Stories of My Life

A potential client called wanting to know if I could do grunge, so I made this logo for my friend (an undertaker turned programmer) for a concept, since a grungy, decayed look would fit his online name well.  This is what I’ve got:

I think, in this case, the grunge look communicates well.  I also designed the T that way on purpose, and yeah, the swirls I left from the font (Bleeding Cowboys) are meant to subtly suggest horns.  Kind of a suggestion of the whole heaven and hell thing that many of us associate with death.  I also cleaned up a few of the splatters and what not because frankly, they were just too much.  I think it works, and that it sufficiently demonstrates that yes, I can do grunge.

But just because I can doesn’t mean I should.

Design is an art form, yes, and I do enjoy the artistic aspects of it.  But it’s all about communication.  I don’t talk to my 2-year-old nephew the same way I’d talk to my dad.  I don’t talk to my bishop the same way I’d talk to a love interest. And, depending on who my potential customers are, I might not want to talk to them the same way I might talk to my friends.

Sure, grunge is hip. Again. Frankly it’s terrifying that I’ve already lived through the real 80′s style and its rebirth as well as the comeback of 90′s style grunge, but I digress.  If you’re trying to sell your product or service to, say, businessmen twice your age, you might not want to talk to them like they’re the guy next to you at a concert.

Then again, perhaps you might. In my case, I choose to communicate here as I do with my friends, because it helps me find the kind of work I like to do.  But the point is that in any form of communication, be it visual or verbal, you must consider how your audience(s) will interpret the message, and make your decisions accordingly.

So I’m in an odd situation where contract work simply won’t do, and I’m trying to sort out my options.

I can do well on about half the salary I’d earn working full-time, so you would think part-time work would make sense. The problem? Part time jobs typically pay less than half hour-for-hour what their full-time counterparts would pay, under the assumption that anyone working part-time doesn’t need to make a living. So instead of earning half of a full-time salary for half of a full-time schedule, it’s more like earning a quarter of a full-time salary for half-time hours.

In my case, that is not a livable wage, so I would be forced to work full-time or take multiple jobs to earn enough to live. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take the higher full-time salary in the first place? It would if I didn’t feel so strongly about being home with my kids when they are home. That’s a strange sentiment these days, I know, but one I’d hope some people out there can understand.

So there lies my dilemma; all my cards are on the table. This is what I want, and I’m fully aware that business simply can’t operate on the demands of its potential employees. But could there be some real benefits for employers to work with part-time professionals? Here are a few I could think of:

- If you’re a smaller company that might not need a full-time employee, you can get full-quality at half-price.
- You could also pay half (or even less) what you normally would for medical benefits and other full-time perks.
- Because part-time professional positions are rare and valuable, and because they allow the worker such flexibility, you’re less likely to have problems with turnover.
- How productive is an eight-hour work day anyway? A shorter shift increases productivity, and you get more for your money.

I’ll see if I can find some scholarly articles and research to help back this up, particularly the bit on higher productivity in shorter shifts, but I think anyone who has worked 8 hours per day and observed their coworkers doing the same knows that much time is spent gabbing, goofing off, and otherwise not really being productive — the idea being that so long as an employee is in the building for at least 8 hours per day, a company will get their money’s worth.

In the meantime, if anyone’s aware of a company that could use a part-time designer/marketer/geek, let me know. I am looking.

“You’re just the judge, jury, and executioner of the world!” my friend teased after I pointed out yet another oddity in a passing billboard. “No, just of their designs.” Well, technically I’d said “logos” rather than “designs” but really it goes for design in general. And, while I wouldn’t exactly call myself an executioner, I certainly do wonder why some designers choose to execute their work the way they do.

Today I caught myself… er… critically reviewing the ads in a local coupon mailer. I’ll add a few others that caught my eye, too.

I am excluding the many, many ads that successfully peddle their wares via misogyny — like the one I saw of a man in a suit and a woman in lingerie saying “Strengthen your marriage!” Because the strongest marriages are made up of white-collar wage-earners and women who run around in their undies all day? Or is that the OTHER woman you’re supposed to compete with by buying more lingerie? Maybe I’ll post those sorts of ads another day, since they bother me immensely but do, in the end, convince men and women that they or the women around them just aren’t hot enough without their products. Again, that’s a topic for another day.

But just on the basis of poor communication or bizarre  aesthetics, you tell me, am I too judgmental? Also, I realize the photos taken with my droid aren’t very good, and yes, I criticize that as well.  But my DSLR just doesn’t fit in my purse.

Off with her head!

The Problem: Either really unfortunate photography, or (more likely) hasty photoshopping.
The Solution: If you can’t just use one good photo of your model, splice, don’t slice. Pay attention to shadows and natural placement. Ask yourself, “Do humans look like this?” and if the answer is no, go back to your originals.
Other annoyances: Seemingly random margins on the coupon, and truly ridiculously tiny social media icons that stand just a few millimeters tall.

What does this MEAN?

Problem: Cognitive overload!  Are those chicken nuggets?  Why are the girly nuggets naked — as evidenced by their high shoulders and super-saggy cleavage — and lazy-eyed to boot?  What happened to the middle nugget girl?  What is that guy looking at?  Are they on the pizza? What is going on here? OH! I see the 2nd from the left coupon says “our famous Mojo Potatoes” — which must mean these are potatoes. Whew. But what have they to do with this pizza?  I don’t see any potatoes on it.  The coupon says “Pizza & Mojos” but the top says “The Mojo Supreme Pizza” — I don’t get it!  I need a nap.

Possible explanation: Maybe these … weird looking thingies — are featured on a TV commercial or some other marketing channel.  I still don’t know what they’re trying to say, though. I would recommend sitting down and deciding all of the ways you could communicate what you’re trying to say, and then eliminate all but the most vital.  Then, make sure that message is conveyed in each channel so that it can have stand-alone meaning.

Does your wittle huter-wunter want his minky winky?

Problem: Well, I had this typed up but lost it. and I’m tired. I’ll revisit in the morning. Unfortunately it already published since I posted this via phone, so, bear with me.

Gingerbread Jones and the temple of doom

No wonder he was able to run away from the little old woman and the little grey man!  He had no heart – at least not after brutally ripping it out.  Here he is offering it up, though, and winking at us in the creepiest of ways, “Heh heh — well, wont’ be needing this, want it?”

The solution: Just don’t pose the heart in his hand next to the hole in his chest. That’s what made him creepy.

So, this plugin has been fairly handy, but I ran into some trouble getting it going and couldn’t find much help on the web. So I figure I’ll write down what I had to do here, in case someone else runs into trouble. I can’t even remember all of the things I had to tweak over time (this was a very drawn-out project) but I figured I’d note the big ones here, and if you or I run into others we can share them here as well.

- You probably need to enable Paypal’s IPN for this to work. From the merchant account in Paypal, click the profile tab, then click the payments option, and choose IPN settings. Enable IPN and set the listener URL to the URL of your WordPress installation.

- In my case, we then had to deal with Internal Server Errors on the listener. I still don’t know why that was, but the site worked fine on other servers. I had the host move from FreeBSD to a linux server, and it worked well after that.

- Disable the built-in CSS so you can make the buttons as you’d like them, then go back and add in your own CSS plus whatever you deem necessary from their CSS to make the site look fine.

- Form Fields won’t line up in IE:
The form page was showing up in quirks mode; if I used the Developer Tools to display in strict mode, it worked fine. As it turns out, there were some hidden input fields above the DTD. IE didn’t know how to deal with this, so into quirks mode it went. I talked to my super wordpress guru friend, Tyrel, and he pointed out that wpnonce was echoing rather than returning. So I had to change wpgft_processOrder.php like so, from:

if( function_exists(‘wp_nonce_field’) ) $post_content .= wp_nonce_field($nonceID);

to

if( function_exists(‘wp_nonce_field’) ) $post_content .= wp_nonce_field($nonceID,’_wpnonce’,true,false);

Currently, I’m trying to see whether I can find a way to display gift certificate information such as the name of the gift, rather than its purchase cost, on the printable emailed certificate. I’ll share details there once I have them.

So I’ve actually been thinking about dividing my personal stuff back out into a separate blog again.

It would be a lot of work, but I think I would be able to much better showcase my geek/designer/marketing skills here if I took the mommy/faith/life stuff over to another blog. I’d also feel far more comfortable talking about faith and life stuff if I wasn’t always a bit concerned about what potential client/employer has to sift through everything else to get to my work-related posts.

The new personal blog in the works already, and in fact has just a few posts in place. So the trick is just going to be getting everything migrated. I’ve never tried it before, but this is what I’m guessing I’ll need to do. Or at least this is how my woke-up-at-four-and-desperately-need-more-sleep logic wants to send me. I figure I’ll write it down and go over it again when I’ve got my wits about me.

- Back up both blogs!
- Export this blog
- Take the few articles I’ve got in the new blog, untag them, and uncategorize them
- Export the new blog and increment my post_ids, wherever they might be, by hand
- Possibly edit the novapages.com export to swap out instances of novapages.com for my new domain
- Make a fresh WordPress install on the new site
- Import the old blog to the new site
- Import the new blog to the new site
- Fix pictures if I need to (copying them over from one site to the other, if needed)
- Get a handle on the new site’s look/feel/organization
- Get rid of techy/marketing/designer-ish articles on the blog
- Start removing / redirecting personal posts from this blog
- Redo novapages.com organization & look/feel

Un-techy considerations:
- Check with CJ.com about segmenting my domains You might have noticed I don’t put many ads on here, but I do have one article that’s popular enough to help with the bills. I’d want to keep that going.
- Comb through my analytics so I can figure out which popular articles I’ll want to redirect. (I won’t worry about anything that doesn’t get google hits)

I also want to get VaultPress installed on the new blog as well.

Wow. And the moment I finished writing all of that down, my tired brain instantly decided to relax and let me sleep… at least for a few more hours. Hooray. I’m off to bed. And I won’t start this project til next week when I won’t have much else to do at night (while the kids are out.) Wish me luck then and sweet dreams now.