We recently had the chance to create a fun ad design for a fellow creative, Cliff Marks Jr. Photography. Cliff is the exclusive photographer for the Treasure Valley Children’s Theater and this fun shot of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ that we used for the ad is perfect to show the fun side of photography. Cliff Marks Jr. Photography provides individual and family portraits, fashion, senior portraits, personal and professional headshots (Cliff got to photo the Romney campaign when they were in Idaho). Cliff also takes some wonderful natural and action/sports images, which you can check out by visiting his Facebook page at facebook.com/cliffmarksjrphotography. Thanks for allowing us to create this ad for you Cliff!
Graphic Zen business
Social Media Integration
How do you share your blog posts with your audience? We are currently testing a service called dlvr.it (Deliver It) to see how well the service handles blog posts and places them into our social media accounts automatically. We were using Twitterfeed, though lately their service has been pulling old blog posts and not updating as it should. Both Twitterfeed and dlvr.it offer free services to start, and dlvr.it has a nice graphic interface that show clicks and network updates for your social media accounts. I’m going to give dlvr.it a try for a week and see if it handles posts like Twitterfeed. If it works well, I’ll stick with it because of the information in the graphic interface. Update to follow.
Looking forward to 2012!
Cleaning out some files for the new year, and ran across a handwritten sheet of inspirational thoughts gathered from various friends, sites and seminars. Thought I would share them with you as you plan for 2012. May it be your best year yet!
- Have a mind open to everything and closed to nothing.
- Be free of attachment.
- You’re not able to give away what you don’t have.
- There are no justified resentments.
- Send blame out of your life.
- Take responsibility for your life and situation.
- Don’t die with your best music left in you.
- You are not able to solve a problem with the same mind that created it. Change your point of view.
- Love a person or thing for what they are, not what you want them to be.
- Treat yourself as if you already are what you want to become.
- You are no accident on this planet.
- Wisdom is avoiding all thoughts that weaken you. Shift your thoughts to empowering ones.
Everyone is creative – so let yourself go and express yourself!
Meet our new team member!
Graphic Zen would like to welcome Richard “Chad” Villapando to our development team. Chad is a talented and experienced website coder and will be one of the lead developers for our web division. He’s developed a wide range of websites using HMTL, CSS and WordPress including sites for start up companies and small businesses. Chad also specializes in designing graphics with Photoshop and User Interface coding with CSS/ HTML for website development projects.
Chad also brings some experience in flash animation, domain name registration, webhost management, Joomla, Dreamweaver and search engine optimization.
You can reach Chad via email at [email protected].
Website tip #1.
This should be a no-brainer, own your domain name! We’ve recently been involved with projects with clients who let other designers or webhost providers register their domain name “as a courtesy to them”. Great – what happens when you want to switch providers or the designer who used to do your work goes out of business, leaves town, or just won’t return your call? You let someone else have control of your intellectual property and now you are going to have a hard time getting it back.
On one of our projects the client had to secure a new domain name – which sucks for them because all of their collateral material, (cards, letterhead, brochures, etc.) were branded with the old domain name. Luckily the site is down because the server is gone but what if it wasn’t? You would have your customers going to your old site, with outdated info and not much you could do about it.
So the key lesson here is register your own domain name – you own it, you control it. If you need to change webhost providers it’s a simple case of updating the nameservers. It doesn’t take a lot of time to register a domain, the expense is relatively small (especially if you register for multiple years) and it might save you a big headache down the road. Any questions feel free to contact us!
Thought for designers (& business owners)
Attention entrepreneurs/business owners: what business are you in? Attended a great business seminar today and was asked that question by one of the speakers. If you answered, “I’m in _____ business”, chances are that you are not as successful as you should be. The speaker challenged us to think that we were all in the “people business”. We need people (clients/customers) to survive and excel in our business. How we treat (service) those clients determines our success and growth as a business. Basic maybe, but true. What say you?