Make It

Illustrator help: Making seamless pattern repeats

I spent most of this weekend working on starting to work on a portfolio of repeat patterns. These are patterns I wouldn't use for Rifferaff, but I would try to sell to agencies. It's fun to work in a different style and color palette than what I try to do with my own line. This whole world is very new to me, so new in fact that I need help on how to make a pattern! When I make patterns for silkscreening I know that my screen will be 18 x 24 so I just arrange the images on an 18 x 24 artboard in Illustrator and call it a day. When making patterns for sale, I have to make a repeating swatch that can be repeated infinitely and potentially be applied to products of any size. I know in theory how making a pattern repeat should work, but after much trial and error I just can't get my seams to line up. They're always off by a hair and it's making me crazy because when I tile the swatches there are always visible lines. Is there a magic step? Am I supposed to be using the grid and my math skills to measure? Or is there a special command in Illustrator for this purpose? Or does it just take lots of trial and error? Help in the comments section please!

Day 78 and 79

Day 78 & 79 - January 5, 6

This weekend I've been working on getting a decent website up. I have no training in web design (are you noticing a trend here) but through trial and error I've learned enough to put up something presentable.

I use NVu, which is an open source software (i.e. free) comparable to Dreamweaver.

Once I get my new screens and can take pics of new product, I'll update it. But I think, in the long run, I'd rather pass off this duty to a web designer. I don't really have the time or skill level to build the site the way I want it myself, so this is something I wouldn't mind passing off to a professional. In the meantime, here it is: www.rifferaff.com

Video Tutorials

Video tutorials on YouTube for Photoshop and GIMP show you visually how to use the programs. It's almost as good as taking a class. (via Etsy Labs blog)

An Alternative for Designing Your Website

Websitesnap.com is an online web builder that allows you to put together decent looking web pages for minimal cost. While I don't think services like this offer any threat to the livelihood of web designers, they offer a middle ground between hiring a professional to create your site and learning all the necessary coding to do it yourself.

The screenshots of other sites created using this service aren't half bad, so this could be a viable alternative. This is the first of these services that I've seen that offers a shopping cart feature that you can incorporate into your site, making it all that easier to add an e-commerce component.

Taschen: E-Commerce

Was browsing through Denyse Schmidt's book in the bookstore yesterday while my boyfriend was checking out design books the next row over when I found this in his aisle: Web Design: E-Commerce, by TASCHEN.

TASCHEN is an innovative and creative publishing house that publishes graphic-heavy books in all manner of subject matter. Their books are always very affordable.

They have a whole series of books regarding different aspects of web design; pictures dominate, text is minimal. The E-Commerce book is mostly comprised of pictures of beautifully constructed online retail sites. Most of the sites are probably too extensive and too expensive for most of us to recreate, but it's worth a look to check out different ways to construct and design online shop.

Free Word Processing Program for Macs

Speaking of MS Word, as a Mac user, I've never quite mastered AppleWorks, the Apple version of MS Word. I find it very confusing and not as easy to use as Word. Enter Open Office. Open Office is a free word processing program available for download at www.openoffice.org/. It's got all the familar aspects of MS Word that Apple Works is missing, like toolbars with info about fonts and text alignments. I find it just as user-friendly as MS Word, but it's free and Mac-compatible. It has made formatting documents much easier and I recommend it for Mac users who do word processing on their computers.

Etsy Version 2 Now Online

The new Etsy is now online. It's very different, I don't know how I feel about it. I think I need some more time to click around and explore the new features. I'm not crazy about the new design of the homepage, it seems like there's more text and fewer pics and graphics than there were before.

I am a huge Etsy fan, but a major issue I have with it is that it's kind of intimidating for people who aren't familiar with it. Navigating and purchasing items from Etsy is not as easy as going onto most other online shops to purchase something. There are just so many sellers and so many different categories to peruse. A point of concern I often see in the Etsy forums is whether the Etsy sellers are just selling to each other and not reaching non-crafty customers. I want the design and the interface of Etsy to be welcoming to non-crafters who are visiting for the first time. We'll have to wait and see if Version 2 accomplishes this.

The Etsy blog has great updates on the latest status of the Version 2 changes: http://blog.etsy.com/

Designers Who Blog

Michelle Caplan recently got a little extra press from the group at Designers Who Blog when they featured her site. If you're a designer and you've got a blog, submit it.

There's lots of inspiration to be found among the other blogs that have already been submitted.

How about this link I found via DWB all about branding. Seriously, nearly every post title has "brand" in it.

Ask an Expert - Arianne of Aeolidia, Part 4

This is our last installment of Ask an Expert featuring Arianne or Aeolidia. Join me in sending her a huge thanks for the info she's shared with us. I hope you have enjoyed the tips she has offered regarding setting up your own website. Check back next Monday to meet our October expert.

What are your top three pieces of advice for a crafter who is thinking about setting up her first website?

1) Know what you want. You don't have to know *exactly* what you want, but it's best to go into your project with a good idea of your goals, your plans, and how you want things to look and to work. We have had clients change their mind halfway through the project before, and starting over can get costly, so we try to make sure to ask all the right questions at the start of the project to avoid this. We have also worked with clients who already spent a bundle of money on a bad web designer and now need our help to start over and salvage their sites. If you're not hiring a designer, it's much easier to build a site yourself if you have it all planned out before you dive into the technical details.

2) Get as much information as you can. Whether you're designing the site yourself or hiring someone to help, make sure you've done some research. Doing it yourself? Find out what your options are, visit forums for small businesses, crafters, or website owners, ask your friends how they did it. Hiring someone? Ask around, get recommendations, make sure the designer gives you all the important info along the way, educate yourself about how your shopping cart works or what your payment processing options are, etc.

3) Don't cut corners. This especially goes for people who plan to set up a shop website. Convincing potential customers to visit your site and actually make a purchase is hard. Make sure the site looks professional and works as it should. Make sure the entire shopping experience on your site is smooth and easy. Get it the way you want it as soon as you can, rather than building something haphazard and planning to update it later when sales pick up - "eh, it's good enough" isn't going to help your sales! Make sure you take the time to get your site complete and test it out before going live - rushing to meet a deadline is less important than making sure the final product is something you'll be proud of.

Ask an Expert - Arianne of Aeolidia, Part 3

Here's the third installment of "Ask an Expert" with Arianne. If you've got a question for her regarding web design, leave it in the comments and she'll answer it in the final installment.

What are the benefits of hiring a web designer instead of creating your own site?

If you already know a bit about web design or don't mind learning, I think it's great to create your own site. If you end up finding it fun to do, you will learn a lot and gain some extra skills. Most people don't think hammering away at HTML and wondering why your site looks good in IE but terrible in Firefox is that fun, though, so that's why we're here! In fact, we have worked with people who are completely capable of building and working on their own websites, but would rather devote that time to their crafting, so are happy to contract the work out to us.

A good web designer will be able to help you with every step in the process of setting up a website: domain registration, web hosting, SSL certificates, payment processors, choosing cart software, creating a design, coding the site, checking it in all major browsers on multiple platforms, and showing you how to update and maintain it.

There is pretty much no way you're going to do everything right the first time you build a website. This goes for everyone from amateurs to professionals - my first websites were pretty bad! Not only will all the technology and options be new to you, but designers will often have more resources than you do. For instance, at Aeolidia we have multiple computers with different screen sizes, and have loaded all common web browsers on our PCs and our Mac for testing purposes. Web designers have and know how to use Photoshop, Imageready, Illustrator, and any other software useful in making a site. Your web designer will have worked on dozens of sites like yours in the past and will know what works and what doesn't and will know what pitfalls to avoid.