How to Create a Header for Your Blog

Have you just started out but want a personal and professional look for your blog? Look no further…

   So as we may all know when we first start a blog (I’m new to this too!) we want something unique to us but don’t want to have to fork out the pounds to pay a professional, well here is a really easy way to make your own professional looking blog header for Blogger.(This may also work for other blogging platforms such as Wordpress but I personally use Blogger). I think the first thing that is really important to consider is what type of blog you want: do you want a theme? What kind of look do you want? After all, your header is technically the first thing readers/visitors will see of your blog. FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE EVERYTHING. I decided I personally wanted something fairly fresh and simple but arty and slightly ‘soft-grungey’ I guess that’s what it’s called. As you might have noticed by the header (subtle I know)… this is a music, fashion and art blog so I wanted to do something quite arty but this is totally optional for you!

① Naturally I started with good old fashioned (can you really call it that if it’s for such modern technological blogging purposes… probably not.) paper and pencil. After I had sketched out some roses, you could literally choose any image you liked, I decided to fill them in with water colours. I think water colours create the pale/pastel/soft grunge feel. If you struggle with the sketching you can completely skip this step and find an image off the internet (check for copyright regulations) or take a photograph of your own or even just use the free photos and illustrations available on Canva (mentioned later, you can skip to step 5 ).

② As soon as the water colours have dried the next step is to either take a photo of it (USING A GOOD LIGHT SOURCE AND QUALITY CAMERA – iPhone/phone cameras are good as long as you have the right lighting) or scan it into your computer. Unfortunately I didn’t have access to a scanner but I feel that this was just as effective.

③ The next step is editing (the REALLY fun bit). I always found this concept really daunting but it’s so much easier than you think and you don’t even have to go out and pay for expensive software like Photoshop which I know isn’t ideal for people just starting out. Some great alternatives? I use the Pixlr editor but there are loads of others ones out there all you need to do is search! So I open the image in Pixlr (which is actually really easy to use) and the best way to get a really clean, fresh, simple background is to really bring out the white of the background, does it sound complicated? Yeah, I thought so too. All you need is the burn tool. I set the brush size to either 200 or 100 select the range to be on ‘highlights’ and the exposure to 100. Now, this is for the outside area of the image, you don’t want to get too close to, in my case the roses, as the burn tool will start to whiten out those too.

④ Once you’ve got a good cover over the majority of the background you now need to go in with the burn tool again but with different settings. You might want to play around but you want a much smaller brush size such as 30 or 50 and the brush that is slightly faded around the edges, you also want the exposure to be lower such as 70 or 80 but leave the range on highlights. This brush size will be much better for getting inbetween the lines without blurring out the details you’ve so elegantly hand drawn.

⑤ So, what now? Well once you save the image on your computer you need to go to Canva, this is also completely free and easy to use. You have to sign up and make an account etc but you will more than likely get a lot of use out of it. So you want to select ‘use custom dimensions’ and type in the dimensions of your blog (these can be found in the ‘Design’ section of Blogger on the adjust widths tab). As an example for my header I selected: 1200 x 360 px . Once your on Canva you can easily upload your image, or use the free ones available to you, and add text etc. This is obviously just right if you are creating a header as you can easily add the name of your blog and maybe a short description. The best thing to do is just play around with it and see what looks best. Another brilliant feature of Canva is that you can duplicate what you already have by pressing the 'copy image' button to the right of your design. So you can have the same size canvas, same images, same filter and then use different text and compare them side by side!

⑥ Time to upload! All you have to do is download the file as an image from Canva and then upload it to your blog, on Blogger this is done on the Layout page. If you struggled to follow this tutorial feel free to contact me jazbishbashbosh@gmail.com with enquiries/arrangements where I could create a header for you using my own artwork/graphics.

I’d love to see how yours turned out! Leave a comment down below with your blog or tag me in a picture on Twitter or Instagram!

JAZ BISHOP x

**DISCLAIMER** I am by no means a professional, this is just how I created my blog header in a fairly simple way and I thought I would share it with you! **DISCLAIMER**