My relaunch of this blog, which began slowly in November, may be finally past a design roadblock I've struggled with for months: what to do with my social media icons.
I initially looked at icons provided by the various social media platforms. The problem with the "stock" icons? Their colors didn't coordinate with my blog's palette. I decided to go with white logos or icons on top concrete-colored Washi tape (link to zip file with the icons). First issue solved.
Next, for usability, I wanted to make it easy for people to see my handles. There's nothing I hate more than wanting to follow someone and having to guess at the handle. (My handles are inconsistent and have changed over the years; this makes guessing a frustrating endeavor.) I couldn't figure out an easy way to specify an Alt tag for an image that was added via Blogger's Picture widget. To get around this constraint, I paired the handle with the appropriate icon in the image. Now, instead of the simple icons I'd wanted, I had labels. Worse than each label's width was the padding Blogger added between them. Together the images took up over two inches of vertical space. I've abandoned this approach.
What do you think of the latest icons?
Overall, I'm pretty happy with how the social media buttons turned out. They're no longer an eyesore. Now, I just need to make some improvements to the column labels for consistency, and I think (fingers crossed) my design will be done.
Ciao Bella!
Eden
