Deirdre.net

  • Welcome
  • Blog
  • About
    • Contact Me
    • Menlo Park
  • Writing
    • Books
    • My Publications
    • My Appearances

Why I'm Quitting Zazzle

March 8, 2019 by deirdre Leave a Comment

In 2014, I signed up as an artist with Zazzle. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve never really put in a lot of elbow grease onto that site as I vastly prefer Redbubble and Society6.

One of Zazzle’s terms is that they won’t pay royalties if the amount’s under $50. New rule: if a company accepts orders for smaller than they will pay in royalties, they are looking to make bank off the artists, not their customers.

The $23.58 of royalties I’ve accrued were earned in 2014 to 2016, and they still have that money. Then, to add insult to injury, they send the following missive today:

Zazzle’s marketplace has evolved so much since its inception, and now our User Agreement and Policies are evolving, too!

Starting on April 1, 2019, Zazzle will have a new User Agreement, and one of the new elements is a push for an even more involved, invested community! As part of this push, accounts that have been non-contributing (that is, haven’t either (1) published a public product, or (2) had a Referral Sale attributed to that account) for the previous 15 month period will be charged a “Non-Contributing Account Fee.” 

You are receiving this message because, unfortunately, we haven’t seen any new products or referrals from you in a long while! We really miss you and would much rather have you back, adding beautiful content to the Zazzle marketplace! So, before the last day of this month, if you upload a new product and publish it to the marketplace, or have a Referral Sale attributed to your account, your account will be deemed “contributing” again for the next 15 months, and you can ignore this message. 

If you’re not able to get your account to “contributing” status again before the last day of this month, we’ll charge the Non-Contributing Account Fee, according to the terms of the new User Agreement (which is posted here) on or around April 1st. For more details, you can also check out this help center article.

Thank You

So, I can give them my labor…or more of my money. How about neither? Just send my balance due via PayPal. You’ve enjoyed it long enough.

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: graphic-design, zazzle

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

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

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

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

An Awesome Resource for Free Website Backgrounds

December 27, 2014 by deirdre Leave a Comment

A few years ago, I came across an awesome resource for seamless patterns, far more professional than most I’d seen before. Best of all, these website backgrounds are free for both personal and commercial use!
These are free for both personal and commercial use, and someone asked about using them in products for sale and was told that was fine. So—knock yourselves out. I know I will. 🙂
The Webtreats site has some truly awesome resources. There’s a lot of broken image links, the search function is dodgy, and it can be frustrating figuring out what you want, but it’s almost certainly in there. Somewhere.
I don’t know how much they have posted, but I know that, over the years, I’ve downloaded 3.3 gigs of images. I’m trying to see what holes I have in my collection even as I write this.
The starry blog background for deirdre.net is from this set.
The almost-black wood background on Ryan Johnson’s fan site came from either the 270 or the 504 set I mention below. I have changed that one a couple of times, keeping within the same color range.
If you truly can’t decide, I’d suggest starting with two collections: 270 tileable backgrounds and 504 additional website backgrounds. These were designed to work with their Awake theme, but can be used with any website where you can change the background and/or control the CSS.

Not Sure You’ll Like It? Preview It!

First, remember that, like paint or wallpaper, the overall effect will be much more pronounced than it is in a small swatch.
Let me show you a trick.
Visit this page of smoky blue seamless patterns.
Some of the free website backgrounds
Click on the middle pattern.
You’ll be redirected to a page that shows that pattern used as the background for the page.
smokey-blue-lights
It won’t look the same as it would on your own site, but it will give you a sense of what the style looks like as a background.

Another Trick: Save Directly to Dropbox

If you have a Dropbox account (note: affiliate link), you can save the downloaded files to your Dropbox. The filenames end with:
.zip?dl=1
Cut off everything after .zip (the last five characters), and Dropbox will ask you if you want to save it. I find Dropbox’s mechanism for syncing with a dodgy network far more reliable than a browser download, so that’s what I would recommend if you have any problems.

Still Another Trick: Finding the Image’s Blog Post Again

So you’ve got these great backgrounds, right? And they’re all neatly in numbered folders. A friend asks you where you got it, but you can’t remember the link and God knows it can be hard to find something on a site with so much stuff.
Let’s take my space scene. Maybe your friend wants to check out some of the other color variations.
The file name is: 857-tileable-classic-nebula-space-patterns.zip
Take the numeric part in the front, and that’s the WordPress post number. So, http://webtreats.mysitemyway.com/?p=857 will get you to that package.

Filed Under: Graphic Design Tagged With: graphic-design, tips-and-tricks

Rule 34 Labs: Putting the Interesting in Internet

December 13, 2014 by deirdre Leave a Comment

15954811_3065647_pm
Rule 34: “If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.”
I was making this sign for a book cover (where it’d appear on the wall as a framed print), then thought: why stop there?
Back when I worked at a backbone ISP, the first day HR training session was interesting.
“If you object to adult material, please do not walk through the art department. We make 2/3 of our revenue from adult content.”
Maybe you like the weird stuff. Maybe it just makes you hilariously happy that the weird stuff exists because then you’re something approaching normal. Maybe you just need a new shirt and randomly clicked on this page.
Whatever freak flag you fly (or, you know, don’t fly :wink:), Rule 34 is there for you.
Rule 34 t-shirt
I have various products now available on Redbubble, Society6, and Zazzle.
In addition to the clothing options on all three of the above stores, the design’s also available in a bunch of other formats, including:
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Amusements, Graphic Design, Redbubble, Society6, Zazzle Tagged With: graphic-design, humor, Internet, memes, redbubble, society6, zazzle

My Favorite Indie Type Foundries

November 28, 2014 by deirdre Leave a Comment

IndieFoundriesI know you know I love type. And fonts.
Here are my favorite indie type foundries in alphabetical order. I seem to have a thing for Latin American foundries.

Albatross

Jay Hilgert’s an Oklahoma designer with some cool fonts like Altus and Boom! Featured up top is Oil Change.

Artimasa

Artimasa’s one of several Indonesian type foundries. Up above is Hipsteria, but I also love Zakia, Casually, and Prada.

Borges Lettering

If you’re going to start doing historical romance covers and want a great cover font, investing $99 (currently on sale for $89) in Borges Lettering’s Desire will go a long way. Sadly, I’ve not personally been able to justify it yet, but I do paw at the monitor every now and again while the page is open.

Cruzine

Peter, a designer from Bratislava, Slovakia does some great design, but he’s also done some great fonts. Up top is Brooklyn coffee. My personal favorite is Rocknroll, and when I look at Memento, I always think it’s an Indonesian design.

Dai Foldes

Dai’s font, Eubie Script, is fun and bouncy, and you really need to see the demo site for it. It has an amazing try me box (better than any other I’ve seen). Nicely done, and I’ve just picked it up. (Naturally, after I finished the header graphic.)

Dexsar Harry Fonts aka Majestype

One of the interesting Indonesian font designers, of whom there are several. Dexsar Harry has several lovely designs. Featured up top is Roverd. I haven’t yet picked up Bandung, but I’m looking forward to getting it soon.

Fenotype

Emil Bertell from Finland produces some lovely swashy faces like Alek (shown in the sample above).

Kimmy Design

Kimmy Design is based out of Santa Monica, California, about ten miles from where I’m typing this. (Away for the holiday weekend.) I have most of her fonts and some of her non-font graphics. I reuse this watercolor template frequently. Up top is Lunchbox Slab

Latinotype

Latinotype’s based in Chile and has lots of great fonts. Shown in the header image is Macarons. Up at the top of the page, my name’s in Courtney, and blog post headlines are in Four Seasons Pro. (So yeah, this entire site uses South American fonts.) I also use Showcase on desamo.graphics

Laura Worthington

I’m so pleased I got to meet Laura at Typecon. Awesome experience. I was tongue-tied and everything. I couldn’t remember the name of a single font when I was trying to tell her how many of hers I had.
One of the cool things about her fonts is that she has font families that are coordinating but dissimilar fonts, all designed to go together. Adorn, in particular, is a brilliant collection. Shown up top is Voltage, one of her newest.

Nicky Laatz

Nicky’s a designer from Cape Town, South Africa, who does awesome hand-drawn things including hand-drawn type. Here’s her shop. Shown in the pic above is Vanilla Frosting.

PintassilgoPrints

PintassilgoPrints is an amazing foundry from Brazil. If I had to describe their type collection, it’s of the type of fonts you’d expect to see on small label mid-century jazz covers. Some of their stuff draws from earlier (30s) and some later, but always with a fresh new twist.
The font I used above is called Brush Up, though I keep wanting to call it Olio because of one of the promo photos.
As a bonus, the bird is from a different font, Card-o-Mat Buddy Birds.

RodrigoTypo

Rodrigo Typo is from Chile and specializes in unusual and fun typefaes, especially display faces suitable for children’s work. Another aspect that may come in useful is that they always include Greek and Cyrillic letters, which is quite unusual for most indie foundries. Shown up top is Pequena.

Thinkdust

Thinkdust is based out of the UK and has made some pretty popular modern fonts. Shown is Nanami HM.

Tipotype

Tipotype’s the first type foundry in Montevideo, Uruguay. It produces, among other things, Quiroga, the typeface I use for the body face on this site. (Meaning: this paragraph is set in Quiroga as you read this if you didn’t override styles.)

Yellow Design Studio

Ryan Martinson’s Yellow Design Studio is the only foundry where I own all the fonts. I love them all. Shown is Veneer, one of my favorites.

Filed Under: Graphic Design Tagged With: graphic-design, typography

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Next Page »

Recent Posts

  • My Coronavirus Playlist
  • Why I'm Quitting Zazzle
  • Kilauea Lower East Rift Zone Fissure 8
  • Samhain Publishing Closing, So Download Your Books
  • EC for Books: Early June Update

Recent Comments

  • Marie on EC for Books: May Update
  • EC for Books- formerly Ellora’s Cave- May Update | Illuminite Caliginosus on EC for Books: May Update
  • azteclady on Some Quick Facts About Transgender People
  • Deirdre on Some Quick Facts About Transgender People
  • azteclady on Some Quick Facts About Transgender People

Copyright © 2021 · Desamo Theme (so so so modified from Metro) on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in