The Holiday Post

I have been really busy at the end of this year: Designing the Business Directory for the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, working on the final version of the 10th Edition of the American Society of Cinematographers' handbooks, working at lining up new work in the New Year. It's been exciting, but left me little time for blogging.

My favorite Christmas video on YouTube (animation of the Drifters' version of "White Christmas") has some sort of protection on it now, and I can't embed it here, so if you want to see it, please Click here to enjoy it.

In its stead, I give you my second-most favorite Christmas video, a 1913 stop-action animation from pre-revolutionary Russia.

Sister Kittie and brother-in-law David came down for the Thanksgiving weekend. We had the now-traditional dry-brined turkey and the appropriate side dishes for the holiday feast. On Friday we took the Gold Line down to Chinatown and went window shopping. On Saturday we went over to Cousin Robin's in the Hollywood Hills. Evan (her husband, for those who don't know) made his galactically famous pizza and we had a wonderful time.

Finishing up the Chamber Directory was daunting, as the listings (over 1,300 of them) kept doing minor shifts when flowed from Excel into InDesign. The result was that names and cities were shifting from one entry to another. So we had to go through the thing, line by line, making corrections on perhaps a quarter of the listings. It meant a number of all-nighters for me, but we got the book delivered on the date set.

I'm up to chapter 52 in the ASC handbooks, finalizing things for publication. There is light at the end of the tunnel and Martha, the publisher, calls to let me know that there are three pages (or perhaps more) to be added to the aerial cinematography chapter (17!). This is going to mean lots of renumbering of pages (at least pages 220 through, what, 876). And the shift will be consistent, so the numbering in the Index can be altered without too much trouble. Between this and the weirdly shifting chamber listings, I'm beginning to think long-form documents aren't really the place to specialize!

We haven't done any decorating for the holidays because Steve and I are going to spend the week between Christmas and New Years up in Eureka, and the idea of leaving the cats alone for a week with the Christmas tree, its fragile baubles calling to them, did not seem like a good idea.

It was my sister Kittie who suggested we spend a week during the winter in Eureka, as well as the week in the late spring we spent there on our last trip. As we are looking to retire up there, she said it would give us an idea of what it's like when the weather's bad. But since the weather really doesn't vacillate that much, it's more of a getaway than a test of our resistance to lousy weather.

When we were up there in the late spring, it was in the mid- to low 60s; this time the forecast is for mid- to low 50s. Same chance for rain (20% to 60%), same coastal clouds clearing to sunny afternoons, so I don't think we're in for any surprises. Also, I pointed out that sitting in a hotel room during lousy weather is not the same as sitting in your own home during lousy weather.

So that's about it. I just wanted to have a chance to send my holiday wishes to everyone (Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, if that's not too politically incorrect), and let them know things are going well. I know family and friends in the northern part of the country most likely will have a White Christmas this year. But whatever your holidays shape up to be, I hope they are warm and happy, and that you spend them with people you love.

Holiday Heart

Another big gap in the blog entries, but I've been really busy this time around: The ASC Handbook redesign got interesting when the publisher Martha asked me to finalize the chapter files for her. One big change has happened: we went to full color, as all those black and white diagrams and illustrations have to be colorized at least a bit, since black and white looks really ugly sitting on a color page.

Problem is, whoever put together the diagrams (especially the camera-threading diagrams) made them up of hundreds of little line segments instead of creating closed shapes. This means now I get to go back and connect all those little lines in order to fill them with color, or find other ways to cheat. It's still taking hours, and there are about 60 diagrams to deal with: most are fairly simple, but others are a real nightmare. But, beyond the tables and charts, these are the last big hurtle I've got in the publication, and I'm hoping we'll get the thing done by the end of the year.

The Pasadena Chamber of Commerce Business Directory started in earnest this last month, and that has been taking a good chunk of my time and attention. The ad work on it is a lot more than I thought it would be. With a supposed deadline of November 26, they're still out selling ads, which makes the layout of the magazine change every time they sell anything of substance. Add to that the fact that no one has the ad files from last year, and a good two-thirds of the ads are reprints. I finally got ahold of the designer from last year's directory; he has the ad files and is going to send them over to me.

This is not the end of it, though: I also have to put together e-mail proofs of each ad that comes in and send it off to the advertisers for final approval. A lot of them aren't responding. And of the one or two ads that I'm building, the advertisers are just not talking to me. I know now why I didn't go into design for sales and marketing: it's too crazy.

So there are two very nutsy jobs to work on, one with a deadline that's getting way too close way too fast, and I am swearing to myself that I am not going to spend Thanksgiving weekend huddled over the computer trying to get these projects out, because sister Kittie and her husband David are coming down from Grover Beach to spend the weekend with us. We'll be splitting the cooking duties, on Thursday. On Friday, we're planning on taking the Gold Line to Chinatown and celebrating Black Friday that way. On Saturday afternoon, we're all going over to Robin and Evan's (our cousin and her husband, who live in the Hollywood Hills) for Evan's famous pizza and because it's an excuse to get together. In between will be frittatas, my famous French toast and, of course, the family tradition: Turkey a la King with the leftovers on Friday evening. And I'm not missing out on all that to make a deadline. Luckily, my contract has a clause that basically says, "If you screw around and don't get stuff to me on time, I can miss my deadlines without breaching the contract, because I'm not responsible for making up time that's lost due to your missing deadlines."

But I never miss deadlines. It may mean that I'm working 14 hours a day for the week after Thanksgiving, but we will get the deadline met. One nice thing: every single chamber member gets a copy of the directory, as well as everyone who writes the chamber from out of town. It's also handed out at Bob Hope Airport (Burbank) by the information desk there, and it's available at most of the larger hotels, so it will be a kind of personal calling card for the next year. And it's been fun putting it together.

Speaking of which, I'd better get back to work. It was time for a break from Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, so I relaxed with a session on Blogger. Here in the 21st Century, that actually makes sense.

Stay Happy.

Security Makes Me Feel Secure

Jury duty this week. Most people groan at the news, but I happen to enjoy it. It makes me feel like one of the special cows (or steers, more accurately) in the herd. And with the online system the L.A. Superior Courts have, it's very easy to take the orientation online (no showing up until 9:30) and checking in to see whether you're being called the next day is simple.

The last jury duty I had was at the Superior Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, which is less of a herd and more of a zoo, especially if there's a celebrity trial going on. If that's the case, don't even try to get through the front doors of the building, as it will be packed with press, photographers and those demonstrating for and against the celebrit(y/ies) involved.

When I was called to that courthouse, I was living in Hollywood, so it was easy to take the subway Red Line down and avoid the hassle of getting into downtown and parking. This time around, I'm assigned to the Pasadena Superior Courthouse, which is much nicer. There's lots of seating in the jury waiting room, and even plenty of tables for those of us who have laptops. I can't take any photographs, of course, so there won't be any visuals in this entry.

They also have free WiFi, to which I was looking forward. I couldn't be posting this entry, in fact, without it. It does have a funky filtering system. I tried to get onto Jigzone.com, a favorite of mine because it has online jigsaw puzzles (hence the name), but it is blocked. I sent a request to the administrator to unblock the site, but I don't expect to hear anything soon. I'm assuming that they block it so the public employees in the building don't spend all day playing online.

When working for an employer, jury duty was almost fun, because it was like time off from work. Being self-employed now, it's a little bit of a convenience, as it's impossible to schedule any appointments or meetings this week (or perhaps next, if I'm empaneled).

Martha, the publisher at the American Society of Cinematographers, has decided to turn the entire Cinematographer's Handbook over to me to finalize for publication. She was planning to drive over here to Pasadena today to hand off an external hard drive that has all of the files on it, but I got called in for service.

Also, we're supposed to have our first meeting on the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce Directory design sometime this week, though it hasn't been scheduled. So, that's on hold. And I just got a request from a local attorney to get together and discuss designing a website for her firm and, again, had to postpone scheduling something until after the jury thing is over.

Things are slow at Steve's job, and he actually got yesterday off (without pay, of course), but I think he was needing a three-day weekend. He was only going to go in for a few hours today to do payroll, but they called yesterday evening and asked him to come in for the full day. For the first time in a while, the cats are by themselves at home. God knows what's going to happen while I'm gone.

So that's about it. Looking forward to the holidays, we're not planning anything for Halloween, and I'm thinking of dry brining a turkey again this year (a little bigger, since we had almost no leftovers last year). We're going to Eureka for the Christmas week, so we've decided to forgo putting up the Christmas decorations or the tree: Saves time, effort and frustration. We may buy a live wreath to hang over the television (the closest thing to over the fireplace if you have no fireplace).

Well, they'll be calling the first panel in about three minutes, so I'd better sign off here. Looking at the number of folks here today, I think most of us will be going somewhere soon. I'll keep you updated (or add to this posting) if I actually end up on a jury: Wish me luck (or not).

Hothothot Exciting Times

It's been so damn hot. Seven weeks of hot and the weather people keep promising us a few days of cooler weather, but they always get moved ahead a few days, and we're stuck with hothothot.

Meanwhile, the entire Los Angeles area was majorly distracted by the arrival and flyover of the space shuttle Endeavor on the way to its final home at the California Science Museum, somewhere in or near Exposition Park. I'm sure you've seen footage or photos of the shuttle riding piggyback on the 747. Everyone has a photo, it seems, but me. Even at work, Steve heard it and went outside and saw it (although he snapped no photographs).

I was very dutiful and watched its progress on the television on Friday morning, and when it was scheduled to fly over JPL here in Pasadena, I was out on the street, my iPhone ready, for a shot I could share here. I heard the rumble of the low-flying jet but saw nothing. Feeling rather bummed out, I broke down and took this photo on the way home from grocery shopping on Saturday: it's the Goodyear Blimp hovering over the Rose Bowl during a USC football game. Not quite as stunning as the shuttle, but an unusual sight in most people's skies.

I've been working on the design samples for the Chamber of Commerce Directory and finishing up the work Martha sent me on the ASC handbooks. I've also been working on putting out a weekly e-mail newsletter which links to the blog page on my business' website. There will be no newsletter this week, however, since I quickly realized, after four newsletters, that there's just not enough of interest to put out something on a weekly basis. So the next newsletter will come out on the 1st of October, explaining that it is now monthly, much to the relief of everyone receiving it, I'm sure.

You probably have heard about the older woman in Italy who decided to "restore" a fresco of Christ in her local church and ended up botching the job. The final image was horrific but, as shown here, even the most tragic of results still points out that we are made in his image. (Or so Bob Ross, here, would claim; do you remember his how-to painting show on PBS?).

Steve and I have decided to head to Eureka between Christmas and New Years (his only paid week of vacation at Pearce Plastics) as a much-needed getaway. Testing out the travel websites for that week, it soon became apparent that the only way we could possibly afford the trip was to fly on the actual holidays themselves, when the fares were reasonable.

So we leave on Christmas Day and return on New Year's Eve. In between we don't have much planned except checking out more housing in the area with our Realtor up there. The whole trip was predicated on my sister's belief that we needed to spend a week up there in the winter to make sure we didn't mind the cold weather. I don't think it will be an issue, though, since it's always in the 50s or 60s and rains most of the year. Steve and I both like rain and cool cloudy days, so I don't think there will be a problem. The rain gear will be packed in any case.

That's about it for now. Work on the directory will be starting in earnest in a few weeks, and a lot of the initial work is just building and resizing advertisements to go in the directory. The real build won't commence until November, I think.

Hope this finds everyone well and happy. And now that I'm not churning out a blog and newsletter a week on my website, perhaps there will be more punctual submissions here.

More of the Same

There’s been no blog post for two reasons: I’ve been busy and I’ve been doing the same thing.

We had our first meeting for the Chamber of Commerce Business Directory, and this month I’m focusing on coming up with three different design schemes for that publication, ready for presentation at our next meeting in early October.

Martha over at ASC has sent more chapters my way, some for revision and some for original layout. She’s been on vacation for the last week, so that work got turned around and two days from now, when she returns, I’m sure more work on the handbooks will be forthcoming.

The one event of note is that I’ve initiated my weekly newsletter and marketing blog as my primary ongoing marketing tool for the studio. The inaugural newsletter went out on Aug. 27, and the second one goes out tomorrow at 6:15 a.m. PDT. So, I am spending my spare time browsing on the Internet and culling information for the short articles that go into the newsletter and the marketing surveys that drive the blog. The idea is to give small business owners a little something to read every week, taking them to the website and hopefully putting my name in their heads as a designer of choice.

If you’d like to be added to the mailing list for the newsletter, go to my website, fill out the contact form and I’ll get your e-mail address added to the list.

The weather is still hot and more tropical moisture is said to be moving into the area, making it hot and sticky. The 10-day forecast is a carbon copy of the last 10 days, and September is notorious for being the hottest month of the year, so no relief on the climate front.

To sum it up, life has just gone on: the wildfires are nowhere near us, the summer-storm flooding is in the high deserts, far away. We did get one brief thunderstorm move through Pasadena last week, but it lasted maybe half an hour. There have been moderate earthquakes — a three-point-something over there and a four-point-something out there — but nothing really worth getting out of your chair for, even if we felt them.

Steve and I have decided to spend the week between Christmas and New Years in Eureka, taking another look at the real estate in the area and planning more walks and hikes in the forest and on the beaches, familiarizing ourselves with the lay of the land. Hopefully, there won’t be too much rain, but we have the rain gear ready if there is.

As you might know, Steve is looking toward retirement next year (just 10 months away), and the whole concept of my studio is so that I can have an independent source of income for as long as I choose to continue working (which is forever, at this point; I can’t see sitting around and doing nothing in particular). At some point in the next few years, we plan on making that move north and living out our years among the redwoods.

For now, we’re waiting here for cooler weather here and the end of daylight savings time, keeping ourselves busy while we do.

Hope this finds everyone well and happy.

Biweekly Is Better Than Nothing

It’s been two weeks since the last entry, and I promised myself I would try to get at least two entries a month in on this blog, so I’m back at the keyboard.

It has stayed hot. I know it’s summer, but this muggy heat wave just won’t go away.

For those of you who have never lived in the Los Angeles area, there is a wonderful marine layer that hangs eternally off the California coastline. In Southern California, we call it “nature's air conditioner,” because when the sun sets, a cool onshore sea breeze carries the marine layer into the L.A. basin and the inland valleys for the night. In the morning, it takes the sun time to burn off this cloud cover, thus relieving us of several hours of solar heat. When this happens, temperatures stay in the 70s and 80s, there's a pleasant breeze from the west, and the humidity is low.

But when we have a high pressure dome sitting over the four-corners region (Utah/Arizona/Colorado/New Mexico) as we do now, it pushes hot air from the continental interior in our direction over the scorching desert from the east. This pattern keeps and marine layer from ever moving inland. On top of that, the clockwise rotation of the high pulls subtropical moisture up from Mexico and the Gulf, making things muggy and setting off thunderstorms and flash floods in the local deserts. This is the pattern of weather we’ve been in for over two weeks now, and I’m getting tired of it. Knowing the meteorological dynamics of the situation does’t make it any pleasanter.

On the business front, I’ve finished up the most recent batch of design work on the American Society of Cinematographers’ (ASC) handbooks. I am assured, though, there is much more to come. I completed the chapters on digital cinematography, green screen technology and the science of the ACES (Academy Color Encoding System). As a responsible designer, I have to know the concepts of the illustrations and graphs I create, so I have to read and tacitly understand the subject matter before I start my work. Even though I consider myself fairly tech savvy, this stuff is making my head spin. At the same time, I find it fascinating information about how computer graphics and special effects work function so flawlessly in the production and post-production phases.

I got some great news this last week: My bid for the design and layout of the 2013 Pasadena Chamber of Commerce Business Directory and Community Guide was accepted, so I’ll be producing that between now and the end of the year. It has to be done by mid-December because they hand them out to folks who are visiting for the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl at the beginning of the year. It’s also a real feather in my cap because each chamber member also gets a copy of it, so my work will be seen by a couple thousand of the more influential business people in town. I’m hoping that will give me a boost of new clients in the coming year.

This last week has been fairly quiet, and I was feeling frustrated at the lack of work: I had to stop and remind myself that I’ve only been in business for six months. All my accounts are in the black and I have nearly $2,000 in receivables on the books, so I’m doing pretty damn well. I still get frustrated at my lack of marketing savvy, though, and my present inability to integrate it into my work schedule.

So, with my quiet time, I’ve been working on creating a backlog of articles of interest relating to factoids about communications and marketing trends that I can put up on my website blog. It will be separate from this blog, which I will continue to write, but I won’t feel compelled to write to such a wide audience here anymore.

Once the blog page is designed and structured, I’ll be creating a weekly e-mail campaign directing business people to the articles I’ve written, gleaned from various Internet sources and presented on my site. Hopefully, this will drive more people there and get them checking out the rest of the site.

I just finished revamping the Q&A page, rewriting it from a point of self-promotion. Rather than “Why you need a designer,” it’s “Why you need me as your designer.” I added links to some American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) information, a nice way to emphasize I’m a professional member of that organization. There is a flyout page with the AIGA Standards of Professional Practice and a downloadable PDF of an AIGA booklet titled “A Client's Guide to Design.”

I’ve also changed the design of the Recommendations page, adding more testimonials and converting from tabbed content to an accordion scheme; this way, I can add an unlimited number of entries on the page.

Steve is still with Pearce Plastics. I don’t think that will change, especially since he has less than a year to retirement (292 days, to be exact). He’s looking forward to cutting back on work hours and taking things a little easier, but neither one of us wants to stop working completely. I get the heebie-jeebies when I see old folks standing like statues in the yard with the water hose or sitting on the front porch, staring vacant at the street, looking lost in their own lives.

For now, though, I am enjoying the excitement of having such a great professional adventure at this stage of my life. Sure, a consistent paycheck would be nice, but I am invigorated by having my work and my time be my own, creating my schedule around my work, rather than the other way around.

Does that make sense?

Summer Swelter

Summer is not my favorite season here in Southern California. When the temperatures climb into the 90s (and especially when subtropical moisture slips over Mexico from the Gulf), things are hot and, at times muggy. Can't complain too much about the last few weeks, though: I've only fired up the air conditioner two days so far. There's still August and September and October to go, though, and those are usually the hottest months.

I've been very diligent about taking care of the plants on the patio this summer, and the result is they are actually doing really well. I'm keeping everything watered and actually have a schedule for feeding them, rather than relying on sickly looking leaves to prompt me. The fountain is also responding to attention, and for the first time in a couple years, all five of the spouts on the front of the fountain are issuing water simultaneously.

Last week I finally had a face-to-face meeting with Martha, the publisher at American Cinematographer magazine, who has been sending me all the lovely work on the redesign of the American Society of Cinematographers' handbooks. Their offices are on the same lot as the Academy's Mary Pickford Film Archives buildings: It's all very austere and monumental except for the magazine's offices, which are housed in a sprawling old '30s bungalow. It's not as imposing as the monolithic quality of the archives, but much, much more homey.

Martha is a delightful woman and is in the same general age range as myself, so we had a lot in common, careerwise. The upshot is that there's a lot more work left to do on the handbooks than I had thought, and I have a feeling this work is going to be a part of my professional activities for at least the next month or so.

And, of course, last Sunday was my birthday. Turning 59 is a nonevent of sorts. Steve took me out to McCormick & Schmick's for dinner, and I had some really nice stuffed shrimp and their deadly good chocolate brioche pudding. My present from him was a really beautiful Murano Glass vase (pictured here), which has yet to find its permanent place in the house.

Our fourth wedding anniversary is coming up on Aug. 8, and we've agreed that we're not going to get anniversary presents for each other, but merely to remember and commemorate the day in some other way. Steve's birthday is in June and mine in July, so August seems like awfully quick turnaround, gift-giving-wise. As Steve said, "The birthdays and Christmas are six months apart, and that enough gift-giving for the year." Also in August, I should hear whether or not my bid was accepted by the Chamber of Commerce to design and layout their Business Directory and Community Guide, which would be another nice big job to come my way. I'm sure all the designers in the chamber are bidding on it, though, so it depends on how cheap someone is willing to go in order to get the job.

So we keep on keeping on. I'm still no better at doing marketing for the business. I need to work on creating focus on it, and working toward that "aha" moment when the next move will be clear to me.

Summer in the City

It’s summer around the house. We’ve had spates of hot and muggy weather, but the past few days have been delightful: in the upper 80s, a mild breeze. This does not promise to last long, though, as another blob of subtropical moisture is heading our way from Mexico (hurricane Fabio was our last moist visitor), bringing possible thunderstorms this weekend and into next week.

We go up and down the stairs a dozen times a day, and it was only this week that I stopped at the bottom and looked at the art in the stairwell. I was so pleased, I took a couple snapshots to share. Up the walls we have a collection of eight lithographic plates from “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” by Thornton Wilder. My dad gave the book to me as a Christmas present when I was a kid: the clarity and simplicity of the writing captivated me, and it was the first book I’d ever had that included lithographic plates as the artwork. When the binding started to fail, I decided to rescue the art and put it in the hallway. On the facing wall above is a blowup of the famous Life magazine cover of Marilyn Monroe, made up of small Life covers from the past. It’s from the last 1990s, when such things were thought of as digital wonders; this kind of image is commonplace now.

In the corner is what I call the world’s largest paperweight: It’s a Rollin Karg sculpture that I picked up when we were visiting Eureka two years ago. It weighs about 80 pounds and is solid glass. Here’s a clip from Karg’s website showing them making one of these monstrosities. It’s a really beautiful piece, and I keep threatening to construct a lighted base to really show off the depth and refraction of the piece.



Things are going well with the business, although not as busy as I’d like to be. But I am getting calls from potential clients, and handing out my cards and the brochures is slowly paying off. I have two appointments for next week; one with the publisher from the American Society of Cinematographers (I’ve been working on their new handbooks, and I think there’s more to come on those), and a local restaurateur who is contemplating redoing her website. Beyond that, I’ve got a couple of book covers, one which I just finished and one that’s in progress, and I have a bid in with the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce to design and layout their annual business directory and community guide. We’ll see how that goes. There are other potential clients out there that I poke at every so often via e-mail, but a consistent and scheduled marketing campaign still eludes me, especially since I can’t throw hundreds of dollars a month at it just yet.

Out on the patio, I’ve developed a real consistency since the spring, and the plants are getting watered and fed on a regular timetable. It’s amazing how lush plants can get when you give them what they need. The shots above are of the ivy that replaced the dead vining ficus that was caught on the patio when the house was tented and, of course, Beuford reclining among the roots of the now-eight-foot-tall ficus benjamina.

I’ve got a webinar scheduled in about an hour and a half covering the major points of launching a consistent and successful e-mail marketing campaign for the studio; of course, it’s hosted by the website that wants to charge me for the service, but doing it on my own takes a lot of time, and I just don’t get the open and response rates that a service does.

This is one of the things I do not like about being in business for myself: Being a one-man band. Doing the marketing, tracking billable hours, networking, and lots more have all got to be attended to without anyone else setting the pace. Sometimes it feels like I’ve got a dozen balls in the air at once, and I probably do. It’s still something I’m getting used to but, every now and then, a part of me longs for a nice corporate job where I don’t have to think so hard and don’t have to shine for everybody all the time.

Fire? What Fire? Oh, That Fire

It was a typical Thursday evening here in Pasadena. Things had just started cooling off from the 90-degree high of the day. We had just finished a nice piece of chicken and some cornbread stuffing for dinner and we were sitting on the couch, remote in hand, one again in awe that, with the hundreds of channels on cable, there was, again, absolutely nothing worth watching.

Then the fire engines came. Now, this is not unusual, because the fire station is just two blocks away and our street (Villa), being one of the lesser traveled east-west streets, is often used by the fire department to get somewhere in a hurry: We get our fair share of sirens blazing by on their way to provide aid and assistance.

It is most disconcerting when the sirens reach the our block and stop, and, just as we had decided to pop in the Blu-Ray disc of the last Harry Potter movie yesterday evening, that's what happened. Steve checked at the window and said there were paramedics. Then another siren came. And another. And another.

"Do you smell smoke?" I asked, because I couldn't. "No," Steve replied, "but their are firemen out there."

Well, who can pass up a chance to check out firemen? So, as another two sirens approached in the distance, we went out front to watch the commotion. Most of the neighborhood had beat us to the punch, and it was like a small street fair. We noticed that there were two fire hoses running into the apartment complex next door (own by CalTech and rented out to students and faculty working and studying there). We walked back to the gate at our building and ran into one of the neighbors from our complex (our condo is one of seven in our building, with 14 units total in our HOA).

"There must be a fire," Steve said. "Oh, yeah, there's a fire," the neighbor replied, "it's way in the back." So we walked back to the last unit and, sure enough, smoke was coming through a broken, scorched window. Jesse, the resident of the back unit, had taken some iPhone videos of the fire in progress, and those are included herein.

We had six fire trucks altogether respond to the blaze, which was contained to one unit, with the unit above receiving some damage. No one was injured, thankfully, although one cat was seen scrambling out of the burning apartment and had gone missing.

The street was closed off for several hours as the firemen did their work which was nice, because it meant we didn't have any sirens screaming down the street while watching Harry ultimately vanquish Voldemort (I don't think that's a spoiler any longer).

Steve has to get up at 5:45, since he has to be at work at 7 a.m., and even though it's only about 10 minutes away, it's still a drag. Upside of this is he gets off at 3:30 in the afternoon. In any case, he's usually in bed by 10:30 or so, and I stay up later, because I am a night person and there is nothing specific requiring my early rising. I take the opportunity for Steve's early retiring to watch some television that I know he's not interested in. Recently it's been rewatching "Twin Peaks," followed by the Joseph Campbell's philosophy series, "Mythos." It's quite a metaphysical combination.

So that's the excitement of the week from Villa Street in lovely Pasadena. This is an opportunity to make sure your homeowner's/renter's insurance is up to snuff. Remember, smoke damage can be as costly as fire damage, if not more so.

Late Nights

One of the consequences of working at a home business is that your schedule becomes your own, for the most part. You have client meetings scheduled and networking functions to attend, but when you get your work done is pretty much up to you, as long as you hit your deadlines.

I am a night person; always have been. This was one of the reasons I worked so well as a theater artist, because my workday began at 2 in the afternoon and ended at 11 at night. Unfortunately, a theater career paid a dismal salary, and the politics of the arts world just wasn't my cup of tea, so I abandoned that career in my early 30s.

So, of late, I have put in a lot of late nights while working on the ASC handbook, or working on the coding for some interactive part of a web page. I look up at the clock, and all of a sudden it's 3:30 a.m. and I didn't plan to stay up that late.

The night is cool and quiet, and I find it easy to concentrate. And when I go to bed, I am really tired, ready for sleep.

The past few weeks, every other night or so, a mockingbird has taken up residence in the trees across the street: not so close as to irritate, but close enough that you can listen to the varied songs it sings, up alone and attentive to its tune.

Summer is upon us. The rest of the nation has gotten the heat before we have, although there have been a couple days when it reached into the 90s. Mostly, though, we have a morning marine layer that works its way into the valleys and keeps the temperatures in the mid- to upper-80s.

Really, there's nothing much to report of consequence. I still have several potential clients who are on the edge of moving on new websites or website redesigns. I keep networking at the monthly breakfast and luncheon meetings at the chamber of commerce and following up with current clients, trying to not be an irritant.

At the chamber networking functions, they always have a raffle at the end of the meal, and last breakfast I won a 30-minute marketing consultation with (what else) a local marketing consultant. He sent me a fairly long form to fill out, but I have to sit down and write out some questions for him about how to approach marketing.

I want to get the reputation for being the design guy you go to with any problems, a senior statesman of graphics who can take a communications problem and create meaningful, satisfying and cost-effective solutions on a one-to-one basis. I'm doing good work on my own, but how to develop that reputation, I'm not sure.

I'm thinking of putting out another mailing with a purchased mailing list from one of the many list services available online. No free sticky pads this time, but a note inserted urging business people to contact me with their communication problems.

This is a very boring entry. I'm in a hiatus from work. The mockingbird is not at its nocturnal post. With all the potential of the future swirling just out of sight, I am oddly peaceful at the moment, but not yet ready for sleep.

I'm going to enjoy this slice of surcease, because things will start zooming about me soon enough.

Has it Been Almost a Month?

I know it’s time to put something down here when I get a call from someone asking why I haven’t put anything down here in nearly a month.

I have busy with business (appropriately). One thing I’ve learned in the last month is that you can never tell where the work will be coming from. I had related signing up for AdWords on Google, and I did get some calls from people because of the ad, but none of those projects ever panned out. The real work simply came out of the blue (or actually came to me by reputation and networking).

That “simple uploading of a website” that I reported in my last blog entry turned into a complete site redesign, since the site had been hosted by a company that placed its own proprietary coding into the pages, so there was no way to just upload the site. As with most people, Grace (the woman I was working with on the project) didn't understand the complexity of web design or how radically it differs from print design. The result of our efforts together is the new website for World Musics Initiative, a nonprofit group that not only gets music programs into the schools, but helps teach musical diversity, as well. The group had gone dormant over the past few years, so hopefully the new website will help to reinvigorate their program.

The salon in Arcadia, which I also wrote about last entry, was a very interesting experience, and I got a pretty good haircut. The man I’m dealing with called the next week to say his sister had died and he had to fly out to attend her funeral, so I've allowed for some grieving time before I jump back in with a website proposal (I’ll be calling him tomorrow about that). He’s in his 70s or 80s and isn’t very tech savvy. Part of my job will be getting some sort of e-mail connectivity into his shop, because he has no computer there now (though he does have one at home).

Networking breakfast with chambers of commerce.

I’ve also been busy going to the monthly breakfasts and lunches hosted by the Chamber of Commerce, and have gotten some contacts there, though nothing that's panned out into work. Still, it’s good to be seen, and it’s good to become recognized by business owners who are involved in the community. The more people who know about me, the likely referrals are to come my way.

But the big news is, about two weeks ago I got an e-mail from Deeann, the woman who was Art Director at The Hollywood Reporter while I worked there. She’s working free-lance now, as well, and she wanted to know if I would like to work on a project she had going. BUT OF COURSE!

It turned out she’s doing a redesign of the American Society of Cinematographer's handbooks for their publisher, and she wanted to have me do the charts and tables that accompanied the text. There are 161 of them in total, and some of them are real bears. Add to this the fact that they are currently in Quark and I am converting them into InDesign, and things get really interesting. This will keep me busy for a couple of weeks, I'm sure, and put a significant amount into the coffers of the business. It’s just the income boost I needed, and having the ASC on my client list isn’t too shabby, either. (Now all I have to do is build a client list and put it up on my website).

I’m also consulting with a woman here in town, an acupuncturist who's expanding her clinical practice to include a holistic approach to wellness. She’s planning on renaming her business, developing a new logo and website, the whole nine yards. No contract signed yet, but I’m hoping this will be my first really big local job.

Steve is still at Pearce Plastics, still counting the days before he can officially retire and get some part-time work instead of working a 40-hour week. That won’t be for at least a year, but hopefully my business will be strong enough by then that he can take it easy…and maybe do some of my marketing for me!

So that’s about it for now. I really should be getting back to those charts, and getting ready for work tomorrow. Hope this finds everyone well and happy.

Back to Basics

I’ve been pontificating about graphic communications here for the last couple of entries, taking a stab at getting clients (and potential clients) to read the blog. This, however, does not seem to be happening. So, while I’ll be talking a bit about business, I’ve decided to revert to making this a location for friends and family to keep tabs on what I’m up to these days.

The business has begun to take off. My billable hours have been increasing slowly each month, and I’ve even made the first of my quarterly income tax payments. And while still far from being a burgeoning fount of plenty, running my own business is turning out to be a very interesting experience. The biggest challenge is keeping motivated at marketing and finding ways of advertising myself that are cost-effective (that is to say, nearly free) and that produce results in the form of new clients.

Primeval Redwood Forest at Elks Prairie

I’ve got my Facebook page up and I’m adding to it. I’m only eight “likes” away from having metrics added to it, which will allow me to keep track of visits and such. It’s kind of a long-haul thing, and I don’t expect to have the complete knack of this social network marketing for quite a while. Included on the page here are the three different “flavors” of cover pictures for the page. I swap them out every week or so to keep things looking fresh. I also have a Photoshop template I can use to take more of my own photographs and turn them into cover shots for the page.

I have subscribed to AdWords on Google, which puts me up front thousands of times a week when someone in my area googles things such as “graphic designer.” The placement is free, but if someone clicks on the ad, then I get billed. In the 10 days since signing up, I’ve gotten almost 60 clicks (which sends people to my website) and four actual calls or e-mails asking about my service. So far, none of those has turned into an actual job.

Central courtyard of the Louvre in Paris

Steve kept pushing me to get onto Angie’s List, so I signed up there and got Pearce Plastics to post about how nicely I’ve done for them. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman who looked me up on Angie’s List and wanted help getting a website uploaded onto a new host server. I was honest and told her she could do this herself and she replied, “Yes, I know, but I don’t want to.” So this afternoon I’m going to drive to her house in Alhambra and upload her website (actually for a nonprofit corporation called International Music Initiative, or something like that) and get her set up on the new server.

If someone would have told me in college that I would spend the afternoon uploading a website to the Internet, I would have said, “Do what to what on the what?” I took computer programming classes in college, but we put the programs and data sets on punchcards and left stacks of them, bound with rubber bands, in piles in the computer lab. They got fed through the monster IBM computer at school and a printout issued at the other end, usually with several fatal errors in the coding, which required fishing individual cards out of the stack for corrections; then the whole thing would get a new rubber band and go back into the pile. You were lucky is you saw your results in two days.

Now I’ve got a computer sitting on my desk here and a laptop I use for client meetings in the field, each of which far outstrips that old IBM monster in power, speed and capacity. Of course, that was thirty-some years ago.

A cloudy day at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen in Wisconsin

Tomorrow, I’ll be getting my hair cut and pitching a website to the salon owner at the same time. Madeleine, one of Steve’s at work, found out her hairdresser was thinking of putting up a website, and she suggested me. I called the guy a couple of times, but he was always too busy to talk, so I made an appointment for a haircut, figuring we’d have to talk, and my mop top is getting a little shaggy in any case.

I had a meeting yesterday with a gentleman who wants to redesign some packaging for his business. It’s not a huge job, but one that might extend, if his product catches on. I had arranged to meet with him at 4 p.m., and I was on my cell phone talking with the woman who I’ll be meeting with today when the office phone rang. I had to put her on hold while I answered the office phone and adjusted the meeting time for that afternoon to 4:15.

It was such as rush to actually have two phone calls going simultaneously, like a presage of a busy business a few months down the road.

Steve’s doing well. His job runs from mundane to insane, depending on what’s happening on any given day. He’s only a couple years away from retirement, and I think he looks forward to being able to gear back, take a part-time job and enjoy life a little more. My goal is to have a solid studio running with a healthy income by the time he hits retirement, and I think that viable and possible. From what I’ve heard at chamber meetings and mixers, the first year of a business is the toughest. After that, you start getting a sense of the pace and flow of your work, and word starts to get around about what you have to offer.

One problem I’m having is trying to connect with other designers in the area. The few that belong to the chamber of commerce were pleasant enough, but one woman was downright paranoid when I approached her. I’m not sure whether they think I’m going to steal customers or take trade secrets or something, but I think it would be great to have a group where we could discuss what works for you, what doesn’t work for you, and experiences with clients in general. Let’s just say no one has been enthusiastic about the concept when I’ve brought it up.

Whatever. I figure there’s plenty of work out there for good designers, especially those who know web design as well as print. And even though there’s a lot of do-it-yourself design sites online (see my previous entry titled “The Tyranny of Themes and Templates”), I think most savvy business owners know that putting out the money for a professional designer is worth it. And, even on my first meeting with a potential client, one of the items I focus on is ways to save money while getting good, comprehensive design for their dollar.

So I continue. Running your own business really is a day-by-day thing. But, then, so is life.

The Tyranny ofThemes and Templates

Just like you have an accountant and a lawyer for your business, it’s important to have a graphic designer who’s there to help you on a daily basis with your business’ marketing and communication needs. A designer can help you avoid the pitfalls of the labyrinth of modern communication options.

The last few decades have seen an explosion in visual mediocrity. The avalanche of visual stimuli that assaults us on a daily basis is astounding, and growing; we react to it by becoming numb. The marketers’ respond by putting more flash and pop and sex and action into the content without any good reason other than making us look. Clever computerized graphics get ever more real — and surreal — and we become accustomed to casually watching animated images that used to be perceived as delusions or hallucinations. And we get even more numb.

But perhaps the most diabolical and banal of actors in this visual overload are themes and templates. Do you have Microsoft Word? You have themes and templates. Use Quickbooks? They're there, too. Every document-building program has them. You also can go online to any do-it-yourself print or web design site and find them: Pick from half a dozen color schemes, choose from hundreds of templates (most ranging from ugly to hideous), pick from 10 or 12 typefaces, add your own picture and a personal message and, presto: instant design for business cards, stationery, brochures, return address labels, etc., etc.

The resulting collateral looks nice enough, and it has the information you want, but it says nothing about you or your business, your vision of what your goods and services can provide: Instead of motivating your potential and repeat customers, you are supplying them with more numbing imagery. Not only that, you’ve now joined the masses who settle for meaningless visual mediocrity, and that’s what’s communicated to the public. You may have saved some money, but you’ve dedicated yourself to a bland visual image for a long time, because you’ll have to use up all those business cards and all that stationery before you have a chance to change your mind.

Like any professional, a designer is trained to find out about you and your business, he or she gets to know your personality and your outlook and how you approach working with your clients or customers; it’s part of his or her job. A designer can synthesize all that down to a unique visual solution that will fit you and your business' needs, and create a meaningful core identity for your communications with the public.

Another important point when choosing a graphic designer: you want to find someone who can create a seamless match for that visual image across all of today's communication platforms, from print to website to social networks. Find out if your designer builds your website from scratch or, instead, uses services like Wordpress or Drupal or Joomla. All these services are theme-based or template-based. And while lots of themes are available, they result in the same banal visual bromide as other prefabricated media design: Choose this theme, add this and that plug-in, change a color and a typeface and you’ve got a website.

A good graphic designer can provide thousands of color scheme choices, tens of thousands of typefaces (in print and online), and deliver a one-in-a-billion visual solution that will match you needs and be memorable in the public’s mind. Also, if you have specific interactive needs for your website, like online shopping or reservations, a good designer has the resources to create that functionality with your business in mind. And a good designer will work within your budget to create a unique identity and collateral that will grow and change along with your business.

So, revolt against the mundane. Look around and find a good designer to add to your list of business advisors. Because the visual image you present to the public should be as unique and important as you and the goods or services that you supply.

Suspension Bridges ofMadison County

Design is the process of creative problem solving: Because it is about solutions, it’s a practical process; because it is about creativity, it’s an aesthetic process. It’s not always easy to get these two aspects moving in harmony without letting one or the other take over. The practical requires logic, hard information and numeric accuracy. The creative requires subjectivity, critique and emotional evaluation.

I think everyone can agree that the Golden Gate Bridge is great design, even timeless. It is the marriage of an engineering feat with an aesthetic design perfect in scale and proportion. It achieves the solution of providing passage over the inlet of the San Francisco Bay while providing room for the shipping lanes below, and it is breathtaking to behold.

But say you’re a rural town of 30,000 people and you have to build a bridge over a 100-foot wide river flowing through your community: building the Golden Gate Bridge or anything like it would be absolutely ludicrous. That’s because, although both are bridges and both address spanning a course of water, the problems are also very different in their scopes and environments and the needs of the communities they serve. The rural community has to approach its problem as unique, and the design it ends up constructing may be as or more beautiful than the Golden Gate, but only if the bridge solves the problem both practically and aesthetically for its community and its course of water.

Shift over to graphic communications and apply the same concept: the practical aspect of a graphic communications design solution is getting information transmitted effectively (and cost-effectively) to a target audience. If you’re a local business that relies on your community to purchase your goods or services, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to produce a national television ad campaign. The commercial spots might be visually stunning and wildly creative, but you’re wasting your money delivering an extravagant spot to an overly broad audience when good design (practically and aesthetically) dictates targeting local neighborhoods with locally relevant information. You will have wasted a lot of money sending the wrong message to the wrong market.

Many businesses make this same mistake when approaching their website design. A retailer may look at the website for a national department store and want to emulate that, but the amount of purchasing traffic that will move through a local website may not even warrant an online shopping module. Also, purchasing elaborate third-party online services can be a mistake, since most are sold “packaged” or “bundled,” and you may get charged for a lot of services you’ll never use. Before letting your emotions and subjective decision-making take over, look at what communication functions your website will shoulder best, then budget and design around those needs and strengths.

One big responsibility for a designer is making sure the client doesn’t skew too far away from his or her main goal during the design process. The toughest thing a designer has to do is inform the client that his or her ideas or concepts are going in the wrong direction, or that the client’s decision is not using the marketing budget effectively, no matter how large the funds at your disposal are. If you’re working with a good designer, trusting his or her advice can be the first step to running a lean, clean promotional machine.

After all, communicating with local markets is about developing personal relationships with your local customers; finding ways to cultivate and motivate those over time. No matter how high-falutin’ the technology gets, it’s still word-of-mouth that get customers and clients through your doors and onto your books. It may show up as posts on Facebook or Tweets on Twitter or reviews on Yelp or other social rating sites, but it all comes down to people trusting people who say good things about what you do.

Even here in the 21st century, local marketing still comes down to generating backyard gossip and water-cooler buzz, even if it is taking place in cyberspace.

Like, Follow, Poke, Pin, Tweet, Share

Folks of a certain age will remember receiving bills in the mail in the form of a perforated punch card. This was back when computers were at least the size of an old Buick and data was fed into them via electromechanical means (punch cards, perforated paper tape and the like). Somewhere on those mailed bills was the phrase, “DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR MUTILATE.” If you did, it meant the auto-reader device could not translate the data on the card, and they would have to be input by a human.

This was the beginning of the end, though we did not know it at the time. We were being asked to adapt our behavior for the convenience of a computer, a machine. Resistance was futile.

We now live in a world where corporate entities (which some try to convince us are humans) do their level best to keep people from connecting with people. On the phone, on the Internet, a communications technology has sprung up to distance the consumer from the provider. It can be a numbered multiple-choice scheme or a voice-activated multiple-choice scheme, but try to talk to a human being and you are thwarted at every turn.

This, in and of itself, is reason and motivation enough to patronize local small businesses, because they don’t have the deep pockets it takes to set up these technological walls of semi-communication. And why would they want to? Local businesses yearn to make contact with customers, they are preoccupied with making connections on a personal level, they are constantly searching for a way to bring you into their stores and provide you with the best goods and services they can. Local business is in the business of being personal and personable.

Folks of a certain age will also remember what avenues small business had to market their wares in the previous century: There were local newspaper and magazine ads, targeted postcard and brochure mailers, door-to-door handouts and the occasional poster; maybe sponsor a Little League team and, if you had the money for them, radio spots were hot with the kids. Back then, “networking” was something that TV stations did to get their primetime programming, and businesspeople joined local organizations as much to benefit the community as to promote their own enterprises (luckily, to a large extent this is still true).

But the faster things go, the more interconnected we get, the more aggressive and indifferent the competition from huge corporate entities becomes, the more frantically small businesses look for ways to make their marketing work in this brave new cyberworld. In order to keep up with the technology of corporate competition, viral marketing has become the domain of small business. The upside is that it’s really cost-effective; they downside is it requires more attention than mailing postcards.

First, having some kind of presence on the Internet via a website is crucial. Your website is your calling card, your brochure, the first face that most consumers see when they check out your business. Getting potential customers off their keisters and into your store can be a challenge, though, so many businesses look to online retail as an alternative. Unfortunately, that can be costly and time consuming, and why sell online to people who live just around the corner or down the block? While cyberselling may turn a buck, it doesn’t enhance your customer base as effectively as face-to-face encounters.

For direct consumer marketing, social networking is the mode du jour. Everyone, it seems, is tweeting and following and yearning to be followed and poked and pinned: we all have our pages on Facebook and “like” our “friends” so that they'll “like” us back. On Pinterest, you can show off your wares and preoccupations to the globe. But, as with any other marketing strategy, social networking only works if you apply yourself consistently, and if you provide your “followers” and “friends” with content that is not only relevant to your business but of genuine interest to your target audience.

Avoid touting pseudo-sales and spewing empty self-promotion; your tweets and posts are easily blocked. Instead, spend some time trolling the Internet for information your target audience would find as interesting as you do. Share and tweet that, and friends and followers will share and retweet it with their own circles: that's how your name goes viral, and that's how you build your online audience base.

A third, and potentially most effective cyber-marketing tool is e-mail blasts. In most cases, this is a nice way to say “spam.” If you’re like me, you spend more time unsubscribing to these irritants than you do actually reading them. But, if done properly, e-mail blasts can be a real plus to your business.

The e-blast Golden Rule: Only send out e-mails when you have something of value to say: they are communiques, not ads. A good e-mail campaign will show up two or three times a month at the most (let social networking be your daily audience informer). E-mails should have real news, engaging writing, and worthwhile visual content and no manufactured promotional hype. Make sure to add links back to your website and social networking sites so you can further engage an interested reader, and always, always make unsubscribing obvious and one-click easy.

Use Google Analytics (or other data services) to track your online presence and adjust your strategies accordingly. And remember, online marketing takes time to grow. Provide consistent value in the information you provide, and a trusting and loyal audience will be the result.

The biggest advantage you have as a small business is that you can use all this high-tech crap to connect on a personal level. If you see that a valued customer has unsubscribed to your e-mail, you can call them in person and show your concern. If you get negative feedback on Facebook or Twitter, you can send a personal e-mail and start a one-on-one dialogue that might just open your eyes.

Now, as it ever was, local businesses need to focus on their strengths: we’re selling to our neighbors, we’re developing commercial relationships that are genuine and trustworthy and, hopefully, will last for decades, even generations.

Good communications technology is technology that promotes authentic human interaction, and that only happens when we invest ourselves, more than our bandwidth, in the process.

Where, There and Every Here

Yeah, so it's been three weeks since I made an entry. I've been kind of busy.

You may recall the last entry was on the day I submitted my mailing at the post office. Well, the next day, I got two phone calls from potential clients. One's a well-established beauty salon here in town and the other is a private mental health-rehab hospital, also here in town. Out of the gate, I did a poster for the salon (for a charity auction they were donating to) and a redesign of a flyer for a seniors program for the hospital.

I've also been spiffing up and expanding on my contact database, which is now almost 900 entries. Then there's folding another 500 brochures and pasting 500 cards inside them, joining the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, revamping my website with more pages and information, and finalizing the custom designs for my business forms in Quickbooks.

I also have been developing my business page on Facebook and my Twitter site. Facebook has been somewhat of a challenge, since I had just gotten the hang of working with the page and they rolled out an entirely new look and format, so it was back to the drawing board (digitally speaking) to come up with a new look for the page.

Big treat for me on Monday of this week: my sister-in-law Pam was in town (well, Laguna Niguel in Orange County, which is just down the road, in Southern Californian terms) with her friend Connie, visiting their friend Marcia. So the three women and I got together in downtown Hollywood for lunch.

I picked the Pig & Whistle for its authentic 1920s crazy Hollywood pseudo-Moorish architecture, and because they have an excellent shepherd's pie. It also allowed them to see the stars on the sidewalk (the Hollywood Walk of Fame), check out the Kodak Theater (which Billy Crystal dubbed the "Chapter 11 Theater" at the Oscars ceremony) and see the footprints in cement in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater.

I hopped on the Gold Line light rail here in Pasadena and transferred to the Red Line subway at Union Station to head out to Hollywood and Highland. The women, who had spent the morning at Venice Beach (at Pam's request, I understand), arrived at lunch around 1:30. We had a wonderful time. I had the club sandwich and a vodka collins. I can't remember what everyone else had (though no one had the shepherd's pie), but I do remember the conversation was scintillating.

The next highlight of my week was my first social/networking mixer as a new member of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce. It was held at Mijares, the oldest restaurant in Pasadena (and really good Mexican food). I got to hand out six or eight cards and mingle with a dozen folks or so. It went fairly well, considering that walking into a roomful of strangers and striking up conversations is one of the things I hate most. My reward was ordering a couple of their "garbage" burritos to go and bringing them back home for dinner.

The one thing I haven't gotten the hang of yet is trolling the Internet to find interesting things to tweet about or post on Facebook. And I also want to expand my links page, because there are so many interesting sites on the web having to do with typography and design.

So, all in all, things are going well. In less than a month I've gotten two clients (my goal is 12 by the end of the year), and I've started networking both online and in reality. Keeping the conversations going and sprightly is my next goal. And posting relevant, profound and astounding things here on the regular basis, of course.

Of course.

Going Postal

For over a week now I have been preparing a bulk mailing to introduce Mark McD design to Pasadena businesses. Being on a tight budget, I decided to do everything myself.

Of course, I designed my brochure and my business cards and my return address labels. I put in a 4”x6” pad of sticky notes with my logo and contact info, and loose-glued into each brochure was a business card. I was pretty happy with the package as a promotional piece, and I’m hoping that at least one person who received it has come as far as to check out the blog page (which is linked to the redesign of my website). If you have, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a comment (see how-to instructions to the right).

Now, if you take a look at the inside graphics of the brochure and go to the website on your computer, you’ll see a Flash animation of the graphics on the intro page. (If you go there on your mobile device, there will only be a static image, since most don’t support Flash.) And with the redesign of this blog page, I think the branding consistency is pretty good. Hopefully, concentric purple squares will soon be burned into many heads here in Pasadena; I know they’re burned into mine.

So my days have been filled with adhering 500 business cards inside 500 brochures, stuffing 500 envelopes with brochures and sticky pads, sealing the 500 envelopes, applying 500 return-address labels, generating a 500-name mailing list, printing and affixing 500 address labels. Little did I realize that the fun was only beginning.

Actually doing a bulk mailing is much more complicated than I thought. Had I known then what I know now, I would have coughed up the extra 25 bucks and sent everything first-class mail. (the per-piece price for bulk mail is cheap, but the $190 annual permit is not.) I figured, though, that I might want to send out a mailing of postcards or some such in the next year, and having the permit already would make sense.

I went online to the USPS website and researched what I had to do. I had all my mail presorted, lowest zip code to highest zip code, and went down to the post office.

My first adventure was getting directions from an employee in the front lobby, who said the bulk mail section was “around the corner of the building at the blue gate; just push the button.” Following these directions, I ended up sitting in front of what is the employee parking lot, which has no buttons at all.

I had not had the presence of mind to put the phone number for the bulk mail center into my cell phone, and the main line for the post office was constantly busy, so I went home and found the bulk mail number, put it into the phone, called and found out that I had been sitting at the wrong gate (there are three blue gates at the post office).

Day two of my adventure: I headed back down with my presorted mail in clearly marked boxes, found the correct gate and marched in to get my permit and mail my bulk. This is when I found out that I had to arrange my mail in authorized USPS letter trays and separate out local zips (910, 911 and 912) from non-local zips. Also, I either had to pay an extra $190 for a preprinted bulk mail stamp (which meant ordering a rubber stamp with my permit number and waiting for it to get to me), sign up for a very expensive private postal metering service, or purchase bulk rate presorted stamps and affix one to each of the 500 envelopes. The budget dictated I go for the stamps.

Now these specific stamps come in two quantities only: rolls of 500 and rolls of 3,000, and they cost 10 cents apiece. The rolls of 500 are gummed, and you have to lick them, while the rolls of 3,000 are self-adhesive. Once the stamps are affixed to the bulk mail piece, their cost is deducted from the overall price of the mailing costs, so they’re basically free. So I grabbed three trays on my way out (at least the permit had been paid for), then headed to the front lobby to purchase the necessary stamps.

That afternoon and evening was spent removing all the mailer pieces from the boxes, licking and affixing 500 stamps, then placing the letters, numerically sequenced, into the trays. I stacked them on their sides in order to accommodate two rows in each tray so that everything would fit.

Day Three through the bulk mail looking glass: I proudly took the trays down and presented my completed form (downloaded from the USPS website) at the bulk mail desk. The woman there informed me that I had to put the letters in the trays topside up, and that the trays had to hold only one of the three-digit zip codes: 910, 911 or 912. All others zips that fell outside those local codes could be placed together in a separate tray, being charged at a higher rate.

Once the trays were properly separated and filled, each had to be slipped inside a cardboard sleeve and transferred to a hopper for weighing. Finally, one piece picked at random had to be opened and inspected to make sure the contents met the criteria for bulk mail (like no invoices or bills allowed, among other restrictions). When the woman opened my piece, she seemed very impressed with the brochure and the sticky pad (especially one so large). Once all this was done, I had to return to the front lobby and get a metered strip and pay the balance of the mailing fees.

You would think by now I would be foaming at the mouth or in a rage, expressing the true meaning of “going postal.” But to be honest, I was having fun. The woman at the bulk mail office was patient and friendly, and even helped me sort out my pieces, and I have gained a new appreciation for what, exactly, it is you pay for when you hire a mailing service.

So, I close with this photograph of myself. It was taken just after waking up in the morning, but it is a fairly good interpretation of how I felt after the mailing was out and done. But you know what they say: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” For practicality, I think “or crazier” should be amended to that statement of wisdom to make it a touch more accurate.

Branding Frenzy

You may have noticed a change in the look of the old blog page here. Well, it’s all part of my excursion into a place I like to call Branding Land. It’s odd, but marketing my own business is a crash course on how to market other people’s, as well.

The biggest part of my recent work has been redesigning my website, which had to be reworked for potential customers rather than potential employers. It’s clean and simple, and I think it will do the job. Also, on the “about” page, there is a link to my portfolio website (which has not been rebranded … yet).

Yes, as part of starting up the studio, I have been immersing myself in all kinds of marketing information, both traditional and e-marketing. Beyond reworking my website, I have also built a business Facebook page for the studio, and have even joined twitter (a social networking site that has always eluded me). Both are now linked to every page of the website because you have “to be where your customers are,” according to the latest viral marketing information. I did stop short of putting them on my business card and brochure, since the cybersavvy customer will check out the website first, anyway.

So I’m spewing my logo around cyberspace, as soon I will be spewing it around town via a mailing and handouts of my brochure. Each brochure will have a business card inside, stuck with removable glue, and each mailer will have a 4”x6” promotional sticky pad (the biggest sticky I could find).

The brochures and cards should be ready at the printers tomorrow, and the return address labels (also branded!) will be coming from a production house (because I could get them half-price online). I already have the sticky pads and specially sized envelopes to house all the pieces. When everything comes together, there will be a flurry of unfolding, gluing, refolding, envelope stuffing and label sticking around here.

Once the mailing is out, I plan to walk each area of town and hand out brochures in person, meet the small business owners in the area and get their business cards to add to my database. (I started building it about two weeks ago and now have over 800 entries with business names, contact names, e-mail and mailing addresses, and phone and fax numbers. I probably have another 200 or so to add before I start my canvassing).

So, I’m seeing nothing but purple squares, and tints and tones thereof. I’ve been working with these images for so long, that I’m starting to get visually numb to them. I’m hoping they will make a good first impression on those who haven’t seen them yet. And, hopefully, they’ll join me on Facebook and follow me on twitter and fall in love with the idea of having a personal designer who’ll work one-on-one with them to achieve their graphic communications goals, whatever they might be.

I don’t have this blog directly linked to my website at present (like I do on the portfolio site), but I think that might be coming sometime very soon. So this space still will be about what’s happening in Mark McDougal land, but I probably will be adding more graphic design-related entries as well, so I’ll have something of interest to post about on Facebook and twitter … because that’s where my customers are … supposedly.

But I still believe in the old-fashioned notions of face-to-face meet-and-greets, of something special showing up in the mails, of a follow-up call and a dedication to serving as a part of your community and not necessarily marketing to the entire globe.

Stay tuned for more purple squares.

About to Launch

It's a cool and cloudy day. The rain has been making attempts at taking over the day, but it's been off and on this morning. I just checked on weather.com, and there's a big old gob of rain headed straight for us; should be here in about an hour.

The Pasadena green parrots are hanging out in a nearby tree, hollering and screaming like they always do. Sounds like about 20 or so of them, and they are loud! I think they're bitching about getting wet. Word has it they were released back in the late '50s from the pet department of a local store that closed.

The last week I've been working like a crazy man on getting my new website up. I've been adding bells and whistles that were not present on the previous site and I'm picking up the coding and style sheet markup to render specific fonts on the pages, rather than having to make a jpg of the type to display. And, of course, Internet Explorer is being a pain in the butt, since it renders pages differently from any other browser.

Please, people, dump this browser off your computer. You can download Foxfire or Google Chrome for free, and it's easy to move your IE bookmarks over to the new browser and start using it right away. The other browsers are also much quicker to adopt the latest in HTML5 and CSS3 capabilities (which is where internet technology is going). And since Microsoft doesn't make a version of IE for the Mac (which I work on), I have to do all my design on my machine, then put the website onto a flash stick, move it over to Steve's PC and check it out on IE. (Adobe does have a BrowserLab where you can dry-run the layout, but it doesn't check all the interactivity on the page).

I'm in the final phase, which is editing and rewriting the copy on the site. And, even though I have Flash animation on the main page, I've figured out a way to display a static graphic on devices that don't support Flash (which is most smart phones). This means you can browse the whole site on your iPhone, iTouch, iPad or Android-driven phone. This is getting more important, since a lot of folks, especially busy businesspeople, are relying on their mobile devices to connect on the internet when on the go.

I've picked my printer, two guys who've been around for years, with a great reputation and costing about a third of the big-time printers in town. I guess I have a soft spot in my heart for mom-and-pop dive print shops. Anyway, once the website's finalized, the brochures and business cards go to press. So the end of the month should see me ready to put out my first promo mailer. Then comes the part I hate the most: follow-up calling.

Well, I just got some work in: Pearce Plastics needs me to resize some UPC bar codes for them, so it looks as though I'll be making some money today.

Wooo-whoo.

Beginning the Year With Confusion

There's something about when Christmas and New Year's Day fall on a weekend. I get all discombobulated. And it's especially true when New Year's Day falls on a Sunday, at least here in Pasadena.

The Rose Parade happens every New Year's Day, unless that happens to fall on a Sunday. There are lots of churches dotting the route of the parade and, back in 1893, it was decided that the parade not be held on Sundays. Even though it was a fairly simple affair back then, allowing people to get to and from church while the parade was going on was problematic, and it was a concern that the noise of the procession in the street might frighten the tethered horses outside the churches, disrupting services.

Thus, further discombobulation, as the parade happens the day after New Year's Day this year.

We live only a few blocks north of Colorado Boulevard (though the 210 Freeway tears a gash through town that sort of separates us), and there are two things that can be done during the parade: 1) head down to Colorado on foot and hope to get a glimpse of the floats and bands or 2) stay at home and watch the whole thing on the television.

Now, with High Def TV, it's almost a waste of time to go down to the actual parade. The coverage broadcast on the tube is right at the start of the parade. If we go down to Colorado and Lake to view it, there are thousands of people crowding in; the bands have been marching for a couple miles in ever-warming weather (it got up in the 80s today) and are starting to show signs of fatigue and foot blisters; and the flowers on the floats have started wilting or have begun to fall off altogether. Also, to be honest, I like to watch Bob Eubanks and Stephanie Edwards host the parade, even though they're kind of ditzy.

On a more personal note, I went down to City Hall last week and got my city business permit, so I am now officially a businessman. That feels creepy, somehow. Also last week, my promotional Post-It pads arrived from the printers (I got them at half price by ordering through a place in Texas). I've finished an extended version of the opening animation for the new website design, and have spent several hours this weekend working with the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) contract templates, putting together what will be edited down to my own contract forms.

Later this week comes picking a printer to produce my brochures and business cards, then joining up with the Chamber of Commerce and AIGA. After that comes launching the new website design, building a marketing database and my first promotional mailing. So I should be up and running by the end of the month.

This is all getting too legit. More news as things develop.