Love My Job
It doesn’t get any better than this. Right now I’m sitting, enjoying a cup of green tea and listening to some beautiful lullaby music by an artist that I am creating a CD jewel case design for.
A lot of the time I prefer designing for the web because I get such immediate results. But I have been doing a lot of websites lately, so I am welcoming a break in that by doing some print design again. It reminds me of just how much I love laying out objects, art, text and forming a color palette.
Also, I love doing CD’s because they are so personal to the client. It’s not just about a business, but it is someone’s passion, creativity in music that I get to try to translate into a package. It’s really fulfilling.
Stay tuned to see the finished piece!
Camillebook
I’m BACK after a long time away from the blogs. I want to blame Facebook for that. I just discovered it a few months ago and tend to go there when I have a few minutes.
Oh, and I did just have a baby 7 weeks ago! Pretty good excuse, eh?
Anyway, I have actually been inspired by Facebook to begin blogging again. I just love how easy Expression Engine makes it for me to form new blogs and to publish to my existing ones any time I want.
I’ve also just upgraded my site from the Expression Engine trial to a full version (like the kind I’ve been building on everyone else’s site!), and I’m inspired to do some things with my site that I haven’t been able to do, like possibly create an email list and create some fun regular emails to send out to clients. That’s my current vision, and one I hope to fulfill in the coming months.
But for now, back to work on a client’s site that I created years ago, and I am now upgrading to a full version of Expression Engine, so that they will be able to manage their own site and expand their capabilities. Fun!
How I Fell in Love with Expression Engine
You may be as alarmed as I was to discover that I get really excited about a content management system. But I do. There are some open source CMS’s that I’ve tried. But the one that I was originally introduced to by fellow business owner Alison Rodriguez of Wedding Chicago, who uses it from the client side to update her site and write her blogs, is Expression Engine. I’ve come to understand that the inexpensive fee that is charged for the lifetime use of an install of EE is WELL worth it. They system is so clean, well monitored, updated and user friendly – and the support of the administrators and community is amazing.
I spent about a 1/2 year (and part of that time nauseated in bed from pregnancy!) training myself by building a site in Expression Engine, and spent a good deal of my time scratching my head and reading the how-to and technical forums, but each time I learned something new I was like a kid in the candy store. I was just so excited at what I could achieve. I would literally jump up and down and clap hands – real dorky, I know – and exclaim that the makers of EE gave me another reason to love my job as a web designer and developer.
So, this is the reason I’ve created a blog for EE. Aside from just gushing about it from time to time, I decided to make a dedicated place to document some of the finer points of the system.