Hi everyone! I wanted to take the time to officially introduce you to my new and much improved website! While you can still access my blog through the same links, I decided to switch up things behind the scenes. I always hate taking such a long time away from blogging as, once again, I have so much to say that I need to catch up on. However, I’ve been planning some changes to my blog for over a year now, and when the opportunity came for my site to be renewed, my mom and I decided now was the time to make them.

My blog has always grown with me, as I’ve literally had it since I was 11 years old, which was VERY EVIDENT as I was looking through old blog posts throughout this process. I mean, I used to always somewhat joke about how I wanted my future husband to go back and read through every single blog post of mine, and now I don’t necessarily know about that… But nevertheless, progress is always good to see, so there is an archive in my sidebar if you want to go pick the brain of my 11-year-old self. Honestly, those were the good days; I wrote as if everything was so simple, and I suppose when you’re young like that, it really is. But that’s why I’m thankful God has given me this blog as an outlet because now, as I realize things aren’t so simple, I can start writing about that, too.

Without making this too technical or long, basically, I wanted this blog to be ready for the next big stage of my life—college. Right now, I plan on pursuing double majors in Graphic Design and Advertising in hopes that what I do for this blog can be part of my career, things like designing for the web, copywriting, creating, communications, brand management, etc. I’ve known for a long time that WordPress is the industry standard website software, so I wanted to move my blog there. I really enjoyed Squarespace for the time I had it, but now that I’m hopefully going to be progressing as a designer and content creator in ways I maybe haven’t before, I want my blog to follow that progress, too.

Then there’s the rebrand I did. I also wanted my blog aesthetic and brand to mimic my personality but also my goals for this blog and what it stands for, especially going forward from here. Obviously, a lot has stayed the same—as it should. It’s still pink, still girly, still sparkly. But I wanted to give it a little bit more of a grown-up, mature feel and also one that evokes more feelings of moodiness or seriousness. Not that my blog can’t be fun, but I do want to blog about my honest, real thoughts on the darkness of the world. Besides pink, I’ve come to realize that I love black. It gives such a chic, edgy vibe to an otherwise sweet, playful color, and I think they’re the ultimate power pair; my mom and I have always loved those colors together. I hope that by making them the center of my new design and merging them like that shows the balance of my blog: mature yet fun, bold yet kind, serious yet hopeful, intense yet relatable, chic yet girly, polished yet easygoing, etc.

Now that I’m practicing for school ( 😉 ), I feel as though I have an excuse to walk you through my inspiration board I made:

There is one thing I would like to change when I get access to Photoshop again, and that’s my header, the first image pictured. I envisioned the black letters having a black glitter overlay to them, which I was able to do back when I had a free trial of Photoshop. I use Canva for my design needs temporarily, and I haven’t found a way to do that. I still like my header, but it definitely needs more sparkle. My other logos do have those elements, and I was quite satisfied with their looks.

This was my first design where I saved up some money and actually bought fonts, and I truly believe that elevated my brand in a way I haven’t before. Of course, you can still create an amazing brand with free fonts; in fact, the main fonts of my design for headings and the text you’re reading are free. It’s all about blending them together in a way that accurately conveys your brand and is visually pleasing. I LOVE that script font, though, and it even came with pretty ligatures that, once again, I can’t explore as much as I would’ve liked to with only Canva, but I will make changes and upgrades as I progress in experience.

This was also my first time creating a complete color palette, as before I’d only really used pink and gold and then had black for everything else. This time, I selected the rosy, bright pink and black as my primary brand colors, but I definitely wanted some accent colors, too, so I have a nude-ish gold, as I do love gold accents, and a lighter baby pink that I also adore. I picked a light grey as a neutral color to blend it all together. I took months just gathering information for this rebrand as I wanted to be thorough—in hopes to not be shutting my blog down for months later, haha, though now I realize that I can always make updates as I go along. Anyway, I had a whole Pinterest board for information and to capture my aesthetic, and I played around with numerous images to find and select each shade of my palette. Then I found images of my own that go perfectly with my brand and included those in similar shades to my colors I picked out.

The first one is a bouquet of pink flowers my mom got me for my room one time, the second is the floor of my favorite store, Victoria’s Secret, the third is…well, some said items I got from my favorite store, AKA a bra, which I don’t know if I was going to draw attention to, but hey, what else do you really buy there? Then there’s stationary, which makes up my life, and—this one ended up being my favorite—a picture of me—well, my UGG-covered foot—at a hockey game, and the light grey of the ice actually matches the grey I went with perfectly. At first I had more of a creamy grey selected, but after actually putting it into the design, I wanted to change it because it had a yellow tint, whereas the new grey definitely did not have that, so then when I saw it matched the ice, I was like aww, hockey found its way into my blog design. <3 Which is great because, unfortunately, it has NOT found its way back into my life yet… Let’s just pray February 5 really is the day of the AHL’s return.

I do want to warn you all, though: I prayed for a smooth transition between platforms because anytime you attempt something like that, to bring all that content as-is over here, I’ve heard horror stories about how it may not work, etc. Once again, I did a lot of research on all of it, and I would say overall it was going pretty well, until I got to the final part of transferring it all: the images. Supposedly, there’s a plugin that automatically switches them from Squarespace to WordPress, and that wasn’t happening for me; then I saw something in the tutorial that said your images should still be showing up before using this plugin…and all of mine were blank. So…unfortunately I later realized according to Squarespace’s unique system, they had an article about how the images may not transfer and may have to be manually imported. It was at that point where I debated ending my blogging career/life, but my mom and I worked out a solution, where she essentially put it into perspective for me and told me to focus on the main posts, where imagery was a major component, and go from there. But that’s why all my old posts will have big gaps where there’s supposed to be images. I do apologize for that; I will be working slowly but surely to get them back into the posts, but it will definitely take awhile, and I still want my focus to be on actually putting out new content as well. You should still be able to read all those old posts as they were, it’s just that the images won’t show up until I go through and put them back in.

On the bright side, when I picked out and purchased this template/theme for my blog, I liked how imagery was a big part of it without being cluttered or overbearing, so I get to finally start integrating my senior pics into my brand! I’ve enjoyed getting this all ready, with only a couple headaches along the way. They say design is about overcoming problems, and I don’t know how much I like the sound of that, but in the end, I hope that’s what I was able to do now. 🙂

One other thing to mention is that this time around, I knew I wanted to simplify all the extra content on my blog, specifically with pages. I now only have two pages, which is all I need at this time, a basic contact page and then my about page where I share more about me, this blog, my favorite things, and my story. While the overall structure of that page remains the same, please feel free to revisit it here, as I did update the writing!

So What Else Is New?

In short, nothing. It’s still the same Sparkles by Ashlee, and I haven’t changed my writing style/topics of interests except for what naturally changes as I grow up. My main categories I will continue blogging about still will be my Christian faith, posts where I share my advice and thoughts over more general subjects but that will, obviously, still involve my faith, and then I will sprinkle in some lifestyle content as well, relevant to my faith and personal interests and what you guys have already responded to and enjoyed! I still want this blog to be a source of real encouragement and entertainment to honor God above all and to give you hope in this dark world. I won’t sugarcoat things or soften up the truth, but I will always share with you the hope we have through Jesus and how He permeates every aspect of life. I’m so excited to write again!

As always, I want to thank each of you for following along. Your support is such an encouragement to me that I thank God for. Please continue letting me know how I can be of help to you and what content you’d like to see. As far as my personal life goes, nothing is drastically new, but to whomever it may concern, if you happen to think of me next week—on Tuesday, January 12—I’m scheduled to have a jaw surgery I’ve known was coming for two years now. (And as a heads up, if this is the only post you see on the blog for a couple weeks, that would be why.) I’m thrilled at getting it done and moving on with my life, with hopes of finally having functional, perfect teeth, but of course there’s still some anxiety about it and the recovery to follow, as it’s a major procedure where they do, essentially, break my jaw(s). I REALLY appreciate your prayers!! Thank you all so much for being so kind and amazing to this blog and my writing! I can’t thank God enough for you all!