and I might make the width of each dropdown section slightly wider. Although the questions look big in the screenshot I attached, this is only because I cropped the image. In real life, this section of her website actually doesn’t take up a lot of space and looks small compared to the other elements and sections she uses. The orange color seems to be a theme throughout the blog, and although it works in some areas where it is used a few times together to create a uniform look such as the blog posts show on the homepage, I would say it doesn’t work in this area. If she didn’t want to change the color of the frequently asked questions section I would highly suggest she make it more visually appealing by changing the width, or adding in other elements that also have the same color so that this section doesn’t look as randomly placed as it does right now.

Overall, I would say that this website is professional and does a good job at organizing content into a way that is easy for readers to find and makes sense. I enjoyed the frequently asked questions section, but would advise to change the colors of the dropdown menus and make them wider so that they take up more space and don’t look randomly placed. If I were to design another website I may use this blog as inspiration because of the way she takes simple html layouts and changes them to make them have more style and flare.

Blog Spotlight: Danielle Carolan

Danielle is a college student that posts content about her life as a student at the University of Georgia, and I have been following her for a while because I really enjoy the content she creates.

Although I mainly follow her youtube channel, I recently checked out her website for some design inspiration.

I had to zoom out a lot to capture her home page in a screenshot, but I absolutely love the layout she used for her header images. This may be harder to recreate, but it’s still nice for some inspiration. It looks as if she put the stars and borders on the images in Photoshop, but I am not sure how she arrange the pictures to lay on top of each other in html. I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to recreate, but it really makes the site look more sophisticated.

Although I do really enjoy the layout of her website, if it were me, I would downsize some of the content so it wasn’t so large on screen. It may not look as large in these pictures, but thats because I had to zoom out to about 60%. Again the effects on the images look like they were down in Photoshop, and I really like how simple they are but they also make the design more edgy and unique.

One thing I would suggest to change is a few of the tabs in the navigation bar. The first thing that caught my eye was the tab labeled “Charity.” This links to a page where she lists three charities and a button people can click to donate if they want to. I would guess that not a lot of Danielle’s viewers, which are girls mostly either in high school or college, do not have the money to donate to charities. I would say this tab is a little out of place and shouldn’t be a part of her website. If she truly wanted to include these charities she might want to consider placing them under her about me page, where she can talk about why she is passionate about each. They should not have their own tab in the navigation because although she may care about these causes, they aren’t a part of her brand.

Another thing I would suggest changing in the navigation bar is to also get rid of the social tab. She lists all of her social media account on the right hand side of the navigation bar, so having both is a little repetitive.

Overall, I really like this website and it helped me with some design layout inspiration for my own blog.

Easy Ways To Generate Color Pallets

If you’re like me, a beginner at all things design, you may feel a little lost when it comes to deciding what colors work best together.

One problem I often face is liking different colors separately, but when I put them together they don’t mix as well as I thought they would. To fix this problem I usually use an online color pallet generator.

I use the adobe color pallet generator as well as a website called coolors.com.

Adobe’s generator is very helpful because you can find a color you like and then they will help you find other colors that go well with what you chose. They also give you the CMYK and RGBA numbers which can be useful when using InDesign.

Coolors.com is more fun in my opinion because all you have to do is press your spacebar on your keyboard, and the website will automatically generate a pallet for you. It’s fun to click through the different ones you come up with until you find one you really like. I use this website when I’m feeling lazy (most of the time) and don’t want to do the work myself.