Monica O'Brien is the author of the book Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It. The book is a step-by-step guide for small and mid-sized businesses that want to find more customers effectively. Get the book:

Twenty Set Redesign

{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

Jarred Taylor March 17, 2008 at 12:46 pm

Hey Monica,

I subscribed to your blog after your guest post on ProBlogger. I’m one of the “twenty set”, and find your content highly relevant to things I’m dealing with. Keep up the good work. Our blog, Tropophilia (http://tropophilia.coom), talks about “change”, and I’m planning to write a post about life changes in the past year: new job, new city, new responsibilities, etc. I’m sure I’ll be linking to you.

We recently designed Tropophilia in conjunction with our move from wordpress.com to a self-hosted install. You can compare the two by checking out our old set-up at http://tropophilia.wordpress.com.

I know Meebo runs an embedded chat widget, but if you’re a Gmail or Google Talk user you might consider their new Chatback feature: http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New.

Regarding your desire to linkshare, we tried a del.icio.us feed for a while but really wanted to be able to comment on the links we were sharing. With the K2 theme we were automatically given the “Asides” feature (you can see this on our main page now), which just moves any posts written in a category you assign to the sidebar. We’re just getting started with it but we’re already in love. I think you can plug this in to your WordPress scheme. Read more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Adding_Asides.

For your logo, I designed Tropophilia’s in about 3 minutes using MS Word and a screengrab. Just play with some cool fonts and extra goodies, and then capture it at the right dimensions using Grab (OS X) or some other screen cap utility.

Hope that helps. Would love to discuss more if you want to shoot an email. And check out Tropophilia, I think you’ll find some things you like. :)

Take care,
Jarred
http://tropophilia.com

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Matt @ Corporate Hack March 17, 2008 at 2:22 pm

Tim Ferriss talks about Lifestyle Design a lot and your blog is a lot about designing your life, so here’s my shot at a tag line:

Twenty Set:
Lifestyle Design for Millennials

And since you are doing a redesign, I will point out that I like your little category navigation that you have on your front page (where you have the tabs and relevant recent posts), but I also have found that this gets in the way of just simple browsing through recent posts… there’s no real easy way for me to chronologically just scroll back through posts of the last month without a lot of navigation and click. Just my thoughts. Good luck with the project!

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NML March 17, 2008 at 6:22 pm

Hi Monica. I’ve become a big fan of yours even though I’m not in my twenties anymore (I’m 30). Another quick way to play around with logos is to download Skitch which I found out about via Problogger. It is fab for playing around with ideas and you can even sketch ideas in it. I find even for playing with text that it’s great and it’s totally free. Definitely look at creating a logo that has standout and reflects your brand values. I’m about to embark on a redesign myself so I know what you’re going through. Best of luck and keep up the great work!

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Monica O'Brien March 17, 2008 at 8:07 pm

Jarred, thanks for the detailed comment! I do use GTalk and their new chatback feature is what I was planning to embed into my site.

I’ve looked at Asides before, but I don’t think they are what I’m looking for. I do love K2 though, and I like your blog header! Thanks again.

Matt, I like your idea. I was thinking something like “Lifestyle Remix. Just Hit Play” Haha. I really have no idea still.

I think you have a good point about the archives. Nobody has mentioned it to me yet. Technically there is a way to through the archives in the bottom left corner. I think I disabled a tab which also allowed people to look through the archives… maybe I’ll enable it again.

NML, I’m glady you like Twenty Set. What you said is part of the reason I want to change the tagline – I don’t think the audience is only millennials. I hate to exclude a legitimate portion of this audience. I definitely want a cool logo – but I’m thinking about getting someone more creative to do it for me. We’ll see.

Thanks again to everyone for the suggestions so far! I’ll probably update this with some color schemes I was looking at over at COLOURlovers.com (Darien’s website, from Young Go Getter).

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Erin Kathleen March 18, 2008 at 3:04 pm

I would love to know when you post. I tried subscribing by email and it does not work.

I can’t do the RSS yet…still behind on all that… :o )

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Miguel Pineiro March 21, 2008 at 11:57 pm

hey Monica

I like the idea of sharing your favorite links with your readers, and of course allowing them to do the same. I’m looking forward to seeing the site new design. All the best!

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Miguel Wickert (Pineiro) April 8, 2008 at 5:38 pm

Hey Monica

I’m going through some changes at miguelpineiro. I purchased a new wordpress theme, also, I’m moving the site to a stand alone hosting. I wanted to know if you had any advice or tips that might make life a little easier? Thanks for your support and feedback!

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