Monday, February 2, 2015

Blog Design Tips: Tumblr Edition


So, as some of you may know, I am a bonafide Tumblr addict. I spend a lot of time on that website reblogging photos, design inspiration as well as anything else that may come across my dash. Part of my Tumblr obsession as well, is designing and redesigning my theme. I love to make my blog my own by adding cute graphics and details. And in today's post, I'll show you how I get the desired look in this Tumblr design tutorial!

Also, if you're interested, you can check out my Tumblr, pizzalyfe.tumblr.com, where this post was originally published. Enjoy!


Step 1: Decide on your theme
So you’re going to want to pick a theme that work for this. I personally love ocehans because they usually come with an option to upload a ‘decoration’ which is great for this. In my example the “decoration” is the palm tree. So once you have a theme that you think will work for this, you want to decide what vibe to go for, and therefore what pictures to find. So that will take some thinking and googling and stuff. (My general tip is pick some decorations that either suit your personality or your blog type!) 
(here’s the general idea of the theme i picked) 
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Step 2: Decide on two images
Today, I picked a palm tree and a pineapple. I usually like to pick hand drawings rather than a photo or digital art. I just find it gives a nicer vibe. 
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So now you can upload your decoration straight to your theme. But, for the secondary decoration, in this case the pineapple, you need to resize it. For most sidebars anywhere from 250-100px width will work, you might just need to play around with it. I resized mine to 100px in this tutorial. 
(this is how you would do it in photoshop) 
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Step 3: Insert your secondary decoration into side bar
So this part is just a tad bit trickier, because, as you’ve probably noticed you can’t just upload an image into your description. So, what we’re going to do is upload the photo into the text post, and copy the image code into the description. It sounds complicated but I promise it isn’t! 
1. Upload image to text post 
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2. Select HTML 
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3. Copy and paste the entire line into your description. 
The final result, after you click “update preview” should look like this 
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Step 4: Incorporate into other pages
No now that you have everything nicely in your theme, it’s time to create some title cards to tie everything together. Today I’ll be using photoshop but I’m sure you can do this with online stuff like Pic Monkey or whatever. So, basically all I am going to do is use the secondary decoration next to the title, with a nice font that I chose. 
Font: Pacifico 
You’ll want to make the entire image about 500x200px, because tumblr posts/pages are 500px wide. 72pt font should work. And just resize your image until you think it looks good. This is what I came up with for my ask / FAQ page. 
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So now, you want to delete the title field for the page (just add a space in instead, so text won’t appear above your new title) From there you can add whatever you want to the page, for instance, if you want to make your own FAQ page you can follow my tutorial here on how to add an ask box to a page. 
Step 5: Repeat as desired 
So, now that you have the basics down, you can pretty much add little details like that all over your blog to make it your own. 

Enjoy your newly beautiful blog! 


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