Fiber Co-op

I'm busy busy busy trying to get things done in the ridiculously sweltering heat, but I'm very excited about something so I'm dashing in to post. What is it, you say? It's The Fiber Cooperative, which will go live in July.

Basically, it's like an online fiber festival, with yarnies and other such folk presenting their "vendor tables" with the best and most representative of their wares each month. It's not a shopping venue, but rather a browsing venue. If you see something you like or are intrigued by the shop, you can click through to the shop and browse everything the shop has to offer.

It should be fun and informative and full of eye candy all collected handily into one location.

It actually reminds me a little bit of the Etsy Promotional Tool someone posted about on the Etsy forums last week, but on a much grander scale.  The EPT is a simple tool that collects the 5 most recent items in one's shop (or the top of one's 'featured' list) and displays them linked back to the shop.  It's very new and very simple as of yet, but it's fun to scroll through.

And in something completely unrelated, I leave you with a YouTube video gleaned from my cousin. Lenny Kravitz crashed a choir performing one of his songs (none of them minded!). It's a delight. Can you imagine being one of those kids? Event of a lifetime, truly.  It goes a little out of sync by the end, but it's still eminently watchable.


Now I've got to go back to editing yarn pictures. I'm planning a big shop update starting tomorrow since it's too hot to dye. Mostly Jackalope (merino/nylon sock yarn) and March Hare (light worsted superwash merino).

Graphic ponderings

I spent today making ads for the widgets.

Ad making is a weird thing. I have no training in graphic design and no background in marketing. But from experience both as a consumer and as a person who used to watch people debate the merits of assorted publications and ad copy, a few basic things should apply:

1. It should be clear - who and what's being advertised, where to get it, etc. If a person seeing an ad can't easily answer "who, what, where", then something is likely wrong. 
2. It should be clean - clutter obscures the information, and the key to an ad is getting across a specific bit of information to entice people into clicking through to the shop. This means text should be as succinct as possible and images shouldn't obscure what there is of text.  And images should be clearly comprehensible when it's tiny because dude, I'm not getting any younger and my screen resolution is set pretty fine.  Folded into this is the fact that the text should be proof read and free of errors, and the images should be free of random artifacts and obvious cut and paste markers. 
3. It should be attractive for the target audience - which is to say if you're advertising to people who are interested in fake blood and gore, then fake blood and gore is the way to go. I'm not, so no big, splashy zombie parties in my ads.  I'm selling yarn and stitch markers, so my ads figure yarn or stitch markers, and I try to go for pictures that will tantalize.
4. It should make sense - And by this I mean all aspects of it. There's got to be some sort of internal cohesion, and random things just popping up don't "make sense". 

These are the basics, and it's almost all based on aesthetics which are totally subjective.  I was making ads for Ravelry, so I'm really familiar with my competition's ads.  Tonight, I realized I got bit with the minimalist bug.  To whit, this is what I ended up with for the dalmatian jasper ad:
   ETA: 
 (eta: the spacing was bothering me, and the smallness of the foregrounded widget.)

Now, it's kind of chilly in color which is potentially off putting, but I decided to keep it because it's a counterpoint to the warmth of the tiger eye ad. But look at all that white space!  I think I could have tweaked the spacing of the words a little bit more to make the white space a little more emphatic, but I'm happy enough with it as it is.