Staring at the avatar on this site was getting on my nerves. When I was first setting up the site I decided I wanted a little image of me against the site name. I didn’t want a random image from the web, instead, something that I had created myself. How hard could that be? Turns out that it was going to be a little harder than I first thought.

I used a vector art program called Inkscape to produce the image. After watching a Youtube tutorial on creating line drawings/avatar type images I was off to the races. The video made it look so easy but it was far from it. The first iteration was utter rubbish. I deleted the file and closed the laptop lid in disgust.

The next attempt was an improvement and then the following seven or eight attempts got me to where the image is (or at least was) Today. Does it look like me? Err, No. Am I happy with it? Well, I was, until now.

The mood took and I set about tweaking the site design. I decided that

1. the avatar image had to go
2. I wanted more colour in the site

The first was easy to deal with, just hit the delete key! For the second, I was playing around on https://coolors.co which was really neat. I knew I wanted to keep the dark theme, so that was my starting point. Using the Coolors tool, once you find one colour you like you can lock that colour into the pallete and complimentary colours will be chosen for the remaining set. You can cycle combinations and once you see one you like lock that in and so on until you have your pallete. After playing around for a while I settled on this pallete. Eventually I replaced the Pine Tree colour with Black in the final design.

This site is built using a static site generator, Hugo and the theme I’ve been using up to now is called Ink. I used the theme as a loose basis for the resulting site theme that is now being used.

Overall I’m happy with the results for now, well at least until the mood takes again :-)