redearthconcepts

SpaceGlyph

One thing I have begun to understand as I walk this road of entrepreneurship is that you have to be willing to ask for help. If you are struggling with something new, find someone knowledgeable to ask. This may be a friend or acquaintance, or it may be an online community. Recently I have tapped people both in real life and the virtual world for help.
The importance of networks and mentors cannot be overlooked, especially at the beginning of a new venture.

In the past few weeks I have been working on getting my glyph designs print ready. This has meant learning how to use a new program. Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. So far it has served me well. There are many tutorials available, some with more value than others, and I have been able to learn a good amount just by doing a basic Google search on the subject at hand.

Just a few weeks ago I was struggling with this project, using the wrong tool and wondering why I couldn’t find a good tutorial that would help me solve the problem. Then I ran into a friend who is a graphic designer and decided to mention my problem to him. He asked what I was using to change the photos into vector graphics and I just had to stare at him in confusion. This is the problem with jumping in with both feet–you don’t know what is under the water. Or how cold it might be. You don’t know what you don’t know; you may not even know what question to ask.

I had no idea what a vector graphic was, or what one would be used for. Turns out that if you are looking to print something, your best bet is to use a graphic image that is scalable; the correct tool is a vector graphics editor. Think about when you try to use a small photo and just increase the size on your screen. After a bit, it becomes grainy and pixelated. This is because the image is in raster graphic form, which maps the pixels in the image. Vector graphics record the mathematical expressions of the image, allowing it to scale without pixelating. I will not try to explain vector graphics, if you are interested you should read the Wikipedia article. I found it rather fascinating, but YMMV.

I can now share my new Printfection site, offering some of my designs on organic cotton t-shirts in various colors; as well as coffee mugs, beer steins and aluminum water bottles.

Ahh, the joys of being a beginner.

The do-it-yourself attitude can get frustrating at times, this is most apparent when you are doing something that you have not done before and have to deal with the learning curve as well as the doing. My second post dealt with this peripherally, as I shared about learning how to build a basic banner for this page.

Over a week ago I decided to make business cards and once again the process involved more learning experiences and frustrations than I anticipated. What follows is a brief summary of my misadventures in business cards.

First of all, I made an assumption (I know…) that I could just Google “business card print at home” and find a quick and easy online designer to use. I knew that I wanted a simple design with my logo and contact info. I found a site that seemed to offer what I wanted. The first sentence on their welcome page said, in bold: “It’s free to design business cards online and print your own business cards at home. And nothing to download!”

Great, just what I need…or so I thought. Some of you are laughing at me right now, because you know what happened. I spent 45 minutes to an hour navigating their site and designing a simple card. The process was easy, and I kind of got lost in designing a background color scheme–it was a bit entertaining to my creative nerd self, what can I say?

Then I went to print and got hit with a screen asking me to pay to save the PDF. They were not asking for a lot of money, it was less than $10, but I felt deceived by their site. They tricked me into wasting my time, with the hope that I would then pay them so that my time would seem less wasted. Those of you who know me will know how I reacted to this. I threw my laptop across the room…oh, wait. Sorry, that’s not me. I complained for a second and then closed the webpage and tried a different search.

Eventually I got tired of the cat and mouse game of looking through the plethora of at home business card printing websites and decided to order a basic set through vistaprint, as I mentioned in my last post. However, trying to keep my costs down, I opted for the free shipping. This meant that I was still 3 weeks out from having business cards to hand.  So I decided that I should try this print at home solution again. I remembered that I had designed my price tag stickers on Avery’s website and that I still had that template. I surmised that most likely they offered a free template for business cards as well. Sure enough they did; however I ran into another problem here, namely that my project got lost when I went to save it. So another hour lost on this project, and I still didn’t have a basic business card to leave at the one shop where my physical product is offered.

When I finally have real life business cards, I will update this post. At this point, I am kicking myself for not just paying someone a small fee to design and print the cards. And that is the point of this post, that sometimes it pays to have someone who knows what they are doing do the job that needs to be done. But I am still learning here, and each lesson comes with its own costs and payoffs.

Now I will get back to designing my business card…this time I downloaded Avery’s software for creating many different types of materials. Seriously, how much time can it take to create a business card?

Update: I just went back to the first site I wrote about and discovered that they actually do offer free at home printing of business cards. The issue I ran into was that I had uploaded my logo, and this is where they delineate between free and pay services. If I had just designed a simple business card without my logo I could have printed right then. My excuse for not understanding this is that it was late at night and had been a long day. I didn’t want to mention the name of the webpage, but knowing now that they were not trying to trick me, someone else might find them a useful tool. So check out BusinessCardStar for a simple, free-if-you-don’t-add-images business card print at home service.

Update #2: I printed out 10 sheets of uncut copies of my interim business card at FedEx Office for $8. Not too bad looking, though for some reason half the logo is a bit fuzzy. For all of that, they turned out fairly well, and the fuzziness is almost mild enough to be thought of as being deliberate, so shhhh! I hope the ones I ordered don’t have the fuzzy issue, though.

After many hours...

It has been an intense couple of weeks, and I have loved almost all of it. Just the thought of actually moving forward on a long held, cherished business idea that involves my creativity has me excited to get out of bed every morning and get going. The importance of keeping track of all the minutia and setting goals is becoming paramount; these are issues I will need to take steps to control.

In the past 2 weeks, I have been busy creating marketing materials, making new products and building my online presence. I also drove to Portland, OR to share a booth at the Mississippi Street Fair.

On the production front I made over 80 new cuffs, designed and made 13 new Glyphs and  14 new Medallions. I also began 2 new projects (24 pieces in total) that make use of leftover scraps that otherwise would be tossed out.

Pennon 2, one of the new projects I have been working on.

For marketing I made a new display from an old briefcase, came up with a new tagline and logo, and printed new signage and labels with this logo. I have also designed and ordered business cards from vistaprint. I upgraded to the paid version so I could order the recycled paper cards. I also worked on the marketing materials for Glyph, which is almost its own entity. I am not sure yet, but I may want to divorce Glyph and Pennon (one of the 2 new projects) from RedEarth, as they are a bit more time intensive and use more of my creative energy. In other words, I value them more and want to be sure to treat them as the gems in the rough that I believe they are.

New display case set up at the Mississippi Street Fair booth in Portland, OR.

For my online presence work; I have created this blog, my Etsy site, and my Facebook fan page. I have posted links on reddit.com to direct some traffic to my Etsy site. I must admit to feeling a bit ambiguous about this, as I am a regular “redditor” and don’t want to be accused of spamming the site.

All of this work I have been doing is sort of like re-creating the wheel, but I seem to learn best and fastest by doing, and for years this has just been a dream with no action.

“A man can dream, but things do not happen until he awakens. Without effort the dream cannot become a reality. A man is less than nothing without effort.” -Ancient Chinese proverb