Posts Tagged ‘fun websites’

1. Send people articles/stories/images/websites that you find that make you think of them. Make sure to tell them why you sent the article. Send quality articles whenever you find them. If you don’t have email addresses, send it through social networking sites. Repeat as often as possible.
2. Wait
3. Receive articles/stories/images/websites that other people find that make them think of you. Use those new links/ideas for your motivation.

So, Katie, thank you for being one of the great ‘sharing’ people that I talk with. And thank you for sending me oneword.com, I absolutely love it.

What unique ways do you find creative motivation?

Remember Rebus Puzzles from elementary school? They were a great way to get your brain going and your mind creative…and still are!

Below are 10 rebus puzzles.

Put your answers to all 10 in the comments. Everyone who gets all them right will be entered for a chance to win a free Twitter Background designed by me (or service credit with Wright Creativity of equal value)!

I will choose the winner on Thursday, July 30th at noon, so make sure to get your answers in before then.

Good Luck!

Honest scrap award? Huh? When Katie Favazza gave me the award, I was a little confused. The name doesn’t really tell you much. But, after tracking links back through over 50 blogs…I finally found an explanation: “This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”

So..thanks Katie!!

Now, onto the rules of how it works:

1. Thank the person who “nominated” you and link back. {Check}

2. “Nominate” seven more bloggers to spread the happiness.{see list below}
   1. Brad Marley
   2. Suzanne Broughton
   3. Jon Buscall
   4. Parks Design
   5. Kyle Reddoch
   6. Kneale Mann
   7. Angry Julie Monday

Monday is always a rough day for creativity – you’re trying to get caught up from the weekend, attack your inbox, check twitter/FB/LinkedIn, plan out the week, etc. But, creativity doesn’t take much to get jump started if you know where to look. I always spend at least 30 minutes every Monday browsing a few of my favorite photography/graphic design sites, and stumbling for a few new ones.

Today, I found 3 new images that were worth sharing:

from Sipper Photography, featured on OC Daily Photo

Photo by Suz Broughton

Created by Parks Design, Josh Durham, entirely in Illustrator

What do you do to jump start your creativity on Monday? Do you have any favorite sites that you visit?

1. Twouble with Twitterers: yeah, ok, so I may be this bad sometimes…

2. Redesigning the Stop sign – if a marketing team was in charge of designing a stop sign…definitely true for some of the large agencies.

3. Font Fight – for the Web Geek in all of us (first shown to me by Creative Whirlwind)

4. Hulu and Dennis Leary – bliggity blogs, facey spacey’s, tweety pages…yeah, I couldn’t help but laugh

5. Your printer is a brat – for all of us who have dealt with the evilness of a printer…

I love reading blogs, almost as much as I love writing them. Over the last few weeks, I have read some exceptionally great ones. Not a single one came from a social media expert or marketing guru, they all came from people just like you an me, those who are passionate about what they do and it shows in their writing. Here are my favorite 8 blog posts from the last few weeks.

1. The secret password to customer service – Kyle Reddoch, The Everyday Web Expert

2. One of the best ads of all time – David MacGregor – Thought Spurs

3. 10 easiest ways to improve SEO – Brian Parks – Parks Design

4. Do they know what you want – Kneale Mann – One Mann’s Opinion

5. Creativity Tips: Use blue – Creative Instigation

6. Keeping up with social media upkeep – Brad Marley

7. Nail Salon – Angry Julie Monday

8. The Road to Hope – Suzanne Broughton – Alive in Wonderland

Make sure to share your thoughts with the authors – help build the conversation!

Me and Suzanne(emphasisisallmine.com)

Last night, I attended the first blogcrush meetup at the Veggie Grill in the Irvine Spectrum. First, the food was a huge shock. For those of you who have never heard of it/been there, it is a Vegan restaurant. I am not a vegan, far from it, in fact I wouldn’t survive if I could never have meat again. But, their food was pretty darn good! I would definitely recommend them to anyone – whether Vegan or not!

So, onto the event itself. It was absolutely wonderful! I got to meet some incredible women and learned a lot about the world of OC Blogging. I got to see my favorite photographers, Dana and Jeff Sipper: http://sipperphotography.com/blog/, who were the geniuses behind my photo shoot! I finally got to meet 2 Suzanne’s I have been conversing with through blogging and twitter for over 4 months, Suzanne of Twenty Four at Heart: http://www.TwentyFourAtHeart.com and the host, Suzanne of Alive in Wonderland: http://www.emphasisallmine.com. Both women were even sweeter in person than they are in their blogging/tweeting and I was so happy to finally get to talk with them. I think I convinced Suzanne/Twentyfouratheart to finally switch to wordpress from typepad…if you talk with her, help me out, she’s worried about transferring all the old blod posts. The group mingled for a while, and I got to chat briefly with Kara of Eli’s Lids: http://elislids.blogspot.com/ and Debbie from Peace Love and Momminess: http://peaceloveandmomminess.com. Both ladies are extremely interesting, and had great thoughts on where blogging was going, and why it is such an important creative outlet. When we finally stopped chatting, and decided to grab food, I was seated at a table with:

1. Julie of Angry Julie Monday: http://www.angryjuliemonday.com/
2. Marcy of The Glamorous Life: http://marcywrites.com/
3. Kristin from Meringue Bake Shop: http://meringuebakeshop.blogspot.com/
4. Stacey of OC Food Mommy: http://ocfoodiemommy.blogspot.com/
5. Roxanne of Me and My Monster: http://themomblog.freedomblogging.com/author/rhack/
6. Jeff from OC Metroblogging: http://oc.metblogs.com/
7. Martha from Melody Gibbons: http://melodygibbons.com/
8. Lorna from Califlorna: http://califlorna.com/

Our table was the best in the house (sorry to the other one, but we were)! We covered everything from what got us into blogging and what we feel creativity means to our favorite shows on TV (Criminal Minds, Chuck, House, American Idol, Lost, just to name a few). I am always impressed at the creativity of the individual and learned a lot from listening to this group talk about their lives, their blogging struggles and their experiences. Who knows, some of those tips/questions/concerns may show up in another post

Anyway, I just wanted to send a special thanks to a great group of people that are all worth checking out!

I have been following Ori (@couchsurfingori) for awhile on twitter and then we connected through our blogs. I thought his stories and his travels were unbelievable interesting, and very creative (plus, he is pretty hysterical!). I also thought my readers would love to hear about what he is doing and why. So, a few days ago, I asked if he would guest post about his experiences traveling the country on couches. After we chatted on the phone, he decided to share via video (and has required that I create a video soon too, watch the 12 minutes mark,…argh!). The video is long, but well worth the watch. And not just because he created it for me.

But most importantly – watch this video and think about what it can teach you, or what you can learn from it. For me, it has given me a lot of motivation to keep doing my freelance work, because I love it and want to!

Anyway, here is Ori’s story:

*favorite moments are at .33 seconds (really Ori? A tiger? lol), 6.22 minutes (answering the phone? Well…if it leads to another amazing story, why not!) and lastly, 10.30 minutes (because not everything is hunky-dory, you’ve gotta have the bad too.)

And hopefully next time he is in Southern Cali, he can surf my couch!

For the longest time, I never had an image show up when I was posting comments…even on my own blog! Finally, I did some simple investigating and found gravatar.com. According to their site:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

Honestly, it took 5 minutes to sign up with my email address and the image that I wanted, and poof, within about 30 minutes, all my icky grey avatars turned into pictures of me!

Do you have a gravatar? You should!

I love color. I love creating unique color schemes. And I love finding them in random places. I often use adboe’s Kuler when I am stuck on a scheme for a design, but I get bored with it fairly easily. A lot of times, I wish I could take a picture and just pull some true colors out of it…now I can! Using stumbleupon and the tag ‘web development’ I came across a great new tool: Colr.org. You can upload any picture you want, let it choose a random flickr image, or have it pull colors from a website. You can click on spots on the picture, and it will pull the true color out to help you create a theme. For example, I pulled in the background image from my website so that I could grab some colors. Once I did that, I can either click ‘pull scheme from website’ or I can mouse over the image and click any of the color boxes for a true color. Here is what mine looked like while working on it:

Try it out, upload a picture and have fun, you never know what color schemes will come out! (and if you create something amazing, please share it!)