Walking the line between Print and Web

Finding a graphic designer who can truly create for all areas of your business can be difficult. Sure if you were to work with a design house they can handle all aspects, but is one person really designing for you, one person that you have a relationship with, or are you have a relationship with a salesman, and then they are passing the information onto the two different departments? Some of your info goes to the designers that design for print, while the others go to the designers that design for web. Or maybe there is only one designer, but unless that designer knows how to code for the web, there can be a number of changes that need to be made to your layout just to make it web safe.

Me, Steve Craig is thisHero Designs. I'm a one man shop, which means I do all the designing for both print and web. And once a design for your web is approved, I Steve Craig code your web site. I know through experience what can and cannot be done on the web. And while anything is possible with the web, is that anything possible while keeping your site optimized for any web browser, or any speed, or any search engine? These are all important factors to take into consideration when designing a page for your business. While sometimes flashy is called for, if no one sees it, what's the point.

Steve Craig - Graphic Designer for Print and Web.

NaNoWriMo

I'm participating in the NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, which challenges people to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. My book is a Science Fiction book which is a prequel to a short story I wrote years ago called "Your Source of Violence". This book, This Hero Has Dead Eyes, is the story of how the main characters meet, how the main character in YSOV, get's the abilities he gets, and set's the stage for YSOV. It's been really fun writing the story as I'm re-introducing the characters to myself and am building quite a background for it. I'm also seeing where the original needs to change a little because of what I'm doing now. I think the changes will be for the better, because it is just adding depth and complexity to the story. Anyways, I've added the badge for NaNoWriMo, as well as an image that ties the stories title into the story. It may not make sense right now, but once you read the book, it'll make perfect sense.

One more thing, as far as writing this 50,000 word book, I'll have the story completed by the end of the month, but believe me, it'll be a very rough draft.

Simple Freshness

I do most of the marketing advertising for Flooring Liquidators, an eight store chain in the central valley, and while he has a great logo and mascot, the pieces can get stale. So one thing that you can do to keep things fresh is by making slight non-permanent changes to the logo or marketing piece. In this example I had made a couple of slight changes to "Super Steve", the teeth and cape, that keeps his identity fresh, but not permanent. As soon as Halloween was over we went back to his normal logo. At least until Thanksgiving.
thisHero Designs... Keeping it real... keeping it fresh!

Navigation Icons

As I work on Flooring Liquidators, I've realized by the sheer scope of the site that the UI or User Interface needs to be much more user friendly then past static sites for doctors and construction companies. With all of the pages that can be navigated for find the product one is looking for or account pages, we needed a better system then simple text based links. Therefore I decided at one point that certain navigation buttons would include an icon incorporated into the button to 1. help with ease of use and 2. to show that its level of importance is greater then other buttons (not that they all aren't important.

Anyways, I've created quite a few of these icons, and for the most part am pretty pleased with them and I thought I'd share them with all of you. Now these are the buttons from the site, just the icons I've been incorporating into the buttons.

Enjoy, and we'll talk to you soon.

Steve

Understanding Twitter

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to understand the importance of Twitter in running my own business, and while the results are still to come, some things have become obvious.

I read an article (and even tweeted about it) last week that talked about tweeting as "building relationships and building business". It talked about how you can not just tweet "10% off" or "this months special" but how tweeting is just like dealing with people in the real world. Sure you talk business, but you also talk about the nature of your business, tips and tricks and even your personal interests

So by building relationships on twitter, by replying to tweets, by re-tweeting and by tweeting myself, I do see my number of followers slowly increasing. Where these new followers come from I'm not sure but I definitely can see it more clearly as building relationships. For example, I replied to a tweet from some magazine, and actually got an @mention thanking me for a great comment (building a relationship). Well now my name is spread out to an even bigger audience, so maybe someone else agrees about what a great comment that is and decides to visit my twitter page and likes what I'm sending out in the form of tweets, then suddenly I've got a new follower.

Now I try to keep the business end, specials or announcements, to a minimum, but it's obvious I'm a graphic designer for print and web, but maybe, just maybe one of these new followers will need me someday, and that's when the time spent on tweeting and building relationships pay off. Additionally with the more followers I have, the better the chance one of them is going to say "I need a web designer" and there I am, waiting to serve them. This is of course all speculation at the moment, but I think it has some merit and as I continue this experiment, time will tell.

Secondly what I like about twitter is following people, I like reading about Apple news, I like reading about the automotive industry news, Sharks hockey news and local news, so I make sure these are the people and companies I follow. So now instead of having to go hit up different sites for all of this information, it is all sent to me on my computer or on my iPhone. I get the headlines and if I want to know more, I click the link and read the full story.

So these are my thoughts on twitter, not the strange new technology that was mis-understood, but a friend that can help me in the long run.

Shop truck is officially a rolling chasis

Well I finally made it over a giant hurdle, the camaro clip is done, it's been welded on, and it's square. I have pulled all the front end components and am in the process of rebuilding the front end and front brakes, which after what I've been through on the front clip seems pretty easy.

I'll post some pictures of the completed frame soon. All I can say now is that Daniel did an outstanding job of joining the two pieces together, it looks great, and looks strong. Now we can get back to the business of putting this thing back together again, adding parts, instead of taking parts off.

At Long Last - An Update

Well, since I've last been on, I got married, hence the pause in production. Well, tired of waiting for other people to do my work for me, last Sunday I finally went back down to Turlock to work on Mator. So first thing I did, cut off the front of the Ford frame, then Frank and I spent most of the day measuring, checking our measures and cutting. While we're not there yet, it should be just one more day then we'll be ready to weld the Camaro clip onto the truck. So far I must say I'm pleased with how it's going. I know there is a lot that can go wrong, and many different ways we can screw this up, but we're taking our time, talking lots of measurements, talking a lot about what we want to do, then proceeding. Hopefully next week I'll feel as confident about the whole procedure.