Did you miss me? Things got a little quiet on the blog last week as I tried to check everything off on a daunting to-do list that I’ve been putting off for a long time. You know the old addage about the cobbler’s children? Well, it certainly applies to me and my online space. It seems that it always falls by the wayside, but the new year had me motivated to make some changes!
Since I relaunched my blog and website all under the Katelyn Brooke brand in August of 2012, my brand has evolved and I made tweaks as I went. I’ve updated my website a few times and made changes here and there, but the logos pretty much remained the same. I figured it was time to make some more serious changes and do an official “rebrand.”
As you can see, it’s not a drastic departure from my original brand- I definitely wasn’t starting from scratch, and you can clearly see the evolution of the new brand from the previous one. Unfortunately, I’ve never posted a brand board for myself, but I’m more than making up for that today! Here’s a look at where things stand for Katelyn Brooke, the brand.
The Mark
The mark that I’m using as the logo for my blog was actually inspired by the return address label I made for our personal Christmas cards. I drew this little wreath, and I loved them so much that I tried to draw something on brand for my blog. It took a few times to get it right, but I like the abstract dot look that I landed on.
I liked what having the little “Katelyn Brooke | Est.” text did for balancing the logo, but I struggled with picking a year. At first I picked 2009, the year I started blogging. Then I wondered if it should be 2012, the year I combined Katelyn Brooke Designs, Stripes and Polka Dots, and Sketch & Wash. Finally, I settled on 2011, the year I started Katelyn Brooke Designs and began the Katelyn Brooke brand. But I’m reserving the right to change my mind again.
Responsive Design
Ever since I’ve been on WordPress, my sites have been responsive (if you’re wondering what that means, check out this post.) Genesis makes it relatively easy to modify your site for responsive design, and I felt like since I was a web designer I had to exhibit this feature on my own sites.
Clients with blogs and sites (not unlike mine) would often ask my opinion about how to handle the mobile view of their site, and I a lot of times I would advise them not to go that route. Not because it was less work for me, but because I genuinely felt like their original layout would be more functional than something adapted to be responsive.
It all changed for me when I got an iPad over Christmas. I was scanning through my own perfectly responsive blog, and I decided that I didn’t like it. So I decided to start following my own advice and forget the trend. I might go back at some point, but for now, I think this is working for my set up.
Features
This has been the “softest” launch I’ve ever done, meaning that it went live and then I kept adding a lot of features / updates really slowly. I still have a lot I want to add, and I’ll leave it up to you to explore the website on your own (although I’m thinking about talking about it in more detail on Biz Nuggets!)
As far as the blog goes, the Resources page got an overhaul and you’ll notice that the blogs that used to inhabit that space are now in the rotating blog roll widget at the bottom of the sidebar. I also added a Policies page instead of listing them in my sidebar. Stay tuned for more features being added in the coming weeks!
So here’s my question for you… do you see any thing that needs to be fixed? I’m one of those people who appreciates typos being pointed out, so let me know if you see any!