This week was my second one-on-one mentorship meeting with Marie Poulin as I go into my second month of Digital Strategy School. This month is all about Positioning, a subject my business is struggling with. The copy on my site as of today is not cutting it, it is vague and does not truly convey the service that I offer.

So that’s the question — what DO I offer? What sets me apart from all the talented designers out there? What makes CMD+Shift Design special and why would a business or organization choose to work with me? While talking with Marie today, I think I may have hit on something that will help me answer these questions.

I told Marie that I enjoy working with people who are passionately excited about growing their businesses. Sure, all entrepreneurs want to be successful — but I’m looking for something different than that. Beyond the excitement for success what about those of us who are crazy excited about our work beyond what might be considered “normal”? What about those of us… who are …nerds? geeks? The one’s who when asked about the new things going on in your industry can go off on a tangent for hours with enthusiasm. The one’s who are excited to learn more. You’re my people!

With this new discovery, I am tasked with reworking my website copy – which is a daunting task, so if anyone with actual writing skills wants to offer up some help, you know where to find me. How do I speak to my future clients out there who are geeks within their industries? How do I convey that the key service offering when working with CMD+Shift Design is having a Design Geek (that would be me) in your corner? How do I write copy that is going to both sound professional, yet is also basically saying “OMG FOLKS! LETS GEEK OUT TOGETHER ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS!!!”?

Who wants to talk about their failures? Business being slow is actually pretty embarrassing to me and the idea of broadcasting it out to the world sounded terrifying. I sat at my keyboard for a few minutes looking at Tim’s tweet — my hands poised over the keys. I wanted to reach out!

It was extremely brave of Tim to be so honest! I saw someone I admire standing out on a limb and I knew he didn’t need to be out there alone, so I typed out the words, “the last 2 years have been crap for me! Trying to turn things around this year!” and hit return. Of course Tim, came back with a compassionate and encouraging response. It was a good feeling to connect and reach out to someone about something I haven’t shared with many people.

Then he proposed something that I did not expect “want to talk about it next week on The East Wing?”

The tiny step of sending a single tweet out that would only be seen by those who follow both me and Tim on Twitter had my knees shaking, how could I possibly handle talking about my business failures live on a podcast and then having the recording of that live forever online?! There is just NO WAY!

Then Aaron Irizarry had to speak up, “But it can also be liberating, and encouraging to others who might be feeling the same way” Great, he hit right at my heart with that one. If Tim’s initial confession about his struggles hit me so hard and made me feel a little less alone, how could I turn down the opportunity to reach out to other freelancers and small-business owners in the same way? I took a deep breath… and then agreed to do it.

On Tuesday Tim and I recorded The East Wing Episode #7: If I Don’t Produce, I Don’t Eat together. It was both fun and terrifying, like karaoke… but with less whisky. Tim lead the discussion through talking about the things we’ve done right in business and then where we have fell short. We fielded a few listener questions and more than a couple times Tim said “you don’t have to answer this question, but…” I pushed myself to be honest and was inspired throughout the show to continue doing so because of Tim’s frankness. I took away from it, that being open and honest about my struggle is always the way to go. There are people out there who will be able to relate to you and who will have compassion, not judgement.

If you want to hear our full discussion, head over to goodstuff.fm/theeastwing and follow Tim on Twitter to stay on top of all the awesome podcasts he is involved with!

Today was my very first one-on-one business mentorship meeting with Marie Poulin at Digital Strategy School.

This was the first of what will be monthly 1 Hour sessions with Marie during the 6-month Digital Strategy School course and I can already tell these next 6 months are going to be a whirlwind!

The course officially began this past Friday, January 16th. We are starting out doing a Business Audit, which includes taking a hardcore look at your business’ strengths and weaknesses in order to help you set goals for the future. At first it felt a little uncomfortable. I was reminded of the first time I went to talk therapy and felt like being that honest with myself was almost more than I could handle. Once I got over that initial hurdle, I began making some connections and having a lot of feels and thoughts about why business wasn’t going well and how I could change that.

In the next 30 days some of my goals to help grow this new business venture is to wireframe a website and do an illustration for an online marketing campaign in February.  That’s all I am sharing for now… but stay tuned here or follow me on Twitter to hear more!

I have been running CMD+Shift Design since 2008. In those 7 years I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes, found some amazing clients, did some really fun projects and made some good money. I’ve had ups and downs and these past 2 years have been tough… really tough. Part of it has to do with personal issues that I allowed to effect business, but I think part of it has had to do with me not focusing on GROWING my business and just chugging along everyday running it.  I know that no one can fix this but me, that is both the beauty and ugly truth of running your own business.

This year, I am getting my butt in gear! One thing that will help me on this journey is an exciting opportunity to do my very first business course. Next week, I will begin a 6-month intensive program called Digital Strategy School. It is lead by a woman I admire as a designer, business owner and person, Marie Poulin and while I am not 100% sure what to expect from the course, I am going to just jump in feet first and see where it takes me!  Some of the people who were involved in the courses beta session have reported HUGE transformations in themselves and their businesses, so I’m ready! LET’S DO THIS!

I’ll share my progress here!

It’s a term that was coined and made popular by renowned sex educator Reid Mihalko and I’ve been one since before there even WAS a term for it. A Sex Geek is much like a geek of any other flavor. Geekiness denotes a persons passionate and intense interest in a subject. Star Wars Geeks, Design Geeks, Sex Geeks, get it?

As a preteen I used to re-read the passages from all my Judy Blume books about menstruation over and over and over.

As a teen I watched the old Loveline TV show when it was on MTV, which now makes me cringe, thinking of Dr. Drew Pinsky sex-negative attitudes!

At 18 I worked on a production of The Vagina Monologues with a troupe of about 20 other fierce feminists!

In college I attended Seattle’s very first (now annual) Erotic Art Festival.

Currently, I listen to 10 times more sex related podcasts than I do design podcasts and I run the Seattle Chapter of Sex Geekdom — a global community for people who love having geeky conversations about sex.

Why is something that is a part of almost everyone’s life such a taboo subject? Why is it considered risky for me to call myself a Sex Geek publicly on forums like Twitter or here on the blog? As the new year approaches, I have decided to be more vocal on my public social media platforms about my life as a sex geek. I volunteer for a number of sex-positive art and activist groups in Seattle and as a designer, I think my knowledge and skills could be utilized within the sex-positive community to help break down some of these social stigmas.

You can follow me on this journey here or by following me on Twitter, @lizandrade.

Discussions that I joined in on throughout the day included subjects such as Impostor Syndrome, Diversity Groups, Side- Projects, Aging in the Tech World and Being an Introvert.

She’s Geeky is geared toward women who work within the technology industry and those who work with technology within other fields. It was a roomful of people who all have related work experiences and all identify within the “woman” area of the gender spectrum but beyond that, we were both as diverse and as similar as humans tend to be.

As someone who exists within a number of minority groups, my feeling of “otherness” is always present. However, the level of respect and support that was present on Friday made this space feel incredibly safe and opened me up to become more aware of how my “otherness” effects how I view those around me and how I am sometimes not as “alone” as I may feel.

It brought up for me again, a feeling I expressed on a recent Pagebreak Podcast, that this is a very exciting time to be a woman in technology… that the level of solidarity that I have seen recently is greater than ever before and that a CHANGE is happening that makes me feel energized and inspired!

First off, what is Refresh? According to their website…

Refresh Seattle is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in the Seattle/Puget Sound area. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards, Refresh Seattle is a part of Refresh and the associated Refreshing Cities.

Seattle’s branch of Refresh had been defunct since around 2008. It was resurrected last fall and this past Wednesday was the 4th official meet up for the group. Each month we are joined by a guest speaker, and this time local illustrator and designer Chris Ballasiotes came to talk with us about hand-drawn typography. He walked us through his process of developing work for clients and even brought a goody bag of art supplies for us to try out some hand lettering techniques on our own!

I was excited about this subject! Since starting my web comic, I have been figuring out my process. How do I juggle hand drawing and also utilize the computer in an effective way? I was hoping to grab some tis from Chris, or at least some inspiration.

The most interesting portion of the presentation for me was seeing Chris’ sheet of quick concept sketches. It’s something anyone who has done logo design work is very familiar with. You quickly draw out everything that comes to mind. Many ideas are crap, but if you allow yourself to put things down unedited, you open the doors for potential gold that you might not have uncovered if working in a less open format.

Seeing these early sketches from designers reminds you that design is a process for everyone. Sometimes it can be hard to remember that when you only see the final product of amazing work that people are creating. Chances are before they made that perfect final design that you saw, they sketched out a page of 10 or 20 mediocre (or even awful) ideas, 5 or 6 good ideas and 1 or 2 genius ideas.

Chris works to capture his final artwork as much as possible on paper. He said that for him and his work, he finds it best to perfect things in the original artwork rather than cleaning things up after digitization. His final drawings get scanned in (or photographed) and (if being used for print) Live Traced in Illustrator. Part of his style was to preserve the textured lines that come from hand drawing on paper, but for those of us who want a crisp line – there is still no other option than to manually redraw the work as vector art.

Later Chris passed out some paper and opened his goody bag of art supplies to the 20 or so designers and developers in the room so that we could try out hand lettering ourselves.  He said “Do your name… or your cat’s name.” Well… I don’t need to be told twice!

Here is what I ended up putting together. For a 2 minute pencil sketch and then moving straight into ink with a brush pen, I’m pretty pleased with this. I like the instant gratification of working with real world tools, but for me, drawing with my screen and tablet is still preferred. I still consider my technique hand lettering,  weather I am moving ink or pixels with my hand doesn’t matter, it’s still my hand!

We filled each other in on all that we’ve been up to, talked about family and pets and work. He expressed his excitement over building his business (which is a partnership with another owner) and that while he is working non-stop, he is loving it! We talked about dealing with clients… the art of retaining clients vs selling to new ones. The balance of looking out for your clients and also not being a push over. He said, “I don’t know how you handle this without a business partner. I need a ‘good cop’ in the scenario — I’m only capable of being ‘bad cop.'”

This got me thinking — am I both Good Cop and Bad Cop? I guess as an Independent business owner, you kind of have to be! It’s delicate balance of being able to lay down the law and tell a client something they may not want to hear, holding your foot firm on policies and generally being able to deal with people on a purely “getting business done” level and the Good Cop side is the smile you close with, the empathetic comment you offer when a frustrating situation arises, the hand holding for those high maintenance clients. It’s tough to play both of these rolls, but not impossible.

I’ve been dealing with a frustrating project lately. A client wants a feature added to a project that was not part of the original scope — trouble is, they didn’t anticipate the added cost of this from the get go, so they are struggling with passing along that expense to THIER client. It’s a mess and while yesterday I had almost reached the point of saying “I don’t care WHAT you do, here’s the bill for the time I put in — and here is some referrals to other devs you could hire to finish the project!” Instead I slept on it, pulled myself together (the good and bad halves) and told them “I know you’re in a really frustrating situation since you did not anticipate this feature being part of the project so the added cost was not part of your original budget (that was the Good Cop, now time to switch gears… Bad Cop, I know you have a ‘but’, right?) — BUT I have offered up some really good solutions and you can either go with the less expensive one that is CLOSE to what they want, but not exactly… OR you can go with the more expensive option that’s going to give that JUST what they want.” While the previous email from the client had been a little huffy — her next response after this message said “Thank you so much for all the time you’ve put into this! I am going to talk this over with my client and follow up with you next week.”

Thank you Good Cop and Bad Cop for Liz and her clients sane! :)

Do you recognize this in yourself? Is there one side you feel you need to get more in touch with? 

First off, I’ll admit that I’m a fan of coming of age stories. All the good ones usually follow a protagonist who is struggling to find their way in a world they don’t quiet fit into — that’s just something I related to in adolescence and even sometimes in adulthood. So — generally speaking — I liked the book. If you went to art school or grew up being an outsider, you will likely find something to like about this story. If neither of those apply to you, you probably won’t find it as entertaining… and are likely to see it as a little bizarre or even boring.

The full title of the book is, “The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters” and the storyline has a very “day in the life” feel to it, even though it spans two semesters (as the title would suggest.) Not a whole lot happens in the book, there are some interesting situations, but it really is more about how the narrator (Happy) feels and thinks about the characters around him and how what they do and say shapes him and how he views himself and the world around him. So… who are these characters?

First there is Maybelle, who is what I think of as ‘the Ducky’. Ducky was the best friend character in the 19080’s John Hughes film Pretty in Pink wherein Molly Ringwald spends the entire film fawning over this rich yuppie dude (and eventually falling in love with him) when all the while she had this amazing friend (and could be love interest) by her side. The only difference of course is that Ducky was an interesting character — Maybelle is not.

Next up, Himillsy. Himillsy Dodd is the manic pixie dream girl. A character troupe that has been played to death in the past decade. Back in 2001 when this book was first published, we hadn’t seen Garden State or  500 Days of Summer so if I had read this back then — perhaps I would not have found Himsy so cringe inducing — but alas. I read it in 2012, at the ripe age of 30, so I see this character as trite.

At this stage, I am beginning to think — maybe I didn’t actually like this book?  …Let’s keep going.

In the second semester of Happy, Maybelle and Himilsy’s journey they putz up at registration and are left with only ONE class option left for their studio class, Introduction to Commercial Art. When they arrive to the first day of class, they meet a sign stating, “INTRODUCTION TO GRAPHIC DESIGN: formerly mislabeled Introduction to Commercial Art. Enter the room at EXACTLY 2:25PM -W.S.”

W.S is our final character,  Winter Sorbeck. I like to imagine looks a lot like Don Draper, which is enough to explain Himillsy and Happy’s infatuation with him. Sorbeck introduces them all the Graphic Design, which — at this time in history was a completely new concept that none of these kids had ever heard! However excited any of you got the first time you played with Photoshop or CSS, it’s not even close to having your whole world turned upside down when you learn there is this whole new way of communicating that is evolving – and it is so much bigger than what we’d known as “Commercial Art” and it is something completely different from “Fine Art.” Whoa.

The last half of the book follows the gang through their class with Winter, and his various class assignments. There are moments that flash me back to my own school experience — and some dorky art school references that those of you who are part of the club will find amusing. For the most part, I see this book as being about a kid discovering passion. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he hadn’t really encountered anything that excited him — and now he’s discovering ideas and people that are driving him nutty with excitement. A pretty relatable experience — being young and excited about things. Being a little terrified as you discover the things that excite you the most and how powerful that feeling of passion can be.

I hear this book is being developed into a movie — which does not really interest me. I found the story not to be about the actual characters, but about Happy’s experience of the characters. It’s his observations and inner-dialog about the things around him that tell the story, not really what is ACTUALLY going on.

I still don’t know, DID I like the book? Maybe it’s not that cut and dry… reading it was an interesting experience.