Sarahmae

Last week I lost my Great Aunt Sarahmae. She gave the best hugs in the world and loved Louis L’Amour. She carried the Olympic Torch when she was 80 years old, made awesome doughnuts and had words of encouragement for everyone she met.

I am so sad to lose another member of this generation of my family. My grandparents are all gone and my great aunts and uncles take with them little bits of history that I can’t get back.

They knew my grandparents and parents when they were young. They know who they were before my siblings and I came along.

My grandparents and their brothers and sisters kept things close to their hearts. They didn’t have Facebook or Twitter to share every detail of their day with the world. They had secrets and heartaches that I could infer only from offhand remarks and conversations. They didn’t feel the need to talk about sad things. They kept on keeping on.

I find their lives fascinating. The hows and whys that moved them across the U.S. and back. I am amazed by their resolve. I am amazed by their ability to keep moving forward. I am amazed by their ability to give.

For more than 94 years Aunt Sarahmae focused on comforting and encouraging everyone who crossed her path. She did so with a smile and a hug and unconditional love that will be with me always. She’s a hard act to follow.

Posted in Life

Design Jargon Translated – Vectors

It’s Monday. Time for me to translate some design jargon into plain English, just for you. Today we’re talking vectors!

Here’s the scenario: Your designer is cooking up a new set of marketing materials for you. You have all the ingredients together. You’ve have copy written, you’ve searched through your files, found a .jpg file of your logo, and sent it all over to your designer and now…

Your designer says: “I need your logo in vector format not raster.”

“What’s wrong with the .jpg I sent?” you ask.

Nothing. It’s perfectly fine, except it’s already baked. Done. Crispy. Toasted. It can only be what it is, just a little .jpg.

Your logo in a vector format is like sugar cookie dough. It’s all ready to be rolled out and cut into shapes. It’s malleable. Smooth vector lines (usually created in Illustrator) allow your designer to scale your logo up, scale your logo down, adjust the color and then save it out into whatever format, size and resolution is needed for the marketing pieces you want.

Your logo in a raster format is like a baked cookie. It’s much harder for your designer to take a raster (.jpg, .tif, .png, .gif, .psd) format logo and make adjustments. It’s like trying to take that baked sugar cookie and give it different shape without destroying it. The only way to do it is to take a bite. Then there you are with a half-eaten cookie and an unprofessional logo.

So now you are on a hunt for your logo in vector format. When you’re searching your files look for a file that ends in .eps or .ai. The most common vector formats.

If you don’t have a vector file of your logo, your designer may want to recreate your logo in vector format. Let them do this. Pay them for the extra work and make sure they give you a copy of files for future use. That way you’ll have the ingredients you need the next time you want to cook up some marketing materials.

Come back next Monday and I’ll explain more about raster files or maybe I’ll just talk about cooking, I’m kinda hungry over here.

Posted in Graphic Design, Logos

Little Bits of Focus

I have a confession.

I’ve been telling myself that I don’t have time to write a blog post, or take a walk, or sweep the kitchen floor because I’m just too busy.

Busy isn’t the problem. The problem is focus. Somedays it’s a lot easier to switch over to check Twitter, or see what’s up with my cousin on Facebook, or check my email, than to focus.

Here’s the thing, I know when I focus, even for a few minutes, I can get a whole lot of work done. What I can accomplish when I’m completely focused on the task at hand is amazing.

So I started challenging myself to focus using an online timer called e.ggtimer.com.

I simply put in the number of minutes I want to focus on whatever project I’m working on, press GO! and I’m off.

Just doing this switches my mind into work mode. It brings out something so deeply engrained in me from my days as a magazine art director. I’m racing the clock to meet a deadline. Must. Meet. The. Deadline.

The timer goes off, time has flown by and I have accomplished so much just by giving myself a little bit of time to focus.

What works for you when you need to focus?

Posted in Business, Life