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

Having a baby a little over a year ago had a certain effect on my work life: it got cut in half. Not the amount of work I had available, mind you, but the amount of time I had to devote to it.

Obviously I wouldn’t trade my son for anything in the world. He’s a rockstar. And I’m lucky enough to be able to do what I do from home, which means that I get to spend plenty of time with him. But managing work and being a mom is by far the toughest hurdle I’ve had to overcome in my life. Granted, it’s not hurdled yet, but I’m making headway. So I thought I’d share some of the decisions I’ve made that are making it possible. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday, February 10

“Valentine’s Day is Sunday. That means tomorrow is the kiddo’s last school day before VD. Wonder if I should still try to make cookies like I’d thought about earlier in the week? What are the odds I can get away putting it off until next Tuesday AFTER the official day? Probably not. Well I’ll just skip it this year and worry about it next year. One year olds won’t notice anyway.”

Read the rest of this entry »

I met the president of my husband’s company today. She’s about five feet tall, maybe 110 soaking wet. And in five minutes I was fascinated with her. Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve decided to choose a new name for my business. Why? Because I’ve never been in love with soulrinse. It was chosen haphazardly, back when my portfolio consisted of design AND art. The soulrinse name refers more to the art side than the design. Read the rest of this entry »

Ten years ago I was in art school at Auburn and working as a staff designer at the alumni magazine. I would have been a sophomore, taking figure drawing (I loved that class) and looking forward to drink specials on Wednesday nights.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using the Shopp plugin for Wordpress on a site I’m developing. There are a lot of great things about Shopp; I’m planning a post in the coming weeks comparing Shopp and WP-ecommerce.

The latest problem I’ve been working out is how to add custom form fields for each product. Rickrackbaby.com offers custom monogramming, so I need a place for visitors to type in their custom text. To make it trickier, I actually need two custom fields for each product.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I had the chance to speak to 6-8th graders at Prince of Peace in Hoover about how I use math in my job. One of my great friends is the math teacher, and has had several speakers over the course of the semester. She was particularly interested in showing the kids that even creative careers involve math on a daily basis.

So, inspired by Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation I put together this little group of slides. If you haven’t seen the video of that presentation it is very much worth a watch. At any rate, the final product has little in common with Mr. Hardt’s presentation, but it was fun to throw together at midnight the night before and the kids got a kick out of it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve been getting annoyed with my email clients. For one reason or another, none seem to perfectly fit the bill. Even Gmail has it’s issues. So when I ran across Threadsy I was interested. Billed as a way to “pull yourself together,” Threadsy aggregates all of your email accounts plus Facebook and Twitter in one place.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Spool over at Johnny Holland Magazine has an article out this week about why making design recommendations is a bad thing. It’s true that critiquing a client’s existing materials, be it print or web, is a touchy situation. I for one am slow to judge another designer’s work. For all I know, he could be dealing with an owner telling him he MUST use purple if he wants to keep his job. Sometimes you do what you gotta do.

But when someone asks your expert opinion, you gotta say something, right?

Jared suggests a different approach.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is it too late for ‘09 lists? Yes? Well, tough noogies.

Here are some resources that became indispensable to me over the last year. Not necessarily all design related, and not necessarily new in the grand scheme. But things I have come to depend on in my quest to create badassedry.

Read the rest of this entry »

Man, I have been trying to figure this out for ages and stumbled across it tonight.

When saving for web, I’ve always had trouble with my images being lighter and more washed out once saved than they are in Photoshop. Well here’s the solution:

View > Proof Setup > Macintosh RGB

Simple, right? This means you’ll actually viewing your files in RGB originally, so no color variation when you save them as such.

Rock on with your web designing self.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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 »