2016 Yearly Reflection - In Pictures

Hello, everyone! So, my last post was a 2016 reflection, right? Well, if you didn't notice, it was my reflection, but specifically "the words". Today I have a visual 2016 reflection planned! Basically, I'm going to look back at the year in pictures, rather than mostly statistics and whatever notes I had jotted down over time. These pictures include bookstagram pictures and our collection of blog designs!

Blog Designs

So, over these 9 1/2 months that we've had this blog, we've had a few different designs for our blog. I will be sharing with you two blog designs that we had for longer periods of time. (I believe we have had other designs over time, but we didn't have those for that long.)

We started out with a flower-purply-pink theme, which I was hoping would make Em more happy with the blog. (She wasn't that interested in it from the beginning, haha.) To keep this theme up, I had flowers everywhere. When we needed a background for a picture with text, we used flowers, and even the headings in posts were a pink-purple or green to match the theme. (If you look at some old posts you can still see it.)

We kept this theme for a while, but eventually I wanted something more modern and fresh. The flowers were nice, sure, but the design we picked had it so that the background was still, with the section with the posts rolling on it. I didn't like the look of that so much, and it just looked a bit old to me. So, after playing around with different designs and colors, I suggested changing it to Em. Together, we made the following design:

I always thought of this as a "glacier" sort of theme, kind of cold and sleek. We had made it gray and white to make it more modern-looking. I had wanted to go with a very light gray, but Em hated all of the white, and said that she instead wanted this darker gray. As you can see in the picture above, I had added a new tab and made our bio shorter so the month's popular posts could be seen once you visited our page, rather than having to scroll down.

Eventually, we switched to the theme that you see now. Em got sick of the gray glacier theme, saying it was too cold and colorless, so we went all the way to the other end with this. Originally, it was a bolder shade of yellow, but I've always hated it so I secretly changed it to a lighter one....I don't think she'll notice.

Bookstagram - Pictures & Feed

Our bookstagram has also changed over time! Not only have we gained followers and changed our bio a handful of times and added more and more hashtags to our ever-growing list, but we have also changed visually!

Below is an evolution of our feed:

This was our feed in the beginning...as you can
see, it wasn't very organized.

Here we made a white divider to separate the older,
worse pictures and the supposedly better ones.

This was when I took pictures on my own, and they
didn't exactly go together as I didn't have a theme.

Here is another feed with pictures that I took! It...it
actually doesn't look too bad, eh?

Aha! Pictures with a theme and good quality! I had
also started to watch more carefully what worked on
bookstagram. (Before I just did whatever I wanted,
which wasn't exactly a good thing.) I also had
help from the amazing Em.

Proof that a good camera doesn't equal amazing
pictures. The pictures certainly were good, but
they didn't fit and I was playing around way
too much with the editing.

Oh, look! I remember actually planning open books
and stacks and such, so that it would be pretty
evenly split. I also edited it so that they would
look similar, but Em said (and I agreed) that
it was too plain and dark.

This was us getting better. Em got some nice fairy
lights, and I starting editing in a more "fallish"
way...which, to me, is kind of rustic, which
people actually really like!

THIS is my favorite. I like all of the colors, and we
started using a different lense...

This is alright. It's still good, with some beauties.

There's an easier way to look at the evolution of our pictures. I looked through our bookstagram and created a collage of the most-liked pictures from each month. (Note: In my opinion, not all of the pictures included are the best from the month.)

As you can see through these pictures (sorry - there's a lot!), we have improved over time. There are a few things that happened over time that I believe helped us to come to where we are right now:

• using a better camera 
• editing pictures (if you don't have a nice camera, this will definitely help; editing does wonders!)
• deciding on a theme and editing according to a theme
• posting more regularly (although I failed at this towards the end)
• making pictures "different" while still sticking to theme
• more interesting pictures (angles, props, etc.)

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In the end, Reading is Inevitable has changed a lot. Heck, you can even see it just by looking at these pictures, which I think says a lot. But in the end, like I said in my last post, 2016 was the year we literally built up from nothing. From nothing to...this. And I couldn't be more grateful. Bookstagram and book blogging has done a lot for me, so I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you to all of those who have read this blog or followed us on bookstagram, and to those who have gone beyond that and have actually spoken to me directly. I also thank all of those with their own bookstagrams and book blogs. I love this community. Let's hope for another great year.

Your fellow bookworm,
Julia