No, I think even watchsplosion results in hilarity. :D I think I'm going to work that into conversation somehow.

I would love to see you do that. Maybe at one of the guys selling watches downtown? "Whoa, careful with that WATCHSPLOSION!" :) And, hey, you changed your userpics! So exciting! ::runs off to look at the others::

Hee hee. I hadn't changed them in soo long that I thought it was about time. Though you'll probably have noticed that I used your lj to figure out places to look for new ones. I didn't have as much time as I'd liked to browse around so I just changed a few. I also wanted to change up the look of my journal. Can I hire you? I love yours and can never seem to feel satisfied with mine. How do you get a picture at the top? Anyhoo, even basic changes are something I guess.

You can absolutely hire me! And considering my dilettante attitude toward web design, I won't even ask you to pay me. :D I actually took the coding for my journal from a design community, refuted. There are a whole bunch out there---thefulcrum, reversescollide (http://community.livejournal.com/reversescollide/21950.html), street_of_mercy---and they usually provide step-by-step instructions for setting up your own journal.

Also, if you like the look of a journal, you'll often find credit for the layout, tiny icons, header, and other components on the journal's profile page. (My credits are listed under the "writing is love" bar.) That's a great way to hunt down a header image as well as a layout. And taking a peek at a journal's page source is an excellent way to figure out how to code a header into your layout.

For instance, sunlitdays almost never does much more than tweak the colors and background image of her flexible squares layout and then add the header image by pasting this type of code into the Custom Stylesheet box of the Custom CSS tab:

.headerimage {
position: relative;
width: 720px; /* Width of the banner, in pixels */
height: 416px; /* Height of the banner, in pixels */
margin-left: auto; /* To center image leave as auto */
/* To right align leave as auto */
/* To left align change to 20px */
margin-right: auto; /* To center image leave as auto */
/* To right align change to 20px */
/* To left align leave as auto */
margin-bottom: 20px; /* Space between bottom of image and outer box of style */
background-image: url("http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a41/sunlitdays/ausunlitdayshr.png"); /* Header image URL */
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

I usually find a header I really like first and then try to match the colors of the layout to the image. sunlitdays has some excellent headers, as do icon_supernova (source of my header), eternalphoenix_, eriised, kisuncha, pinklabel, and girlyb_icons. (These are all stock headers, but if you want icons with characters or models or actors, etc. in them, you can usually find some posted in communities devoted to those characters, models, or actors.)

That's more or less the basics of layout design. Does that help? Any other questions I can bend my (questionable) expertise to answering? ;)

Oh, and minty_peach isn't designing layouts anymore, but there are lots and lots of the previous designs still available on the journal. (There are also some headers and a post on how to do a CSS layout if you've never done one before, which is rather nifty.)

Ooo, very cool and helpful. I'm going to be playing around with this for a bit! Though, in the end, I may just enlist you to be my designer. :)

I can handle that. :) And the playing around is always fun (even if occasionally it *does* reduce me to tears of frustration). I like your current layout, though...it goes very nicely with your icons for some reason.