freedom ride...

Karleigh Linn

For My Shelby Loo

Graphic Design Woes: I Give - You Win

I'm not even sure that there's much of a narrative that I can write for this. The pictures will explain it all.

After a LONG string of emails and numerous changes (and with making this ten times busier than i'd prefer)...

they decided to do their own and scrap my design. i'd be offended but it means that i am no longer involved. thank you sweet baby jesus.

i love them, i do. design is hard. i know. so to that i will just say... go read this article. and be kind to your graphic designers. www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/clients-are-morons

you can google anything

including 1-800 numbers. as hard as i try to avoid it, i have some family members that don't have the best track record who like to write my number down on things. if i see a number i don't recognize i google it if they don't leave a message. try it. it's genius. i also used this for much more legitimate reasons once when i had a bad feeling after giving a guy my credit card number. he was part of an organization collecting donations for military families. after originally not agreeing to donate over the phone (because i had a kid on both hips) and telling him to please email me the info, he somehow convinced me to put down one child and dig out my wallet. i was flustered, david was deployed, and it was just $20, right? EPIC FAIL. immediately googled the number after we hung up and called and cancelled the card. there's a special place on the dark side for people like that. anywho - this made me giggle after looking up a number today.

Mondays. Such A Case Of The Mondays... Creating An App Without Breaking Your Budget

I had so many ideas this weekend of things I needed to blog about and share. Alas, I sit here with nothing coming to mind...

So two cups of coffee later I did finally remember one thing. I'm all about things that come cheap and easy. I'm also terribly afraid of commitment so monthly commitments are much easier for me to make. I work for a municipality and we really wanted an app. Want to know how much they put in the budget for us to get one???? Nope. Guess higher. Still not there. DING DING DING! $50,000!!!! Do you know what I could do with $50,000??? It actually didn't pass. So I started digging and found this.

This website will let you do a test run and not only gives you a really easy interface to create the app, but it's a monthly charge (which varies depending - I would be happy with the $39 a month plan) and they will not only submit it for you to apple but also across all platforms. So you get an app that will be available for anyone in your audience, for $39 a month! Not a bad deal.

http://mobile.conduit.com/

the only work i did to get as far as this screenshot was put in our website. not everyone gets that lucky but making it look like this takes about 10 minutes even if you don't have that kind of luck.

 

whenever i messed with it about this time last year i took ten minutes and got it to look more like this, with a handful of other features that you can access! our branding has since changed so they look considerably different!

just an easy approach at getting a mobile app out there if you want it. it is free for your users to download from what we were told. i haven't tested it as far as to know whether or not there are ads within the app but i'm still looking. they also give you easy ways to promote (including the code to put QR codes and more on your website, facebook, etc) your app and you have full access to the analytics so you can see if your $39 a month is worth it. i would imagine tying this to a visitor site would be amazing. as soon as ours goes live i will be testing it and begging and pleading with the powers that be!

Photoshop: Fireworks Users Do Not Be Afraid!

I grew up using autocad as a drawing program and net fusion to build websites. Isn't that insane? And I SWEAR I'm not that old!! I eventually, in college, moved to using Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks. Some of you may have never heard of fireworks. BUT if you're a web designer before a graphic designer you know it well. I'm a web girl that eventually turned graphic. All of that being said I was TERRIFIED of photoshop. Layers freaked me out. I never learned how to properly use them in Fireworks so I always had everything in the same layer but you could choose what you wanted to work with. Not the case in photoshop but i'm here to tell you THAT IS OKAY! You will survive the transition! Layers are a beautiful thing. If you have any hint of OCD, like me, it will be your favorite photoshop feature! Looking back they are not terribly different, but driving the two programs is. The best thing I can tell you to do is either find a friend who is a Photoshop genius like my co-J or dig through adobe's tutorial videos! They are wonderful! They have an entire playlist on this page of how to get started but I love the layers video for newbies: http://tv.adobe.com/show/learn-photoshop-cs6/playlist/getting-started-with-photoshop-cs6/

If you're not new to photoshop but looking for a few tricks that you may or may not know here's one that i found today that was always something i couldn't figure out how to do so i would revert to fireworks for it! the source is linked to the pic!

another one that we use all the time so as not to reinvent the wheel is stealing layers from your other photoshop artwork. all you have to do is open your two psd's in two separate windows and drag and drop a layer from one to the other! depending on your file size you'll probably need to resize it but it can save you a ton of time if you're making numerous graphics for the same event in different sizes (ie advertising graphics). 

the other tool i LOVE to use that makes the proceeding ecard valid is a filter called liquify. there's no way to explain it other than to get in and use it. you can squeeze in and push out in all the right places. but be careful or you'll end up looking like this:

 but if you do it right this card can secretly hold true for you!!