How I use Google in my business.

All the work I do as an illustrator is from contacts I find on the internet. I almost never do business locally anymore. My computers have not only been my tool for creating the illustrations I sell, they're the tools by which I advertise my trade and seek out new clients on a daily basis.

Aside from the fact I'm writing this blog on Google's 'Blogger', I'm finding some really intricate ways to integrate Google's services into my business. So I thought I'd show you exactly how and maybe it'll spark your imagination into finding similar ways it can help you in your business.

Have you ever had your computer crash on you? Totally wipe out all your information? Maybe your house burns down and your entire business along with it? Maybe an invoice is due but a storm hoses your computer, or a virus crashes it, or it just shuts off your electricity and the only way you can access your data is to tear apart your entire PC and take it to an understanding friend's house, set it all back up and work there.

I read online once that the ultimate goal of the internet is to put all your programs and documents on a master server that can be accessed from anywhere with a simple username and password, thus eliminating the need to constantly buy more memory or programs for your computer, and eventually allowing you to work from anywhere using a simple internet browser, either on a laptop or blackberry, or a public PC.

This gave me an idea as to how to protect my constantly changing data from getting lost.

Google Docs

Google Docs not only allows you to create and store documents, spreadsheets, forms and presentations on the web, it lets you publish them on your website. I have certain clients that I work with on a regular basis who are perfectionists and extremely specific about the artwork they commission, because if it isn't perfect, it doesn't sell. I've found with these customers that an hourly wage combined with royalties on the sales works best. So I create a spreadsheet that's basically a timesheet, which at the end of a pay period or project, I create a screenshot of it and send it as an invoice.

But occasionally my client has a budget and doesn't want to exceed a certain dollar amount on a job. It would be helpful for him to get access to a running tab so he can make decisions about cutting cost. With Google Docs, I can log my hours into a Google Docs Spreadsheet, which calculates the hours worked on each project. then I can create another Google Docs Spreadsheet that copies and displays only those cells that my client needs to see, namely, the running total for each job and the grand total to date. In the mean time, my client has a link to a webpage on my website that has this spreadsheet embedded on it. All he has to do to keep tabs on his bill is to go to my webpage and there it is, updated every 5 minutes. 

I can also keep my books on a Google Docs Spreadsheet and never have to worry about my computer crashing and losing my financial records. Also, I can update them from any PC - protected by my password. I also keep a list of art for my regular customers so they can stay updated on the last revisement dates, sizes, pattern numbers, etc -- all protected from hard-drive failure. 

These are all things I need to protect from loss.


Gmail

 Gmail's been awesome lately. It just came out with the Priority Inbox, which really makes my job easier. I get emails from all over, usually working several jobs at once. As I work on one job, I send an update to one client, then wait, sometimes a few days, for a response for approval to proceed or a correction on an illustration. In the mean time, I work on 5 other jobs, all sending updates, all requiring that I wait for a response before I can proceed.


Keeping track of that can be a nightmare in my email programs. I tried Opera and Thunderbird, creating separate folders for each customer, apart from my normal emails, each with a filter and alert option, only to end up with stacks of folders that leave me scrolling up and down looking for new emails from specific clients.


Gmail's Priority Inbox allows me to separate my regular emails from my current jobs from my "emails on hold". Any client that I get work from gets marked as important - so any email coming from them drops into my Priority Inbox. Any email I have that carries current instructions or concerns a current phase of an job gets starred, so it stays in the Starred section of the inbox. The rest drop into my general inbox. As I work the instructions in a starred email, once completed, I un-star them and they drop into the regular inbox. If I need to research a specific job, I simply do a search. Any emails with information I need to keep permanently, like for passwords or links to FTP folders for specific companies, all get moved into my "Save for Info" folder for easy access.

Notice on the bottom right in the above illustration the Task List. As I read my instructions from any particular email, I can click on "More Actions" then "Add to Tasks" and a link to that email with the instructions in it will drop into my Tasks under the subject heading of the email. Click on the task and it'll pull up the email bearing the instructions. So at a glance, from anywhere, I can see exactly what I need to get done. I can even assign a task a deadline date. This helps me keep my starred section cleared off and helps keep me on track.


To the left are handy links to my Docs, and a chat program for instant communication with my clients. There's nothing that says "professional" to your clients like being right there when they need you. Any client with a gmail account can see me online working and if they have a question, all they have to do is type it and they can have an immediate response. Sometimes that can be the difference between making a sale. 


There are also times when I need to ask my client something about a job I'm working on. If I can see them online and ask that question right away, and get an immediate answer, that saves me a lot of waiting and speeds up the progress of the job tremendously, especially when response time can be as long as a week in some cases.



My Contacts list to the left of my Gmail inbox can also include addresses and phone numbers and even images of my customers. And I can call my customers anywhere in the US for free using my Google Talk and a headset. The Quick Links link under the Google Chat lets me store links from clients pertaining to a specific job I'm working on with them at the time. This keeps me from clogging up my bookmarks with temporary links, provides quick and easy access without fumbling through my bookmarks folders, and allows me to view those bookmarks from any other computer.

Google Reader

Another handy tool is my Google Reader. I don't know how I did without it before. Occasionally, I'll run low on work and need to find new clients. I used to troll through Craigslist for hours, going from one city to the next, scrolling through the creative gigs - a tedious job. Then one day it hit me - I simply started adding each Creative Gigs page from each city in the US (and some overseas) to a folder in my Google Reader marked "Work", so now, all I need to do is to pull up my Google Reader and click on the Work folder and the very latest posting, no matter what city it's in, will pop up on top of the list and I can scroll backwards in time, making sure I get the most recent jobs first, until I've searched every available gig in the country. I've found some pretty steady and profitable clients that way.


Another category in Craigslist that comes in handy is the local "Free" section in the For Sale category. Never know what someone's gonna give away for free.


Google Calendar

My memory is horrible - anyone who knows me will tell you that. My brain works differently than most folks'. I focus on multiple jobs at hand, then move on to the next job, oblivious to anything that doesn't pertain to the jobs or mental projects I'm working on at the time. I'm always asking what day it is, because the date has nothing to do with my work, so I don't keep track of it. I actually usually end up losing a day every week, wondering what happened to it.

So when it comes to remembering appointments, I'm terrible. My cell phone has a calendar, but if my phone breaks, I'm screwed. Google Calendar not only lets me know what day it is, it also lets me post reminders to myself - and - get this - it can send the reminders to my cell phone!  Wherever I am I can get my reminder(s) - and I can get more than one reminder for the same event - warning me that the time is getting closer - a day in advance, a few hours in advance to get ready, and a few minutes in advance to get off my but and go. And since my phone has internet access, I can pull up and edit my calendar on the fly.



There's also a feature where, if I need to be in a particular place at a particular time, if I key the address into the "where" box, it'll link to Google Maps (which I also have in my phone) and tell me how to find the place. Since I've been living in the boonies the past 10 years, the city has changed, and I've only recently been going downtown to do the artshows and hang with the art crowd.


Now - being able to utilize all this great stuff is one thing, but sometimes, having all these screens up at once can take over your entire web experience. Not to worry - there is a way to not only organize all these great features, you get added bonuses along with it ----- meet ----


iGoogle

iGoogle is like your own personal homepage where you can organize all the features above, either on one page, or on several pages all within the same browser window. It's like having iframes all through your homepage that shows you your email, Reader, Calendar, all at once. But it doesn't stop there. It gives you a gazillion widgets to see things like the latest news, weather, search tools like phone lookups and currency converters. There are even sections that will show you your Facebook and Myspace updates without having to go to the websites. You can store bookmarks in one gadget, so you'll have access to your favorite sites from anywhere. Your Chat program is in there, too. Making this your home page will give you easy access to all your Google tools. There's even a gadget to access all the Google services.


Picasa 


One more service Google has that I've recently discovered as handy - Picasa is a program you can download from Google that can not only keep track of your images, it can syncronize specific folders inside your computer with folders on the web, so you don't have to upload individual photos to your Picasa account manually. It'll do it as soon as you open the program and move the images into the folder that's synced with the online photo album.


How does this come in handy for my business? I use it in two ways. 


My website has a small iframe on the first page that shows all my latest art in a tiny slideshow. That slideshow is actually a Picasa photo album that is synched with a folder on my computer. As I take screenshots of jobs I'm working on, I store them in one folder that I use to attach the screenshot to emails to my clients. When I'm finished with a job, I move the final screenshot to the folder that synchs to my website slideshow folder and so it automatically uploads the image to that Picasa album, which automatically adds it to my website's slideshow. Update made - little effort involved.



The second use I've created for my Picasa syncing feature is this ---- I have a webcam that I turn on when I leave. It faces out away from my computer. It has a motion sensor that takes a snapshot whenever anything or anyone moves in the room and drops that snapshot into a specific folder. I also turn on my Picasa when I leave. Then I use a simple post-It Note program to fill up my screen with a huge note that is very difficult to move because the handle to move it is invisible and hard to find, and I set the note so it is always on top, so whoever tries to use that computer has a very difficult time with it. The note says "Run Beotch!Your Face is uploading to my Picasa Gallery right now!" And it is. That's because when the motion sensor makes my webcam take a snapshot of whatever is moving, and it drops that snapshot into a folder that is synced with an online Picasa photo album, that photo album gets uploaded automatically. If someone runs off with my computer, they have to unplug it - immediately closing the Picasa webpage, as well as my Firefox browser. In order to use Firefox to sign into my Picasa account, they'd have to know my master password, which they wouldn't. It would take very little time for me to go to my Picasa account from any other computer and pull up the webcam shot of the culprit who stole my Computer.


So there's a list of Google tools I'm currently using, and I may end up thinking of more uses in the future. If so I'll post them here. 


Thanks for reading :-)

Moto-Q Windows-Mobile 5 Screen Choices Suck.

So I've had this Moto Q for some time, and being the anal-retentive efficiency fanatic that I am, I've had some real problems with their choice of screen themes and layouts, both in their arrangement of icons and screen info, and in their choice of color schemes and background images.

All of them have major flaws that could be greatly improved.

The main issue I had with the screen arrangements was that either the icons were too big and pushed everything off the screen so you had to scroll to see the next calendar appointment and text message count, or the clock was so small you had to pick up the phone to see it, or it had links to crap they wanted to sell you that you could just as easily get for free if you were an advocate of the dedication and works of the Open Source community. 

One even had the service indicator - you know, the thing that says "Out of Area" or "Home service", the biggest thing on the screen, shoving all the useful info off the bottom of the screen. If I'm close enough to my phone to dial out, I think I can see the freakin' service indicator even if it was a 32nd-of-an-inch tall. I'd much rather be able to see my clock at 4am from my bed while my phone is sitting on the end table and my eyes haven't adjusted to reality yet.

So, realizing that these layouts are not much different than web pages, and since I do my own website and know a little about HTML, I plugged in to my computer and dug out the XML files for the screen arrangements, just so I could see what makes them tick and whether or not they were hackable.

Seems they are --- very.

So this is what I thought I was stuck with ---

One was a screen with huge icons that pushed everything off the page.

The other had icons the size I wanted but was covered in crap I didn't need.

Look at that pathetic clock - and what's all that crap on the bottom? Did I really need that crap? I don't use my phone to read the news, and I especially wasn't going to limit myself to corporate filtered news like Reuters and AP, which is exactly where those links would take me, and I didn't want to buy Microsoft's crappy apps. I just wanted to read the freakin' information that was pertinent to my phone operations - and my freakin' clock.

So, digging into the apps, I used the XML file from the first layout and decided to steal the icon sizes from the second layout. So I dug thru the XML from the 2nd app and located the icons, then pasted the code into the first layout. Then found the clock plugin, figured 'y' meant the 'y-axis' and made that number larger, in theory increasing its size, while locating the code for the Service Indicator, where I promptly shrunk that puppy to a minimal.

That entire line with the Pocket MSN (which I never use - I'm a Google fan) really had to go, since I was never gonna sign into MSN. Found that code and just deleted it.

NOW things were starting to look good. All my Profile and Text info were right on the screen, nice and neat. My clock was legible from a distance. My icons were small enough for me to not have to search from the Start Button to find anything. I was happy now.

The only thing bothering me now was that contrasting dark line cutting across the lettering. It was distracting. If I wanted to quickly glance at that section, I didn't want distracting contrasting light and dark diagonal lines pulling my eyes from the text.

I had a better idea.

I got into my image editing program and dug up one of my 3D renderings and created my own background, moved it into my phone and made it the default background to the Chrome theme, making the lettering all white.

Now the image looks awesome, is well out of the way of my text, my clock is now clearly visible, I can fit more icons onto a page (cuz I'm all about my apps - that I DON'T have to buy from Microsoft), and my color scheme utilizes my favorite colors.

Then, a while later, I thought of a few more improvements.

I tweaked the illustration to fit more seamlessly into the text, and dug back into the XML, (using the Word App I downloaded off the internet that allows me to view and create text files in my phone) to create a better contrasting highlighter, which makes it easier to select icons on a sunny day.

This is my final layout:

Bright, eh? Git's 'er done.

You don't have to be stuck with whatever some visionless corporate clone sticks in your phone. Get in there, play around, and have some fun. Make your phone your own.

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A quick note on drawing

I went to CCAD for a year and only learned 2 things that I found useful.

1. The closer you want something to look, the more contrast you use, the farther away you want it to look, the less contrast you use. Take that rule and follow it - or learn how to successfully manipulate or break it.
2. When you draw, start light - VERY light - barely touching the pencil to your paper.

If someone had stood up in front of the class on day one and told me that, I could've gone home. I was done. Everything else I learned came from following my interests, outside of school, from library books and the internet.

One major thing I found out on my own was to not take as gospel the rantings of those who practice the standard teaching techniques. I taught myself to draw by tracing, which I advocate immensely - and every art school teacher and student that I've spoken to condemns. What better way to maintain a student following than to keep your students from learning on their own, and to give your students a reason to have to keep coming back to you to keep taking lessons? I'm a firm believer in using science, and the science of the human brain, to teach the concepts, rather than the techniques.

Drawing is like martial arts. Remember Karate Kid? Wax on, wax off? Same concept. You find the exact movement you want, then you practice it until it happens without you thinking about it.What I've found is that the same concept holds true for complex thought processes also.

When you practice, and draw from life, you spend most of your time practicing your mistakes, because you have not yet found the exact shape you need to make your drawing look like what you're drawing. You see what's in front of you and your brain knows what's supposed to be there and starts getting all involved in telling your hand how it should look - then before you know it, your proportions are all hosed and you just don't know what went wrong.

When you trace, you see the 3D shape as a 2D, abstract shape and you train yourself to make the shapes correctly first. You also train yourself to follow new shapes exactly. Ever notice you tend to use the same pencil stroke to create, say, an eye, or a forearm? Instead, tracing makes you concentrate on the contours and to draw with your eyes, not your head. The repetition of directly following contours with your eyes and with a pencil trains your eye and hand to work together as one, rather than letting your brain get in the way by saying "No, that leg isn't supposed to be an inch long!" when your eye clearly sees that the foot on that foreshortened leg is only an inch away from the hip. 

Practice doing it correctly from the start and you won't be practicing your mistakes. Eventually, you won't need to trace. The tracing will happen in your mind's eye.

Why Yellow Lights Up Your Life

When using Yellow in a painting, you will find that it's actually brighter than white, or at least gives the illusion that it is. When painting the sun or a flame, using yellow around the inner perimeter makes the white center appear to vibrate.


That's because the high chroma (or amount of color) placed adjacent to low chroma (or "closer to grey" color) is actually a contrst in color, much like placing red next to green (opposites on the color wheel). Contrast creates vibration. Using the white/yellow contrast in this situation actually seems to animate the flame, and the gradient from white to yellow creates a glowing illusion.

The highest chroma of yellow, that is - the richest yellow, is lighter in shade (shade = the lightness or darkness of a color) than the richest of the other colors, like red or blue. It is closest to white, so when placed adjacent to it, it vibrates more than other colors.

Blue vibrates more when it is placed next to a more medium grey, because the shade of the riches blue is darker than the shade of yellow. Notice here how much more it vibrates in the top pair of circles (which are the same shade) than it does on the bottom two (which are darker and lighter in shade). The closer a grey is to the shade of a color, the more it will cause it to vibrate.So yellow, being the color lightest in shade, represents the most vivid, or most chromatic, form a light.

Our sun being a yellow sun, gives off yellow light, when it's not bent towards red by the morning and evening angles as it fights its way through more of our atmosphere at those angles. Adding a touch of yellow to lighter colors warms them up and gives the illusion of sunlight.

Deeper, richer yellows come from a candle flame or campfire. Adding more yellow to lighter colors can enhance the effect in a painting that the environment is fire-lit. Yellow's psychological link to warmth is long engrained in human evolution.

Evolution has also taken advantage of the color yellow in flowers, as they draw the attention of more mobile life forms to gather and spread their pollen. You often see yellow in a flower contrasting with its opposite on the color wheel, purple, to create a 'target' for pollenating creatures.

Flowers being the harbinger of warm weather after a long cold winter have a psychological effect on humans, too, uplifting their spirits and promising longer, brighter, sunnier and warmer days ahead.

Links to Art Lessons and Pshop Tuts

Thought I'd list tutorials that I run across in this blog.

The power of color in direct marketing

30 Photoshop Tutorials

Why is grey depressing and color so revitalizing?

The sun brought our ancient ancestors warmth, spring, relief from the ice age, and life. All plants bow to and face the sun. Each night, we hid in caves or bushes or any form of shelter we could find until the safety of the sun brought light to our world, fending off the nocturnal predators and making it safe to forage again.

It's no wonder early humans worshiped the sun.

The sun was the brightest, most powerful presence in the sky.

And each morning, it's coming was announced with deep violets and purples, bathed in sparkling red, orange, fuchsia and yellow, bringing with it warmth, comfort, and a bounty of food and singing birds.

Unless it rained.

When it rained, our beautiful sun was blocked out, we were cold, wet, and uncomfortable. Life became a chore, hoping to find fire (before we knew how to make fire) or a dry place. We didn't have towels to dry off with. No warm cozy clothes. Animal fur and skins was the best we had. Everything was just plain uncomfortable when the clouds poured rain on everything.

Fog was also uncomfortable, hard to watch out for predators, a harbinger of more rain and damp, cold weather. Even around a warm fire the air would be damp. Our skin was sticky, our hair damp, dirt stuck to us. It was just no fun.

Without the sun to illuminate the colors, everything was dim and muted.

But as soon as the sun begins to shine again, the warmth returns, the flowers open, birds sing, and colors begin to brighten. We dry off, water now becomes a pleasant thing, life emerges and is easy again and we're cozy and dry and fed.

Is it any wonder why grey triggers depression and lack of life? We're conditioned by the weather to react favorably to color, as it always implies abundance of food and warmth and security. When bright color shown, it was a signal to go out and find food while the weather was good. It triggered activity and socialization and living.

One thing about some of Thomas Kinkade's work that is so popular is how he captures that moment just as the sun breaks through the fog -- that moment when discomfort and depression leaves and cheerfulness and bounty trickles in with the promise of happiness and joy. By placing brilliant color adjacent to grey fog, he creates the strongest chromatic contrast you can get. He intensifies the feeling created by the color by making it look even more brilliant next to the grey.

The amount of color and the intensity of color that you use in your paintings has a strong influence on the reactions of your audience. Depending on the mood you want to convey, your control over the amount of color you use can make or break your painting. That's why Gothic styles are so colorless (except maybe red), to create that sense of morbid dread, and Thomas KinKade's invokes such happiness.

Why is the Green Glow so Mysterious and Eerie?

Remember the movie "Alien"?

When I was learning about creating bookcovers, one of the main rules was that green doesn't sell books. Then the movie Alien came out. It's not so much that the color green is eerie --- it's the green 'glow' that we find spooky. That 'otherworldly' luminence eminating from that egg shape drew lots of crowds to the movie theaters, and the rule of 'not using green' to sell a product was thrown out the window.

So why did it work?
Why is a green glow so alien?

Are you thinking "OK, Dale, where do aliens fit in to our evolution? Are you gonna say we were visited by ET's when we lived in caves? or are you gonna tell us ghosts are real?"

Nopey -- sorry. I paint Fantasy and Sci-Fi. It's my business to separate Fantasy from Reality. Not that I don't believe it's possible --- I'm just still waiting on the proof.

But humans are no stranger to green glows -- even though most folks may not be able to imagine where in nature ancient man could have encountered such a strange phenomenon.

Alien as it may seem, we in fact did. I remember walking through the woods in southern Ohio at night and turning around and seeing tiny glowing footprints behind me. I recently wrote a blog in my "Things I Find Interesting" blog about tiny glowing eggs I discovered this summer at Myrtle Beach.

Ya - we're talkin' bioluminescence here. Now we flatlander city dwellers may not have had the eerie experience of encountering these things, but ancient man lived in the woods and on the beach ---- especially the beach! There's a theory out there -- which I strongly support -- that humans got most of their traits from living along the shores.

I mentioned in my "How Cool is Blue?" blog right before this one how humans dwindled down to a few thousand in Africa. In fact, in that same Spencer Wells video I mentioned, while the rest of the world was in an ice age, Africa was drying out - my guess is because so much of the earth's water was locked up in glacial ice.

Exactly what do you think we ate?

Not much left but fish, crabs and mollusks on the continent's shores. That also explains our rapid migration around the world -- first along the southern coast of India and Southeast Asia - as soon as Africa got within range of Saudi Arabia -- then later up along the coast of Europe -- all along following the food -- seafood -- even what we today call "brain food".

Our fur got in the way when we ate up all the shore critters and we had to dive deeper and deeper into the ocean. The deepest swimmers got the best food -- so we shed our fur and 'got naked'. Even the hair on our arms is streamline -- curving back away from our hands so we can spear our arms through the water more efficiently, then spread our webbed hands out into small paddles to 'hold onto' the water and push ourselves ever deeper in pursuit of food while we paddled with misshapen feet, our foot-thumbs pushed up against our other 'toes', that evolved perfectly for efficient beachcombing and swimming. Even our beard-hairs turn streamline on the sides of our cheeks to minimize resistance whan swimming.

All this deep diving increased blood pressure in our heads, expanding our veins in our heads to compensate for the pressure around us, and the exertion of the swim pumped more and more blood and, thus, nutrients, into our brain, nutrients high in vitamins that are good for our brain. It's possible (still waiting on more evidence -- sorry, that's just me) that all this diving and seafood eating is what actually gave us our smarts.

So during these thousands of years of beachcombing and surfing and beach-bumming and acting like pearl-divers, the dawning of our very intelligence that led us eventually to outer space, what did we encounter?

Turns out the little glowing eggs I found at Myrtle Beach are most likely young Comb Jellies --- a bioluminescent critter that looks like a jellyfish -- but harbors no stinging tentacles, so it's not really a jellyfish. But, it's among a wide range of bioluminescent critters that dwell along the coasts of warmer climates --- like Africa, India and Southeast Asia. Though Comb Jellies irridesce (is that a word?) in rainbow colors, most bioluminescent critters, both in the sea, and on land, glow greenish.

There are mushrooms that glow green, too. Foxfire was what was glowing in my footsteps that I mentioned above. Seen at night, it looks like it has some magical powers. To be able to create your own light -- on which humans depended to find food -- like harnessing the power of the full moon, must be a miracle of a more powerful and more advanced being.

So green glowing energy evokes not only an alien quality in your SciFi art, stemming from our odd encounter with bioluminescent sealife in an alien world in which we can't breathe or live, and where we float with no gravity like in outer space, but it also helps create eerie, night-time, booger, ghosts and haints feeling, as magic mushrooms leave ghostly footprints at night in the rustling leaves in fall, perhaps footprints of those gone into the netherworld, that seem to follow you through the woods until you reach the safety and light of your home fire.