New Look!

Hi! Did you catch the snazzy new design when you loaded the page today? After five years, I finally finished the new design for ATV. It didn't take me five years to put this together, it took me that long to figure out what direction I wanted to take the design in. I'm sure this post interests exactly nobody so by all means, please go take a look around. If you've been here before then it won't be difficult at all to see the changes. The old site design and the new one are night and day. I wish the page had been registered at the Wayback Machine before I redesigned it, but the design was tragically basic. Gray page, gray background, no header, the only bit of color was the pink menu bar going across the top of the page. The blog had no voice, no personality and it showed. It was boring. 
One of the main reasons it took me so long to get it together was because I like a lot of vintage themes, so my main thing was trying to find the blog's identity. The main two themes I was stuck on for the longest were Art Deco and atomic/diner, and trying to find a background that I felt spoke to the tone of the blog was actually what took the longest. I love Art Deco but it felt a bit too formal, too stuffy for what I consider an informal, casual blog. That left me with the atomic/diner theme, but I couldn't find any patterns that I wouldn't have to pay to use. Vecteezy is actually what saved the day; once I found a pattern I could edit and use, the rest of the design fell into place. 
 As for the site layout, because I don't run the site full-time anymore it was important for me to highlight the various series on my blog because I'm proud of them and there was no way to see them with the previous design without searching the archives. My top four series, TNT, SUTS, Octoberfest and BHS are at the top because they're my pride and joy, but the other featured series are all longtime staples of the blog that I want newcomers to see.  
The main pages I'm excited for you to see are the TNT and SUTS pages, which have undergone a major facelift. Before, the TNT page looked like the rest of my site--sad--and only had the links. Now, there's a cute little header and the poster for the movie alongside the link. The SUTS page is similar; rather than just linking you to the label it now has a designated page so you can see all of the entrants and Daily Cinemas I chose since I started covering the festival back in 2013. 
I don't often do Vintage Spotlights, but I'm proud of the ones I've finished and would like for people to see them. They're the longer, more in-depth informative pieces on the site. If there's a particular topic that I don't think is talked about much but I'd like to delve into, I condense most of the essential parts into a Spotlight. They're my very amateur effort at educating someone who doesn't already know about the subject. I haven't done one in quite some time though, so they're pretty deep in the site's archives. I included them in the sidebar so that you'd be able to see them.

I basically made this post so I could promote the site design lol, but I wanted to walk you through a couple of the new changes as well. The series that don't yet have a page are still grouped by label, but the individual pages are coming. If you want to know where I got any of my graphics from, the Attribution page is the last link in the menu and everything is sourced and linked there. Either way, I hope you enjoy the new look and I'll see you soon!