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(Hey, that’s me!)

So the wait is finally over, Niki and I have been scheming about this for a long time now and then over the last couple weeks pulled it all off…

PageBreak is a design, business and marketing-themed book club and podcast, started by Liz Andrade and Niki Brown. The main goal of the club is to build a strong online community of designers, developers, freelancer (like ourselves) and to discuss and enjoy books about the stuff we love to do!

We’re starting out with the plan to pick a new book and record a show at the end of each month, so if you have a suggestion we’d love to hear them! You can subscribe to the show via iTunes or stream the show at pagebreakpodcast.com (we’re working on a site with commenting and all that jazz, so stay tuned…)

Book #1? Rework by 37Signals Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Make it through the show (or download it and skip to the end) to find out what we’ll be reading for September, maybe you’d like to read along? If you’ve read Rework and you want to discuss it with me and Niki or other listeners of the show – head over to the GoodReads PageBreak group!

So any of you who may follow me on Twitter or Dribbble, might have an idea of something I’ve been working on with Niki Brown. (I interviewed Niki a long long time ago, remember?) If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, here are some of the hints (mostly all of which are not-so-subtle) on the new project we’re excited to be announcing very very soon! (perhaps even this week!)

Have any guesses?

I’m totally serious!

One of my dear friends and clients, Seattle Wedding Photographer Laura Marchbanks won a contest last month that was put on by another Seattle company (and another client of mine!) CreativeLive! They were hosting a contest for a free wedding, so that they could broadcast it live and make the process part of a photography course taught online by Jasmine Star.

(I know, crazy huh?)

It was just a couple weeks ago when I got a frantic call from Laura asking for help with her invitations, the two of us have worked together on marketing for her Photography company so she was confident I would be able to quickly tune into what she wanted on the invite and get her something that she loved. We talked about the style she was after and after about 8 emails back and forth and less than 2 hours we had the design done and sent off to the printer. (That is NOT a normal turnaround, but Laura was putting this wedding together in 4 weeks with the team that CreativeLive compiled, and I was happy to have her back and be a part of this awesome experience!)

So this evening, I will be headed to celebrate Laura and Billy and you can check out the whole thing yourself, cause it will be happening live online at creativelive.com/billymarieslaura.

It only took a new minutes to clear away the clutter and get things back where they belong, viola! Desk is inhabitable again! (and kitteh is lookin’ cool in the background)

I saw this post from Freelance Switch come into my Reader this weekend called “Real Home Offices from FreelanceSwitch Readers” – cool to see, but I am surely NOT this tidy! I’m sure many of these people snapped the shot after they cleaned up their work areas… I mean, no one wants to look like a slob! I’m totally not a slob, but I had a busy end of week last week and this Monday was just as bad – so this is what my REAL HOME OFFICE looks like today…

Yesterday I was featured on Web Design Ledger amongst 50 Web Designers and Developers to follow on Twitter. Someone finally clued me into this when I noted what a random occurance that I had such an unusual amount of new followers that day.

First, I want to say thanks to Thomas Hardy who including me on that list. There’s so many faces and names included that are people I admire, who have been both supportive and entertaining members of the web design community — so to be bunched into that group is flattering in the extreme.

Second, thanks to any new people who are finding this blog now because of that post! Welcome! In a nutshell, I’m a (still barely) 20-something internet nerd and crazy cat lady who resides in Seattle, WA where I run a one woman design studio. I specialize in Web Design and WordPress, but I have a full background in branding and print work — so i do all that stuff too. CMD+Shift Design is all about delivering work I am proud of to business that I want to see succeed. This blog aims to help other designers, developer and small business owners to learn from some of my experiences.

Lastly, I just want to say that I’ve met so many cool people just by publishing what I write here, so both new visitors and regular readers — thank you thank you thank you for being a part of this blog with me!

A Compete Guide on Sending a Print Design to Press | Part Three

It’s been awhile, but here is part 3 of my series on Sending a Print Design to Press. If you missed the first two parts, we’ve covered Choosing the Right Type of Printing for your Design and Specing Colors For Your Printer so far and now — it’s time to think about paper.

For a quick and dirty print job that you may be sending out to a digital printer, chances are you will not have many choices where paper is concerned. But when you’re working with an Offset or Letteroress house, there are near endless possibilities — anyone who isn’t interested in paper would be shocked to know what a huge industry specialty papers are and you easily can (and I have) spend hours paroosing paper sample books feeling all the intesresting textures, marveling at the beautiful colors and weighing the benifits over all the various shades of white there are to choose from!

* WARNING: It wasn’t until I sat down to write this that I realized just how complicated this subject is… i think it is something you just get comfortable with as you deal more with it.

Paper Weight

This is a complicated subject, which I will not even attempt to cover here – but there are some great resources out there to learn more about the systems for determining paper weight, (check out the Wikipedia page and its resource list.) I will break it down to the basics as I understand them, there are text weights and cover weights… within those broad categories, papers are defined by a weight.

Text Weight : This is thinner paper, you may use this for letterhead, catalogue pages, books pages… “80 pound text” would be something I might spec for a letterhead.

Cover weight: You guess it! You would use this for a book cover, business cards, postcard, stuff like that…  ”110 pound cover” is something I might spec for a business card.

There are also other terms for these categories and different printers or paper manufactures may use variations, like the word writing instead of text.

Paper Samples

Aside from being porn for graphic designers, paper samples are going to make the job of choosing paper much easier. As time goes on, you will start to remember specific sheets you favor for different types of jobs – but having a variety of papers in front of you to look at and touch (and show your client!) is going to be invaluable!

So how do you get these? It’s easy — just ask! Call up your printer and get a referral to a paper respresentative in your area or do a Google search for a “paper distributor” in your city. Once you get a hold of them and let you know you are a designer they’ll get you sample books of the papers they distribute free of charge!

Paper Pricing and Usage (Get to know your Printer!)

I know I will talk about this more in part four of this series, but I think the relationship between a printer and a designer is very important. You need someone you can turn to for advise on projects who is knowledged in working with a large variety of papers and printing processes. No designer knows every single papers weight and sheet size and there is really no reason to waste your time with that type of stuff.

Talk to your printer as you develop the plan for your design and get their input on papers! They may know of a paper solution you weren’t aware of or if you are working within a budget they will be able to make recommendations to you that will bring the printing price down.

Do you have any tips on this subject? Leave a comment and share them with us! :)

Upcoming subjects in this series: Getting Estimates on printing and finishing, Getting a sign off on your print order, Reviewing a digital proof, Doing A Press check.

These photo round up posts may be a bit of a blogger faux pas, but I came across these doing some research for this grand conept I’m working on my own tattoos… and I thought ya’ll would enjoy these…

Like these nerdy tats? Check out My posts of Typographical Tattoos and Punctuation Tattoos!

It’s been up for a few days now, the new face of Google image search. Obviously inspired by Bing, this is fun to play with. Try Googling yourself or business nameand see a quick glimpse at who you are on the web.

Got this question just recently via Facebook and decided to expand on my response for another installment of Ask A Freelancer.

Question

WordPress isn’t something I decided to specialize in, it just sort of evolved. My first introduction to the software was with putting together this blog. In the months before leaving my old 9to5, I came home every night and spent hours at the computer slowly teaching myself WordPress and building what was version1.0 of the CMD+Shift Design blog. It was late 2007, I was working with WordPress Version 2.3 — which when I think about it now it was pretty primitive compared to what we know as WordPress today!

Time Lapse from Late 2007 of me learning WordPress and building V1.0 of the blog in the hours after my “9to5″ workday was over.

As I worked with the software more and with the big upgrade to features that version 2.5 brought, I was very excited about how vertistile WordPress could be and naturally started selling it to clients. It is not a solution for every type of site, but it is much more than just a blogging platform, for sure!

What I like most about it is how easy it is for my clients to use! Whenever I do a WordPress project I always include a tutorial session at the close of the process. The client has a chance to sit down with the software and get walked through how they will update and maintain their new website. As the software evolves more and more, it has just gotten easier and these sessions rarely last more than a half hour.

Over the last month, I have even opted to make screencast tutorials for my clients  — in a 10 minute video I can walk them through all they need to know and they have that to reference back to whenever they need it! There are also some great resources for helping your clients get familiar with the software, like WordPress.tv.

I remember the days when having a content management system was an expensive process that was still not very simple for a casual user to pick up and for the most part — websites were fully static creations, meaning if you wanted to change something, you had to edit the code. I’ve dealt with teaching clients how to do basic HTML editing, it was awful! No client should have to deal with that stuff, they have businesses to run and they shouldnt have to shell out my hourly rate everytime they need some contact info changed.

Content manegement systems put the power into you clients hands so that they can grow their business in an efficient way and it ensures that the integrity of the design you have created with them is not compromised by any code blunders along the way.

WordPress isn’t the only game in town, there is a bunch of great CMS’s out there that can do a variety of unique things for you unique projects! There is Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine, Movable Type, Magento, CushyCMS, CMS Made Simple and a lot more. Download and install and just try one out, see what it can do and think about how it may benefit your clients and you business!