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?