happy 5 years, parapalla . . . !

. . . you get a new look!! :) While October 23 is the official birthday, I thought I’d take inspiration from my dear friend, Courtney, who celebrates “birthday month,” and get things kicked off a little early on 10/10.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

WOW. What a fun and full, few years it’s been! (And I still love alliteration.) While I haven’t been able to do all I’d hoped to do here in that time, I was able to do a good bit and have some great conversations turned blog posts, and fun design projects to work on for friends!

As 2018 began, one of the things on my heart was to give a new face and new voice to parapalla. I worked through the summer, here and there on updates, and I’m excited to share some of these new things with you!

SO What’s new?

I think my top three favorite new things here are the pages that add more life—a new wedding invitation page with layouts that give faces to the names, ministries that are near and dear to me—ministries that Mark and I are able to support and share about, and then just for fun, a page full of some of my favorite photos, most from travels and some of family.

Also new, is the overall layout, color palette, blog format, and logo!

For this post, I thought it’d be fun to start with the name and share a progression of my logo and how/why I landed on the current one now.

Getting started

This was my first parapalla logo in October 2013, and I was so excited for it—not just the design—but for what it represented in a dream/vision coming to life.

I loved the soft and rounded letters of Bellota with slight accents on the terminals to add a touch of personality. I also drew that little bird in Illustrator and use it now on my web tab as a favicon.

Next up, july 2015

For this second version created almost two years later, scripty fonts were everywhere, and I thought it would be fun to make this small update! I had purchased a bundle from Creative Market, and found this little gem of a font in Bellwethers. I liked the natural and bouncy feel of this one as well as the lighter weight overall.

Here’s a little before and after of my home page when updating the logo, back in 2015:

Today: Less color, more contrast

For this new, 2018 version, I was really drawn to the simplicity of black and white and the idea of the art and photos here being what really pops.

Below are a few of the ideas I played around with. I’m still in love with a pretty script, but I was also envisioning a really clean all-caps too, to shake things up!

I liked different things about each of these, but landed on the one below and am really pleased with it! Avenir (my favorite sans serif!) won the all-caps job in the Light style, and another fun bundle find, Storyteller, is the script:

Because all-caps can come across strong or loud in feel, it was also important to me to include a lot of tracking (uniform, extra space between each letter) to help keep some of that light and airy feel I’d had before. I felt like a lightweight script would also compliment that idea as well.

I don’t know what the next five years will hold for this site (or my logo!) but I hope you’ll enjoy it with me and follow along as inspiration hits and new thoughts and designs are shared.

As always, thanks for being here :)