a blog by its cover

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you've probably noticed that it's gone through an number of aesthetic iterations. I started out with one of the standard Blogger templates -- Minima Lefty. I picked that template for two main reasons: first, it looked like the plainest, least intrusive of the choices, and, second, I wanted the sidebar on the left hand side, since, for reasons too dull to go into, although I'm right-handed, I mouse left.

I found a picture of a krater, an Ancient Greek vase used to mix wine and water, with clay-colored figures etched on a black background, illustrating the death of Niobe's children. The image was in black and white, which suited the uncluttered look I was trying for, but because the krater is curved and the screen is flat, the edges of the scene were cut off, which bothered me every time I opened the page. Because the scene was relatively complex, I tried to find a simpler graphic for the header that wouldn't compete with it. For a while I used the image of a piece of marble, then I tried a photo I had taken by pointing the camera straight up on a sunny day, reducing the contrast until both sky and and clouds were shades of grey. But, although it was an improvement, the header background struck me as too derivative of (and not nearly as pretty as) the one on the Louvre's homepage .

I couldn't find a header background that I was happier with, until I tried my photo of the green-grey waters of the Seine, which had the advantage (as someone pointed out) of looking a little like a river of tears. Once that was up, I decided that there was now enough color and texture that I could finally get rid of the Greek vase painting, though I wondered if it would be disorienting when readers clicked on my blog, only to find the most recognizable image gone. From the very beginning, I had wanted to carve out a white column for the text, because I didn't think that the letters and photos showed up clearly enough otherwise. But it took me months of fruitlessly manipulating the html before I was able to figure out how to do it.

How did you design the look of your blog? How and why has it evolved? Are you happy with it? What do you wish you could still change?