Some may recall the phase I went through, designing lots of headers for this site. I gave it up because… well, I wasn’t that good and I wasn’t really getting much better, and I moved on to other exciting creative things. BUT, you know, sometimes, of a Saturday night, you get the creative urge to mess about with Pixelmator. I wasn’t planning a new header, but I followed a random tutorial, and ended up with this.

I went back to good old Abduzeedo for this one, the tutorial for Abstract Wallpaper. I tweaked the colours a little and made it my own, following the tutorial exactly made it too dark for my tastes. As ever, I have used Anivers for the font, as it matches the text on the blog. You’ll notice that there is no month in the header this time out. I’ve been quite lucky that I had a productive few months earlier in the year and had some spare designs in the bank, but now I have run out.

I was somewhat loathe to get rid of last month’s header. I did so enjoy the purpleness of it. However, a new month means a new design and this is what I have got. My aim with this one was to take something that I attempted to do in the previous batch of headers and do it better. So, last time I used a skyline sillhouette: City Skyline Nice enough, but I can see exactly how it came together and could probably replicate it in seconds.

This header came about suddenly at the last minute, but was a culmination of a lot of experimentation during the month. Firstly, the typeface is the one I use for headers on the blog - Anivers. When I made the changes with Typekit, it suddenly made the existing header look a bit strange. I’ve already mentioned that I need to find a way to make text look more integrated with the pictures rather than stuck on at the last minute, but somehow the typeface tweaks made it seem even more obvious.

It’s always going to be hard to follow the panda success of March, and that being the case, I present you with a header I actually made beforehand. It was based on this tutorial but I went wrong somewhere along the way. I ended up with a dark pink nightmare, that was far too black. I threw the tutorial away, tweaked some bits and pieces, and most importantly, changed the background colour from pink to this glorious green.

So, I reckon this could be the best header I’ve ever made. The idea came to me while I was in the middle of quite a lengthy drive, which was more than frustrating, but by the time I got my hands on Pixelmator, I was ready for the challenge. I found some creative commons photos, via vladdythephotogeek and used a tiny portion of this comic style tutorial. The font is Meiryo, and was possibly the toughest part of the whole thing.

Mr C spotted the tutorial for this over on the Pixelmator site, and I was keen to give it a go. It certainly looked like a challenge, and it came right about the time we were talking all things space, and that programme was on the BBC and everything. I didn’t really like the clock bit in the middle, so I just replaced it with another planet. It kinda makes less sense now, but it’s just pretty planets anyway, so I like it more.

For the new, I’m switching up the way I change headers on the site. I’d come to a position where I could make a perfectly good header in a week and that was fine. I could keep on finding brushes and doing what I could, but a week wasn’t really long enough to make anything particularly special. Instead, I’m going to do a monthly header, with the hopes that I can spend more time on them and keep up the learning process, rather than settling for what could be done in such a short space of time.

I wanted to do something to commemorate all the snow we have been having recently, and I pondered the idea of taking a photo of the white stuff, but didn’t find it all that inspiring. Instead, I went in search of some snow-related brushes and found some really good ones. With a bit of adjustment to the scatter patterns, this is what I came up with. Made with: Pixelmator Font: Plantaganet Cherokee Brushes: Snowflake Vector Brushes

This one started when I was investigating the Quartz Composer, and found the option of radiating circles outwards. I can’t quite remember which one it is, but once I had that and I added in some of the best colour in the world - purple - I had it set. Made with: Pixelmator Font: Didot Brushes: Nature (I think these came with Pixelmator)