Wednesday, August 15, 2012

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?

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

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.