Twitter Addiction

I’ve also been using Twitter a lot lately and that probably takes up the most time. Is it an addiction? Only if learning can be considered an addiction. If you follow the right people, it’s like hardwiring your brain to an Encyclopedia. The relevancy and timeliness of the knowledge is extremely valuable as social media becomes more mainstream. Also since Twitter limits each tweet to 140 characters, the information will be summarized into a nice 1 second read.

I’ve been anticipating the social media global brain idea for a long time, and from my observations in Twitter, it seems to be much closer now. The value of creativity is brought back into the spotlight, where one person’s idea can be amplified a million fold through social media. I will continue to stay with Twitter, because it has become an essential tool to staying ahead of the game.

How I learned about the Interweb

I have a background in Advertising and Marketing. Worked in studios and Ad agencies but really hate having to deal with clients. They aren’t out to improve anything, and most just want a safe bet. I am someone who needs to learn constantly, who needs to create something new. I knew it would be pointless if I continued to be a salary slave, and so I began by learning about internet marketing.

I suppose my training would be similar to many people. Reading articles on SEO, online business, monetization, writing, forums, Videos, E-Books etc etc. Every new project that I start, I try to incorporate more and more into it as a test bed for a future big project.

I’ve been using the Internet for a long time but I haven’t really given much thought to how it actually worked behind the scenes. I don’t mean the software running the sites, but the interactions that naturally occur between groups of interests. Then I had an opportunity to change all that.

My first big web project

Earlier this year, I created a series of WordpressMU networks with a partner. For months I went through mountains of learning material and testing for User interface design, social media design, adwords, SEO, online communities, blogging, PHP, CSS, SQL etc etc. One moment I would be photoshopping a fantasy landscape, the next I would be sweating with a PHP help file.

There was a steep learning curve for working with a partner too. It taught me all the things that could go wrong in a business relationship and I’m thankful for it. Definitely better to learn all of that early on.

I’m a Pisces so I’m all about using the creative side of my brain. All of this was an uphill battle for me and made me lose a lot of sleep. I wanted to outsource everything but I’m glad I stayed the course and learned everything myself. Without all that knowledge, I would not have been able to create all the opportunities open to me today. I believe jack-of-all-trades  are going to thrive nicely on the internet.

Plans for this Blog

I’ve been experimenting with different types of design themes, blog post topics and plugins. While I’m getting closer to understanding the optimal goals of blog design, I fear that I’m going in the wrong direction with Creativeherb.com.

This blog was originally meant as a home base for me to write down my thoughts, and perhaps share a tidbit of wisdom or two. But like many things that I do, I tend to be a perfectionist. I started to become traffic greedy. Why share words with 50 people when you can potentially share it with tens of thousands?

I changed my blog topics twice in a month and site tagline 3 times in a week. I just couldn’t decide which subject I should focus on, I just have so much I wanted to say across many categories. Then I realized that the name “creativeherb” was just difficult to brand. Is it a creative site? Or is it a herbal site? I didn’t want to give up my personal site though.

Summary

My master plan for 2009, is to refocus Creativeherb around my business projects and design experience. I will talk about my projects and the business thinking processes I go through. It will not be a continuous stream of business tips or photoshop tutorials, but something more personable.

I will also showcase my professional design portfolio and talk about my design processes. I  hope this will increase exposure and authority for me as a Brand. I will also aim to increase reader participation because I would like to converse with like-minded people through my designs as well.

I will also start my new primary blog, involving case studies of brands and branding. I love branding, I can talk about it all day. And the domain name is much easier to remember than Creativeherb.

I have several other projects in the planning stages and one big project in the works. They are in completely different markets, so it will be interesting to see the success level of each.

That’s the bite sized summary of me, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about me and will come back to visit soon. Feel free to leave a comment to say hello!

I did freelance web design and flash banners before, but now I’ve gone beyond that with a deeper and more cohesive understanding of user interface design, social media strategy, SEO, trending etc. Like many people, I fell into the trap of over expanding my range of discussion topics, some of it inadvertently, some as a testing platform for bigger projects.

The range of topics here will be refocused to pull more from my experiences, on subjects such as marketing, branding, design, SEO, user interface etc. The unique selling point will be an experience that will be presented in an integrated approach based around the designable aspects. Leveraging my broad range of experience across different sectors.

Design is a broad word, but also can be taken as a problem that can be solved through a creative and intelligent plan of action. That will be the new premise of the Creativeherb.com. You will see changes over the next few weeks as I phase in new categories, completely new theme, new post topics.

Behind the scenes, SEO will have more of a design focus based on the categories mentioned. I will keep everyone updated and post about my methods as well. I’m very excited about the upcoming changes, and I think it will definitely be getting more interesting for everyone too.

EDIT: In case you were wondering, yes I will still keep a sub-section for misc. helpful tools/tips like the Melamine Food List or the Canadian Google Flu Trends I’ve been keeping updated.

Of course, I already have Version 2 fully drafted in my head and hopefully one day soon, I will be able to get to it.

Why NewsGrid?

First of all, what you see now on the main page of WarhammerBlogs.com is called the NewsGrid. Why is it called that? Well, it’s news, and it’s lots of information placed in a grid format. NewsGrid. I wanted to create a place where the most important community information is displayed in a convenient manner. I went through a few versions before it got to what you see now. Kevin also made me remove a bunch of features that would have extended the production time by another 500%, but hey I’m the Creative. It’s my job and my right to think up totally unrealistic yet sometimes brilliant ideas.

The Colour Debate

For the NewsGrid colour scheme I used neutral shades of brown/tan at first, but that caused the headings to be lost in the clutter. So then I fixed it by vastly increasing the contrast of the overall colour scheme to punctuate every heading, also making it much easier to locate each section. That is also one of the reasons why I created icons for some of the headings, for the users to locate and differentiate easier.

The overall styling of the NewsGrid and User Blogs are fairly consistent, with the main theme graphic image up top, merged with the small nav bar. The theme layout is not at a point where I’m completely happy with it, but it will have to do for now. In a future version, I will make it even easier to design for. Because right now the design restrictions that I have imposed on myself is quite difficult sometimes.

Signup 1-2-3

The standard signup page from Wordpress MU (WPMU) was horrid at best, so I PSD designed a custom form, simplifying the process for the users visually. I guess sort of similar to having a “list” in blog posts. 1,2,3, easy as pie.

100+ Layers PSDs

Designing the theme headers was quite a challenge. I had to do it in a relatively short amount of time AND it had to look good. I think my current favourite one would be the Empire Theme, which I did last. I suppose I just adapted to theme designing over time.

I used a crazy amount of images sources and techniques for creating the theme headers. All images were taken from rights-free sources of course, but manipulated so much so that it is probably completely unrecognizable from the original.

To give an idea of the complexity, for example, I might split the Empire Theme into 8 different areas, with each area composed of 5 images, and each image would have their own 2-3 modification layers attached to it. Multiply that together and you have alot of layers for that one header alone.

I keep all my Adobe Photoshop PSD files extremely organized and labeled of course, with colour/levels as modification layers so that there’s no permanent ‘damage’ to the original image file, allowing me to make tweaks to it even months down the road.

Perhaps in future posts, if is any interest in my design process, perhaps I’ll share some of the design techniques that I’ve learned or discovered along the way. Till next time!