If my mom had told me making money would be this fun, I’d have gone to check with my dad.

ThreeGears.com recently hired me to create some napkin sketch style artwork for his sales/support process.

The Sketches
The sketches were created first with good ol’ pencil and paper and later redrawn in Illustrator. The final versions shown here represent the phases that any company goes through between its formation and its back end support structure:

Start-up
Sales
Service
Support

Sketches like these are a great way to show your customers what your business is all about. They can also, in short order, show your site visitors how to get around, …

Just because you use an out-of-the-box theme doesn’t mean you can’t make it something special.

I recently got the opportunity and honor to work with Leo Babauta, the creator of the ultra-successful ZenHabits blog.

Recently Leo released a new blog that is already well on its way to becoming ultra-successful in its own right. His new blog, WritetoDone.com, is a great place to pick up what Leo has to teach about the art and craft of writing.

Thanks to a great pal and erstwhile client of mine, Stephen Smith, Leo and I were introduced to each other. At the time, WritetoDone hadn’t been unveiled yet, and Leo wanted to give it some more oomph and branding …

Finished the site and logo for the How to Write Guy a while ago, but wanted to say a couple things about the logo.

First, it’s unfortunate but I lost all of my napkin sketches for this, which I love show for process. Needless to say, most of the early versions were a “W” and a “G” in various layouts. I’m sure you could imagine some. Put a W next to a G. Put a W on top of a G. Put a W sort of behind a G. Now play with colors.

It was no good.

The main problem with these W/G configurations was that they deemphasized the “THE Write Guy” part of the site. The client wanted the branding to lead away from “how-to …

Here’s my latest logo and header design, done for Ignite Living.

With a name like Ignite Living I figured right off the bat that the design would be split in two parts. One would be more of a graphical logo utilizing fire in some way, and the other would be “Ignite Living” written in full. Most of the design time was spent trying to find a font that would look good in both situations. I finally settled on Baskerville Semibold.

The first version came out like this:

For some reason I hated it. I could see it had potential but it wasn’t sitting right with me. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

Then …