Tag: computing

Business decisions

puzzle pieces A recent thread on Ravelry about pattern pricing made me wonder whether I’d ever written here about the decisions I made along the way to opening my pattern store. A little looking says no, I haven’t, so here we are. I think it may be of interest both to people considering buying from me and people considering selling their own patterns. Pricing is at the bottom, since I decided it last, in case you want to just hop straight down there.

Getting Started

Before making my first PDF, I read about page layout and graphic design; The Non-Designer’s Design and Type Books taught me a lot of fundamentals at large and small scales, and various sites online chimed in about grids for page layout, style guides, and branding (I still have yet to crack open Brand Against the Machine, though, and Amazon tells me I bought it two years ago).

As part of branding I chose colors (“Stumpy Green”, a pale blue, and originally “Hugs White” but that was replaced with true white), developed my logo (which took a long time, and then a quick inspiration, and then another long time), and chose fonts: Janda Elegant Handwriting for my logo and Rotis Semi-Serif for my pattern text (you can also see it in the header image on this blog). Overkill perhaps, but I wanted all the pieces in place as though I were a huge company, because then they will all just be there as I proceed.

I also needed an appropriate program. As a former mathematician, I first turned to LaTeX, but I simply couldn’t get it to easily do what I wanted in this case. I like open source as a philosophy and also wanted to minimize my start-up costs, and the combination led me to Scribus, a desktop publishing program. More on all the software I use has already appeared here; I’ll just mention that it took me some time to discover the existence of WooCommerce. I actually found it by reading 1-star reviews of a different WordPress e-commerce plugin, where someone said they wished they could have a do-over and use WooCommerce instead.

Layout and Style

Continue reading Business decisions

Credits

I’m trying to spread out the non-project posts, but it’s time to give some credit to the software that makes all this possible. I’m an open-source kind of gal, but as someone who only barely programs, the contributions I can make are limited. I do hope to eventually create some tutorials, but for now I will settle for proclaiming my use of them to the world.

WordPress is the obvious starting point, a beautiful content management system that is infinitely customizable. My theme is a slight modification of the included theme Twenty Twelve, called ReveDreamsSpecial. It is a child theme, but barely so, since it changes the header but otherwise only changes the CSS, which I could do to Twenty Twelve directly. Should I ever want a dramatically different-looking custom-designed webpage, I could keep WordPress as the basis, because it is built for such flexibility in the presentation of content.

Along with WordPress I use WooCommerce for my shop. Technically this is a plug-in, but it’s so extensive it doesn’t feel like it should have that designation. However, its plug-in status means it integrates seamlessly with WordPress, including in the sidebar and menu contents. There are additional plug-ins for free or pay that extend WooCommerce with various payment gateways, customer interface functionality, ability to sell subscriptions, etc.

In the background I have three programs used for working on images and pdfs. Scribus sees the most use; it is a page layout (desktop publishing) program. I use it to make my pattern pdfs. It allows me to put text boxes and image boxes wherever I want them while maintaining alignment of text baselines and so forth, can input vector graphics, and has (very) basic image editing abilities and shape-drawing options. I can set up a whole template of margins and guidelines, and tweak positions and measurements down to the fourth decimal place in a variety of units of measurement. It can be crabby sometimes, but I love that it does not require Mac’s X11 program to operate.

The remaining two do require X11: Gimp and Inkscape. Gimp is well known photo editing software that I used to clean out the gray behind Stumpy in my header image. I don’t use it too often (typically I am at the depths of the editing I know how to do with iPhoto’s options), but it is my go-to when I want to make a photo collage or similar. My most recently acquired Gimp skill was how to make an animated gif.

Inkscape is a vector graphics program, and in it I made my logo, as well as a graphic of stork-shaped embroidery scissors and some embroidery stitch diagrams. I haven’t quite grasped all the uses of vector graphics, I think, but I feel good having grasped the basics of creating them.

This page would be incomplete if I omitted some non-open source components. I mentioned iPhoto, and I am also a big fan of TextEdit and Preview on my Mac. I must admit I’ve been considering buying Pixelmator to replace both Gimp and Inkscape with a Mac-native program, especially next time I want to make stitch-instruction diagrams. The script letters in my logo are Janda Elegant Handwriting by Kimberly Geswein, and the title and byline text are Rotis Semi-Serif, which is also the font used in my patterns. I’m a fickle web-browser user despite the annoyance involved in switching from one to another, but currently use Firefox.