Jun 29, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Baking
2 Comments
A friend of mine had an approaching birthday and her daily Cupcake of the Day posts on Facebook inspired me to go out of my normal comfort zone when it comes to baking. She posted a recipe from Shape.com for Lemon Lavender cupcakes. I’ve heard of lavender used in savory dishes, but never in sweets so I was intrigued to give the recipe a try.
These were by far the easiest scratch-baked cupcakes that I’ve ever made. With minimal ingredients and simple preparation it took minutes to mix up a batch. The hardest part was finding the dried lavender buds called for in the recipe. All of my local chain grocery stores did not carry this ingredient, but a local natural food store carried it in bulk and also gave some very good tips on the using lavender buds. The recipe calls for 1 and a half teaspoons of dried lavender buds, but according to my friendly natural food store clerk that amount would just about overpower any other flavor in the cupcake. I used a healthy pinch for an entire batch plus a few buds on top of each cupcake for garnish. There was just enough of the lavender flavor in each cupcake without the flavor completely overpowering the fresh lemon taste. And most importantly, the cupcakes were a hit with the birthday girl!
The recipe can be found here at Shape.com.
May 30, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Freelance
No Comments
Be sure if you live in the NEPA area to pick up your copy of the Electric City and the Diamond City. Covers designed by myself with some great photographs by Tom Bonomo.
Feb 07, 2010 at 6:32 pm
Design
No Comments
I attended a Home Showcase expo with my sister this weekend to get ideas for her new house. While the show was a bit of a wash for home ideas, the best item I found was this very creative business card for a local builder. It’s the standard size of a business card, 3.5″ x 2″, but it’s 1/8″ thick. It’s made of a very lightweight wood, making it nearly the same weight as a traditional business card printed on heavy stock. The information is done in, what I can assume, a wood burning engraving technique and it’s just as legible as type on paper.
Not only is this a very creative business card, it’s also highly appropriate for the business. There were also traditional, paper business cards available from the same business but the wooden ones were the definite attention getter.
Feb 01, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Design, Freelance
No Comments
Late last year I began working on a freelance project for a small, local, floral design company. I believe that a website is the ultimate launching pad for revenue. For a small amount of money you can have your own web address that can be printed on anything and distributed to prospective customers. There are endless possibilities. In the digital world we live in today everyone does research online before doing business with companies. A website is an invaluable tool for small business and I was very happy when asked by the owner of Four Leaf Clover Designs to create their first website.
I began the process by designing a logo, as the company is in the beginning stages of defining it’s identity. The logo went through approximately four different phases before the below logo was approved and finalized. The final logo is a good blend of what the client requested and what I was hoping to achieve.
Once the logo was defined I began researching other floral companies to see what the trends in web design are in that market. I had a pretty solid idea of a layout mapped out in my mind prior to researching, but looking at other floral design and wedding design websites helped me to get a handle on what sort of information I needed to request from the client in order to create this product. I requested the information I needed and learned that what makes Four Leaf Clover Designs unique is that they don’t do the standard ‘package deals’ that I came across at most other floral design and wedding companies. They tailor everything to the client’s needs. This unique and intimate quality needed to be well defined in the website. There would be none of the standard corporate business website design used here.
The design of the website went through two revisions before the above, final, version was approved. Originally I had a more playful color scheme that used pinks, oranges and greens to balance out the orange and green of the logo. The client requested a simpler scheme of just orange and green. The major challenge, for me, was integrating a WordPress photo gallery that could be easily updated and maintained by the business owner.
I talked in my previous post about how I haven’t worked with WordPress in a long time. I knew what I wanted to do would be simple and I gave creating a customized template a try. I used WPDesigner.com’s tutorial So you want to create WordPress themes huh? to create the custom template used on the gallery page. It was very easy. My knowledge of HTML was big in aiding me create the template. I also learned a lot about PHP and I hope to integrate more of it in my future web projects. I used the NextGEN Gallery plugin to organize and maintain the actual images within the gallery. It’s a simple plugin that gives a professional look to image galleries. There are a few kinks to work out, such as tagging photos and making them completely searchable, but with the amount of images in each gallery right now that isn’t posing a problem.
Overall I am very pleased with the outcome of this project. I believe it is a good representation of the clean, simple, user-friendly design that I love creating. To visit the website and to get more information about Four Leaf Clover Designs visit FourLeafCloverDesigns.com.
Jan 25, 2010 at 7:59 am
Design
No Comments
Almost ten years ago I started developing websites. It began with free services and quickly escalated to owning my own personal space. I taught myself HTML and CSS and used publishing tools like Blogger and WordPress as my CMS. The content ranged from blogging to fan sites about my teenaged obsessions.
When I enrolled in college my focus changed to print design and the front-end of web design. In the four to five years that I wasn’t developing websites on a regular basis I missed a lot. Most of the standard HTML practices I used were now simplified by CSS, but that wasn’t the difficult part. WordPress, the publishing platform I used most often, had completely evolved. It went from being simple HTML tags you could integrate into templates to coding languages that are foreign to me.
I began refreshing my knowledge by learning new CSS techniques and now I’m moving on and tackling WordPress. The first step was setting up this blog using a pre-designed template and learning to use the dashboard. Now I am ready to move on to the next step, developing my own theme. I started by installing MAMP on my Mac to allow a local install of WordPress. Now I’m following WPDesigner.com’s tutorial So you want to create WordPress themes huh? The theme I’m hoping to develop is rather simple and I’m hoping the process will be the same. Only time will tell.