Blog Header Design is one of my favourite areas of expertise in Graphic and Advertising Design.

It is so much fun to design blog headers, because most often you are dealing with a real person, and the website is about their lives. I say *most* often, because of course there are millions of business blogs out there, but today I'm going to talk about personal blog header design in particular.

A few questions to ask your blog header client before starting out:

1. What do you want to achieve with your blog header?

This is to establish the purpose of the site, is a personal blog, a weight-loss blog, an artisitic blog, photography blog. The main idea is to establish purpose and intent.

2. Who are your readers?

This information may be a little harder to get, depending on whether or not your client is a seasoned blogger or not. If they are just starting out, and only have family members as readers, then you can make the header more personal. If they have 30 000 unique hits a month, then you can ask for a copy of their stats to help you ascertain the geographical location that the majority of visitors are coming from, and use this as part of your design process.

3.  How do you want to blog header to reflect YOU?

This will largely depend on whether or not it is a personal blog that you are designing for, or if it is for a niche blog. If the client wants the header to reflect themselves, then they should supply photographs of themselves that they like, and leave you with an indication of how 'realistic' or 'abstract' the blog header should be.

A photographic blog might require you to zoom in close and do some photoshop wizardry on their eye for example, but a blog about scrapbooking would require you to do something like adding decorative borders to a few photos, and displaying these in the header, artfully arranged, in a scrapbook format, with embellishments.

4.  What emotions do you want to convey?

Again, this will probably be determined by the content on the blog, but it is a good idea to ask your client if they are looking for bright and cheerful, sleek and professional or grungy and emo, and then narrow it down from there! You do not want to spend hours designing something without knowing the answer to this basic question, or you could be wasting your time!

5.  What format do you require?

If your blogger is a newbie and does not know what they need, find out what their blogging platform is, this will help you find out what format will be acceptable. If they are wanting to incorporate it into an existing template, then simply go and measure it using Firefox's "MeasureIt" plugin. For the most part, a .gif, .png or .jpg is usually a safe bet as a format of choice.  You can also match the colours of their template exactly using the "Colorzilla" plugin for Firefox. I find these two tools the ones I use the most when I am gathering information for a design.

6.  How many headers do you want?

This might seem like a stupid question, but why only design one header when you can design three. Your client will have variety, and remember if you ask them to link to you when they unveil their new header, your website will benefit every time. A great thing of course would be to score a project where you are contracted to provide new headers (for a regular fee of course) on a weekly basis.

7.  By when do you need them?

A natural question, but one that many designers forget to ask. Get a clear time frame from your client, they may have a big blog launch planned. Make sure that you under promise and over deliver to ensure repeat or referral business!

8.  Do you have any samples of stuff that you want to give/show me to use/use for inspiration?

I once had a client tell me 'she just knew that we were on the same wave-length'. Naturally being a designer I have a gazillion 'wavelengths' buzzing through my creative side on an hourly basis and had no idea what 'her wavelength' might be, until I asked her to provide me some images that she liked, and what she was leaning toward for personalized stationery. Thank goodness I thought to ask. Lesson learned!