New Decade, New Blog Design

New decade, new The Novel Hermit. (That’s the saying, right?)

I’ve had this blog design for approximately seven years, and it’s served me well, but it’s time for a change.

For this to have lasted me this long, that’s a feat in how much I loved this design. Like how can I not with the waves of the menu, the blue twinkling sea, the iconic ombre social media buttons, and so on.

It’s so damn beautiful and so personal.

However, though this design is near and dear to my heart, certain aspect of the design has been breaking over the years. I haven’t kept up-to-date with tweaking the blog, so I have no idea how to fix the broken coding. And I’ve been itching for a redesign for a couple years now—partly because I wanted to revitalize this blog, and maybe having a new design will inspire me to post more.

It was time for a refresh.

Feast your eyes on this new blog design.

I didn’t want to do major tweaking or create a design from scratch (since I’m a mere novice), so I went with a pre-made design from Sky and Stars Co.

Here’s the color palette I went with:

INSPIRATION: I wanted the overall theme to be botanical—preferably with Spring vibes. I wanted more colors, and when I saw a pattern designed by Julia Dreams Design, I knew I needed to incorporate it into the new look. (I’m not totally in love because I miss my waves—they were very unique to my blog, and my previous design was very personalized.)

The main thing I wanted to stay from my previous design was the social media bars.

There’s still some things about this design I’m tweaking—I’m still not sure about the header, but overall, I’m glad to have something new to look at. (I may change it back to my previous design just because I love it so fucking much. I would still use it and change the pattern of the waves, but unfortunately, changing the images breaks.)

What do you think of The Novel Hermit‘s face-lift design?