Clients are humans too. There. I said it. We all know it’s true but sometimes when they ask us to do the impossible and devolve into demanding demons… or really-scary-deadline-demanding-jerks-who-don’t-realize-you-are-not-a-robot. In light of this, I would ask you to remember something. Ladies and gentlemen… please remember you can push back. If a client wants a deadline that’s unreasonable, for heaven’s sake just SAY so. Don’t destroy yourself with an all-nighter, or give up on what you had already planned! That will make your life miserable and eventually it’ll breed resentment. Truth be told, the client has no idea why one graphic may take 10 minutes but another takes you 10 hours. Saying a **version** of “no” to a client almost never means you’ve lost that client for good, but designers are afraid to put that foot down. If you can save the client every now and again with an 11-hour Hail-Mary pass then that’s awesome, but even when you pull that off you need to be clear that you can’t do that every time – but you’ll happily accept their praise for rockin’ it this time. 🙂 […]

So this all came about because I had gone to order flowers for a client who was in the hospital. Half way thru we found out flowers weren’t accepted in the ICU so we decided to wait until he was moved to another room. Then the stalking began. I’d closed the website, but was being followed around by an ad for 1-800-Flowers literally everywhere I went. Kohl’s, Yahoo, and I believe CNN and Facebook as well. It was a bit creepy!     But I knew why it was happening. When I’d visited 1-800-Flower’s website, they installed a cookie with a tracking code so Google Ads could serve me flower ads wherever they were located – to get me to come back and finish out my order. These kinds of ads that follow you around, they work from a business standpoint extremely well. They’re targeting a warm audience, someone who’s already visited their site and is familiar with their wares. However, there’s no way for an ad to know that the reason you didn’t buy something was because you genuinely just didn’t need it (yet anyway). […]

The short answer: WordPress.com is where WordPress (the company) hosts WordPress sites (much like Wix or SquareSpace). WordPress.org is where you can download WordPress the open-source content management software to use on your site. The easy answer is .com is for beginners, and .org is for developers. It does get confusing because there’s WordPress the company, WordPress the software, and WordPress the service WordPress the company offers that hosts WordPress the software sites. Got it? […]

One of my favorite topics is addressing how users interact with a webpage because there is so my psychology behind it as well as artistic input. This episode deals with buttons specifically, and how to craft the ones on your site so they are appealing the best to your visitors, helping with conversions, and standing out on a busy page. If you’re looking for some direction on how to handle buttons on a landing page, or a general overview, this broadcast is for you. […]

So, how do you fix the problem of multiple posts when you’re using Hootsuite to post a single post with multiple images? The short answer is, you can’t. It seems the Facebook API (the gadget that let’s developers/3rd party businesses connect to Facebook) doesn’t currently allow for outside sources to submit multiple images in one post – at least according to Hootsuite. And boy are people calling for that capability. Their solution is to make multiple posts using the same text – one for each image. It’s fine that they want to handle it this way given there is no alternative, but a simple heads up error notice would have been preferable to finding out later in the day. Currently the system sets you up to spam your audience. […]

Welcome to the introduction of the CreationDepot Podcast! My name is Wendy Litteral and I’m here to give you a quick overview of what to expect in upcoming episodes. CreationDepot is a web and graphic design company by trade, but we’re largely focused on where we came from – the design, development and production community. We look at both digital and print design, and really try to convey what good design is and how to pass that experience onto your customers. […]

In Windows 10 there a ton of ways to maximize a window. Drag it to the top and “snap” it to the top border of your screen, click the maximize button, or double click the title bar of your window. But what do you do if you don’t have that option? In my case, SOMEHOW I had managed to over-minimize Adobe Dreamweaver AND push it off my right screen. The trouble is, Dreamweaver puts so many things in that top bar that when it’s minimized like this dragging it to the top screen isn’t an option – it just won’t work. I can’t grab that top bar. So how do I get my program back?! Come on Adobe I got work to do! […]

There’s this new thing (and by new-ish I really mean it’s years old) where photographers will greatly wash out their stock images, because the idea is that filter/look makes it look higher-end. Here’s the problem with that, while it does look “heavenly,” washed out photos just don’t print well. So what if you’re only using it for digital purposes? Well, you will still run into a similar problem. Printed light photos can run into the issue of printing too lightly, and thus causing the image to look like a mistake – or even like the printer made a mistake and ran out of toner. With digital media, you can run what I like to call the “monitor” problem. It’s tough to get two monitors on the same workstation to display color the same, let alone every monitor across every device. […]

According to Lynda.com, the term “retina” is actually something that came from Apple. It’s a marketing term that was used by Apple to bring a new technology to the general public – and retina does sound cool. Of course it’s named after the retina in the human eye – the part that takes light and turns it into signals for image data for your brain. It’s a cool name but what does it actually mean in tech speak? Well for all the hullabaloo it really just means high definition. There is no difference between “retina” and high def, and any other pet name companies try to throw on it. The long and short of it is images look better because there’s more data being displayed on the screen. Full stop. […]