Pilcrow: My New Blog Design

Whoa. Since I made the bold move and tore the dark but rigid Chaotic Soul from my sight and site last year, it’s amazing how fickle I’ve become.

I’ve tried out six other WordPress designs, but I’ve been growing tired of them rather quickly. Most of them just didn’t feel like me or allow me enough self-expression. Like, I’ve had Spectrum for a few months. It’s cute, and even with the option to change backgrounds, there’s not much you can do with it to make it feel distinct.

What I want in a WP design is a lot of flexibility to make my mark in Blogland. I need decent header room, and not many offer it. I don’t want categories or any kind of clutter at the top.  I don’t like too simple, with boring fonts. I also like being able to choose my own background and the option to remove the site name to avoid the redundancy when I have it in the header.

I’ve already used and got bored with Under the Influence, so, this brings me to two possible designs that meet all those specs.

Duster, which is sleek with black and white guts over your choice of background, but it just seemed a little too big and overwhelming to me.

And, Pilcrow, which is what I chose. It comes in four different color schemes: light, dark, red and brown and also gives you several layout options if you’re the widget-happy sort.

I’ve had this header in mind for a while but it’s too high for the defaults on most of the others. I’m glad I looked closer at Pilcrow, because it looked boring to me at first and I missed the color options entirely.

Well, I do love the red scheme so much, though the black and white is sharp as well. But the red just pops, and I haven’t had red before, so it feels very fresh and new to me. And with the added background and the custom header, it helps to give my blog a more individualized look, which I’m happy about. What do you think of Pilcrow?

Really, the only thing I don’t really like about this design is the calendar. I know it’s lame to dismiss a whole design over a silly thing like that, but I almost did. Most designs have a cute calendar, and in this, the numbers crash together and it couldn’t be more blah. They could’ve tried harder, that’s all I’m saying.

Now that I have a new layout for Creative Burst, I just need to work on a new concept, because I’m getting bored just talking about writing. And by my lack of frequency, I’m pretty sure it shows.

~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.