This teacher had a simple solution: free business cards (I recommend these). 100 cards is easily enough for a teacher to give each mom and dad one card at the beginning of the school year, and still have plenty left over for notes and what not.

Since I’m such a great daughter, I shamelessly copied the idea for my mom, who is also a teacher, and designed cards for her as a birthday present. (Don’t worry, Mrs. Bills said it was OK.)

There are lots of free education templates available, but my mom wanted her school mascot on her card along with an emphasis on the sorts of things they’d be studying in 4th grade. So this is the design I made for her, with the details switched out for her privacy:

Teacher calling card

The back of the card is an excellent spot for a weekly schedule and a list of special dates through the year. Not every free business card offer allows you to print on the back and keep the special offer though — in fact I’ve seen some that print their own ad on the back. :-/

But I’ve been happy with Overnight Prints. They -will- let you print on the back for a little extra; in fact their offer (which you can get here) just takes the price of 100 cards off whatever you decide to do. They also allow you to upload your own design without an extra fee, or you can choose from the templates they’ve got. Other reasons I like them: their cards are made from heavier stock, they come with a free gloss if you want it, and they can also do offset printing. Oh, and they’re fast

Anyway, my mom is terribly happy with the results, and I’m happy to have given her something she likes so much. I may even decide to create cards for my kids’ teachers as a gift to them as well.

The political arguments that ensue at every family get together are fantastic. Sometimes I wonder if Dad could wean himself off blood pressure medication if it weren’t for MSNBC. But he’d also have to deal with the fact that his namesake is a serious Anti-Fox News evangelist. And their choice of news media is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their political differences… or is it?

They’re both very smart people, and generally I’d say they both have valid points. What’s more, after they’ve argued for an hour or two, they eventually calm down, and occasionally even agree on a few things. So why the mental brawl?

I believe most sources of news media out there teach us to marginalize others’ viewpoints. They seem less concerned with honesty and problem solving than they are with ad-space and ratings. Ratings they collect by creating an addictive sense of animosity toward anyone who happens to have another point of view. And nothing glues an audience to its chairs like a good fight. Just ask the pro wrestlers. But I’ll just keep cheering for people like poligazette.com.

Some time ago, I’d noticed a post asking for a new header graphic. I thought to myself, “What they need is a logo, but much as I like this site I just don’t have time.” Then one evening when I did have time and was particularly appreciating their site, I decided to play with a few ideas, and came up with this:

New poligazette.com logo uses a compass instead of a star

Here’s what it used to look like. They’re quite happy with the difference.

Old poligazette.com header image

She’d asked me to help her make her store easier to find. So we did a little keyword research and fixed up her items titles and descriptions. It’s amazing how many more t-shirts sell when people can actually find them! But she still wasn’t very happy with how her store looked. The CafePress premium shop allows for some customization, so we added horizontal product dropdown menu, created a funky vintage custom tiling background, layered her logo design over some chocolate stripes, and did a custom front page with a grid of her best selling t-shirt designs in colors she loved.

Here’s the final result:

Custom Designed CafePress Store

When I went to make myself an invoice template in open office years ago, my logo wasn’t importing well. So I worked up new one that would work in plain text, with turquoise text and an orange asterisk in lieu of the supernova symbol I’d created. And to my surprise, I liked it better.

For one thing, the old symbol I’d made (which you can see in my favicon) looked a little like a circular saw blade. Plus my blog was becoming and more random, and asterisks are wild characters. (Just like me. Kidding. Kinda.) And of course I also liked that an asterisk/star could still vaguely reference a supernova, but that’s another story saga.

But now I’m seeing stars! Everywhere! Is the Asterisk the new Swoosh?

I’ve noticed them on banner ads for various companies out there on the web and wondered if their asterisks were as well intentioned as mine. But imagine my horror when I noticed yet another asterisk laden logo.. this one in blue and orange much like my blog.. for WALMART!?

When I designed this site layout and logo, I was purposely avoiding the look other sites and designs had at that time. I wanted to go simple and accessible.. something I could design once and forget about for years on end. Which is precisely what I’ve done. But now that freakin WALMART looks like me, I feel like I have to change to avoid looking like them. What would you do?

I’ll post Walmart’s logo here and will add in other asterisky logos as I find them. If you see any, drop me a note and I’ll add them here as well.

All of these logos are trademarked and / or copyrighted by their various owners, even if they are smelly old copycats. And if it turns out they ARE smelly old copycats with no originality whatsoever, I surely hope my logo doesn’t make me look like one of them.

So we scratched our heads a while, then realized that maybe we should advertise these changes. On our own site. So we checked out a couple of sites that advertise their own stuff on the front page, and decided a rotating banner script would do the trick.

We decided that true banner-sized banners would be less effective, as people would simply skip over them without even consciously thinking about it. So we made billboard sized ads instead. Incidentally, this size does not fit on my site very well. But obviously if you did this on your site you’d design for your own space. I’ve had to shrink these a little, but if you’ll click on them you can see how they look on the site. (And i do intend to work on the site layout again soon)

So, armed with just Futura, Impact, and a few credits at stockexpert, here’s what what we came up with:

For the virtual dedicated serves, we wanted to convey a sense of power and control as that

We

This one was lots of fun to make. We needed to convey that small stores are still strong stores, but because they were small they could actually save quite a bit now with the new Mini package. And a bonsai is small and strong. This one

Wedding Essentials Logo

Wedding Essentials Logo in White

As always, a good logo should work as well in color as it does in black and white or in a single color. That way your logo will work no matter where you use it: from your website to a silk-screened tee, from letterhead to large banners to metal cutouts, you’ll be ready.

Cheap logo designs, such as those you might get in a logo contest, will often dazzle with full colors, drop shadows, and gradients, but when it comes time to use the logo in print, you run into troule or have to pay your print shop to make it work.

Drop shadows and gradients can jazz up a graphics made with your logo, but if the logo cant stand on its own, you’ll regret it sooner or later. If you need help converting your logo to a format that works this way, drop me a note.