I decided that in June I was going to blog about blogging.  I have been blogging for about three years now and in the past 9 months or so I have learned so much and would love to share just a few ideas for making your blog great using blogger or whatever hosting site you choose.  
Today I want to talk about choosing your blog’s style.  This is the first job to tackle when starting a blog.  I have changed my blog so many times in the past and I finally sat down one day and created a style board of the colors and patterns I like.  I now have a blog that makes me happy and reflects my own style.  
Here is my board I made a few months ago:
I also used these colors to choose my background.  I loved the tribal digital papers from SpencerReedDesigns but wanted the colors to match my blog’s style.  She did a custom listing for me and now I have my background.  Etsy is wonderful for helping you get inspired for your color choices and style.
I used PicMonkey to help me put together a board of colors, fonts, and patterns that make me smile.  I am going to show you how to make your own today using my Example Blog.  
First go to PicMonkey and under Design select Custom.  You can choose whatever size of image you want to work with but it needs to have room for everything that inspires you.  
Now think about what colors you love.  I use the digital papers on Etsy to get inspired.  I found this great set of papers from  VNDigitalArt that I really liked.   This inspired my interactive header that I had already made.  
Purchase the paper you love and now we are going to use it to build our blog’s style board.
Click on the butterfly on the side menu and click Your Own at the very top to add your own overlay.  Go find your digital paper or whatever image inspired you for your blog’s colors.  Add that image first.

Next go find your Header image and add that plus your social media icons that you have created or chosen.  Then you will build your colors part of the board.  Add any image your want from the overlays section.  I just chose a rectangle this time.  Now to get the exact color you want, click on the tall rectangle next to the colors options.  This will create a small dropper tool that will let you go hover over the color you want to find.  Hover over the blue for example in the digital paper and it will tell you 84c9c9.  That is the color number you will use every time you create an image for your blog.  

Now right click on the rectangle and click to duplicate the overlay.  Do this 3 or 4 times to get your uniform shapes.  

Here I have chosen 4 colors using the process above for color matching.  Then go to the fonts menu and choose a font and type the corresponding color numbers over each box.   I have all of my colors numbers memorized now but for a few months I would need this blog board to help me remember them.

Now choose your favorite 3 or 4 fonts that you will be using for your blog.  I use these fonts for my Pinterest images, my labels in my sidebar, and my interactive header.  When you choose one, type the actual name of the font so you can find it again.  Make sure at least two of these fonts are very easy to read for sidebar menus or labels.

We are almost done!  Now just add a few overlays or images that inspired your blog.  These are images you might use in your custom favicon, header, or labels.
Here’s a summary of everything we created!  Save this somewhere easy to get to and look at it every time you are creating something new for your blog.
What inspired your blog’s style?  Please share your blog boards with me 🙂