Creative Soup Trademark Registration

My company Creative Soup finally got the official documents for the Trademarking of the logo. This was a personal milestone for me, so of course I had to forever render it impervious to time and shoot it. Creative Soup is my marketing and design company for small to medium sized businesses. I’ve been running my own company for about seven years now. My mission is to be a one-stop shop for small businesses and their marketing needs. I offer printing, graphic design, web design, photography, trade show management, market strategy, branding, and work flow process design. So far things have been great and my customers love my work and I’ve loved working with all of them.

Creative Soup Trademark Registration

Creative Soup Trademark Registration

Balboa Park bridge highway at night

I finally got out to do some night shooting around town here and I am very happy with what I came up with. I met some other photographers that were able to instruct me on how to capture the best possible image.

I was able to set my shutter speed on my camera to “bulb” settings in order to manually control when the shutter opens and closes. A tripod was used as well as a remote shutter release. The exposure on these pictures ranges from 30 seconds to 3 minutes.
Enjoy and comment!

San Diego Skyline At Night

San Diego Skyline at Night

Airplane taking off from Lineburg Field in San Diego

Nikon D90

I splurged on myself a little this Christmas and got myself a Nikon D90 DLSR camera. I have been using the Canon EOS Digital Rebel for so long that I decided an upgrade was in order. I got the camera yesterday and have been playing around with it learning the controls all day. One of the most exciting things I’m going to be doing is working on some HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. I’ll post up more about it once I’m able to go out and shoot some of my own to share.

Free Galaxy Space Desktop Wallpaper

So I got a little crazy on photoshop tonight and decided to try my hand at a little art piece. I created one of my favorite places…space. I’ve always been fascinated by the big “unknown”. I’ve even got those glow in the dark stars on my ceiling of my bedroom…Tastefully done though ;). This was very fun to make and I hope you enjoy it. It was my first space scene and it was almost therapeutic to make. In this world everything goes where you want it to :). I’ll be making more I’m sure.

I also made this funky little 3D orb. Enjoy!

Free seamless orange shag carpet tile for website backgrounds

So I had some random stock photography sitting around and I decided to teach myself a new tool for making seemless tiles for website backgrounds. I have noticed most of the sites that impress me don’t have typical solid color backgrounds. So I took 4 images that I thought would be fun to see on a site and made them seamless. Feel free to download them for your personal use. If you end up using them on a site, all I ask in return is to let me know! Post a comment here with a link so we can all see how you’ve used it.

Happy designing.

Free seamless cork tile for website backgrounds

mesh

Free corrugated cardboard seamless tile for website backgrounds

www.buythereef.com Buy The Reef website design

Background: I had a website build that a client hired me to do. I was on a tight deadline and the programmer I had lined up hiked up the price on me and really screwed me over. So that brings us to the day I thought I was going to lose my mind because I had a website design finished, cash in hand, an approaching deadline, and no programmer. I contacted no less than 10 boutiques in the States for quotes. I was met with nothing but obstacle after obstacle. The biggest one being a lot of the programmers were asking for more than I even charged my client. It seemed that everyone wanted their piece of the pie and most just wanted the whole pie.

I decided to go to elance.com a freelance website for posting jobs and receiving bids. I posted up my job description and a general idea of my budget and received an overwhelming amount of proposals. Some were easy to weed out as their proposals were either too basic, horribly worded, or too expensive. I found one company that seemed to know exactly what I needed and the price was right, but they were located in Egypt.

I was very nervous and decided to try and raise the contact listed on skype to see how we would communicate. Surprisingly, he spoke perfect English and knew more about the programming I was asking for than I did. I talked with him for about an hour and decided he was the right fit.

I awarded him the project and everything over the next month went so smoothly at times it astounded me at times.

We are now done with the site and the programmer was able to stay exactly to my design from the .psd.

I am glad to report that if you follow your common sense and prepare, outsourcing isn’t something for even a small business owner to shy away from. I was able to keep on my deadline, stay within budget, and create the best work I’ve done thus far. Check it out for yourself.

www.buythereef.com

I’m working on a large e-commerce website build for two weeks now. I thought I was set to move forward with the project and I hit a huge brick wall. This site was one of the biggest builds to date for Creative Soup, so I took what I normally paid a programmer and multiplied it by 4 to give an estimate. I got the business and went to the most professional looking programming firm in town to discuss the details. They verbally agreed that working within my budget shouldn’t be an issue. So I designed my site according to their shopping cart. The day I sent over the design my account rep writes me back that they want DOUBLE what they had originally talked about!! WHY is it that when it comes to money people lose all common sense? They want to charge me for just programming MORE than I’ve charged customers for entire site builds and then some. Needless to say I wrote back telling them that they were indeed crazy, and now I’m on the frantic hunt for a new programmer.

I hope to find one this weekend, but I am going to let the client know up front about the situation. That way if there happens to be a delay in the site launch he can at least have expected it a month in advance.

Lesson Applied: Be 100% up front and honest with the client

Lesson Learned: Always have a back up plan, no matter how much money you feel you’re throwing at someone to do things right.

Creative Soup - Marketing and Graphic Design for Small Business

What is Creative Soup you ask? It’s my marketing and design company for small business. A little background how it came about…

When I was 18 living in Tampa, FL I started my own company doing graphic designs and logos for companies. The business evolved over the course of my undergraduate degree and my MBA into a full service marketing company. I graduated through an interesting chain of events at the age of 21 with my Master’s in Business Administration and almost four years of business ownership under my belt.

At this point, I decided to leave everything I had built in Tampa for the sunny shores of San Diego, California. I felt that since most of my skills in design and management were self taught, I’d take this opportunity to submit to someone with more experience and be mentored in a larger company. I eventually accepted a position as Marketing Manager at InfoSonics Corp. (NASDAQ: IFON). I was a one-woman marketing department. Concept, design, roll-out, evaluation all under my task list. Ironically I started working for someone else to learn how things are done in the big bad world, and I end up running the show single handed again.

After almost two years of the typical 50+ hour work weeks, I decided that while I was afforded with great opportunities and challenges in a large company, I really missed interacting with the “little guys”. I worked on projects saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, and no one really batted an eye. I missed getting in the trenches with the small business owner and creating something for them that they could have only dreamed of.

I started working for myself again in June of 2008 and I haven’t been happier with any decision I’ve made in my entire life. Giving up the steady upper-management paycheck was terrifying, but my quality of life has improved so much.

My advice to anyone unsure about what career path to chose is this: Find something that makes you happy, and figure out a way to charge money for it.