Maybe you can just blur that texture a bit so it's not so grainy? Otherwise, I like it- and your diva-bat logo ROCKS.

(And yeah, all the cartoony-balloony Web 2.0 stuff is way tired.)

the body text font looks wrong. I'm not sure whether that's a font thing or a colour thing, but there's something not right.

I like the placement of the photo and the logo, and the logo does indeed rock.

The border feels unbalanced. There's too much symmetry on the left hand side for it to be the part of the header. I'd like to see something that separates the sidebar from the header or try and add more stylisic cues to force them together.

I like the border texture, but there is something not right about it. It could be the thin brown border separating the texture and the text. I'm not sure what it is.

Boy - I sound like a bad customer. Anyway yes. I think you need to make it more good. And change a couple of minor things that are personal preference.

I'm with BP on the grainy texture. You don't need it, really. I know you're going for parchment ... something more photo-realistic would look better, but a background that detailed and large would weigh down your site. Maybe just a solid color?

Is the DivaBat logo -- the DivaBat Signal! -- a transparent PNG or part of the overall background graphic? If you keep it as a PNG (or a well-defined transparent GIF for those poor folks stuck on IE), then the background color/pattern can be changed independently of your logo.

I'll ponder more ...

Two things: you should use the "fi" ligature in your logo, because they're in danger of colliding. And I think your design suffers of too many different font sizes. I like it, though. What are you using for the backend? Joomla? Wordpress?

As a thought experiment, I squinted really hard so I couldn't make out all the words, and I got a few different ideas about what it "looked like":

- The Scarlet Letter/Puritans/Pilgrims/Pre-Revolutionary America
- Divabat logo = falling leaf, accentuated by the offset tilted photo
- unsure if the ".com" is necessary
- the person in the photo is totally wearing the right color for the color scheme on the site! well-chosen!

What about making the main body text area be more, uh, paper-y? It's a bit rounded and clean, with a uniform background color...don't know about that.

And a minor linguistic nitpick: what is "multicreative"? I could imagine what it might mean - that you're creative in many ways or something - but on first glance, I thought it was odious marketing-speak. Sorry! I don't know what to replace it with - a word not beginning with M? In fact, the whole 3-words-which-summarize-you thing is, well, not my favorite thing. Perhaps you can change the phrase/words in that area often, or so that every time someone visits the page it displays a quote you think embodies your message, or just refreshes to something different?

Overall, though, very cool.

(Actually, I don't know about the ligature thing. Apparently some people don't think ligatures should be used at all. Learn something new everyday.)

Definitely use the f-i ligature.

When I think paper / parchment, I imagine a more yellow-y than brown-y colour. That background texture on first glance says more spraypaint or stucco to me. But the layout is clean.

I'm no kind of expert at all, but I think it looks great except for the background - if you were going for a parchment/papery look, you missed the boat colour-wise, I think. To evoke an image in people's minds of paper, I think you need to be more "obvious" about your colour choice.

"Multicreative, multicultural, multitasking" is a tagline I've been using for about a year to describe what I do. A friend just told me it sounded marketingy as well! Haha. I might keep that though, because I've already been using it consistently elsewhere.

Re: colour - it's actually inspired by the photo, though the background is a bit TOO red. I need to find a happy medium.

Re: logo - it was just something cobbled together with Brushes; I'm sure a better job can be made!

Re: ligature - what's a ligature? What do you mean by f-i?

thanks :)

Re: ligature - what's a ligature? What do you mean by f-i?

A ligature is a set of two letters merged into one character. This is done in certain fonts so letters look better. The dot in your "i" is too close to the "f", which is why I suggested you use a ligature. [more inside]