Creating a Blog

Approaching setting up a blog was a lot more work than anticipated. From learning the backend setting up of WordPress alongside widgets and plugins, creating a blog seemed daunting and extremely open ended. What really helped me narrow down my decisions was creating the vision board/ mind map. Firstly, I knew that my blog would be oriented on creating a less formal feel with the user, a more transparent and honest point of view. After establishing what feeling what feeling I wanted to instill with the user I began planning certain design aspects to execute this feeling, like brand personality. The personality types that aligned most with what I wanted to accomplish are sincerity and sophistication, something that is achievable and relatable to user, but at the same time something refined enough that they would want to attempt it. Because my blog idea stems from the concept of a café, I took a majority of my inspirations from the websites of cafe’s that I frequent, such as Nomad Café and Breka Bakery & Café.

From these two websites I notices the intentional use of content, minimalist use of colour, and sans serif fonts. Taking inspiration from these two websites I decided to stick to five colours for my blog’s overall colour scheme, sticking to predominantly browns and greens, as well as sans serif fonts. Something I have yet to fully implement, but plan on doing in the future, is using minimal hand drawn line art for Process Posts. This use of hand drawn work is meant to create a more organic feel to the website and establish a clear mood to each post. Something that will also become more apparent after I publish more posts if the intentional use of colour carried through to images. Ideally I will also be creating an Instagram account for this blog as this seems to be the tendency with other cafes to help with publicizing content.

Links:

Nomad Café: https://www.nomadyvr.ca/

Breka Bakery & Café: https://www.breka.ca/#a-vancouver-favourite