what's with the liquorice allsorts?

the story behind my blog header...

Good Wednesday morning to you! A not-so-short but sweet (literally) post today to help you through “hump day”.

So, see those headers up there? I get a LOT of questions about “those liquorice all sorts” on my blog header and in my avatar. WHY do I have these as my “blog brand” (as I guess it’s now called)?

Well, it’s a bit of a story - grab a coffee and settle in!

If you were an early reader of my blog (some of you actually were, way back in May 2009!) you might have remembered this post about how much I LOVE liquorice which featured my VERY FIRST all sort avatar in the making…

(omg, right? TERRIBLE photography!!!)

But you can see it featured here as my profile picture (when I was trying to stay anonymous LOL) on the very early iteration of my blog:

As you can see in this first ever post, I started the blog initially because it was a course (Blogging I and II) I was working on through writers.com (they are STILL around too which is lovely - highly recommend their courses!) and the all sorts avatar and header emerged from a task in that course.

A break from academia

Let’s back up a bit… Way back in the spring of 2009, I was on a break year between finishing my MA and PhD and was looking for something to do in my spare time - after 2 years of working full-time and working on my MA simultaneously, I marvelled at just HOW much time I had on my hands! And I craved a little creativity in my life (let’s just say that writing academic papers can be a little, how shall I say… dry…). Blogs were just starting to be “a thing” and I came across the writers.com course and wondered whether that might be my creative outlet in between academic courses.

My MA had taken me to Paris for the previous three summers where I had kept family and friends up to date with my life there through a private iWeb (omg, remember that?) blog. After a couple of summers of reading my musings, my dad commented that “most of your posts seem to be about food” and, indeed, I had TONS of food photos already so when I was thinking about blogging, it seemed like a natural topic choice. I signed up for the course with a plan!

(this liquorice photo was taken in Bayonne (France) during one of those summers. Again, omg terrible photography!)

A blog about “all sorts of things”

One of our first tasks in the course was to choose a blog name and tag line. I went all in with “eat. live. travel. write” because I felt like that would give me licence to write about, well, whatever I wanted. I thought I was being clever by using the tag line “a blog about all sorts of things” with a plan to make a pretty header using my beloved liquorice all sorts.

The blog tutors immediately jumped on the tagline and let me know that “while it was clever”, if I wanted my blog to go anywhere in terms of Google finding it, I needed something that was more specific. It was probably the first time I had heard about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and to be honest, at that point, I didn’t care too much about it. I mean, I was going anonymous, right? I didn’t WANT anyone to find the blog! Even now, I DON’T write for SEO and my traffic definitely suffers for it. But I kind of don’t care still. I don’t want to write “for keywords” for my own blog (I do write like this for other outlets and that’s fine. Just not for me).

Reluctantly, I worked through why I was writing the blog (as a creative refuge from academia) and we jumped on that as a tagline. And it worked!

My creative refuge from academia

Ah, ok, so I had the tagline, now to work on the header. Since I wasn’t using the “about all sorts of things” tagline, I didn’t feel compelled to use the candies as the image so for a while I went with this…

(again with the awful photography!)

From bad photography to beautiful illustrations

But wasn’t happy with that iteration either and kept on coming back to the all sorts. Luckily for me, in those early days of blog reading, I came across Lisa Nunamaker’s beautiful blog The Lunchbox Project where she illustrated all sorts of food (and a lot of recipes from fellow bloggers) from 2008 until 2014 when she shifted her focus to garden design (check out Paper Garden Workshop for her current work).

Here’s an example of the work that inspired me to hire her - isn’t it GORGEOUS?

I contacted Lisa in those early days with a crappy photo of liquorice all sorts and asked if she could create a header and avatar for me. From the very start of our relationship, Lisa has immediately understood what I wanted and it rarely takes more than a couple of drafts for her to finalize jobs. Here’s the original header…

and the later iteration when I had dropped out of the PhD programme (ironically because the blog was taking up so much of my time - the “in between” project became the main project!). And I figure “culinary adventures” in our own kitchen are just as valid as adventures as those which take place on our travels, right?

That was my header for years and years, until early 2021 when I was doing some back end work on the blog and wanted a brighter, whiter header which brought us to today’s iteration. I love the bright modern feel of the latest iterations! (Lisa’s also behind the illustrations on our holiday rental site, Neil’s wine site and the line drawings in In the French kitchen with kids - we LOVE her work!).

And, about those all sorts?

So, am I still writing about “all sorts of things”? I guess I am but to be perfectly fair, the blog is mostly about food now (travel… coming soon… again???). Do I think I need to change the “branding”? Nope. I think at this point too many people associate it with me but even if they didn’t, maybe it’s time to bring back doing things because they make us happy, not because they make Google happy. Right?

What about you - if you had a blog what would you call it? What would the tagline be?

Or if you have a blog already, how did you come to name it?

Let me know in the comments below!

Thanks for reading and stay tuned - I have neat freebie coming for paid subscribers next week :)