Recap: Portland Bloggers Back to Design School Event
Last Saturday, the Portland Bloggers group met for our annual Back to School Event at Portland Community College. With a schoolhouse theme (cue 2B yellow pencils, lined paper, gold spray-painted clipboards, and polished red apples), the event focused on blog design and unifying the look and feel of your online presence.
After a short meet-and-greet and welcome from Portland Bloggers founder Jenni Bost from A Well-Crafted Party, Suzannah Hamlin-Stanley from Create/Enjoy spoke to the group about what branding actually is. (Hint: it’s different from marketing and is a more subtle pull of your audience, rather than an overt push, of your message.)
With a background in advertising and years running the successful blog Adventures in Dressmaking, Suzannah helped impart a better understanding of how branding impacts your blog.
Left: Portland Bloggers’ founder Jenni from A Well Crafted Party, Right: Suzannah from Create/Enjoy working the camera for our “class” photos.
Designer Sze Wa Cheung then spoke about blog design, segmenting current blog design trends into 2 major ones: the Infinite Scroll design (think Pinterest) vs. the Category Showcase design, and offering notes about good design (like effective use of font, white space, thinking about the readability of your blog, your post-dividers, and your color palette).
After a short break I then took the podium and presented my talk on How to Create a Style Guide for Your Blog. I also announced the top secret project I’ve been working on for awhile! (I’ll be sharing the full announcement here tomorrow!!)
We then had a final wrap-up with a number of questions from our fellow bloggers: where to find technical help resources online (Answer: Google is best for a specific question, and the Help/Forums for your specific platform, but W3Schools is always helpful for coding!), whether to start on Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, or Squarespace (Answer: keep your end goal in mind; if you want to turn it into a money-making business and are okay with a learning curve in the beginning, I’d recommend WordPress, but if you’re blogging as a hobby or want the simplest interface, choose Blogger, Tumblr, Squarespace, or Wix), ways to add text to images or edit graphics (Photoshop, PicMonkey), where to get on-brand social media icons (the answer to that TOMORROW!), how to ensure color consistency when printing your logo vs. how your logo looks online (choose CMYK color profile in creating your for-print logos/branding; try to choose PANTONE colors whenever possible).
All the slides that were presented at the event will soon be available to view.
Thanks so much to everyone who came out for the event – it was wonderful to meet all of you and get to know some fellow Portland Bloggers better!
Hope to see you at the next event!
xo
Carly