Grant:

Tammy said we needed a banner for the blog. She asked me to work with a digital fish logo she found for free on the internet.

I started by uploading the logo.  It was too big:

I tried cropping; it was too small:

I read the banner documentation:

Click “Add new image” to upload an image file from your computer.
Your theme works best with an image with a header size of 1400 × 400 pixels — you’ll be able to crop your image once you upload it for a perfect fit.

I copied the gray background, pasted it into a new picture, then put our logo on top. I resized it to 1400×400 and uploaded it.  Yuck.  Too far to the left:

I tried again.  Kinda better, but not really:

Again.  Whoop-de-do.  Progress?

And again.  And again.  And again.  Nope.  It was killing me.

Tried cropping again.  Nope.

I ended up with 33 different image files before I quit.  After several hours of failure, this thought smacked me: I didn’t even know if Tammy would like it. Instead of trying to make something fit, I needed to work with Tammy to find out what she wanted.

I showed it to Tammy on my phone.  My banner overwrote the title of “Fishing and Love.”    We needed professional help!

 

===

Tammy:

The beautiful banner on our blog was created by one of my best friends, Maritza Ruiz-Kim. Maritza has been a dear friend of our family for years and is a talented artist.

When I told Maritza that we needed help with a banner, she said she would do it. We joked that we would give her 10% of all proceeds we receive from our blog, which is probably going to be $0. She still agreed to do it. It is moments like this when you know a friend really loves you.

Maritza wanted to meet with Grant and me to discuss the banner before she jumped in. Sean is good friends with both of Maritza’s boys, Nate and Zach and it was their Spring Break, so we went up to North Lake Tahoe together. While the boys had a snowball fight in the heated pool of the Hyatt supervised by Gene (Maritza’s husband), the three of us sat in the lobby to casually talk about our banner.

If I got a dollar for every person who asked me if they could pet Jirachi, I would be a rich woman. I’m serious. In the lobby, every person who passed by had to stop and pet our little furry girl. Two ladies asked to take a picture with her. A group of Korean kids clustered around and cooed.

One mom even left her 5 year old daughter with Jirachi. I think they were checking out of the hotel but it was weird to look up and see Jirachi babysitting that little girl for several minutes. Jirachi never met a human or dog she didn’t like so she happily ate up all the love. She thinks everybody is her best friend- which makes me worry somebody may dognap her one day.

Maritza sat to the left of me on a brown, leather sofa working on a cool art project using her iPad. Grant sat in an armchair to the right of me, typing away on a blog entry. All three of us were on an electronic device. Maritza said my task was to find some fishing and cooking blogs so she could tell what I liked. As I scrolled and clicked through blogs that came up when I googled “best fishing blogs” and “best cooking blogs”, Maritza continued drawing on her project.

Most of the time we were chatting about other things. Now and then I would make comments such as, “this blog has too much white space” or “this has too much going on.” At one point, Grant left to return the sleds we had rented because the boys did not want to sled. It was snowing hard outside and her boys didn’t have snow boots.

After two hours of scrolling on my laptop, Maritza drawing on her iPad, and Jirachi being petted by total strangers, Maritza said she had a good idea of what we wanted. I don’t know how she did it because I didn’t show her the blogs I saw. Grant and I never said anything specific except that I mentioned we wanted koi fish in the banner to represent our Asian heritage.

I swear Maritza has a third eye that can see everything. How else could she create the perfect banner for our blog while she is working on a separate art project on her iPad? I’ve told her this twice already and she just laughs. Here is a link to her own blog if you want to know more about Maritza and her artwork. Please check it out. Amazing is the word to describe both her friendship and her artistic gifts.