In which you ask of Charlie, “Now why don’t he write?”, he explains it all and you laugh tears of joy and kindly forgive him.

Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to the newly revamped Charfish Design site. I trust you had a good and safe holiday!

First things first: where have we been? Busy as all hell, that’s where. We’ve just completed our second year of rockin’ the web with sexy design, and it was a crazy one. So much so that any update to this site’s content has been virtually impossible. Given the choice between client work and updating our own stuff…well, we chose the client work.

But then, we DO have a readership …

In mid-2008, Charfish Design became an actual, legal, tax-paying company. I’d like to tell you how my time in the trenches has been so far, and what I’ve learned along the way.

What you’re about to read isn’t stuff I read in some book or overheard some lawyers talking about in a coffee shop. These are just a few things I’ve picked up on this sometimes winding and bumpy road of owning my own business. Hope you enjoy these points and get something out of them!

Communication is the key

I’ve said this a million times on this site and IgniteLiving.com, but if you don’t communicate, you’re not gonna make it.

It doesn’t have to be …

We promised free items for you to send to your Grandma, so here they are. See, we weren’t just kidding around.

Everybody loves textures, and since we use them on practically everything we make, we thought we would share the awesome.

We are starting out with a set of Wood Textures here, even though there are already eighty bazillion free texures on the interwebs. Ours are better because they are free. And they are wood. And stuff. Anyway.

About the wood textures

Being a photographer, I often find myself shooting every single thing in sight, without reason. To justify this ridiculous use of my camera, I …

Is your website a noxious visual miasma? A hideous concoction of strident hues? A vomitous amalgamation of eye-related wretchedness? Well, this post may be for you.

You know how when you walk into Baskin Robbins, you see all those ice cream colors? And there’s that smell in the air? That sweet waffle cone smell that makes you feel like your nostrils just got a cavity? That shouldn’t be your website.

And with that, I welcome you to Part 3 of our “10 Ways to Make Your Website Look Better” series.

Today, we’re going to talk about color.

An introduction, and why I’m even bothering

I think it’s safe to say that MOST of us don’t use hideous color …

Can’t get enough free textures? Well, you are in luck, because I LOVE giving away free stuff. And I love getting free stuff. So if you have any extra cakes that you don’t want, send them my way!

Stuff! Things! Other stuff and other things! That’s right, folks, free textures. Again. Barely more than a week since the last time we gave you free things. Geez, we are awesome.
About the nature textures
These textures are a bit random, but super swell anyway. I have used these in design work – and turned out some stunning results.

Each texture is a jpeg and comes in one size: 1024×685 …