How do you create your headers?

#writing #design #watercooler

I often get asked how I create the headers for my articles.
Thus I thought, let me write down how I do it and set it up.

When writing, I used two kinds of headers: my old legacy ones. These are kind of dark and contain the logo in the background. And then the new colorful ones.

The old ones were all hand-made in Sketch locally.

But today we'll talk more about the new ones.

From idea to execution

When I rebranded my website and logo, I also decided to take the headers of each article more seriously.

And thus, I decided to hire someone with more experience in the design field.

Before even looking for a designer, I decided to write down the types of headers I wanted.

I was able to split it out into these categories:

Celebration banners
Social media headers
Event banners

And then article headers:

Code block + logo
Logo/Icon
Image

These were all rough the banner types I had, and I decided to put them in a notion document linking some existing examples.

Now that I had a clear idea of what I was looking for, I decided to look at Fiverr and target five people whose styles I liked.

I reached out to these five people and ordered one header from each. This was pretty cheap and gave me a good idea of what I liked.

I really liked designedbyhello's work most and decided to go with this person to create the actual templates.

He decided to create a Figma template file for each of my templates where I could easily add images/change texts.

The Figma file looks like this:

As you can see, I can use all kinds of different setups, and for each file, I can easily switch color patterns or images.

And that's it. I'm super happy with my design templates, as this style reflects my style and blog.

I'd love to hear about your process and how you like my headers.

Thank you for reading, and let's connect!

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Top comments (8)

Jon Randy 🎖️ • Sep 27 '22 • Edited

TBH - I usually just try and find an image (with appropriate rights) somewhat related to the content. Failing that, I'll use an image of some code mentioned in the article.

For me, professional looking header images are a big turn off and often an indication of posts with an ulterior (often financial) motive. I also find there is frequently an inverse correlation (not in every case) between the 'professionalism' of the header image and the quality/depth of the content.

Chris Bongers • Sep 28 '22

Interesting!

I've never really looked at it that way.
For me it was more a quick win to make the images look a bit neater and all in-line with each other.

I do see what you say, with a lot of publications that seem to put more effort in the headers than the actual articles they aquire.

spO0q 🐒 • Sep 28 '22

good question!

I tend to like big headers with lots of space, nice gradients and clip-path ^^, but when it come to blog, I prefer a single line with all "fundamental" items like the title, the menu, the search bar

Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Sep 27 '22

Thanks a lot, I will try this out.

That topic was a pain point for me. In fact, I hated so much having to create a banner that I used random things instead like here where I use a photo of my dog walking over my piano