The Essential Pieces of Me

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks playing with graphics software for the Mac. Yeah, I know, there’s Photoshop, but I really didn’t want to shell out 800$ for software that I was going to whip out and futz around with four times a year when a mood takes me to redesign my blog logo. That’s really where this all begins… with my blog graphic.

Truth be told, I hate it because it came with the theme. Now, the graphic itself is nice, but it’s missing something for me. It’s just not me. I like the rest of the theme but I am so used to being able to channel a piece of myself into my web pages that I just don’t comprehend the trends of today’s bloggers for just grabbing whatever the hell they find available for free with wordpress or moveable type and call it a day. Even Leo Laporte and Wil Wheaton’s blogs look like they snagged their graphics off some free archive and for most people, I’m sure this is okay, but I used to design graphics for people for a living so I really can’t just settle for whatever happens to catch my eye on some freebie archive. I needed the world to see, visually, what it is they are coming to read and I can do that through the magic of photoshop.

Of course, the process of putting this together is easier said than done. I’ve thought of using my car as a base to begin with and then adding some pictures of some of the things I talk about a lot, if you’re a regular reader, then you know what these things are. If you’re not then you will realize quickly, just by looking at my tag cloud, that I talk about cars, macs, gadgets and anecdotes about life from the eyes of a geek girl who is standing on the outside looking in. Sometimes, I get ballsy and fling mud at the local media companies, and let’s be honest, they deserve it. But really, when it came down to defining these things in a visual medium, I found that it simply couldn’t be done in a way that wasn’t chaotic and strange. So I’m still struggling with a new banner graphic… but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m going about this the wrong way.

I think I’m trying to sum up too much in one image and what I need to be doing is considering the possibility of evoking feeling with a much simpler graphic. I’m treating it like a statement on my life and not paying attention to the statement that I really want to make. I should be approaching this like a poem. This is not a summation of the essential pieces of me, it is a brief glimpse into one moment that, while seeming small and forgettable on the surface, carries with it so much meaning that it leaves a sense of wonder and introspection for the remainder of the day.

New banner graphic, coming soon.