A History Of Banners

In the 2 years and 4 months that I've been blogging, I've only had 3 different blog banners. My first one--and boy, can you tell it was my first--was extremely simple:

But I liked the simplicity...for awhile, anyway. Simple soon became boring so during holidays I would change the paw prints to hearts or shamrocks or something like that. But changing the banner every month became a chore so I settled on this:

It's Howard and Lexie! Aren't they cute? I thought so but this banner didn't last long at all. I just never really liked how the rest of the blog looked with it--the link colors, title colors--it lacked cohesion. And it was still a little too boring. So then I came up with this:

I loved this banner! Unfortunately, my sister hated it. I had a long flickr badge on each sidebar with a brown border and I'm sure she thought the whole thing looked like wood paneling. And I didn't want my blog to be the wood paneling of the blog design world so I changed it once again:

It's my current banner and I've had it the longest--probably over a year now. And I have no plans to change it. It's simple without being too boring and colorful without being too busy or distracting. And more than that, I love the picture. It's a girl, outside on a bench, with a dog and a book. I can totally relate.