Shape Shifting

Well, her shape needed no shifting at all. But together, we created a new aesthetic more befitting the lovely and enterprising Kyra. My friend asked me if I would help her with some nips and tucks on her blog. I was pleased to help and I think we met our expectations.

It was a great learning process for me. I started with a standard, canned Blogger template, and after considerable modification, we ended up with this:

The .css was coded at a higher level than I'm used to, so that took a bit of playing with, but there were really only two big sticking points in the design process. The first one was in designing a banner that would seamlessly blend with the post and sidebar content. The design part was easy, thanks to Kyra's great graphic selection (her little "Mini Me") and one of her beautiful paintings used for the banner background (we have more of those to come, BTW : ). The sticky part was knowing how to successfully create this content blend. First I tried simply setting a negative top margin value for the main and sidebar wrappers, pulling those content areas up into the banner. This displayed fine in IE, but Firefox would have no part of it. So that was no good. The all around better solution was to slice the banner graphic in two pieces horizontally. The top half was simply imported as the Blogger banner, then I created a new DIV container for the the bottom half of the graphic, and laid it just inside of the outer wrapper, under everything else, which worked great.

The other thing that I had a bit of trouble with getting the footer graphic positioned correctly. Wahh! Had never done that before either. Kyra added some great touches throughout the process. So head on over to her place and take a look. I think her Open House is going on right now!

I do kinda miss the Charlie's Angels hotties on the old banner. But new Mini Me is pretty hot too. : ) Now I gotta do something with my OWN blog.