Soooo…I have said a few times over the last few years, “NEVER AGAIN WILL I EVER CHANGE MY BOOK REVIEWS FORMAT.”

Why? Because I am generally anal-retentive, and with 300 completed reviews, there is a niggly part of me where, if I change something, I want to go back and change all of them to match. I’ve done that three times. Once around the 100 mark; once again around 150 or so; and once around the 200 mark. I did a different kind of update around 275 or so where I added some code to each review on this site so that I could generate multiple indices without manually adding a file link to all of them.

All in all, I’ve been writing them the same way for 25+ years. A few tweaks here and there, a few major changes in format here and there, but I like my consistent format. So what could I want to change? Not my voice, not my harshness, not my layout, not my content, really. It’s just that…

The visuals are outdated

Let’s start with my featured image. I almost always use this image:

If I’m talking about writing book reviews, or something related to a library, I might use these ones:

Or maybe, on occasion, just me writing.

I liked my clipart, I did. But it is 25-year-old imaging. And having my visuals 25 years out of date does active damage to my brand. It’s time I leap over the millennium hump and enter a new age for my blog. To be honest, I’ve been playing with new visuals to improve things across the entire website, this is the first one I’ve actively blogged about.

Introducing: Book Reviewer Frog

This will be my new Book Reviewer image:

Yeah, I leaned in hard on the frog. It has always been my brand, always lurking softly and gently in the background, and I toy with it from time to time, but now I’ve fully committed. I am all in on the frog.

I have two more archetypal characters for myself: reader frog and warrior frog.

I’m also going to change my ratings frog. For the last ten years at least, I have used a symbol for my ratings, an icon if you will…🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪ meant three polywoggs out of five. I’ve used it in my page headings and in my reviews. And it’s okay, but when I wanted to make something a little more visual for my reviews, maybe a little more social media-friendly, it didn’t really work. Way too emoji-ish — like an ancestor before emojis really existed. Sometimes I used an old GIF:

Annnnnyway, I need a new ratings frog, so here he is. His name is Neo…part real world, part avatar.

All of which is good. But is it enough? No.

Introducing the Froggification process

As I looked at a bunch of my images and material, much of it does very little to encourage interaction or even reaction. I have the book image, sure, like the one below from my second book review on file:

And I can do an image card that directs people to the site to see the review, include a teaser of the content, all of that…most of the professional sites out there are doing stars or aggregating their logos and # of reviews (Amazon, GoodReads, etc.). That’s not really my thing. What could I use as a “froggy” hook? Well, what if I froggified the existing cover?

I took a book cover and put frogs in the place of the characters. It worked a little too well; they look like an alien species, not really Star Trek-y.

I leaned a little harder on the frog premise, and I got Star Frog! An even more alien species and uniform, perhaps a step too far.

I decided to try a different approach and took the original cover three images back and turned it into this:

I am quite amused by that. Hence, my new approach for cards to go with my reviews. I’m going to “froggify” the covers somehow. Just cuz I can. Let’s see me try that with the old clipart. 🙂

Anyway, that’s what I have so far. And no, I’m not going back to do 300 reviews that way. I don’t think. Maybe I’ll do random ones from time to time, just for fun. But mostly I’ll be doing my new reviews. Alas, this will take longer than the original process which was already long enough. It’s fun, though.

Oh, I almost forgot

I’m also going to change the name of the category to the Lilypad Library. 🙂

Feel free to give me feedback on any of it. It’s a long work in progress. Until the next book,