Because in a world where everyone’s a designer, designing isn’t enough anymore. Clients want to know what’s behind their projects and the people that do them.

Some say technology is making our world smaller but it’s really just making it more anonymous.

There are professionals from every field available online. You can order groceries, do your banking and hire a lawyer whose face you’ll never see, all from the comfort of your keyboard. Whatever you’re looking for is available in legions.

So the question is no longer whether or not you can find someone to do the work. You can.

The question is: who’s going to do it? It’s about you and me and our personal branding. It’s about the people behind the scenes, what they do and how they arrive at their magic.

It’s about the quality you’ll present to this growing world of quantity.

In all the speed of our modern world we’re all still seekers after beauty. We can get the news anywhere, but where do we find the poetry? For me the poetry is in the process and in the end result. You’ve got to take a ride and make the ride enjoyable for those around you. You’ve got to be responsible about where you’re going and how you get there.

This manifesto is about us, what we do and how we arrive.

Why do we design?

We design because we love it.

We design because design is beautiful.

We design because making something look better earns us the right to complain about things we don’t like. And then change them.

We design because this is our world and if we don’t like it we’ve nobody to blame but ourselves.

Apple computers are gorgeous; that’s half the story. They also work phenomenally well, which is the other half. But were they boxed in matte black sheet metal they’d lose appeal. You could say beauty is not tangible, but anyone who’s opened the box of a new shiny gadget and felt that rush knows the truth.

Design is tangible; beauty is tangible. You can’t cut either of them with a knife but that’s a physicist’s definition of tangible and we’re not interested in that here. The truth is, we all know, deep down where the real things reside, there’s another universe of tangible and it sits right there in your chest.

It’s the place where Christmas as a child lives and where it hurts when you lose someone. There’s more reality there than in any block of concrete.

That’s why we design: because it matters.

How do we design?

Very carefully. That’s the truth disguised as a flippant answer.

It’s the truth because good design is functional, and without the end goal and end user in mind, there can be no true function and hence no design.

We design when we know where we’re going, and no sooner. There is beauty in functionality, in purpose.

You know the feeling you get when you flip on the light switch and nothing happens? That’s bad design. Bad design is improper function and something not working like we suppose it should.

Is a website any different? Should there be ten images when one will do? Should the navigation require the wits of a neurologist to figure out? Should every last pixel be packed with eye candy?

One glance around the ‘net will show you that not everyone in our field agrees, but there’s one sure thing we’ve come to know over the years:

When there are millions of websites, ebooks and products available at the flick of a “dot com,” quality is of utmost importance.

The web is about content. Anyone who comes to your site is looking for something. Our purpose as designers is to deliver this something, make it live, make it breathe and present it as it should be presented.

Or at the very least just make sure people can find it, for God’s sake.

Design is the route the crow flies from dry utility to brilliant interesting function.

If it doesn’t work, it isn’t designed well. And if it does work but people don’t want to use it…it still isn’t designed well.

Good design works and people want their hands all over it.

Everyone has spent the last month or so crying for the lack of free items, I know. So here you are, some funky peeling-paint textures. You can print these out and frame them for your living room, or you can download them and make your friends jealous with your growing free textures folder. Yay.

About the paint textures

There is nothing I like better than peeling paint. Seriously. I see it anywhere and I have to stop and just look at it. It is layers and layers of pure awesomeness.

Anyway, each of these 3 textures are .jpg’s and are in one size: 3872×2592. The total file size is only 4.2 MB (quick download!).

If you end up using them on something and it looks super rad, you should share it here. I love awesome stuff. Especially when I wasn’t the one who just spent a million hours working on it.

I hope you enjoy them!

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We are continuing today with the series on ebook design. This time we’re going to discuss the bare-minimum quality that ANY ebook should have. By bare-minimum we mean an ebook that at first appearance won’t make your audience laugh or feel they’ve been ripped off.

This post is based in part on an email I received and which got me thinking. Basically, the email said:

“Look, I really just need a cover. The inside doesn’t need to be anything special because it’s going to be a freebie anyway. People won’t be expecting much.”

Mmm…no.

First off, if your friend gave you a bunch of hand-me-down clothes that didn’t fit you and looked like something from the early ’70s, complete with sequins, would you wear them because they were free?

And second, who cares what people ARE expecting? That’s Averageville, Mediocrityland and a boring roller coaster ride to Plain Jane’s house.

Don’t JUST give people what they’re expecting! That just makes them…well…another customer

Give them MORE than they expect and you’ll make a die-hard fan who will go out and sing your praises to his friends.

So…bad idea #1:

Only ebooks that cost money need to look good. If I’m putting out a free one, it’s okay if it looks like a bomb went off at a chili cook-off.

Why a lousy, ugly or average ebook is worse for business than you think.

• They create far less word-of-mouth attention, reducing overall sales.
• Customers may trust you less and/or think you’re shady.
• A book that looks lousy also creates the apparency that its content is lousy.
• They get more refunds from unhappy customers.
• Unhappy customers now leads to fewer repeat sales in the future.
• Ugly ebooks are promoted by fewer affiliates who themselves fear returns and damage to their reputation.
• Your affiliates who don’t jump ship will also be getting more refunds.
• Unhappy affiliates now means fewer affiliates in the future.

On the other hand, here’s what a professional ebook design means for your business:

• Far greater word-of-mouth attention = more web traffic = more advertising dollars = far more sales.
• Far fewer, if any, refunds.
• Affiliates who are happy to support your product.
• Affiliates who will also happily back your future projects.
• Huge word-of-mouth between affiliates and their networks.
• Repeat customers in the future.
• Trust.
• People will know you’re a professional and care.
• Blooming friendships, networks and relationships, bringing more sales opportunities.

You must remember that the internet is one giant snowball effect. News, good or bad, spreads quickly through Internetville via multimedia channels too numerous to count. And it is permanent.

This means if you create something poor enough in quality that people want to bash you, the word is going to spread fast via blogs, videos, YouTube, etc. and your little enterprise is going to see troubled times.

On the other hand, if you create something really nice, it can similarly spread like wildfire. Chris Guillebeau’s 279 Days to Overnight Success is a case in point. Aside from being very interesting and well-written, it’s also visually stunning. That kind of combination is unstoppable, as Chris found out while his ebook was being downloaded 25,000+ times over a couple days. Did the design of Chris’s book help? Absolutely. Would it have been as highly downloaded if it had been ugly but just as well written? No chance.

And in summation

Make it look good and people will trust you and think you’re a pro. Make it look amateur and people will think you don’t care and will look elsewhere. Can you blame them?

And, lastly, if you’ve got some writing you’re about to launch and need some help with your ebook design, contact us. We’d be happy to help you out.

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 at 300 dpi. There are 9 different textures in this set. The total file size is 7.8MB.

If you have any questions about these or you want to request a certain kind of texture, leave a comment below and I might even write you back!

Or just download them and go about your business. That’s what I would do.

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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 schemes in our designs. The reason for that is simple and quite obvious: they’re hideous. They stick out like a sore thumb. A hideous sore thumb with yellow and purple and green bruising. Maybe even an open sore that…nevermind. You get the point.

This post isn’t about the huge glaring mistakes you can make by using really awful color mixtures on your brochures or website. Well…it sort of is. But it’s also about the fine-tuning, such as picking hyperlink colors for your text. Or finding the right color for the chapter titles in your book.

Well, it’s all about integrity.

Integrity of the Piece

I like to think that every project has its own purpose. A website isn’t just a website. It’s a website ABOUT something. It’s about fishing or cooking or cross-country running.

A logo isn’t just a picture or symbol. It’s a picture or symbol ABOUT something, like food or health or technology.

That’s where the integrity comes in: your visual assets are supposed to be doing something, and that something is communicating a message. Your fonts, colors, layout, images, etc. all support (or should) that overall message.

So…if your header is red and your main content bright green, ask yourself, “What is this doing for my overall message?”

But overall, just be practical

Back in college, where I studied architecture, I gave an end-of-quarter presentation about a building I’d designed over the prior three months. At the end of the presentation, one of the visiting architects in the audience raised his hand and said, “Architecture isn’t about building.” Um, what?

Yeah, I know. I thought so too. But that’s not even the crazy part. He then said, “Architecture is philosophy. Every brick in your building should have a purpose. What is the purpose of the bricks in that wall?” he asked, pointing to my model.

When I replied that the bricks were holding up the ceiling, he insisted that I think harder about it.

My point is, it’s all too easy to go overboard with thinking deep thoughts and philosophizing about every last detail. “Red means impulse” and “Blue means peace” and “If you mix tan with off-white, it means please take your shoes off before entering.”

You can drive yourself nuts with this stuff, and it’s quite likely that your audience isn’t going to get it anyway. So don’t go all introverted on me.

The overriding function of your site, business card, logo, etc. is that it simply look awesome and communicate. Your site, regardless of whatever deeper meaning it has as a whole, simply needs to be legible.

I could lie about the text on this site and say that I chose black text on a white background because it symbolizes how I hope for equality between cardboard manufacturers. But nope. Black on white is easy to read. That’s it, and you really don’t need a better answer than that.

Where to find a color scheme

Speaking on the integrity thing, your golf site probably needs some green in it. It just makes sense. Again, you could go all avant-garde and do it in pink with elephants all over, but your audience is going to miss such subtle symbolism.

So…you know you’re looking for a green color scheme, but how do you come up with one that works? If you use one shade of green here, what shade works over there? And what sort of text will be legible?

Well, a great place to start (after you’ve experimented…which is the best way to learn, I think) is to head over to Kuler. Kuler is a color scheme picker and it’s phenomenal. The first thing you’ll see there are sample color schemes, complete with RGB and hex codes. Simply browse around the site a bit, or do a search for “green” and you’ll have all the schemes you’ll need.

And the really cool thing is that after you pick a color scheme, you can tweak individual colors of that particular palette. So, for example, if you’re still working on your green golf theme, you can start by exploring for a green scheme that works overall. Then you’ll need some colors to use as emphasis, say for your logo or text hyperlinks, right? Well, you can use that little slider dealy to find them and you’ll see exactly how the colors will all interact.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next with some great tips on how to format the text on your page so it’s easy on your visitor. Want a hint? Well, your old school professors had it all wrong…but you knew that already.

If you missed the other parts of this series, you can find them here:

• 10 Ways to make your website look better
• 10 ways to make your website better, Part 1 – Effective eye trails
• How proper line height will improve the look and stickiness of your site

And if there’s something else you’d like to see here, or you’re looking for advice on some particular woes, just let us know in the comments or contact us.

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 have to do something, right? So here you are, free textures for you!

Each texture is a jpeg and comes in one size: 1024×685 at 300 dpi. There are 9 different wood textures and you can use them on anything you like! The total file size is 8.3MB, so you should have a sweet, sweet connection before downloading them.

I hope you enjoy these and I am looking forward to posting some more next week!

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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 artsy, poetic, business-like or even intelligent communication. It just has to be communication.

Your client doesn’t care if you use the words “empowering”, “networking” or “flux capacitor” in your email. He doesn’t care if your sentence structure is a little funky. He doesn’t care if you floss regularly or subscribe to any particular political stance.

He just wants you to exist and act like you’re actually there.

When someone writes you, write them back. When someone says they like your stuff, say thank you. When someone says it’s urgent, don’t go out for a long lunch before you answer. When someone calls, call them back.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t like the phone. I’m with you; I hate the phone. Ultra-hatred bordering on homicidal and/or suicidal psychosis probably. But it’s not about me. It’s about the client and the client wants a phone call. Seeing as how that client’s money will be paying my bills or buying me some groceries, I guess I ought to just shut up and get on with it, eh?

When you do communicate, have fun

If your business is anything like mine, you might have a LOT of clients. That’s not a boast; I’m just saying I don’t charge an arm and a leg for what I do, so have to make up for it in volume.

If I wrote every client the same email, over and over and over, I’d go insane. I try to keep it fresh and interesting and inject my personality into what I do. It makes it way more fun for me, and I’m sure clients enjoy my messages more than some generic bland form letter I could send. Plus, if you act like yourself, your client probably will too. You may even end up making some good friends along the way!

Pay attention

This is a tribute (or anti-tribute maybe) to the old used-car salesman mentality.

You go in looking for a car. You say, “I want one in blue.” The car salesman says, “We don’t have that, but look at this stunner in bright pink. Now that’s you!” And you think to yourself, “Is this guy a moron? I want a blue car and he is showing me one in bright pink? And it’s not even the same model!”

This happens all the time in business, especially via email. Client says, “I have a 50-page ebook I want designed.” Don’t write back and say, “How long is your ebook?” It makes you look stupid. It makes the client think you’re not really paying attention…which you weren’t. You can lose business this way.

It takes much less time to read an email all the way through and get it, than it does to read another email the client has to send because you weren’t on the ball. Wastes their time too.

Don’t take every client

I always run the danger of estranging clients when I speak of “Clients from Hell!” on this site, so please read this disclaimer first lest you think I’m pointing a finger at you:

Clients from Hell don’t care if they’re Clients from Hell. If you have the sensibility to even worry that you may be a Client from Hell, you’re not.

If you have to ask a client four or five times how long their book is, you might be steering into dangerous territory. If you ask the client, “Is it okay if I get this to you on Tuesday,” and they write back, “My favorite color is blue,” you might be in for some trouble.

You bring in what you put out

That probably sounds a bit enigmatic, so I’ll explain. If you want work to come IN, you have to put OUT communication. If you want a new client IN, you have to advertise OUT. If you want someone to know that you sell special wedding napkin rings with ducks on (business IN), you have to tell them (OUT).

Make some noise, tell everyone what you do, post to your blog, pick up that phone, spark up conversation even if you hate talking to people. Your reward will be new business. It never fails.

Take care of those who take care of you

When you find someone with whom you work well, boost that relationship and protect it as much as you can.

There are a few clients for whom I’ve done countless projects, one after the other. They make my business and life so much easier, having their repeat business. I have no illusions about that whatsoever, so I take good care of them. The more I help them the more they help me, and that is a fantastic way of things.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, do your best for them. Well, you should be doing your best anyway, but maybe you could do extra your best. Or something more logical perhaps.

Keep getting better at what you do

This is not only essential for keeping up with your competitors but also is a great trick for keeping interested in what you do.

Case in point, after designing about 8,384,859 ebook covers, I was feeling a bit stagnant and burnt out, and wanted to spend all my time watching Square Dancing DVDs.

So I started learning 3D programs, different Photoshop skills, studied up on classical typography and layouts, figured out what the Golden Mean was and how it could help me in my designs. All of a sudden I was interested again and started having better ideas and more of them.

So, long story short is don’t type-cast yourself. You’re not necessarily going to develop new skills and competencies just working your routine. In fact, just in interest of time and keeping the machine running, you may end up doing the same things over and over. They’ve worked before and they’re easy for you, so you just keep pulling that same trick out of the bag. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s also not the best route to personal development either.

Of course, this not ALL I’ve learned over the past year of working, but these main points will leave one in good shape if they’re remembered and practiced. Plus, I just don’t feel like writing any more.

Next week, we’ll be posting the next installment in our old series: 10 ways to make your website look better. You don’t want to miss that so subscribe now. Oh…and here are the first three posts in the series, case you missed them:

• 10 Ways to make your website look better
• 10 ways to make your website better, Part 1 – Effective eye trails
• How proper line height will improve the look and stickiness of your site

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 here that doesn’t consist entirely of clients. We can’t go on ignoring all of them, eh? So get ready for some new content on a regular basis. Yes…we’ve said that before, but that was all just a lie.

What’s new?

It is practically a requirement that a person write an “end of year, what I am going to do now” post every time we roll over into a new January. So, here you go:

New Charfish Design site! Now with twice the flavor!

While the old site was getting the job done just fine, we wanted to make some changes to its overall usability. First on the list was making it easier to navigate for Ye Olde Readers. We’ve consolidated the site quite a bit, but unless you’ve spent a lot of time here you might not notice the changes. Suffice it to say that we’ve saved you at least one mouse-click per visit to our site and thereby prevented years of index finger joint therapy. You’re welcome.

Second was getting the site up to speed design-wise. I mean come on, this is 2010, right? Eye-candy is out…minimalism is (still) in. So we went more minimal. There is altogether much more whitespace and breathing room here. Not only is whitespace awesome all on its own, it’s also really good for us lazy folk because we get to design less.

A new employee person item

Gang, I’d like to officially welcome a new employee to the Charfish tribe! Her name is Annora.

Who is Annora? First and foremost she’s a human, which saves us from awkward stares during client meetings. On top of that, she’s a pro photographer, wicked ebook designer, JavaScript junkie and all around amazing person.

And she’s wicked smart in the head area. You tell her, “Hey, Annora, why don’t you try to do this thing you’ve never heard of before and do it better than me without having any practice or even asking the Google?” And she’ll say, “Done. Here it is. I’m going for coffee.” And you look at what she did and you drool a bit. Amazing eye for design and you’ll see quite a bit of her work in our newly revamped ebook portfolio.

And speaking of portfolio…

As part of the new site design, we’ve also created slick new portfolio pages for our websites, ebooks and logos.

The way we coded up the portfolio pages is also going to save us about 18 hours per update, so you’ll be seeing more work more often here. Yay!

That about covers the update for now, so what’s in our near future? Here ’tis:

What’s coming up for us?

• We promise to post AT LEAST once a month, we swear!
• More goodies on the way…like textures! Everyone loves the textures. And more icons! Freebies galore and items you can give your granny via email! She loves that.
• A WordPress theme of awesomeness! That’s right…our very own theme. There are a gazillion themes out there. Some good, some bad, some exactly like every other theme. So why do another one? Because we’ve got some damn good ideas, that’s why! Not to mention, about 70% of our web design clients use a theme we developed but never made public. So we figure if it’s good enough for 70% of them, it’s good enough for the general populace as well. The theme promises sexy whitespace, super-ultra-simple navigation, plenty of admin options, clean code that doesn’t suck, jaunty angles and a gorilla. Wait…no gorilla.
• TONS and TONS of design work! Our clients are pure awesomeness. We’ve got more work than we can shake a stick at, and you can shake a stick at quite a lot of work. A big thank you to our clients, one and all. You guys have made our time in business a dream come true!

Well, there you have it. You’re updated and you know more about our business than I do.

We’ll be back soon with a great post that you budding designers and old timers alike will really enjoy: what we’ve learned in our first two years in business.

Subscribe to our feed so you’ll know right away the next time we post! Like maybe even next week!

Happy New Year!

Let me tell you a story…

At the end of 2007 I gave away a free ebook to my customers over at IgniteLiving.com, another site of mine. At the time, the site was only a couple months old and had exactly 17 RSS subscribers.

My plan was to offer a great ebook that would attract some visitors and possibly some business. So, I wrote the book and designed the hell out of it. I gave it a slick cover, nice fonts and typography, a cool color scheme and made it available for free download.

When the post went live, a whole lot of nothing happened. Which is sort of what you’d expect of a site with 17 subscribers. But within a few days the ebook had been download dozens and dozens of times and my RSS subscriber count was going out the roof.

Even better, and far more important, were the comments and emails that started coming in. Relationships were blossoming all over the place, and before I knew it I’d made fast friends with quite a lot of people. And as will happen anywhere real relationships are born, a few of those connections were very valuable and are providing income to this very day.

All of that from one 30-page ebook that I published almost two years ago to a handful of people.

Of course, I designed it myself so it didn’t cost me a dime, but even if I’d paid $500 for it, it would have been well worth the price. (Oh, and don’t worry…$500 is NOT what I charge to design a 30-page book

Now, let’s ask the obvious question. Would all that profit have happened, would all those relationships have been made if my ebook had been some hideous beast? No way in the furthest reaches of the icy plains of Hell.

So, read this and remember it well:

Every single thing you produce right now, whether it’s an ebook or something else, free or not, IS a pre-launch to any future project you have.

The quality of what you do and produce right now is a barometer and compelling factor (good or bad) for anything you sell down the road.

So, yes, be productive and be proactive. Get your stuff out there, but make it good, because people DO judge books by their covers.

And if you need help making it good, contact me and I’ll certainly help you out. You will probably get famous and end up on TV.

Web 2.0 style, which is/was great in its own right, gave us a lot of slick glossiness that was almost too perfect. It’s only natural that a new style would emerge, one that would act as a counterpoint to all that.

That’s where these sketch icons come in. They’re the perfect contrast for any Web 2.0 design you may have, and they’ll fit right in with anything you’re working on that needs a more organic feel.

About the hand-drawn icons

These were all drawn by me. On paper. With a pen. Then I scanned them in and cleaned them up (but not too much) in Illustrator.

Each icon is a jpeg and comes in two sizes: 48×48 and 96×96 pixels. Each is dark greyish on a white background. You want more info than that, you’ll just have to download them!

I hope you enjoy these and are able to add some human touch to your design projects. And when you do use them, feel free to send me a link and I’ll feature your work (if it’s awesome).

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