Another idea for a new layout!

Howdy everyone! I started sharing this the other day, but Gadget and I were talking about it and more changes were made - but I'm going to share with you guys what's been developing with the design of my new blog layout.

Off the jump, you'll notice a huge difference between these two and the two that I shared a few months back.

There's a lot going on right now, but you'll notice that this is a HUGE redesign - from the ground up! So far, I'm super pleased with how posts will look - but that sidebar/header is making me really indecisive. There's a lot of duplication of buttons because I was testing how hover & active states will look.

With this first one, I had the big header at the top... which I'm going to be moving away from.... and I know I want to show off some artwork, but I don't want to take away from the blog content, so I'm going to go with a faded lineart.


With the second one, I put the header title IN the sidebar, and pushed the main content to the top of the browser.


This third one I feel is moving more towards the right direction. I removed all the extraneous hover state buttons to eliminate confusion (for both you and myself, haha!) I adjusted how the photo & about me info is displayed so it doesn't clash with the lineart in the background. Speaking of background lineart - I'm going to make it bigger like in the 2nd version above.


My ONLY gripe right now is that I didn't make the content wider - in fact, I somehow went narrower...
But I am pleased with how this is going thus far!! I'm trying to solidify a design by Memorial Day (Monday!!) and get started on some code!