For the past several weeks, I've been helping Daffny from A Vintage Nerd with her blog. She wanted a total blog design overhaul so I spent a whole day watching videos, learning how to do some stuff and then I created a blog design for her. I always wanted to learn how to digitize my doodles into vector graphics so I found some really wonderful videos for that kind of thing on Skillshare. I loved the learning part of the process and it made me actually miss being in school! Here are the classes that I took:

Digital Illustration: Doodles to Design
Creating Full Color Digital Illustrations from Your Handmade Drawings
Pattern Design: Creating Inspiring Repeats
Learn the Ins and Outs of Illustrator

Skillshare membership is $10 per month and you can take as many of these classes as you like, which is pretty amazing.


The videos use Adobe Illustrator, which I didn't have at the time so I applied the teachings to an opensource program, Inkscape and learned how to use that as I worked.


I created several cute icons for her categories, all scanned in from my drawings and digitized. I really had fun doing this part and if I can refine them more, I'll be listing my clip art sets in my etsy shop. Here are some of my favorites.



The coding was a lot of the same stuff that I already knew how to do but this time, I figured out how to code a sticky navigation and use a custom google font for her post titles. I also made social media buttons to do really cool roll-over effects like mine.  I teach 12 step by step blog design tutorials in my ecourse, Bloggerific: how to have a beautiful, successful blog.

It was a long process of figuring out what we liked and what the other was talking about!  I must have designed 30 different headers before choosing the final one.





I'm looking forward to spending some time this winter, learning illustrator, drawing more and hopefully by the spring the clip art shop will be open!

Stop over and say hello to Daffny and check out her new blog!