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My BayCon Schedule 2016

May 10, 2016 by deirdre Leave a Comment

BayCon - San Francisco Bay Area science fiction & fantasy convention
I have two panels at BayCon this year, which will be held from May 27-30 at the San Mateo Marriott San Francisco Airport (this is a change of hotel from the previous years).

BayCon Guests of Honor

Writer Guest of Honor: David Gerrold
Artist Guest of Honor: Chris Butler, F.R.A.S
Fan Guest of Honor: Anastasia Hunter
Toastmasters: Library Bards

BayCon Charity

BayCon’s charity this year is SETI Institute.

My BayCon Schedule

I’m on two panels, one on Saturday and one on Sunday.
The good, The Bad, And The WTF of Cover Art
Saturday, May 28 2:30 pm, Connect 1
Forget judging the book by its cover, sometimes you can’t even identify it. Our panelists discuss highs and lows and just plain weird in the world of cover art.
WordPress
Sunday, May 29 11:30 am, Connect 1
Methods for making the most creative and effective use of WordPress.

Programming Schedule

The full programming schedule is available here.

Filed Under: Conventions, Graphic Design, WordPress, Writing Tagged With: baycon, conventions, fantasy, science-fiction

Book Covers and Stock Photos

March 23, 2016 by deirdre 3 Comments

I’ve heard a few things lately about book covers and stock photos that have been bothering me. First, let’s go into a primer of how stock photos work with regard to book covers.

How Stock Photography Works from the Photographer’s Perspective

When a photographer takes photo sessions of a model (or a landscape), they add keywords to each photo they wish to sell. A given photographer may have relationships with as many as 15 or 20 different stock photo agencies, but not all photos may be uploaded to all agencies. Each agency has different audiences and different plans.
Let’s take this photo as an example. Here it is on another site.
Some stock photo sites list how many times a photo’s been sold, but that’s only how many times it’s been sold on that one site. A cover artist (or an indie author doing their own cover) may pick a photo that has relatively few sales on one site and believe they’re picking something that’s not overly popular. But that same photo may be significantly more popular on other sites.
Also, the same photo may be used for completely unrelated purposes. Like buying a new car and suddenly seeing that car all around you, buying cover art has the same perils. A photo I bought for a book cover has also been used in a Korean cosmetics ad. Not all those image uses will be to a given stock photo purchaser’s taste, so unless one wants an exclusive cover shoot for many, many times the cost of a stock photo, one’s just going to have to put up with the fact that this photo may be used in very different contexts, also with the photographer’s permission.
As a final point, within traditional publishing, covers get re-used all the time. Even covers designed to illustrate a particular book get reused, just with different text.

If You Are an Author

Unless you paid for a photo shoot and exclusive rights to all photos taken in that photo shoot, do not contact another author whose cover uses the same photo (or a photo from the same shoot) accusing them of copying/stealing your cover.
If you did pay for that photo shoot, you might want to contact your photographer first in case there was some kind of miscommunication…before engaging with another author.

If You Are a Reader

Do Not criticize an author, either publicly or privately, for using the same cover photo as another author. If the author you’re trying to support said that they had an exclusive shoot, then contact the author who you think was hurt. Let the author make that call.

Filed Under: books, Graphic Design Tagged With: book-covers, books, graphic-design, stock photography

Creative Market Raising Money for Nepal Earthquake Relief

May 21, 2015 by deirdre Leave a Comment

nepal earthquake relief
I’m one of 474 Creative Market shops donating some or all of their shop proceeds for the Month of May to Nepal earthquake relief efforts. Creative Market will match shopowners up to $20,000. I’m donating 50%.
Here is the announcement and a list of participating shops:

Throughout the month of May, participating Creative Market shops will donate up to 100% of their earnings to Nepal disaster relief. And in partnership with the Autodesk Foundation, we’ll also match the first $20,000! These funds will be sent to All Hands, a non-profit organization that addresses the immediate and long-term needs of communities impacted by natural disasters. So purchase great design assets, and join us in our efforts to help Nepal.
Together, we can make a difference.

At this point, I only have one product in my shop grunge textures photographed off the front of an M60 Sherman tank. It sells for $7, my usual royalty is 70% ($4.90), so half of that ($2.45) will be going to All Hands for each sale.
If that’s not your thing, and you buy some other participating store’s products by starting at this link, you’ll help both Nepal relief and me.
Thank you!
(Note: I did previously post this on my desamo.graphics blog, but the way the two blogs propagate to third parties is different.)

Filed Under: Graphic Design Tagged With: charity, desamo.graphics, fundraising, graphic-design, nepal

Like an Octopus

May 4, 2015 by deirdre 2 Comments

friends-come-and-go
Someone on facebook mentioned wanting this in a plaque form, so I decided to get out the spiffy digital papers and have a go at it.

Design element credits

Polka dotted background: Uber Grunge 13 by Joyful Heart Designs
Solid inner: Solidified Seven by Joyful Heart Designs
Typeface: La Paz from TipoType

Filed Under: Graphic Design Tagged With: humor

Some Web Marketing Tips

January 20, 2015 by deirdre 2 Comments

P1070897
Even if you’re not selling something directly, these may help you. It’s related to a few comments I’ve gotten about this post.

  1. Sites that load faster get higher search engine rankings.
    There are a few things you can do to improve load time. Specifically:

    • If you don’t need PNG’s transparency, use a JPEG.
    • If you want to produce retina graphics without significant pain, save a double-size image at a low JPEG quality. Usually a 30% quality JPEG is smaller than a high-quality JPEG or PNG that’s half the resolution.
    • Use a WordPress (or whatever) theme that is optimized for load time. For WordPress, that’s StudioPress’s Genesis, which was developed by CopyBlogger. The entire point of their themes is to provide a quick-loading site highly optimized for making Google ad revenue.
  2. Don’t bother with a slider. Or, if you do, it shouldn’t take up most of the vertical part of the front page. Notice that Amazon’s doesn’t. I was going to praise Creative Market’s use of sliders in categories—only to discover that they’d eliminated them.
    Why not bother? Because anything that takes more time to load, as sliders typically do, means that the most important part of your page is blank while the client’s browser is waiting for the information to render it.
    You may have a great internet connection, but you can’t expect everyone looking at your page to.

  3. Put the most important items above the fold because people will spend four times more time above the fold. Not all people are willing to scroll, especially if the page takes time.
    If you’re a publisher, new titles, preferably all the newest titles, should go above the fold. If you can’t make that work, put the titles you expect to be bigger first.

  4. When adding colors to your site, remember that some people are colorblind, and not just in the ways you expect. Take a snapshot of your site and desaturate it. Can you still see the differences?

  5. Aging eyes need higher contrast. Is your content sufficiently high enough in contrast to be read by them? Also, reduce contrast for less essential elements (I de-emphasize meta information about a post such as categories, tags, and date and time.)

  6. There is a sharp divide between the links should be underlined people and the underlining makes links less readable people. I’ve previously used underlines (or a dotted border) on hover, but I’m a no-underline person. Just: be consistent, whatever you pick. These days, you could use a much less intrusive method like:

    a:hover { border-bottom: 1px thin dotted #bbb;
      border-bottom: 1px thin dotted rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.25);}

If You’re an Author, What’s Your Number One Design Goal?

I’ll let Tim Grahl of Out:think Group take this one.

Your #1 goal in building out your website, and in everything you do to market your books online, is to grow your email list.

Here’s Tim’s post about building an author site in an hour.
(Yes, really, I’ve done it in an hour.)

People Spend More Time on the Left than on the Right of Your Page

This assumes left-to-right reading, so those of you with Hebrew or Arabic pages should reverse this.
For this reason, I personally dislike putting sidebars on the left.
However, if you’re going to put a sidebar on the left, then at the top is where your email signup form should go.

People Read in an F shape

Mostly headlines, spending less time on content.
So, use headlines in your posts. If you enable Markdown on your WordPress site (it’s a Jetpack plugin feature, and you absolutely should be using Jetpack): ## at the beginning of a line is an h2, ### is an h3. Easy peasy.
(I published this post accidentally, so I guess I’m done. Anyone want to read up on how SEO-optimized sites, making $ off Google ads, work theory-wise? I find it fascinating, even if it’s not my cuppa to produce them.)

Filed Under: Business of Writing, Graphic Design Tagged With: business-of-writing, graphic-design, marketing

Modern Hand-Made Value Fountain Pen with Dip Pen Nib

January 19, 2015 by deirdre Leave a Comment

New+Section+and+Full+Appearance
P1010660
Desiderata Pens is a modern American maker of inexpensive fountain pens. Breaking tradition with other modern makers, instead of a traditional fountain pen nib, they use a dip pen nib. A Japanese dip pen nib.
Specifically, they use a Zebra G nib, often used for manga.

My Own Issues With Modern Steel Nibs

Generally I hate modern steel fountain pen nibs. Why? They tend to be super hard and scratchy. I’ve famously hated on the Lamy Safari, as I find its nib worse than most in this regard.
Yes, you can tune modern steel nibs to be less scratchy. (But why should I have to?)
They can even be tuned to be a tidge less hard, but not enough for me without some real expert work. At that point, you might as well have bought a better nib from the start.
There is, so far, only one modern steel fountain pen nib I like: Pelikan’s 200-series nib. I think it’s brilliant. It has some give and a tidge of line variation.

And Then There Are Dip Pen Nibs

Note: for dip pens, the pen is what fountain pen people call the nib, where the pen holder is what fountain pen people call the pen. Because a nib doesn’t provide the fountain part, the feed/ink reservoir does.
Famously, dip pen nibs have more line variation than all but the most prized vintage fountain pen nibs. However, they’re not intended to be used with any of the methods that fountain pens feed ink.
This is both an advantage: dip pens work well with inks that’d clog fountain pen feeds, e.g., India ink, white inks, and metallic inks.
It’s also a disadvantage: you’ve also got to work with an open bottle of ink.
I don’t know about you, but I do not lead an open bottle of ink kind of life. If you’ve ever seen my hands on the day I’ve refilled my fountain pens, you’d understand. I use Amodex Ink remover, but it’s not perfect. And neither am I.
If you do want to learn more about dip pen nibs, here’s a great post to start.
Now, granted: dip pen nibs tend to be scratchier than fountain pen nibs, and many are known for catching paper. When I’m writing with a fountain pen, I want the attention to be on the words in my head, not on the awareness of the nib’s interaction with the paper. Drawing, however, is different, so my standards are different.

What Desiderata Has Done

Desiderata’s figured out a way to put a dip pen nib onto a fountain pen feed, add a sac at the back, and make a fountain pen. Most of their pens run $100-120, but their matte black delrin pens run $50 plus shipping.
I haven’t spent a lot of time playing with my Desiderata pen yet, but so far, so good. I am trying to learn how to draw, and the line variation I get, even with the bog standard Visconti fountain pen ink I have lying around here in droves, well, it’s incredible.

Desiderata Has YouTube Videos

Here’s a very short one. You can hear the scratchy.

For dip pen people, this much longer video review may also be of interest.

The Big Wrapup

I’m trying to learn how to draw, so this seemed the perfect accessory for the analog portion of that endeavor. I can carry it around. It’s a dip pen, except it’s not.
Desiderata’s least expensive model is $50 plus shipping.
Sounds like a great deal to me.
Just want a dip pen for manga-like drawing? JetPens to the rescue. Don’t forget the brush pens. (JetPens has an amazing variety of pens and stationery, many of those items from Japan.)

Filed Under: Graphic Design, Pens Tagged With: fountain-pens, pens

My New Creative Market Shop

January 13, 2015 by deirdre Leave a Comment

My first product in my Creative Market Shop
I’m a huge fan of Creative Market. When I started to have items I wanted to sell, I applied for a shop there. I’ve been on a waiting list for a Creative Market shop for a really long time. Probably at least 8 months.
My first product is ready, too!
Last week, I got word that it was finally ready, which meant getting a ton of things done:

  1. Setting up e-commerce on desamo.graphics.
  2. Setting up a separate email list for desamo.graphics. Which I may have forgotten to complete. Ah well.
  3. Removing some of the suck from (you guessed it).
  4. Creating a header for my Creative Market site. (Shown below.)
  5. Fixing up a product that I’d thrown up on Gumroad a few months ago (and only two people looked at it, ever).

I’ve been working on everything I needed to do for several days, including re-tweaking the CSS on the site and re-generating all the image thumbnails until I was happy with them, and changing the site from the girly pink to a less girly mint—which has the added benefit of receding into the background, as cool colors are wont to do.
Here’s the facebook edition of my new shop header. Bibi is not my cat, but I’m glad that the virtual office mockup included a kitty. Mine would never pose like that!
facebook
It covers a bit of what I did last year:

  1. Poster (etc.) I did that’s on redbubble.
  2. Bora Bora photo from a year ago.
  3. One of my funny holiday cards.
  4. And a photo I sent out to my email list but haven’t otherwise shown publicly. Thank you to the 42.5% of you who saw it.

If you’re inclined to like facebook pages, here’s the link.
My Creative Market shop is here.

Filed Under: Graphic Design Tagged With: creative-market, desamo.graphics, graphic-design

The 2015 Awards Consideration Post

January 2, 2015 by deirdre 8 Comments

2015-awards-consideration-post
Another year! And a post to let those of you who vote for Hugos, Nebulas and other science fiction/fantasy awards know what I’ve done in the last year for your award nomination consideration. Without further ado:

Best Fan Writer

Five Several of my best posts:

  1. After fifty years of it never being public, I broke the story about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s abuse of her daughter Moira. Thank you to Moira for choosing my blog to speak out in. My two most-viewed posts on this: Marion Zimmer Bradley Gave Us New Perspectives, All Right and Marion Zimmer Bradley: It’s Worse Than I Knew. Link to my other posts on this topic.

  2. How to Get to Helsinki from Pitcairn. All that odd travel knowledge comes in useful sometimes. Bonus picture from Pitcairn that I took last January.

  3. Delia Derbyshire, Overlooked Musician and Composer. A piece about the performer and co-composer of the famous Doctor Who theme.

  4. Vernacular & Literary Tricks. Commentary on the use of vernacular in fiction, specifically sf/f.

  5. Jay Lake, RIP, and a Few Memories. I’ve never been able to say before, on the day someone died, “I had a great time at his wake last year.” That’s the kind of person Jay was.

  6. Also, while my series of posts about Ellora’s Cave are more about the romance genre than science fiction/fantasy, EC also publishes some arguably SF/F/WTF works, including EC’s main owner’s own work. Review here. Eggs!
    Anyhow, getting to my writing on the subject, Proving Substantial Truth is an interesting post about the following hypothetical. Let’s say a blogger publishes an article that says “a set of authors” hasn’t been paid in quite a while? What does it take, size-of-data-set-wise, to prove that that’s not substantially true?
    And then there was the “Virtual Visit” to Romanticon, Ellora’s Cave’s own single-track convention, where single-track could be a double entendre. On the way back to Texas, Cavemen Axl and Taylor wound up sitting within three feet of Amber Vinson. They self-quarantined at first, then, when they entered the more likely active contagious time period, the quarantine was mandatory.

My other fan writing is tagged here.
Note: If you’re inclined to vote for me for Best Fan Writer (or, heaven help you, Best Fanzine), the canonical version of this site is deirdre.net. I compose there, and it pushes to Dreamwidth, Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter, my Facebook timeline, my Facebook Author page, Google Plus, and, until it annoyed me by stripping my own links out, LinkedIn.

Best Fan Artist

  1. I’m best known for this t-shirt I designed for John Scalzi.

  2. I’m proudest of this set of products I designed around the Dihydrogen Monoxide theme.
    a. Approved Dihydrogen Monoxide Isolation Vessel (aka coffee cup)
    b. Stand Back Dihydrogen Monoxide Reaction Timer (aka clock)
    c. Stand Back Dihydrogen Monoxide Containment Shield (aka shower curtain)
    For what it’s worth, I sold exactly 0 items in this series last year, but I had a lot of fun making them anyway.

  3. What to Do With a Rusty Dumpster. Space art from common things.

  4. Mockup: 307 Ale Bottles. One night, Tom Smith’s song “307 Ale” would not leave me alone. Hence.

Best Short Story

I don’t think “The Duchess’s Dress” has a hope of actually winning anything, but I did publish it last year. It’s in the middle of flipping over to Amazon Select, meaning it should be available in Kindle Unlimited in a couple of days.
If you’re not a KU subscriber and don’t have a copy but are an eligible nominator, please email me and tell me your preferred format. (EPUB, MOBI, or PDF. If PDF, let me know if you need large print.)

Eligible Nominators

  • Nebula: SFWA Active and Associate members.
  • Hugo Awards: You’re a supporting or active member of either Loncon3 and/or Sasquan, and/or MidAmericon. Note that while nominations typically remain open until March-ish, you’d have to become a Sasquan member by January 31st.

Filed Under: Graphic Design, Writing Tagged With: award-consideration, fanart, fanwriting, publishing, writing

New T-Shirt: Hell, Yes, I'm a Feminist

December 30, 2014 by deirdre 2 Comments

Hell, Yes, I'm a Feminist T-shirt

T-Shirts

Redbubble has American Apparel shirts. I totally get why some people won’t buy them, especially in this context, but Dov Charney’s out and the new CEO, Paula Schneider, is a woman. This doesn’t magically fix things, of course.
Zazzle has Hanes shirts (as well as other brands). Zazzle has more sizes, more types of shirts, and so on.

A Note on How the Glitter Prints

I thought I’d mention: this isn’t actually glitter, it’s a glitter-like effect. It prints as different hues, but is more subdued when printed on fiber. (I already knew the color would be, which is why I blew it out.)
I used that same effect when printing my purple 100 Countries pillow. Here’s a photograph:
2014-12-30 08.26.32

Other Products

Redbubble also has prints and posters and cards and stickers and stuff.
flat,800x800,070,f.u1
And there are also man purses tote bags.
tb,1200x1200,small.2u1
If you’d like some other format, let me know. Duvet cover, shower curtain, tech gadget covers, all possible.

Design Element Credits

Top to bottom:

  1. Heart: Out of a big pack o’ vector art from Callie Hegstrom over at Make Media, which I got several times over, including in a Design Cuts bundle. Here’s an interview with Callie.

  2. Background ribbon: from the same vector pack.

  3. “Hell” and “I’m A” are from the Nexa Rust type family, which was designed by four Bulgarian designers, Fontfabric, including Ani Petrova. Here’s a blurb about her.

  4. The flourishes around “Yes” are from Showcase, a type family from Chilean foundry Latinotype, and co-designed by Paula Nazal Selaive. I love this family. Here’s a profile of her.

  5. “Yes” is Nicky Laatz’s typeface, Stringfellows. She’s a South African designer.

  6. “Feminist” is Laura Worthington’s amazing Voltage typeface.

  7. Venus symbol is from Jolly Icons. I use their icons for my Twitter, Facebook, and email icons on my site. They’re a team of two, and Jucke’s female, but I don’t know if she drew this particular symbol.

  8. Glitter! Is from Nicky Laatz.

  9. (print only) Paper textures from Jennifer Howland at Joyful Heart Designs.

  10. (print only) Damask overlay from Designious.. They don’t credit individual designers for these, though. Also, not sure which of the many hundreds of damask patterns I have from them that I used….

Filed Under: Graphic Design, Redbubble, Zazzle Tagged With: graphic-design, redbubble, shopping, zazzle

What to Do With a Rusty Dumpster

December 29, 2014 by deirdre 1 Comment

What-to-Do-With-a-Rusty-Dumpster
Note: this is a much simpler form of this tutorial from Spoongraphics.
The other night, a friend of mine and I were chatting, and she complimented something I’ve been working on (but haven’t yet posted). And I said, “ehh, it’s just a dumpster.”
She replied, “I would not have assumed dumpster.”
So, here’s my dumpster space scene mini-tutorial.

  1. Acquire a photo of a rusty dumpster. I used this one ($3), but many others are out there. Or—take your own! I used a blue (sea) + rust (land) combo, but there are many other combinations that work. Scratches, however, make it seem unrealistic (though you can mend those in Photoshop).

  2. Cut out a circular piece that you like the water/land shapes on. Spherize (in Photoshop: Filter > Distort > Spherize). Rotate it, if desired, to put the elements where you most like them. (I didn’t bother with this.)

  3. Create a black area the same size. Gaussian blur it with a big blur. Then blur it again. This is the most fiddly part, and you’ll need to fuss with it to make it look realistic.

  4. Expand the shadow region until it looks right.

  5. Add inner and outer glow to the planet so it has atmosphere.

  6. Find a good lens flare photo. I used one from Photography planet I had lying around and used it at 80% normal blend mode.

  7. A good background is black or near-black, and has stars. I happened to use one from here. You can use brushes to make star patterns, or use photos of sky or nebulae—whatever.

  8. I added a different layer above the lens flare, set it to lighten 70%, then filled in a few places (atmosphere, flare itself) with 50%, 70%, or 100% black to keep the stars from peeking through.

From there, the Spoon Graphics tutorial has lovely ideas on how to make the whole thing more realistic, including adding clouds and stuff.

Filed Under: Graphic Design Tagged With: art, fanart, fanwriting, graphic-design

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