The Making of the Banner

Every now and then, it is necessary to examine the work we have done and to see if it can be improved. Over the past few years, I've felt more and more strongly that the Sourdough Home web page was looking dated, that it had become hard to maintain, and there were features I wanted to add that I could not easily add. So, it was time to start a redesign. A lot is happening behind the scenes. One of the first pieces that has come together is the new logo. I looked at some blogs and was really delighted by the artwork on some of their banners. One of my favorites is Amy Chen's Nook and Pantry. In addition to having a neat banner, it is also a very fine food blog. She has a fine palate, good sensibility and she writes very well.

So, work began. Mostly, I did other things and thought. Then I started kicking around ideas with Chris Hayes, a friend, former co-worker and graphic artist. When he gets his web page a bit more together, I'll put a pointer here. My first thought, that survived more than a second glance, was to write our logo in dough and bake it. And then maybe have Chris clean it up.

So, here's the first shot at it .... raw dough and baked dough. It was a nice sourdough challah.

Looking at the raw dough, I was encouraged. It looked pretty nice. When it rose, the detail was lost, and the difficulty in rolling the dough really consistently became very apparent. Still, the color when it was baked looked pretty nice.

A number of additional tests ensued. I decided to use my KitchenAid pasta maker to extrude the dough to avoid the narrow spots that browned too much, and to use what is called "dead dough" or "decorative dough" which is an unleavened dough used for decorative baking rather than a risen dough. That way I wouldn't have to wait for it to rise, and the dough wouldn't distort as it rose. It also became obvious that the banner work had to be larger, or the detail would just be too close and the writing would be illegible.

At this point, I passed the pictures on to Chris and asked him if he could work magic upon them. He did. He asked what sort of background I wanted, and I told him, how about a cloudy sky? Which led to this....

While I thought it was attractive, test audiences hated it for any number of reasons. It went through a number of changes. I sent Chris a closeup picture of the crumb structure of some bread I had baked and suggested that we could use the texture of the bread crumb as the background. He hated the idea. His partner saw it and said, "WOW - that works!" And that led, after a dozen more changes to the current banner. We hope you like it!