I'm Ginny Shope Fowler, a freelancer providing agencies and businesses with quality print, web and identity design.

Awhile back I came up with a helter-skelter way to show a list of tags for the NextGen Gallery, a feature that is oddly not built in. Then they went and updated the plugin, and it stopped working.

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I know, I know…you already have an inbox overflowing with eBay, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, and Facebook messages. So why should you register to get emails from me? Couple of reasons.

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I’m on the hunt for a plugin that will allow existing clients to request and approve a job quote. If there’s a support ticket plugin out there, it could probably be modified to suit my needs. Read the rest of this entry »

Ordinarily my thumbs are black as coal. For example, last summer I bought a beautiful palm and it lived happily for months in my den. And then we went on vacation for a week, and my palm died a slow, parched death.

Fortunately, I now have a Plant Nanny.

I got mine at Smith & Hawken. The best part is that you use a wine bottle to dispense the water…as though you need another excuse to down a bottle of wine.

For me at least, logo design is one of the most time and thought-intensive things I do. I’ve got to represent an organization with one mark that is both visually strong and technically flexible, as well as sell the client on the rationale.  This article on Freelance Switch is a great look into how a logo is designed, especially if you’re the client. My process is extremely similar, including the part about how I usually start off with WAY more logos than the client actually sees. The thing is, just because there are hundreds of variations I COULD create for a company, they’re not all going to be the best. My job is to weed out the weaklings and give the client several strong options to choose from. If you’ve ever wondered why a professional, unique logo design costs what it does, here’s your answer.

A few pics from the nursery. I’m trying to keep things relatively spare at the moment because I know once there’s actually a kid in there, the toys and colors and craziness will get overwhelming.

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Surely someone I know could manufacture these. I’ve been looking for something to hang in my hallway, and a series of green plants would be very cool. Of course, I’d have to learn how to keep them alive.

In honor of the new season of 24, I give you Random Jack Bauer Facts. My favorite so far is: My husband doesn’t wish he was Jack Bauer. He wishes I was Jack Bauer.

Have I mentioned that designing for myself is stressful? Well I’m having a kid sometime in the next month, and people keep asking me if I’ve picked out birth announcements. The first level of difficulty is that we don’t know what flavor Cletus the Fetus is going to be, so I can’t really make a final decision yet.

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Some new photos are up on Flickr from our new Sony DSLR A300. So far I’m loving the camera, although my hatred of the flash and my husband’s tendency to steal the tripod mean lots of grainy photos.

I also feel like I’m not very good at getting things focused correctly. If you’ve got suggestions on how to improve on that or retouching tips, they’re more than welcome.

Great article at Design Observer about what happens to creative business during a recession, and what you can do about it. As a freelancer with very little overhead I’ve been fortunate so far; but there’s no telling what ‘09 will bring.

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via Freelance Switch

Recently I spent a week working from the beach. There were a few reasons for this; the two biggest were that I was offered a cheap trip, and I’ve been in the middle of a huge project for weeks and needed the change of scenery.

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I noticed today for the second time since the relaunch that my site was loading under the default WordPress theme, and nothing worked. My first thought was that it’s a bug; my second was that someone was hacking it just to annoy me.

But then a little Google informed me that this guy had the same problem I did, and figured it out over a year ago. If you have this problem, here’s the solution.

I spent last week working from a beach house on Dauphin Island. My family had originally planned a beach trip back in September, but it was postponed by Gustav. So instead we had a beach Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, the rescheduled trip was a terrible time to take vacation – the week before the actual Thanksgiving holiday, when everybody would be off, and right in the middle of a huge project. So instead of taking off, I just took work with me. The beach house had wireless internet as a feature, so I was counting on everything running smoothly.

And…it did. And as soon as I’m caught up on everything that needs to be done today, I’ll do a real post about it.

It has been a hell of a week. I’m working on one of those complicated projects that takes as much time to wrap your head around as it does to actually design the pieces. It will be exciting when it’s finished though.

Just now, on the radio, I heard a guy talking about Charles M. Schwab. Not the investment guy; the first president of U.S. Steel in the early 1900s. He  Apparently he was a superb businessman with a wild streak and a willingness to take risks.

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Disclaimer: I am not a programmer. I know just enough about coding to get things to work, but not enough to make it pretty or even usually be able to explain it to someone else. However, I thought this might be helpful.

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I am my own worst client. I’m an indecisive, know-it-all procrastinator. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the choices when you have no one to please but yourself. So designing, or in this case redesigning, a website is an arduous process. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a kid, I had a theory that you could make more money by selling pencils for $.75 apiece than for $1.00, because more people would be attracted to the lower price and you’d sell more pencils.

Looks like I was right.
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I got to Mad Men late—missed the first season completely. AMC is one of my not my usual Sunday-night-channel-surfing stops. But after the Emmy’s, you couldn’t spit without hitting a blog post about the great period advertising drama.

At first I was unimpressed. Maybe because there was so much hype; but also, all the characters just seemed so stereotyped. Sexist men who cheated on their wives with anything that breathed. Flighty secretaries who seem perfectly happy to file their nails and nail their bosses. Everyone drinking and chain smoking because life is just so hard.

But it seemed like everybody loved this damn show. (Although I searched diligently for a review by a female, and came up empty.) So I kept watching. And after 12 of 13 episodes this season, I’m not so frustrated by the sexism as I am plain bored. Read the rest of this entry »