Rethinking your Design Choices

I've ordered the new laptop, should arrive early next week so I can write longer posts again.

A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to change my shop's banner. This was the banner I had been using:

I liked this banner a lot but it had a big problem. When I bought my new light tent and camera I decided to redo all my shop photos and changed from using a light blue paper background to a deep blue velvet backdrop and the banner no longer fit.

I decided to completely redesign my banner so I drew up a new design with octopus tentacles, scanned it, then spent hours tracing and coloring it on my latop (pre-keyboard death). This was the result:

I wasn't totally happy with it but I decided to give it a  for a couple weeks to see if it would grow on me. Well it didn't and I was REALLY missing the old banner. So I scrapped the new look and revamped the old banner, I replaced all the photos with new ones and made the background colors richer and deeper.

So the lesson in this isn't that I shouldn't have changed my banner. I absolutely needed to. It's that you shouldn't be afraid to rethink your design choices. I tried a radical change, it didn't work, but it made me take my old design and punch it up to look much better. If you think you need a change, just go for it. You can always change it back if it doesn't work out.