Graphic Design

To fill my shop, or not to fill my shop

I’ve had an Etsy shop (spoiler alert, it’s empty) for a while now that has changed as my interests have morphed. When I was in college, I was into making jewelry, so I started an online store to sell my jewelry and take custom orders (it wasn’t through Etsy, but the site no longer exists anyway). Now that I have a house and am far more interested in home improvement projects and other sorts of crafts, I rarely make jewelry. So when my jewelry listing expired, I didn’t renew them.

Nowadays, my interests fall under design: interior design/decorating and graphic design. It’s actually a little surprising to me that I was ever super into making jewelry since I wear almost none myself… but I digress. I do a good deal of graphic design at work and just got a drawing tablet from my hubby for Christmas that I’m pretty excited to learn how to use. So now I am toying the idea of filling my Etsy shop with some of the prints I’ve designed. I even went so far as to create a bunch of prints last year that I planned on listing. BUT, I’m super indecisive — or am I? … I can’t decide — and I can’t decide if it would be better to sell my prints as a PDF that a buyer could download and print on their own, or have them printed out and mail them to customers.

That’s my dilemma. There are pros and cons to each, but I welcome any thoughts! Do you own a shop where you sell prints? Do you sell them electronically or physical copies? If you are interested in buying a print (not necessarily from me — from anyone!), would you prefer they mail you one and you pay more, or to get the file and print it yourself?

OK, enough of me thinking out loud/in writing. Here’s are a few of the prints I created last year. I think they’d be adorable in a nursery. I can customize the background colors and swap out the animal name with a baby’s name.

The fox is my favorite.

Fox_asmithofalltrades

Bear_asmithofalltrades

Trex_asmithofalltrades

I really love this little whale, too!

Whale_asmithofalltrades

I’m excited to start using my drawing tablet to create even more fun prints. I hear it takes a long time to get used to it, but I’m up for the challenge.

 

Graphic Design, Life

Happy whales

Disclaimer: I should start this post by saying I caught some sort of head cold this past weekend and am not 100% with it right now. Hence my goofy post about whales.

ANYWAY…

OK, is this not the cutest thing ever!? If I ever get rich enough to own a beach house, this is the first thing I’m buying for every single room. 

This adorable tissue box holder is from Etsy and comes in so many colors!! I’m seriously geeking out over them right now.

They just look SO happy!

I don’t even remember how I stumbled upon this creation, but I was inspired by the smiley whale tissue holder. Funny what you can replicate when you think it’s adorable and when you are cracked out on DayQuil and allergy medicine.

Bahaha. So funny. When I have my beach house, this will be framed right above the tissue holder. Love.

Side note: According to my coworker, the whale tissue holder is probably inspired from the text message whale. I also think this is hilarious.

On a serious note, if you are like me and are super interested in graphic design, I definitely recommend playing around with the Adobe programs whenever you can. Every time I use them I learn something new. In fact, I just figured out how to make a triangle {Object > Convert Shape > Triangle}! Sounds easy… but I didn’t know how to do it as one set shape, so I used to just draw the three lines and group them as an object {Object > Group}. Life in InDesign has officially been simplified.

I’ve also been trying to learn more Photoshop and Illustrator. In fact, I am taking a two-day course on Illustrator at the beginning of May! I am really excited and have been teaching myself parts of the program here and there. It will be really nice to have formal training on it. I’ll have to let you all know how it goes.

Last random thing — Happy birthday, Phillip!