First Veterans, this is for you! There are a bunch of deals just for you! Check them out! Thanks to the Military Wallet for putting together this awesome list!

Second, some custom graphics! All I ask is you comment if you take and send others who’d like them to this blog or to the facebook page.  If you’d like them customized I can do that too, just let me know in a comment.  If you’d like a specific ribbon please let me know which one(s)!

Please right click & save as and download to your computer. Please do not hotlink.  No reproduction of any kind permitted.

Why do people “like” a business? For example, as a native Vermonter I love all things Vermont and “like” all Vermont related things on Facebook, this includes big name businesses like Ben & Jerry’s, 7th Generation, and King Arthur Flour. I genuinely like not only the products these companies provide but their mission statements and the way they do business.  All these businesses also have an active presence on Facebook. They do an excellent job of connecting with their customers.  This is in my opinion the biggest thing businesses can get from social media, especially Facebook: A connection with their customer base. Connect with your customers and they become more than a number, a meaningless source of dollars, they are people who have a connection with your product or service.  Connect with them and you can build brand loyalty.

Of course they advertise specials, deals and news. But they also update about events, and perhaps most importantly ask engaging questions. What’s your favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor? What do you like to bake for Halloween? How do you reduce your carbon footprint? What do you like best about our product?  These questions not only can be used for marketing purposes but get your fans to interact with you. They may bring up things you’ve never even thought of, used your product in new ways.

For me it’s not a question of should my business have a fan page, it’s a question of, is my business using the fan page in the best way?  Just shouting at your fans that you have such and such deals, look at our new site, etc isn’t interacting and engaging. Sure they might find it interesting, but they’d rather feel like you take an interest in your fans, that you care about them.  The same applies to Twitter. There Blizzard customer support for example, does a great job interacting with their customers. They constantly help people with their questions and direct them on how to get a compromised account back, and explain why the forums/servers are down.

Every business is different, and figuring out how to best use social media may be challenging. In the end social media isn’t going anywhere. It will undoubtedly grow and change as it has over the years, but when it comes down to it people love to share. They love to tell their friends about things they like, including products & services. Social media is just an extension of what people do in real life.

1. 365.ca It’s a year long project by a photographer and graphic designer who used their own pictures with inspirational quotes every day for a year.

2. The 360 Project Ryan Hughes used 48 cameras to capture dancers from all angles.

3. Tumblr may I suggest exploring by the “art” tag or “design”

4. deviantART, no matter what media you prefer deviantART has it. Try a random deviation.

5. SiteInspire showcases website designs that are awesome.

6. Need a starting point? Try Illustration Friday, a new theme every Friday.

7. 100 Themes Project, feeling ambitious? There are  100 themes waiting for you to develop. there are also several different versions, in case you need more, this group dedicated to the challenge lists 5 variations.

8. Vandelay Design Blog, a great blog that I follow. They offer galleries of various topics to get your creative juices flowing.

Are there sites you like? What did I leave out? Let me know in a comment!

• You may have noticed we now have a shop page! Check it out, there are resources for you to download.  Brushes, textures, and patterns are all in the works.  Make sure you check back often for updates.
• The specials has also been updated, not only here on the blog but also on the note on Facebook!
• There have also been updates to freebies! But, that’s for Facebook friends only! Don’t worry, all you have to do is “Like” us on Facebook!
• While I’m at it, follow us on Twitter @klr_designs
• ETA: Cafepress shop updated with lots of new stuff!

On to the FAQ:

You may wonder if you leave a comment on any page or blog entry why your comment doesn’t show up right away. Here’s why:

I personally approve all comments posted here because most of the comments I get are spam, and they may post links to sites with bad reputations. So to protect readers from spammers and bad links I delete all spammy comments.  On that note, please feel free to comment, I love getting them! Unless you are a spammer, in which case, don’t comment you are wasting your time.

If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to answer and even compile a full FAQ!

I’m back in action today however and am working on some resources! Currently I’m working on Photoshop brushes (.abr).  How do you use brushes? What kind of brushes do you like?  Also in the works are some textures, and also patterns!  You can find the resources up on Facebook, here.  Looking for free resources? Don’t worry. There will be some free ones too! Looking for a brush, pattern or texture? Feel free to comment and let me know and I’ll see what I can do! If you are looking for it chances are others are too!

Is there an interest in image packs? I know not everyone uses Photoshop or even the same version of Photoshop. So if you are looking for brushes for GIMP or Paint Shop Pro for example let me know and I’ll transfer existing brushes into the correct format.

ETA: Check out the shop page to download all my resources!

First, original artwork! One of a kind!  Media used were copic sketch markers on heavy card stock with a smooth finish, and a touch of prismacolor pencils and a white gel pen. 

Next, a freebie! Would you like a nice new fall signature? Customized with your name! Comment on this post with your name and your custom fall signature is yours!  The background is transparent but could be colored, if you’d like it a color just let me know what color.

And lastly, a fall themed pre-made layout.  The colors of fall in a warm toned layout.  Like it? Love it? Want it? It can be yours!

Images only: $25
Images + code: $50

Inkscape is an open source, free, vector editing program similar to Adobe Illustrator (very similar from my limited experience with Illustrator).  Want to see the scale of what Inkscape can do? Just take a look at some of the tutorials the community has created.  Good looking stuff, eh?  I started off my exploration of Inkscape with some tutorials, namely the Spiro Swirl tutorial. I love cool looking swirls but some how never get them too look as awesome as I’d like. Problem solved!  I actually ended up using one of the swirls I made based on what I’d learned in that tutorial as part of my logo.  My entire logo, all versions of it, the large one up on my site, the small one shown here, and everything in between, were created in Inkscape.

What was my experience with Inkscape? Well aside from incredibly useful, it was good. It has all the tools you’d want in an image editing program.  You have your layers, various font options, filters, pen tools, shapes, and more.  I especially like their calligraphy tool. I really want to spend more time with it and my tablet and hone my calligraphy skills.  You can tweak the tools, especially pen/pencil tools to your liking from changing the smoothness to the shape. Some shapes are provided or if those aren’t to your liking you can use one from your clipboard.

My experience with Inkscape wasn’t without problems however.  It did crash on me, for no apparent reason.  Fortunately it had an autosave feature, and saved the document I was working on so no work was lost.  Once I found where exactly it was saving the documents too I was happy once more.  I also wasn’t a fan of the zoom. I felt like I couldn’t get the page the size I wanted it, either too big or small.  However, that was a minor inconvenience at worst.

When it comes to exporting your document you also have lots of options. Starting with, what exactly do you want to export? The entire page? Just the drawing? Something custom?  Then choose your size, and dpi.  You can also import just about any image file format you would want to.  Inkscape also saves in .svg file format by default so no worries about not being able to open it in Illustrator or your other vector editing program of choice.

All in all I think Inkscape is a great program and a must for anyone interested in working with SVG, and is a great and affordable (by affordable I mean free) alternative to Illustrator.

• New Merch shop @cafepress www.paritydesigns.com gear and also other merchandise featuring my artwork & photography
• You may have noticed the blog layout has changed a few times this week. I’m still working on a new layout so this is only temporary. Don’t be alarmed if you visit one day and the blog looks wonky that’s just me fiddling behind the scenes.
• I’ve been active on Twitter, don’t forget to follow me there @klr_designs
• We are having a “like” campaign on Facebook, the goal 100 “likes” the reward? I’m sure I will have something for the lucky 100th fan

To start off with I thought a redesign of my site was the perfect opportunity to see what Muse had to offer. First things first, lets get this started.

If you are familiar with Adobe products this looks pretty similar to the screens you’ll find in Dreamweaver for example. I already started my project here so lets click on that and move along.

Interesting thing about Muse is you start off with the “Plan” screen.  This lets you plan out and organize your site’s pages and even wire frame them out. The “master” page down at the bottom lets you plan the overall styles or layout you want to have on your site. The changes you do on this page will effect the entire site. Makes it really easy to make site wide changes.  Honestly it took me a tutorial to figure out what exactly the “master” page was for.  Once I got it, however, it was easy to use and actually made complete sense. Of course the “master” page effects the entire site!

Here we have the “design” phase of Muse.  Notice the light pink/red columns? Muse will let you choose a grid system to use in your design. Here I went with a 12 column grid.  This page is the Master page, here I set up the basic layout for my site; background, text, header & footer information.

Now this is the design view for my index page. It’s different from the other pages because it has 3 different content areas, the other pages will only have 1.  Because this isn’t the “master” page the changes I make on this page will only effect this page. You may also notice the menu on the right side. It’s very similar to the menus you will find in Photoshop or Dreamweaver. It gives you options for the font, paragraph, and even link styling. Link styling wasn’t as intuitive or customizable as I’d like however. From what I saw (I didn’t look up a tutorial on this part so I might be missing something) you could pretty much only customize the link colors & if you wanted them bold, italic or underline.  Muse also has the option to use built in widgets, such as slide shows, image galleries, or menus. All the widgets are customizable.  If that’s not what you want you still have the option to enter your own HTML code, as I have done here with Twitter’s code.

This is the Muse preview phase. It lets you preview your work as it would appear in a browser. To Muse’s credit it was right on. Open this site in Firefox & IE and it looks just like that!  No only does it look like what your site will be when it’s live but you can also click all the links, use all the photo galleries or other special items on your site.

All that’s left is to publish your site… This is where Muse kinda lost me, and might loose you too.

That’s right you have to sign up for something! “Business Catalyst” in the trial version (which is what you sign up for here) lets you load your site to their web space for free. They also email you stats about your site, and show you some of the perks of having your site there, likes it’s easy for you to show to clients, and get feedback on it.  Well that might be great for some, but I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have it on my own web space. I can just as easily send a client a link to my web space as theirs.  Fear not, you don’t have to sign up with another services you probably don’t want or need. There’s another way…

Go in to File then down to export as HTML and you will get a nice folder of your site, just waiting for you to upload to your host of choice!  I did that and now have a lovely copy of my Muse site. Until you export at HTML your site will be in Muse format, and only usable by Muse, so that might be a problem for some folks.  Once it’s exported you can edit the HTML & CSS in any editor of your choice as you would any other site. Speaking of code, how does it look? Well, like this….

This is from my index page. As you might notice that’s a lot of code…and a lot of divs.  I’m fairly certain you don’t need that many divs to do the same thing.  The code isn’t as clean as I think it could be and probably would be if it was coded by hand.  So what’s my overall opinion on Muse?

Well I think Muse has potential. Once I got over it’s learning curve (which isn’t a particularly huge curve but it is there) I found it pretty easy to use & I didn’t like the final code, it wasn’t clean enough. However I found myself wishing I could do more with it.  Maybe that was because I was still learning it, or just limitations of the program. It is still only in beta right now. The final product will probably have more functionality.  I should also note that there has been an update since I last used Muse. I haven’t checked the notes to see what was changed, so there may be a Muse second look review to follow.  I look forward to seeing what Muse is fully capable of when it’s finally released.  If you’d like to see the site I made in Muse here it is.

Have you tried Muse? What did you think?