March Madness Update

With one week left in March Madness, and one week left before I turn older by another year, I am somewhat satisfied with this month. I have felt like the Madness and the March have both been present, but will I reach the finals?

Maintenance clients have driven the court for these games. The guys on the bench stepped up and scored financially while the draft prospects and future stars trained for their day in the sun. And it's the quiet ones on the end of the bench sometimes that give you the reward.

Two web designs were completed. And I am waiting on the clients' responses. One client has been promising, the other has gone dark for now. A T-shirt design came out of nowhere and was completed and printed. A maintenance client returned for an update to his site and is now working with a technical writer to enhance his content. Another client has increased his speed ad kept me busy throughout the month, developing a new photo gallery for his site.

More details later, as I write this hours after I should be sleeping, and now am ready to sleep hard and well.

Excited about March Madness

What I hope March Madness to be in terms of this business is an addition of many new jobs to work on and a closure to the handful of jobs in design and development.

Currently working on two website designs, one which the design is done and I'm waiting for the client to give the go ahead on the development, and the other is a new design in which I have created two design options and have to finish up the secondary page on the first design and finish the entire wie screen design.

Also working on a business card in which I have a little bit of cut and past and doctoring to do to a background image. If all works out, it will be a very nice business card with a new logo to post also. If not, I will be stuck with an overworked project which I had high hopes for. In addition, I created a t-shirt design a few weeks ago. The client said he had put the printing on someone else and feared it would not work through to an actual shirt, but if it does or doesn't I will still post the design somewhere. Probably on this blog if it never gets printed. Finally, back in January, I created a half-page ad for Yellowbook and am waiting for the new phonebooks to come out so I can add that sample ot my portfolio. If all works out, I will have strengthened my graphic design portfolio. And let's not forget about the new BH Creative Design logo.

For the business side of BH Creative Design, I have recently drafted an Agreement and a Website Form which are both in review. I also look to create a Rate Sheet and post portions of that on my website. I still have to gather generic samples of alot of my work with my former employer. After 3 yrs and many projects in Flash and other interactive project, I have little to show that reflects my experience and skill becuase our main client and those projects were not for public viewing.

So, February was a bit of a frenzy. Hopefully March Madness will get the gears turning and then April will result in more consistent and continuing projects and clients.

Ads on Craigslist

Recently, at the suggestion of a very kind supporter, I was reminded of Craigslist as a route for finding work. When my girlfriend, oops - I mean this kind supporter, sent me a bunch of links for possible jobs, I was enthusiastic. I sent replies back to those ads, but none of them panned out.

A few days later, I posted an ad under 'creative services'. The following morning, I posted a new ad which I created in Illustrator. It was a graphical ad. I noticed some ads have a very nice and formatted mixture. View the Ad.

At my first response I was excited. It sounded like someone was going to send me to a site that could also help out. When I followed the link sent later that day, it didn't make sense. The following day, I got a similiar email. And as of now, all Craigslist has yielded on my ad is spam.

The jobs out there seem legit and some of the other companies advertising had valid and impressive work. Have I found an avenue or stumbled onto a road under construction? Much of what I have seen and experienced on Craigslist has matched my contempted opinions before this experience.

To create an ad under creative services, which is free as opposed to creating an ad under jobs wanted which cost $25 an ad for people in some of the major cities, you have to re-post it daily to be competitive and found. I'm not so sure of the spamming rules there, (obviously they are weak in the way of email), but they do warn you that deleting existing ads to re-post the ad immediately or within a two day period is considered overposting or spamming. So, I will have to research a little more and see how to approach this.

(In testing Craigslist on deleting the post, my previous ad was deleted without asking me if I was sure I wanted to delete my ad, so I guess after that spamming period has expired, your ad gets deleted immediately when you hit the delete button, BE CAREFUL! I quickly had to re-post the ad! The link above has been updated.)

In each of the 3 ads I have posted, I have changed the title. Am I spamming or over-posting? I saw one company there on multiple days, so I figure there is an allowance of some type of repetitive advertising under the creative services.

I guess the point or moral of this post is to figure out the advantages of posting on Craigslist. I can"t hurt and the spamming on my email hasn't been overwhelming. Only time will tell. I had much contempt that Craigslist was a bunch of spamming and quick online dating results (after hearing a story a few years ago about someone who got caught using Craigslist as a way to hook up), and although it may all be ture, it still may be a valid way to expose (should I use a better word?) or advertise my creative services.

Playing With A New Logo - Part II

In 'Playing with A New Logo - Part I", I displayed some logo ideas I came up with the other night. Basically all are the same logo and color, just different fonts on the name and tag.

Years ago in college, at ITT Technical Institute, I was taking a clash in Flash animation and we had an assignment to create a short animation for a company logo. That is when I created "BH Creative Media & Design" - now shortened to "BH Creative Design". Back then, I created a flash animation which I never did live down during that class.

Before I embarrass myself with the link, (and most of you will scroll down anyway and find it), the idea of my company was to inspire creativity in every person. My thought was that if I could be creative, so could the next student or person. Throughout my life, I was fascinated at people's creativity. So I created the idea of, "Deep Down A Creative Fire Burns", then came the punch line, "Let It Burn". Once I overcame the humility of all the ointment puns, I realize this was a marketing strategy that would just backfire, no pun intended. OK, so here's the link, please keep reading though: http://www.bhcreativedesign.com/samples/bhcreative_burn.htm

The next thought I put into the name and logo came after a few therapy sessions and months later ... and no ointment! I wanted complex simplicity. Yes, I realize how it sounds and how it looks. I created the logo currently used. If you look at it, between the "b" and the "c" there is a small line connecting the too letters, whose purpose was to serve as the middle stroke of a very curvy and inter-twined "h", all representative of "BH Creative". The biggest ponderance out of this logo was what "bc" stood for. So I had failed again and given in to a new idea for awhile. This and I had a delusional self-serving thought that it didn't matter if others understood it, or that the artists in the room woud see it as I saw it, because I was an artist. Eventually, the flaw in much of that last thought came through. Other artist aren't looking at my site, employers and clients are.

The New One
So for this next venture into self-expression. I created the logo that upon inspection, represents all the letters, "BH" and "C" and "D" for creative design. Upon looking, it looks like a box unfolded (the C and D) and a box coming out of the other box (the B and H), so is born the theme of hinking outside the box, represented by various ads in a box - we'll work on that one. Hopefully, this can evolve into a permant idea, or at least a more sensible anc clear representation. But you can email your puns and jokes to me, you just have to track down my email address! Enjoy.

Playing With a New Logo - Part I

BH Creative Design plugged into the networking

After finishing a recent website, (although I have a little work to do today on it also), I went crazy last night and today with the social networking.

For my website, bhcreativedesign.com, I created a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, linked to this page as my blog, but didn't link to my MySpace page yet. Now I think in my spare time, I'll ahve to re-create the MySpace page and separate it from my personal page. Right now the two are intertwined.

I have three fans of the Facebook page as of day 1. Myself, my lovely girlfriend, and my friend Art. Thanks to my Art and my girlfriend for the immediate support. Especially her. she was a fan just minutes after we hung up even though she was tired and this is not about my girlfriend! Anyway.

I have that curious, unaccountable resistance to Twitter right now. I already noticed an increase in web visits from the last two days and happy about it. Now I await for one more client website to go live to add their site to my portfolio.

I think the social networking realm is good for small business to grow and look forward to see where it takes BH Creative Design.

What I came to moments ago about my "company" name is that I eventually just need to find a better way to market and display this name because I have been extending the name out there beyond the website and a new identity would cause a bit of re-painting the name and image. So for now, we stick with BH Creative Design and move along. Be sure to visit us on Facebook and LinkedIn and also on our website.

So your client used a WYSIWYG?

The Designers' Sympathy - The Clients' Education
Dear God, if I could provide some of the screen shots from the sites clients brought to me based of their own WYSIWYG website builder! This is both maybe one of the most frustrating and also the most promising situations that arise in my experiences. Two quick experiences I'd like to share.

The first one came with a client I had about 3-4 years ago. He had built a site to promote his product and the site had become so clustered, he finally decided to direct his look and feel to something more "webby". Previous to my re-design, anything that could rotate, blink or flash DID!! Links flashed, stars rotated, etc..

He asked for a re-design for a site that had a lot of good information and alot of bad "webby" stuff. I was excited at the possibilities. At the time I was still somewhat unexperienced myslef and solutions diverted to sites with white text on black backgrounds - you know, to stand apart from everyone else. Both of us had gone in the wroong direction with the best of intentions. In those days well written content, optimization and non-distracting design, unfortunately weren't well-interpeted practices.

My client wanted to present the site well, but in sharing the design process with him, he still requested an appealing site, but hoped I could keep as many of the blinks, flashes and rotating thing-a-ma-doos as I could. I killed them all in the first design. And now that I looked at it I may have moved it from one bad design to another. It was terminated by the client within a couple years. The site was off a reasonable builder if I remember right. And I think they may have even offered some templates.

The other WYSIWYG builder was more of a pain to work in. The website builder converted your files to it's own file extension. I guess this is good for some form of protection against something down the road. When uploaded, the files seemed to save as regular html files. Somehow we got around this after a half a day of trying to figure it out, but it was a painful process.

This particular client didn't have the flashing, rotating or blinking circus pages, but instead had linked extremely large image files that were sized down in the code to his pages. Some of his pages took minutes to load. That's loss of viewers who, like myself, click away after seconds. being that most small clients don't know or don't care to reduce the sizes of images or create thumbnail versions, I had no problem fixing this for him.

To The Clients
So here's one for those who don't want to spend the moeny on a designer now, but hope to later. USE THE TEMPLATES!! They are most likely built correctly by professionals. Look for the templates which are layed out in your desired style and have imagery layed out in your style. The text is easy to update. Ask yourself how much information will YOUR site have. If you go after a template that holds the information/content you think your business will have in five years, keep in mind without all that content it will look empty for five years. Is the time spent searching templates that fit your content and size worth it? Yes, I believe so. Isn't your business worth taking that time?

You can provide the designer with all of your largest images and we'll compress them down for you. Also, if you want a sharp design, don't send poor and pixelated images. Track down or create vector images for logos and artwork specific to your business. Find stock images related to your website and mark the links to these images. I now tell my clients to go to http://www.istockphoto.com and create a lightbox or send me the links. They have cheap images there with high quality.