Ramblings
Twenty Years of the House 173 Masthead
How fifteen years of mastheads, Photoshop, yellow doors and a little artificial intelligence led to this.
There are certain things I have spent far more time thinking about than any reasonable person probably should.
Paint colors, for instance.
The exact width of a piece of trim.
Whether something that is almost straight is straight enough.
And, apparently, what the words House 173 ought to look like at the top of a blog.
I hadn't really thought about just how many times I've changed the masthead of this place until I started gathering the old ones together. Put them side by side, though, and something becomes pretty obvious.
The masthead has been remodeling itself right along with the house.
 |
| The many faces of House 173. Over roughly two decades, the blog masthead moved from Photoshop gradients, shadows and photographs to increasingly simple typography...eventually to the black, white and green identity created as House 173 approaches its centennial. |
First, What Exactly Is a Masthead?
Technically, we're playing a little loose with the terminology here.
In traditional American publishing, the masthead is actually the section listing a publication's editors, owners and other information. The big identifying title across the front of a newspaper is properly called the nameplate or flag. But "masthead" has long been commonly used for that big identifying banner, particularly online, and that's what I've always called the thing sitting at the top of House 173.
Whatever we call it, its job is important.
Before someone reads a single sentence, it tells them where they've arrived.
Some of the great American publications figured this out a very long time ago. The distinctive blackletter nameplate of The New York Times became inseparable from the newspaper itself. The New Yorker has used the distinctive title lettering designed by Rea Irvin since the magazine's beginnings in 1925. In fact, The New Yorker still credits Irvin with designing both its signature title font and Eustace Tilley, the top-hatted gentleman from its first cover.
Then there is National Geographic, where for generations you barely needed the words at all. That yellow rectangular border became enough.
Different publications. Different designs. Same lesson.
Eventually, the name stops merely identifying the thing.
It becomes part of the thing.
And there is actually some science behind that. Research into logo design and "processing fluency" suggests that familiarity and repeated exposure affect how readily we recognize and respond to visual identities. Researchers have also found that complexity matters: what catches our attention initially isn't necessarily what works best after we've seen a logo again and again.
Which is an awfully scholarly way of explaining something I eventually learned by making a bunch of blog headers:
Simpler is usually better.
It just took me about twenty years to get there.
In the Beginning, There Was Photoshop
The earliest House 173 mastheads look very much like the era in which they were created.
And I don't mean that as an insult.
I made them myself in Photoshop, usually beginning with some combination of the number 173, the words Our Old House, and a photograph of the house.
 |
| The Photoshop Years - 2011 |
That first blue version is wonderfully of its time.
Big beveled lettering. Drop shadows. A faded photograph of the house. And underneath:
A middle-age couple, ever so slowly remodeling our old house.
That pretty much summed things up.
Actually, it still does, except the "middle-age" part is becoming increasingly optimistic.
The photograph was important because the blog was about this house. I didn't want a generic Victorian, Craftsman or bungalow standing in for it. There was good ol' 173, right there in the corner.
Then came variations.
 |
| The Blueprint Years - 2013 |
At one point I put the name over architectural drawings. It made perfect sense. This was a remodeling blog, after all, and nothing says remodeling quite like a floor plan.
There were shadows.
There were gradients.
There were different fonts.
There were probably effects in Photoshop that I used simply because Photoshop provided a button for them.
That was part of the fun.
From Photoshop to Canva: The Mastheads Get Simpler
Eventually the mastheads became simpler.
 |
| Just Didn't Make it Past a Month - 2015 |
The photograph remained for a while, but the typography became cleaner. The giant 173 took center stage. The old tagline remained underneath.
Then I tried something different.
 |
| The Photo-Collage Years - 2015 |
Instead of one photograph of the house, there were several snapshots, little Polaroid-style images showing the house changing over time.
I still like that one.
It captured what House 173 was really about better than some of the earlier versions did. This wasn't simply a picture of a house.
It was a record of one changing.
And somewhere along the way, the tools changed too.
Photoshop had been my workbench in the early years. Later, Canva made this kind of tinkering considerably easier. Instead of wrestling quite so much with layers, masks, type effects and image placement, I could move things around and try different combinations quickly.
The mastheads got cleaner because making them cleaner got easier.
But the house was changing too.
Then Came the Yellow
For quite a while, yellow became part of House 173's identity.
Yellow had become part of the house.
The yellow back door arrived first, and after we saw how much we liked it, the front door eventually followed. By 2013 the front door was wearing Valspar Goldenrod and becoming one of the most recognizable features of the exterior. I once described that yellow as rich and creamy rather than the screaming yellow it sometimes appeared to be on a computer screen.
For years afterward, that door was simply part of 173.
 |
| The Yellow Years - 2015 |
So the yellow door and yellow lettering that eventually appeared in the masthead weren't just graphic-design choices.
They represented a period in the life of the house.
That's something I appreciate more now than I probably did when I made it.
A logo doesn't necessarily have to remain unchanged forever.
Sometimes changing it records history.
The yellow door lasted more than a decade before we finally decided the exterior was ready for another chapter. And even when we changed it, I admitted that we had loved that door and taken a certain amount of pride in how distinctive it had become.
The yellow masthead belonged to that House 173.
But House 173 is changing again.
A New Logo for House 173's Centennial
This year, House 173 is 99.
Next year, God willing and the joists don't give out, it turns 100.
And I've found myself thinking more and more about what that means.
Not simply that the house is old. I've never been particularly interested in treating age as an accomplishment all by itself. A house doesn't deserve a medal for managing not to be bulldozed.
What interests me is the continuity.
Since 1927, only seven people have called this house home. That's part of the welcome I now give readers on House173.com, and increasingly it feels like the blog is becoming something more than a record of remodeling projects. It's becoming a record of the house itself.
Its people.
Its materials.
Its oddities.
Its changes.
And its memory.
So as the centennial approaches, I wanted the masthead to grow up a little too.
From Photoshop and Canva to Artificial Intelligence
Which brings us to the newest generation.
 |
| The Minimalist Years - 2019 |
By this point I had stripped almost everything away.
No photograph.
No blueprint.
No Photoshop bevels.
No collection of snapshots.
Just the name.
And that turned out to be the right direction.
But recently I started experimenting with another tool that certainly wasn't available when I started this blog: artificial intelligence.
I began using AI much the same way I once used Photoshop and later Canva, not to decide what House 173 should be, but to help me see possibilities.
I tried fonts.
I changed proportions.
I moved things around.
I added things and took them away.
There were versions that looked like restaurants, versions that looked like law firms, and probably a few that looked as though House 173 had begun selling expensive men's cologne.
Then, gradually, we got there.
 |
| The Centennial Masthead - 2026 |
And for perhaps the first time, every major element means something.
The Meaning Behind the House 173 Colors
The background is plain white because white is the house.
It has been the dominant exterior color through much of its life and remains the field against which everything else works.
Black comes from the shutters and the carefully placed dark accents around the windows. It gives the exterior definition, and it does exactly the same thing in the logo.
And then there's green.
That one reaches farther back.
When we bought 173, the house still carried evidence of the old white-and-green color scheme. From what I've been able to piece together, that combination goes back through the Mosher years and was maintained for something on the order of six decades.
We wandered away from it.
Brown came along. Yellow came along. Gray came along. Seventeen green paint samples came along during the 2026 porch project, because apparently buying sixteen wrong greens is merely preparation for buying the seventeenth. The blog records that little adventure rather well.
But green belongs to the history of this house.
So now it belongs to the masthead again.
Not because I'm trying to make House 173 look exactly as it did in 1927.
Because I wanted to tip my hat to where it came from.
And That Little Fleur-de-Lis
Between House and 173 sits a fleur-de-lis.
That may be the smallest element in the entire design.
It may also be the most personal.
The fleur-de-lis comes from the cavalry regiment my unit was attached to during the first Gulf War. It has remained my favorite symbol ever since, and over the years fleur-de-lis have quietly found their way into quite a few places around House 173.
Some are obvious.
Some aren't.
There is a story behind all of that. But that's for another post. For now, it sits between the house and its number.
And somehow that feels exactly right.
EST. 1927
Finally, there are those two little words and four numbers above everything:
EST. 1927
I don't think I would have put them there twenty years ago.
Back then, House 173 was an old house we were remodeling.
Now, I see it differently.
 |
| House 173 when we purchased it in 1997. |
It is a house approaching a century, occupied by generations of people who painted it, repaired it, altered it, planted things around it, wore paths through it, looked out its windows and occasionally did something to it that caused the next owner to stand there and say, Why on earth did they do that?
We are merely the current caretakers.
We've been here for nearly three decades now, longer than I ever imagined when we first walked through the door in 1997.
And somewhere during those years, the blog changed too.
It isn't really 173 - Our Old House anymore.
It's simply:
House 173.
The old Photoshop mastheads were right for their time. The photographs were right. The blue lettering was right. The floor plans were right. The Polaroids were right.
Even that yellow stripe was right.
Because each one showed House 173 as I understood it then.
The newest one does the same thing.
White for the house.
Black for the details.
Green for the history.
A fleur-de-lis for a small piece of mine.
And 1927, because after all these years of writing about what we've done to this place, I'm increasingly interested in everything that happened before we got here... and what might remain after we're gone.
Funny.
It took Photoshop, Canva, artificial intelligence and about twenty years of tinkering to make a masthead that mostly consists of words, three colors and one little symbol.
Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how projects go around here.
Hey, thanks for stopping by - see ya' next time!
Further Reading: Typography, Graphic Design & Branding
If you'd like to wander a little farther down the rabbit hole of typography, logos and visual identity, these are good places to start.
Adobe - Typography Design: A Guide
A useful introduction to what typography actually is and how typeface, hierarchy, spacing and readability affect a design. This is particularly relevant to the evolution of the House 173 masthead because increasingly the typography became the design.
Adobe - Discover Graphic Design
A broader collection covering serif versus sans serif type, kerning, typesetting, logo design and the use of black and white—all surprisingly relevant to the decisions that went into the newest House 173 masthead.
Adobe - Understanding the Basic Principles of Graphic Design
A particularly useful introduction to hierarchy, emphasis and the other principles designers use to control where the eye goes first. That's essentially the problem every House 173 masthead has been trying to solve in one way or another.
Canva Design School - Typography & Layout and Graphic Design Courses
Canva's Design School includes courses specifically devoted to typography and layout, graphic-design fundamentals, logo creation and branding—the same areas that increasingly became part of my own masthead-making process when I moved from Photoshop to Canva.
American Marketing Association - Branding
This approaches the subject from the marketing side rather than purely from graphic design. The AMA defines brand identity as the combination of visual and symbolic elements, including the name, logo, colors and typography, that together create a recognizable identity. That's a pretty good description of what I was unknowingly trying to accomplish all these years.
American Marketing Association - How Effective Logos Shape Consumer Beliefs
This one goes deeper into the psychology. Research discussed by the AMA found that characteristics such as symmetry, balance, geometry, proximity and regularity can affect the impressions people form from visual designs. In other words, the seemingly insignificant decisions involved in moving a line, changing a font or simplifying a logo aren't necessarily so insignificant.
FAQs
What is a blog masthead?
A blog masthead is the identifying graphic or title area at the top of a website. It usually contains the blog's name and may also include a logo, tagline, photograph or other visual elements. Technically, traditional publishing distinguishes a masthead from a newspaper's nameplate or flag, but "masthead" has become commonly used online for the visual identity appearing at the top of a site.
Why is typography important in a logo or masthead?
Typography does more than make words readable. The choice of typeface, spacing, scale and arrangement can make the same words appear traditional, modern, formal, playful or authoritative. Adobe describes typography as the arrangement of type to make written material both readable and visually appealing, with hierarchy, spacing and typeface choice contributing to the message a design communicates.
Why did the House 173 logo change?
The House 173 masthead has changed as both the blog and the house have changed. Early versions emphasized remodeling through photographs, architectural drawings and Photoshop effects. Later versions became increasingly simple. The yellow era reflected the yellow doors and other changes being made to the house, while the newest design looks toward House 173's 2027 centennial and incorporates colors and symbols connected to the house's history and its owner.
What do the colors and fleur-de-lis in the new House 173 logo mean?
White represents the predominant color of the house, while black reflects the shutters and dark window accents. Green recalls the earlier white-and-green exterior associated with the Mosher family's long stewardship of the house. The fleur-de-lis has a separate personal significance: it comes from the cavalry regiment to which my unit was attached during the first Gulf War and has since appeared in a number of places around House 173.
Keywords
House 173, House173.com, House 173 logo, House 173 masthead, old house blog, blog masthead design, logo evolution, historic house blog, 1927 house, centennial house, Photoshop blog design, Canva logo design, AI logo design, old house restoration, fleur-de-lis logo, historic house colors