Aviary & Phoenix

I was searching for a good way to make an Etsy banner/blog header that DIDN'T involve Photoshop, (since I don't have or want to buy Photoshop), and I found this. It's a nice, simple tutorial for a banner using a web application called Phoenix. I'd never heard of Aviary or Phoenix (or any of the other programs) but I'm now a big fan! I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I got 5 decent looking banners in one evening. And it's free!

I've tried using GIMP for photo editing, etc. but never got the hang of it. I think some of the problems were from trying to run it on my Mac, who knows. Phoenix runs right in Firefox and doesn't do too many weird things. I did have some issues resizing the text, but I just kept working with it and got it to do what I wanted. There were also times when I had to click things more than once (like "Export image" - never worked the first time I clicked it). But really, nothing big.

I'm waiting for official permission to use one of my mom's images for the header that I picked, but here are some of the other versions (one of which I like and may use in the future).

First try

Version 2

Version 3

Hopefully I'll have a new (real) blog header tomorrow!

***Update - It's up!***