I’m about to ruin groverXIII‘s reputation as a hard-nosed metal blogger.
Before I do that, get out your calendar and draw a big red circle around December 21. On that day, The Number of the Blog will celebrate its one-year anniversary. On that day in 2009, groverXIII published the first post on his brainchild. It happened to be exactly one month after the day when we started NCS.
In the almost 12 months that have followed, groverXIII and his talented colleagues have turned TNOTB into an extremely entertaining, extremely informative, content-rich, heavily trafficked home for metalheads. I can’t imagine that anyone who visits NCS hasn’t discovered TNOTB, but if you haven’t, you ought to.
Now, on with the ruining of groverXIII’s reputation. Less than a week after we observed our own Year One birthday at this site, he e-mailed me with an offer to produce for us “a shiny new header for the site’s second year.”
Now, bear in mind that this dude is raising a family, holding down a job, writing prolifically for his own site, and undoubtedly doing all sorts of other things in the operation of TNOTB — and he offers to spend time he probably should have used sleeping to help give us a new look. In other words, groverXIII is one good dude. Â (more after the jump . . .)
He did make clear that he didn’t consider himself a graphic artist, but hey, I wasn’t going to turn down such a generous offer. I figured if whatever he created turned out not to be an improvement over my own half-assed header design, I could always think of some polite way to take a pass.
GroverXIII sent me to some web sites to browse through font designs. Â I picked some font styles I liked and also told him that we wanted to stay close to the same color scheme we’ve been using since day one in the old header. Wisely, groverXIII proceeded to use his own ideas for the font design, picked a background scheme, and did other creative things of his own conception that led to the very cool new NCS header you’ll now be seeing every time you visit our site.
We think the new look is seriously cool. We also think that beneath his sometimes gruff exterior, groverXIII is a big teddy bear — and we are very grateful for both his generosity and his creativity. Thanks dude!
Now, what do you think of the new look? We hope you dig it as much as we do, but fuck — this is a metal blog, which means if you think it sucks ass, we expect you to say that, too. Either way, we’re interested in your comments, so please have at it.
UPDATE:
Following up on a comment below, we asked groverXIII if he could make an alternate version of the logo with the “unclean” font in front of the “clean” font. And he did it. It will give us the option of alternating the header, like on those days when we’re writing about particularly nasty music. Check it out:
22 Responses to “GROVERXIII IS A SWEET DUDE”
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I like it. Better than what I’m capable of at the moment. A couple tweaks to the rest of NCS to complement the facelift and I’d think you’re good to go.
Glad you like it. E-mail me with tweak ideas!
I like the idea, but I would have inverted the logo, since this is *NO* clean singing, to me it would make more sense if the “unclean” logo was on top or more prominent.
Really interesting idea. I’ve already taken full advantage of his generosity, but maybe I can talk him into generating that kind of alternate for us too. Stay tuned . . .
Check the “update” at the end of this post, and you can see what that reversal of the font looks like — and thanks for the idea.
Don’t do it!
Although metal fonts are intrisically better, due to their spikiness, the logo just doesn’t sit right with the dirty over the clean.
The original is much more subtle too.
I’m in agreement. This combination of fonts works better the way groverXIII originally made it for you. Stick with that.
I’ll have to agree with the other respondents, it just doesn’t work. I think part of the problem is that since the background is red/black and the spiky font is black it blends into the background making it hard to read. Philosophically I’d have preferred a less clean logo, but I’m not really here for the logo but the writing.
I still think I’m going to use that logo from time to time, just for the hell of it. I still think it was a worthwhile idea to test out, and grover was cool for doing it.
Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad… Oh wait I work there… MOST AWESOMEST HEADER EVER!
🙂
Does this mean we can get bumped up a few spots in the blogroll? I mean a new header has gotta be worth at least being slotted above blabbermouth right?
We never did put any of those sidebar links in any kind of order, other than the order in which we added links as time passed following the launch of the site. But you do make a good point . . .
Looks good. Now I can start coming here more often.
(Goddamn internal monologue on the fritz again)
You see? I knew we could get those TNOTB dudes to pay more attention to us if we’d just let em re-design our site.
(internal monologue on the fritz again, dammit)
Whoa…whoa….let’s not get carried away….I’m from That Devil Music. I just hang out with TNOTB too much:P
Ooops. I do see your comments there a lot. Leaped to the wrong conclusion. Cool name for your blog, which I now need to check out. (And for others, it’s here: http://thatdevilmusic.blogspot.com/)
Looks fantastic!
I had actually played with the idea to offer you a banner myself, because frankly, your old one kind of sucked don’t you think? 😉 Time constraints kept me off it though and I’m glad they did, because Grover’s work is much beyond what I could have achieved. It’s delicious!
Cool! And I take no offense from your comment about the old banner. Actually, I think that was part of groverXIII’s motivation for helping — he was getting sick of looking at that thing. Coincidentally, we’ve been thinking about replacing it for a while, but none of us knew how to do it ourselves and I was too lazy to actually seek out help.
Heh… I’m always happy to be a bro. And in fairness, it was actually time I should have spent working, not sleeping. (OK, not really working… it’s usually pretty quiet around here, which is why I have the time to run TNOTB in the first place.)
I’m happy to help with any other graphical touches here on the site. I’ve got the .psd file saved with the various layers so I can recreate the effect pretty easily for other images if needed.
And if anyone else is interested in my marginal talents, drop me an email and I’ll be happy to do what I can. I’m cool like that.
Looks really good.
Nice muscles, by the way.
Thank you! Or are you talking about groverXIII’s jaws?