I’ve been doing photography as a hobby now for a quite a bit.  Although I love it dearly, I just haven’t given it a lot of time.  Being an IT guy nowadays has that affect.  After moving to Minneapolis in mid 2015 I decided to change that.  I wanted to start doing something other than argue about the best way to deploy a linux box all day.

To that end I decided that the best way to approach it would be to treat it like a company. I figure if I spend so much time thinking about how to make my employer successful as a company, why not translate that over into a hobby that I enjoy. 

Logo

The first thing I needed to work out was a logo.  I already had LacedVisions as the brand name, but I never spent time making it visually memorable.  I started out by trying some free online Logo editors, but quickly realized that I had no design talent at all.  Luckily while trying different editors I found that VistaPrint had a partnership with DesignCrowd. And then the magic happened.

DesignCrowd is a handy design marketplace.  You put up your requirements in the form of a contest and designers from around the world compete for the money you put up as the contest budget.  The entries I received were at times jaw-dropping.  The contest length was 10 days and I didn’t expect anything for the first few days, but I started receiving designs within a few hours of starting the contest.  

After the contest was over I selected the logo you see all throughout this site.  I own all rights to the image and even the source files in Adobe Illustrator.  The winning designer made a few changes for me before I closed out the design contest but I was able to make a few different versions on my own using a trial version of Adobe Illustrator (via Adobe CC).

I highly recommend DesignCrowd to anyone looking for a high quality design for their needs.  

Clothing

After I had the logo, it was time to get some swag.  I originally thought VistaPrint since that’s how I found DesignCrowd but instead decided to go with designashirt.com.   Putting the logo on the shirt was relatively easy despite some of the quirks of the editor (sometimes not uploading my images, but that could have been the image itself. not sure).  I haven’t received the hoodie and t-shirts I ordered yet. Amazon Prime has terribly spoiled me.  When I do get them I’ll try to post about the quality of the items.

Business Cards

Business Cards was the next stop.  All the reviews pointed me to moo.com.  For once the reviews were right.  Moo.com was pretty damn easy to use. 

Although I could have paid more to get a card design from DesignCrowd I decided to design the card myself.  Moo.com has a page that gives you templates in various formats for designing your own cards with your custom graphics based on their card dimensions and the like.  Being a complete Adobe Illustrator novice I was still able to use Moo.com’s template to work in the logo design to their card specs.  Yes, i could have used Photoshop but there was some initial pixelation when I tried to work the the new logo and I didn’t want to struggle with figuring out the problem there (in hindsight, I spent the same time figuring out Illustrator. Hey, but at least I learned something new!).

I decided to go with the green cards they offer. Recycled paper made in sustainable factories.  Truth be told my reason for going with the Green cards was to get brownie points with the girlfriend.  Mission accomplished.  When it comes to my girlfriend, Flowers are nice, buying products made out of recycled materials is better.

I receive the cards in the next few days so I’ll try to post a followup about them when they arrive.

Website

Finally I had to choose a website.  This was easily the most frustrating part of building up my brand so far.

I looked at various sites and tried them out quickly to find one I could deal with. Being in IT for so long I have developed certain expectations of software:

• it has to be intuitive
• It must not restrict me from doing what I want to do
• If it’s something I’ll use constantly, it must look good.
• It’s constructs must make sense

Well I guess those would be the expectations of any user, but I’m a bit more picky and a bit more unforgiving in some areas.

The sites I tried out are:

• Wix
• Squarespace
• Wordpress.com
• FolioHD
• pixpa
  
• Format.com
• And a few others who were dismissed because of price.
  

Wix.com was definitely the most customizable out the bunch, but after spending a few hours I was still debating what I wanted the site to look like.  It was too much power for someone who loves to tweak software. However the reason for rejecting Wix was because the page width was set to 960px and there was no way to change it. Based on a help file somewhere it states that that width is static and there is no changing it.  For the site I had in mind at the time it was a deal breaker.
- Restricted what I wanted to do

Squarespace I tried a few weeks ago and despite being nice in some regards I just couldn’t get the hang of it.  There was just something really off about it.  The one thing I do remember hating is that the example templates are more like example websites. All of the pages and all of the content is there.  In general that’s minor, but when you click on one of those example pages you get a pop-up telling you that you have to make a copy of that page first if you want to edit it.  When you’re just trying to click around and get a feel for things that gets annoying pretty fast.
- parts of it was not intuitive

Since I wanted a blog, I looked at Wordpress.com. I’ve hosted my own Wordpress.com sites in the past and thought it would be easy.  When I looked at the available templates there was only one that I liked (Avid) which would cost more money on top of the yearly subscription.  Ultimately it was the layout of managing my photo galleries that turned me off.  From what it looked like I would have had to manage my galleries via posts and that didn’t sit well with me.  There were possibly more options, but I was so frustrated with all the other tools so far that I didn’t bother looking and spending more time, and possibly more money to find a solution.
- Constructs didn’t make sense.

FolioHD I ran across as it was focused on portfolio sites. The demo was so restricted I didn’t give it more than 5 minutes and deleted my test account immediately.
- not intuitive since I couldn’t determine if it was worth my time

Pixpa was promising but as I started using it I ran into a glitch that made me hulk out  When testing the galleries they would always slideshow. I went into the options and saw that it was off.  Well after some time of reading help files and the like I found that slideshows was turned On, only the little graphic was reversed. Minor I know but at this point in the process I wasn’t going to pay a lot for that muffler.
- not intuitive

After thinking that I exhausted my search on finding a suitable site, rejecting some high price options, I ran into Format.com.  I started a trial and after about 20 minutes I was no longer ranting about software design and was actually looking forward to creating my website.  I even walked away for a little bit and came back and still didn’t run into a show stopper.  Granted by this point I may have experienced a numbing, but format.com seemed the right fit.  It was pretty intuitive, and even it’s small quirks was easy to figure out. The options looked good, it had a blog and things made sense.

Format.com hit a sweet spot for me. Despite finding several restrictions, like title/splash pages being very inflexible, the restrictions weren’t in spots I actually care about. Things look good and it all makes sense to me.  Yep it’s a little more per year than the others but in the end I’m fine paying a little more for a service that doesn’t frustrate me within it’s first 30 minutes of use.

And now…

Now that I have all of that setup, time to actually put my pictures up and start shooting again.