Stewart Design Doodles

Meeting Ellen Forney, Comic Artist

Amy — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:36:42 +0000

On a recent trip to Seattle to visit our daughter and son-in-law, I was flipping through the local paper while sitting in a Capitol Hill coffee shop, when I happened upon an ad for one of my FAVORITE cartoonists of all time, Ellen Forney, author of one of my favorite comic collections of all time, “Monkey Food: the Complete Collection of ‘I Was Seven in ‘75’”. Giddily, I fired off an email to see if she would be available to meet and show me her studio. As luck would have it, she lived nearby, and she agreed!

(Side note: I don’t typically stalk my favorite artists like this. Unless you count the time I called George Segal while on a trip to New Jersey in 1988, after discovering his studio was just 20 minutes from where my friend Diana and I were. He was nice enough to show us around and indulge our pretentious art student questions for a whole hour.)

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Wordpress-based websites: what I’ve been doing lately

Amy — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:08:24 +0000

Hello everyone, and sorry for the long absence! I’ve been up to my ears for the past few months in website work, catalog work and family visits. (It’s still raining babies in our family. I’ve now got a new baby nephew, and a grandson on the way, bringing the baby total to 8 in just under 3 years. More on that later.)

I’m really excited about all the Wordpress-based websites we’ve been building lately, and I and wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about our process and show you some of the latest sites we’ve done.

All our sites are now built on Wordpress using Thesis. Wordpress is a powerful opensource blogging platform, and Thesis is a brilliantly flexible and SEO-friendly framework that helps you to customize your Wordpress-based site. I do all the design work, and the multi-talented Doyle Calvert does all the programming and behind-the-scenes magic. Between us, we have spent the past 8 months getting Wordppress/Thesis to do some pretty amazing things. Here’s a sampling:

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Unraveling Bolero: Woman with degenerative brain disease paints music

Amy — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:50:00 +0000

I am fascinated by anything related to neurological disorders, creativity and art, and especially how the two relate to each other. Creativity is such a deep, fickle and mysterious thing… it’s no surprise that it changes significantly when your brain does.

NewScientist has posted a fascinating story about a woman who suffered from a neurodegenerative condition called primary progressive aphasia that took her speech and eventually her life. Unaware at first that she was suffering from this disease, former chemistry professor Anne Adams found her creativity suddenly flourishing. Check out this visual painting she did of Bolero:

Visual representation of each note in Ravel's Bolero

In Unravelling Boléro, each of the vertical figures represents a bar of music, with its height corresponding to volume, and the colour representing the pitch of Adams’ favourite note within the bar. Like the music, the theme repeats and builds until a change of colour to orange and pink, representing the key change that precedes Boléro’s dramatic conclusion. (excerpt)

Some patients with progressive aphasia develop a passion for art, a creative blurring of boundaries between the senses, and a fixation with repeating patterns. Adams became intrigued by her own disease, and after she lost her ability to speak, she found and presented to her neurologists a scientific article indicating that Ravel may have suffered from the very same disease!

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Musicians who Blog: Free Promotion for Musicians

Amy — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:36:09 +0000

To all you musicians out there looking for some additional free exposure… check out Musicians who Blog, a project started by Upstart Blogger.

Musicians submit their blogs along with a press photo and some information about their blogging, what they use their blog for, how successful they have been because of their blog, and anything else that they would like to share. In addition to providing increased exposure for musicians, it will also be an interesting set of case studies to show how much blogging can help your career.

Their mission:

The aim of this blog is to highlight, perhaps unsurprisingly, musicians who blog. That might seem easy to the uninitiated but, in reality, it’s a little harder. Musicians Who Blog will seek to help promote real musicians, the ones who get their hands dirty online and write their own blogs, whilst at the same time pointing the finger at all the fake bloggers, the ones who hide behind faceless corporations and let the men in the grey suits do the talking for them.

Furthermore, Musicians Who Blog will seek to promote, by way of example and case study, positive use of blogs and online marketing in the music industry. It is hoped that this blog will become a useful resource for both musicians and music lovers alike.

As introductory explanations go this one has been pretty simple. Hopefully the whole concept of a blog like this is perfectly self explanatory. All that remains is for me to open the email gates and invite blog submissions from any musicians who maintain a blog. To submit your blog simply email me on ashley@ashleymorgan.com. Please include a high resolution photograph if possible.

If you are a musician who doesn’t already have a blog, you really should start. It’s one of the least expensive and most far-reaching ways you can get noticed.

Side note: I see that Musicians who Blog is hosted by AN Hosting, our top choice for blog hosting. You can get 3 months free by using the code UPSTARTBLOGGER.

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Stick your neck out: Creative, cost-effective ways to market yourself in a bad economy

Amy — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:54:53 +0000

What’s the biggest killer of creativity? STRESS. Whether it’s a difficult boss or a tanking economy, we typically cope with stressful situations by retreating into our shells, sticking to what is safe and familiar, not taking any risks. When you are afraid to get your head chopped off, you’re sure not going to stick your neck out!

Fear of failure is paralyzing, and it kills creativity. But creativity is exactly what we need the most to help us out of stressful situations.

Okay, so the economy is collapsing. Nobody wants to go out of business, so to save what we’ve got left, we’re chopping budgets and jobs, dropping advertising, cutting back on printing, forgoing those web projects, and doing less rather than more. When times are tough, marketing—the head of creativity—is often the first to go. And that’s a HUGE mistake. Now is the time to market yourself more, not less! This horrid economy won’t last for ever, and if you stop marketing yourself, then you won’t either.

Marketing doesn’t have to cost a lot. There are a innovative things you can do on a budget, as well as creative ways you can encourage your customers to come out of their shells. Here are some low-cost and no-cost things you can do to help your business grow:

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How to customize Google Search on your website

Amy — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:13:46 +0000

A very simple way to make your website more user-friendly is to add a search feature. Google Search makes that easy: just Create a Custom Search Engine by filling out a form, and then paste the resulting code wherever you want into your web page. (If you want it to search only on your website, then enter your URL only under the "Select some sites" portion of the form.)

After you have completed the form, it will take you to a page that has a link to the Control Panel for your new custom search. Click that, and then click "code." This is what you will copy and paste into your home page.

Here’s what that code looks like when it’s pasted into your HTML page:

But what if you don’t like the default look? No problem: there are several ways to change the look and feel of the search bar, and also the search results page that comes up afterwards. Just click the "look and feel" link and you will be presented with several options, including the option to choose your own text colors, and add your own logo to the custom search results page. (Note: you can also choose where that search results page is hosted: either on your own site, or on google. That option is under the "code" link.)

And that’s it– your own custom search in minutes!

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bbp bag Giveaway: Leave a comment to win this ergonomic hybrid laptop bag

Amy — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 04:09:42 +0000

Win the Lime Medium Tango Flow bag above! Leave a comment at the bottom of this review.

It dawned on me recently that I almost never go anywhere without my laptop and all its associated gear. I’m like a jockey (a very large jockey): I basically have to weigh in with my 15-pound saddle. I take it to the bookstore, the coffee shop, to our favorite local pub that has free wifi, on trips, and anywhere I know I’ll be able to do some work. And boy, does my back pay the price.

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7 reasons you should have a blog in addition to (or instead of) a regular website

Amy — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:46:04 +0000

This post is especially for all the musicians and store owners who attended my session at NAMM last weekend. I briefly touched on the idea of having a blog, but there wasn’t time to get into much detail about why it is so important for your business. So I’m going to tell you some of the reasons why I think nearly all businesses like yours need one.

Some of you were unfamiliar with what a blog is. A blog is essentially a ready-made, highly customizable website which includes lots of interactive features. Wordpress is the most popular blogging software and the one I recommend. Even better, the Wordpress software is free!

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Winter NAMM ‘09: Amy gives a presentation on web design entitled "This Old Website: Why Your Site Needs a Makeover!"

Amy — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:50:21 +0000

I just returned from an inspiring weekend at the NAMM show in Anaheim, California, one of the largest (and loudest) music shows in the country, with over 80,000 attendees from all over the world. I was invited by moderator Danny Rocks to speak to this diverse group of musicians, educators and business owners about ways to improve their websites.

My session, called "This Old Website: Why Your Site Needs a Makeover!" drew a good group of about 100 people, mostly small business owners and music educators. My friend Madeleine Crouch of Madeleine Crouch and Associates, an association management firm, offered up one of her new clients in need of help, and joined me on stage to discuss the problems and solutions.

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Art, vision and the disordered eye (or: why are artists so weird?)

Amy — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:02:21 +0000

After reading this article in the Guardian about the glasses for the poor, it got me thinking about how vision affects so many fundamental things in our lives and shapes us into who we are, especially as artists.

I had always taken it for granted that I, as an “artistic type,” was simply wired differently from the rest of the world. But how much of my personality and even my artistic vision was rooted in my bad eyesight?

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