Holiday Fun

Well, I’ve left the blog alone again for a long time but this time I was designing something! I decided around Halloween, when I made my trivia game, that it would be fun to put together little projects for some of the major holidays.  Last Christmas season I had the idea that it would be fun to create a “Night Before Christmas” animation, I put that idea on hold again this year after realizing I just don’t have the time to pull it off (and I remembered I wanted to do that last weekend) put I was able to put together an animated Advent Calendar, where you can only open the doors for the current day or past days.

Here it is: http://www.elizabethberschneider.com/2010advent.html

enjoy!

Holiday card = fun with Photoshop

I got started on the family holiday card a little early this year.  Last year it was well into December before I got it done – and it was simple.   The past few years, the card design has been left up to me, which I don’t mind – its fun! This year I decided I wanted to do something a little different.  We had this adorable photo that my dad took of Oliver on Christmas Eve last year and we all knew we wanted that to be incorporated into our card this year.

I didn’t want to go the “traditional” photo card route, because that is what I did last year and they can get a little boring.  I was looking at pre-made cards online for inspiration, and I saw one that said “let it Snow” and had a snowglobe in place of the “o”.  I liked the idea of using a snowglobe in the card, and played around with making some in Illustrator, but those didn’t feel right.  I knew something could probably be done in Photoshop, so I poked around online and found an old photoshop snowglobe tutorial.  I based my snowglobe off of the tutorial but changed a lot of the settings and changed the base to come up with something that looked (in my opinion) very nice.

I decided to put the picture of Oliver inside of the snowglobe, but it was decided that the photo needed some editing – bits needed to be removed and changed.  So after some manipulation in Photoshop I came up with this:

I inserted that photo into my snowglobe file, created a gradient background with the snowflake brushes I forgot Photoshop had, and did several test prints for color and bam -  our 2010 Holiday Card:

oops!

Well, I never meant to leave this thing abandoned for so long, I guess life has been busy since I last posted in July.  At least part of that time I have spent doing some designing!

I finally got my portfolio website all set the way I like it, and I’ll hopefully keep that design for a long time.  I also removed some older work and added new(er) things that I have been working on, which helps.  The latest thing I’ve done was a little Halloween Trivia quiz.  I made it just for fun and I did it in Flash – it may be a little late to play it now, but here is the link to try it out: Halloween Trivia

The past week or so I was busy working on Halloween decorations for our yard, I was inspired by things I saw in the Martha Stewart Halloween Handbook
Here are a few pictures of my pumpkins and yard decorations:

We had quite a few compliments from neighborhood trick-or-treaters and their parents last night, which was great!

Now that Halloween is over and my portfolio is more up to date, I’ll be starting to job search again.  I also have one small design project to finish up this week and then I will also (probably) be working on a logo, business cards and a website for a friend.  Busy weeks ahead!

Hopefully I’ll remember to keep this thing updated!

vacation

Wow, I can’t believe its been over a month since I updated.  June ended up being a busy month, I was asked to design the invitations for a family friend’s 30th Wedding Anniversary Party and also work on the centerpieces for the party coming up at the end of July.

Then at the end of June my family and I spent some time in Michigan for my cousin’s wedding and then a trip up in the Upper Penninsual with my Aunt and Uncle, which was a blast.  It is absolutley beautiful up there and I would recommend it to anyone who loves nature.

Now I have been working on editing my cousin’s wedding video, which has been fun. I’m learning more about Adobe Premiere and also learning how to use Adobe Encore to create the DVD menus, which is great!

The next project is finishing up the party centerpieces then its off to another wedding and then the anniversary party – another busy month!

Who knows what August will bring – maybe I’ll be able to find a job (finally)!

I’ll end this with a photo from my trip in the UP – one of my favorites from Pictured Rocks in Munising.

Freelancing

I heard back from 30 Mile, while they liked the logo I submitted they said it wasn’t really what they were looking for, but since I was the only person who submitted anything they decided to give me another shot at designing the logo. They also sent me a sketch of something they had found that they liked and wanted me -to use their terminology – make it “badass”.  That has been a bit of a struggle, as I’ve been trying different accessories to make the logo appear “badass” but still keeping it kid friendly.  I need to submit something by Thursday morning and I have several iterations of the new logo done, but none of them seem quite right yet, but I’m hoping inspiration will strike at the last minute!

I’ve also agreed/volunteered to design the invitation for an anniversary party for a family friend which should be a fun project.
I hope to find a few other volunteer (or paid) projects over the summer.  I tried a site called CrowdSpring for a while, where clients post their design needs and creatives can submit ideas over a period of 30 days or so and get paid if their design is chosen.  I got rather frusterated with that site, when I would submit something and get rather high ratings from the clients, but then have them choose something else (that to me, always looked very similar to what I designed!!)  I might try that again for a while this summer – some of the projects offered quite a bit of money to the “winner”.

I’ve had to put my jewelery site on hold again as I’ve been busy with the 30 Mile logo and now with the invitation, but I will hopefully get that going soon – I’ve got some sketches so at leas that is a start!

Here are the ideas I came up with for the 30 Mile logo, if anyone reads this before 11pm on the 2nd and has any ideas on how to make it more “badass” yet still kid friendly let me know!

Back online

I finally got most of my portfolio site back up online after  switching to a new hosting service for cost reasons.  A few pages re-uploaded with some Flash issues that I haven’t been able to sort out quite yet and there are a few other changes I decided to make, but hopefully those minor fixes will not take long and won’t cause any other issues when they are uploaded.

Recently I’ve been looking for volunteer design opportunities while I continue to look for a graphic or web design job.  I recently submitted a logo design to 30 Mile, a charity in the Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin that helps those dealing with childhood cancer.  I’m still waiting to hear back on whether or not they are going to use my design.  I also have a few other design projects I volunteered to do for friends over the summer and I am hoping to re-work the web site I designed last summer for I Love a Parade so it is something that they can update more easily.

Hopefully as summer progresses I’ll either be able to find a full-time paying design position (or any position for that matter) or more volunteer design opportunities.

wildlife site

Well, I finally realized I had abandoned this blog for a while.  I spent most of the last month attempting to create blog page from scratch using PHP and MySQL to be part of a website I was designing as a birthday present for my dad.  I wanted the site to be an area where he could share his nature photography and blog about what kind of wildlife he sees around here from week to week.  I got the idea after he got rather into a blog we created to inform people about what was going on with the Shoreview Turkeys – which was a big news story.  I wanted the end result to be home to a flash photo gallery and a blog. After a month or so of struggling with different ways of creating blogs from scratch, I finally found a way to do it in one of my PHP books,which seemed simple enough until the freeware that was required to run some of the scripts wasn’t compatible with either my server or Vista (still haven’t figured out which).  At that point I knew I had to create a blog on WordPress (or similar service) and try to incorporate the other aspects of the site into that blog.

That method seemed to work for about a day, until I discovered that most blog services do not support Flash content due to security reasons, so I would not be able to use the gallery I had already created.  I also discovered that in order to customize the appearance of the blog (beyond the header) I was going to have to pay a subscription fee, which I wasn’t thrilled about, considering I wasn’t sure how much use the site was actually going to get.  So in the end (and about a day before his birthday), I opted to create my own site with the photo gallery, info, etc and link to an external word press blog.  I hope to eventually be able to incorporate the blog into the regular wildlife site, but it is going to take some toying around with the freeware and my server.

The Wildlife site is not live on the web yet – again it was an issue of cost but here is a screen shot (with placeholder text)

For my next big web project I plan on finally creating a store front for the jewelery I make, although I don’t know if I want to tackle the issues of security surrounding a e-commerce site, so it may just turn into a gallery and people can contact me if they want to purchase something…still working on the logistics of how that kind of site would work.

almost finished

I am finally almost finished with my web portfolio!  My test upload went well and everything was functioning so my dreamweaver/flash issue must have fixed itself.  The only things I really have left to do is finish my home page and do a final read through and spell check of everything then I can upload it for real.  I probably would have had it uploaded much sooner this week, but I have been distracted by the Olympics and a neighborhood controversy involving 60+ turkeys and a neighboring townhouse association that has asked the city council to eradicate the entire flock.  The story has actually attracted quite a bit of attention starting out as a cover story in the local weekly paper, and moving on to both major Twin Cities daily papers and one local news channel.  My dad was even interviewed by one of the papers about it by coincidence.  He opposes the City’s apparent decision to fulfill the association’s request and it is interesting to see his statements compared to the statements coming from people who dislike the birds.

I do hope to unveil my site by the end of the weekend, and if not then, by the end of this upcoming week.  We’ll see what happens.

starting over?

I guess I’m still on a break from finishing my portfolio site, and now I am contemplating redoing it again – even though I am close to finished with my original redo.  I got a “web designer’s idea book” for my birthday and started rethinking my design after seeing several examples of portfolio sites in that book and on the web. I have new ideas, but now I need to decide if I want to go a traditional, simple route or more flashy and interactive. Flashy and more interactive would definitely take me more time, and might be more difficult to update but is potentially more interesting than a simple non-interactive site.  I guess its something I’ll have to think about for a while, but I’m up to suggestions if anyone has any.

portfolio vaction

Its been a while since I’ve updated anything. My new PHP/MySQL class started about a week ago so I’ve been focusing on that for a while and taking a little break from all the portfolio stuff – mostly because I was getting frustrated with it.  But then tonight, on a whim, I did a short little job search and found a few things I might consider applying for, but need a completed portfolio to do it.  The first one I found was an unpaid graphic design internship was for the MN Chapter of the National MS Society.  It would give me experience and its only in Minneapolis, so the commute wouldn’t be bad but there would be no money, and with turning 23 next week and needing to get my own health insurance and pay for car insurance, no income wouldn’t be the greatest situation.

The next thing I found was a job I had seen over the summer once and found it reposted again this past week.  It’s a marketing/design tech for Menards and would basically entail laying out their weekly sale flyers.  On the upside it would be a paying job but on the downside it would require relocating to Eau Claire (not sure if i have the money to do that yet) and they want knowledge of Quark…which I’m intending to learn, but haven’t yet.

The third job I found was an Interactive Design position for Delux in Shoreview – not even a mile away from where I am now.  The downside to that one is that, while I can do interactive stuff, I’m far from having the 10 years experience they are looking for!

Hopefully I can get this portfolio cranked out this week, but I need flash and dreamweaver to get a long so that half of the portfolio is actually viewable!  I really hope everything works once I “go-live” with the redesign.  Its working fine when I run it locally, but that usually means it will give me trouble later.  I’m still not pleased with how it looks, but I need to have something other than what is there now.