Have I mentioned lately how much I love Shopify? As a shop owner, web designer and coder, they just keep geting more and more awesome. Two new features have been launched recently that should make things easier for some of you. First up, a mobile theme so you can browse my shop more easily on your phone. I’ll be fancying up the design a bit more when I have time, but it’s all working great. If you prefer to use the usual site design, just click the link at the bottom to swap.

And secondly, customer accounts. I have to say customer accounts was never high on my wish list as I much prefer to check out without an account wherever possible, but I do think it’s a great time saver for any regular buyers. It’s completely optional, so you can still checkout as a guest, but if you do shop regularly, you can create an account to speed up future purchases (your address details will be pre-filled) and to view your orders to see when they’re fulfilled and shipped.  I also plan to do some fun things for account holders in future including discounts, pre-orders and other surprises.

If you’d like a customer account, you’ll be offered the option to create one after you’ve checked out your next order – it’s for buyers only.

Let me know if you have any questions, or spot any problems. And if you’re thinking of setting up your own web shop I really can’t recommend Shopify enough. Feel free to email me if you’d like a trial store to play around with – you can play with it free of charge for as long as you like with no fees or obligations

Seems I underestimated you and at least one of my readers is crazy awesome enough to stay up all night to see my new blog banners! Thanks to Mike, you can all see them with no effort required. Which is your favourite?

In reality, my life is not as exciting as this. It would involve about 14 hours of me sitting in front of a laptop, maybe a couple of hours of me out in the rain (or sometimes even sun!) and the rest sleeping. Speaking of which, it’s really about time Claire organised another Day in the Life.

Right, I better go and put together a cool prize for Mike.

Tomorrow (Monday) is Free Shipping Day at Spoonflower. If you’re outside the US, this is a great opportunity to buy some awesome fabric and save on shipping costs. I would humbly suggest my own fabrics but there is so much other good stuff on there too.

As always with these kind of events, I’ve been spurred on to finish up the rest of my fabric design ideas so I can buy a swatch pack and get them all up for sale.With the kokeshi and spooky wooky designs from a few months ago, I’ve got 11 new fabrics to test!

My favourite is definitely the balloons, but I love the colours in my pushpin girl designs and the Le Buns pattern took hours to get right – it’s a bit complicated. And finally, the Blythe dress from the other day had me making some teeny weeny prints – I started with Panda & Bunny but I might do some more before Monday. Tiny things are cute!

Old size on the left – teeny weeny on the right (it’s even smaller but you couldn’t see it at web res).

Do let me know if you buy my fabric, especially if you make something with it!

A few people asked about how I made my book so here are some details.

UPDATE: I’ve just added a link to my InDesign template at the bottom, which might save you some time.

Choosing a publisher

I did a bit of research last year for another publishing project I would still like to do sometime and decided I preferred Lulu. I can’t even remember exactly why now but the marketplace is promoted more on Lulu and the community forums are pretty good. I tested the system by putting a couple of my PDF zines up for sale – I haven’t sold any yet but the process was fine. I hear good things about Blurb too though.

Once that was decided, I did some experimentation with the Project Options to decide on a size etc. I really wanted to do a square book and in colour, and the rest is really decided by how many pages you have. So I got all the dimensions and got ready to make my book!

Content

I already had a lot of content written, from my zines and blogging, and I bashed out a rough draft of my recent trip over Christmas. I cannot deny I started it on Christmas Day while watching TV! I also did some illustrations in Illustrator and made lots of photo pages in Photoshop from my favourite photos. Unlike my zines, I’ve kept the photos and text separate – it just looks much nicer and I can group sets of photos together. This was pretty time-consuming – I really made the most of my time off getting this all done!

Layout

After that, I set my file up in Adobe InDesign and started laying out the pages. You don’t have to use InDesign – Lulu also provides templates you can use in Word – but I needed full control of the layout and I’m also pretty experienced with InDesign. If you’ve never used InDesign, it’s a professional publishing program – probably all your favourite mainstream magazines are laid out in InDesign. It basically makes everything so much easier – you can set up styles for your text and headings, run long text pieces through multiple layouts and make sure all your bits and pieces are lined up exactly. The image above shows two different types of pages – click for a bigger view and you’ll see the bleed, trim and column guides I set up.

So, I pulled in all my text, images and illustrations and laid them all out end to end. I wasn’t worried about page order yet, just seeing how many pages it took. Once I knew that, it was a question of fiddling with margins and font sizes to decide what would work out cheapest but still readable. The Lulu forums were a lot of help with this.

Editing

Once I had got things down to their smallest size, I was still using way too many pages so now came the editing – cutting out and rewriting stuff to make it read and fit better. After the first big edit, I moved everything into the right page order and kept doing the calculations to find a happy medium between cost and all the content I wanted to include. The winning number turned out to be 67. As a zinemaker, this seems like madness, but it was actually cheaper to have 1 blank page at the end, rather than fill it.

Problems

My biggest issue by far was figuring out the bleeds. Please ignore this paragraph if you have no interest in print layout! Bleeds are where you extend your content (usually images) outwith the page border so that when your page is trimmed, your images cover the entire page with no white borders. Trim sizes are never exact so it’s tricky at the best of times. I was completely baffled by what was happening with my bleeds until I finally figured it out from many many forum posts. Lulu does not use bleeds as one might expect, instead it resizes your file so that the bleed edge is on the trim line. That does mean your important content will never be trimmed, but does mean you can get white borders as there isn’t actually a bleed. Annoying, but what can you do? Other than pay to get things printed professionally, of course! Apart from that, I had no big problems.

The Cover

I had kind of forgotten about the cover until it asked me and had no real ideas about it. My main aim was to make it obvious at first sight that this was NOT a book about traditional Japan. I didn’t want someone to buy it and be enraged at my frivolous tales of shopping in Kiddyland and photos of cute bunnies! And also, of course, to set my book apart from the traditional Japan books already for sale on Lulu. So the cover design ended up being a bit of a collage of Japanese-inspired illustrations. Lulu provide templates for covers so it was really easy – they even tell you where to leave a space for the barcode. My only disappointment was that I didn’t get to write anything on the spine, I guess because my book is quite thin.

Uploading and Ordering

Once I had all my files together, I uploaded them using Lulu’s rather clunky book maker. The cover builder (above) is really really terrible. Even after all my efforts and deletions, my test copy still somehow has my name typed on top (it’s in white so you can’t see it, thankfully). After that, you can save it as a private project and order a test copy for yourself! I signed up for Lulu’s mailing list so I was able to time my order during a 20% discount offer – that helped with knowing my book might print terribly first time. Lulu partner with various printers around the world so postage was very reasonable and it only took a week between ordering and it arriving at my door. And, despite what their website says, the cheap shipping is just with good old Royal Mail so no courier troubles for me.

The Actual Book

You are constantly reminded by Lulu and forum users that it’s all a bit trial and error until you see the actual book, so not to expect everything to work first time. As it turned out, mine was almost perfect! Because of the white cover title thing, I would have to revise it anyway, and my rush to use the 20% discount meant there was still a bit of text tweaking to be done. Seeing the actual book also made me see I could move the page numbers much nearer the edges, which looked 100x better. The other issue was that I do have a white border on the bottom of my pages. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about that, since it’s caused by the trim – my second copy has virtually no white border and the next batch have the white border at the top. As a bit of a perfectionist it’s hard but I’m just going to have to Let It Go, Jack.

Revisions

One other thing to note: the title you choose when you begin your project at Lulu is set in stone and becomes the public title of the book! You do get a chance to change it before publishing but it certainly wasn’t obvious or pointed out to me. Luckily, you can change it by creating a revised version, so I was able to do that before making it public. Because my book was still private, I didn’t have to order another copy but I did anyway as I ended up making a lot of little changes. As mentioned, that came out pretty much perfectly so I was all set to make thing public!

Publishing

While I was waiting for the revised copy to arrive, I took the time to write up my book description and autho bio, create a preview section for people to view online and decide on my commission for copies sold through Lulu, as a printed book or downloadable PDF. Lulu does take a big cut for copies it sells, so I’ll only get a few pounds from each sale, but it will add up in the end. And they do have to do all the work!

Once the book arrived, I was able to press go and make it publicly available on the site. Once you do this, you get the opportunity to set up an Author Spotlight page (above), which is well worth doing as not only will it collect all your publications in one place, but you can add a picture of yourself and links to your websites. It’s not very customisable but it does the job. It takes a few hours for everything to show up on the site and then you sit back and wait for orders. You can also pay to have your book listed on other sites (like Amazon and Barnes & Noble) but these seem to be mostly US-based just now so I’m going to hold off on that for a while.

Conclusions

I’ll definitely be using Lulu again in future as it worked out fine for my needs, and the books turned out great. I only wish the process was a little less clunky and the help section was easier to browse. Also, it really lacks a real community space. Things like the themed groups are basically dead and there’s nothing like wishlists or listmaking tools to highlight books you want or like.

Anyway, I hope that was slightly helpful. A lot of it is very specific to how I work (a total control freak!) so it may not be of much use if you don’t have InDesign, but I hope it spares someone a little bit of the hassles I went through. If you’re making a much simpler book and don’t care about bleeds and things then it would be much easier. Let me know if you have any questions!

And of course, you can buy the book or PDF either from Lulu or from my own shop. Thanks everyone who has done so far – it’s so exciting to imagine my book on your bookshelves!

My InDesign Template

For anyone else struggling with Lulu layouts, I’ve uploaded a blank version of my InDesign template for a Small Square (7.5″) book. Click here to download it – includes INDD file for CS5, IDML file for earlier versions and some notes on the formatting.

You might have noticed my shop is just slightly different! I’ve been working on this for a while and decided to put it live yesterday. The old site was getting a bit muddled and hopefully this is a bit more organised and easier to navigate. I still have some tweaking to do so let me know if you spot anything horribly wrong.

You’ll also notice I am finally on the Christmas bandwagon – if your thoughts are heading in that direction then do check out the Christmas gift guide!

Have you seen some of the cute websites I’ve been building recently? Lucky me has had four awesome Shopify stores to build recently, all with cute artwork. One was even for kawaii heroes Cute Plush (and I’ve just finished another job for them, to be launched soon).

There’s also posts about tons of things I’ve been designing recently for 5pm plus lots more. Check out my portfolio to see!

Also, if you’re considering starting a Shopify store, now is the time! There’s an offer on now where any new accounts I bring to Shopify get their fees waived until December! Shopify is basically 100% awesome and can be customised to your every whim or used with one of the great pre-built free themes (like my Prettify design).

There’s no contracts or any obligation to use my design services – just email me and I’ll get in touch as soon as I return. But if you were looking for a designer, well, I do come with the highest of recommendations…

I have a few pairs of my Sew Cute rainboots in the shop from my personal stock. I’m reserving them especially for UK residents as we get the roughest deal when buying from the USA. Hop on over to my shop to pick up a pair for just £45 including postage. You’ll be wishing for them when the snow starts so why not just get them now?

If you’re not in the UK then you can buy a pair direct from plueys.com.

PS. The above is one side of a cute promo card I got printed to put in orders. Here’s the other side.

If you remember, back in this post, I liked my free cards from Moo so much I was going to get some done for networking purposes. Well, here they are!

As you can see, I’ve gone for a similar idea on one side – a selection of my favourite patterns and illustrations. I can use this as a mini portfolio so people can see my range.

And on the other side is ME. Like I say, these are for networking so not only will the person have a reminder of my work, they’ll also have a reminder of me as a person. The only problem here is that it means I have to make a good impression!

Anyway, I love how they turned out and hope they will help me stand out from the crowd. I’ll be giving them a whirl at Pulse in June – I’m mainly visiting to see how feasible it is for me to take a space there next year, and also to get some inspiration for Super Cute Kawaii, but I’m sure there will be opportunities for networking too. If you’re going, it would be cool to meet you!

It’s a while since I ordered some business cards from Moo but when DaWanda offered up a set for free I wasn’t going to turn that down! Because they’re free, they come with Moo and DaWanda branding so the only thing I could really design was a thank you card for DaWanda shoppers. They’re already familiar with DaWanda and hopefully it will remind them to come back sometime.

I’ve also been thinking about getting some new Moo cards done for illustration networking purposes – the ones I have now are fine for Asking For Trouble or for freelance networking but I’d like some that showcase my illustrations and patterns so I can use them as a little portfolio and leave one as a reminder. Having seen how nicely the patterns came out on these, I am definitely going ahead with this, especially as I hope to visit a trade fair or two this year.

Anyway, if you want one of these, you’ll have to buy something from my DaWanda shop! Lucky for you, there’s a 12% Easter Sale on right now until Sunday – it’s applied to a different category every day but just look for the 12% off mark on my products.

Yay! The Glasgow Craft Mafia‘s relaxed Sunday afternoon markets return for 2010. We won’t be there every month like last year so get along if you can. I will be there this Sunday with a selection of my wares including perfect Valentine’s Day gifts and cards, and a bargain box! I’m not bringing all my stuff so if you’re coming along and want something in particular let me know so I can make sure to bring it!

I did the flyer too, using Chloe from Kuro-e‘s lovely illustration. There’s some more of my recent design work on my portfolio site.