Meet Seymour Sea Dragon and Santiago Sea Turtle! You can see Santiago brightly swimming around town on the 3rd t-shirt illustration in the San Diego Blood Bank's 70th anniversary series. After the Dulce, Diego and Duke Dolphin "Celebrated the Past" and Octavia Octopus "Embraced the Present", we needed a cheerful representative to "Improve the Future". Sea Dragons are amazing creatures that have a cool connection to San Diego. While they are native only to Australian waters, our own Birch Aquarium has a world-renown sea dragon breeding program and from the first time I saw them there, I was mesmerized. Although I had already started a sea turtle design, when Michael at the Blood Bank suggested a sea dragon, I was hooked. So how did the third t-shirt design turn out to be Santiago the Sea Turtle then? And where is Seymour now?

For my second San Diego Blood Bank t-shirt illustration I was tasked with creating a fun new design that would carry on the local sea life theme while communicating the second part of the campaign slogan of "Celebrating the Past, Embracing the Present and Improving Life Tomorrow". Who would be better at "embracing the present" than an octopus?!? Whereas the dolphins (our first design) had retro styling to reference the past, we wanted a contemporary look for this one. Armed (yuk yuk!) with these concepts and inspired by action sports logos and my love of cephalopods,  I set to work, however, it took a bit of Disney magic to bring it all together. 

​What is RGB and why does it matter? Why is there a big blank spot on your site where you uploaded that TIF image? In this episode, we’ll do a deep dive into color spaces and look at how our image formats are influenced by our eyeballs, LED displays and even the sun itself. I’ll also provide some easy examples of what to use where and tips for getting the best results. 

Say you want to add a photo to your blog as a thumbnail graphic. You snap a cool photo, pop it in and WHOA, it’s gigantic. Plus, it’s taking forever to load. Wouldn’t it be great to know how big to make the photo in the first place? In this 1 minute episode,  I'll show you three easy ways to determine how large an image should be and give you some handy image size examples. 

Content marketing is a fancy term for promoting yourself online by offering useful material. It's successful because it works on the power of attraction instead of distraction. In the same way we skip commercials, it's easy to tune out cheesy stuff online. Instead, we want to put out appealing, relevant content. Simple! Or is it? Do you have a hard time seeing your business through the eyes of an outsider? What may be an everyday, mundane thing to you (ho hum, here I am meeting with the wine rep again) might be wonderfully exotic to a new client (the handsome Italian wine rep - are you kidding me?!). With the goal of harvesting cool content for your social media marketing, here are 15 social media ideas that come out of the everyday things you probably already do. 

The best way to make the most of your online marketing channels - whether it's your website, blog, email newsletter or social media feed - is to develop a habit of keeping them fresh. For small businesses and nonprofits though, this can be a real challenge. As small business owners, we wear a lot of hats and marketing often ends up on a back burner. To remedy this, consider scheduling in a 7 step monthly update. Here’s a step-by-step guide to doing your first one and setting it up as an easy task each month.  

It's not as if there are a zillion more of those suddenly. You're noticing them because the car caught your interest. It's been lifted out of the selective blindness that keeps us from being distracted by daily life's irrelevant details. So let's put that to work. Here are 3 very simple things that I do with my website clients to help them regain the precious skill of childlike focus.