Tomorrow morning, earlier than anyone in the world should have to be up, I’m hitting the road for a couple of weeks to speak at a few events and spend some time with family. I realized today during a cold-pizza lunch that I still hadn’t designed business cards for myself…and that I probably should for this trip.

So after spending some time tossing around ideas, I went to Kinko’s (yup, I took the ghetto printing route), and came back with these:

What do you think?

If we meet and I hand you a card, I hope you’ll use it to goof off (if only for a little bit). I only had one hundred printed. When these run out I’ll redesign and print some “real” cards. But for what they are, I’m pretty happy with the result.

And now I need to go pack.

Last night (bleeding into early this morning) I made some big fat changes to my site. What do you think?

I’m really excited about the new banner, because it gives me a legitimate excuse to doodle now. Hopefully I’ll be switching out new sketches every few weeks or so.

After many requests, I’ve finally added a portfolio (albeit a miniature one) directly to the site. Click it! Fun things happen.

As the title mentions, this new design is a first step. Over the long haul, as time allows, I’ll jazz up the site’s design below the navigation to be just as organic and hand-drawn as the banner. Right now I feel like there’s a slight disconnect. But I’d rather launch now than wait until it’s perfect. It’ll never be perfect, you know.

There’s also lots of content to beef up - including adding more design and commentary to the little portfolio on the right.

My goals with the site are twofold:

1. To be a place for good conversation, and
2. To showcase my design business. Since leaving Trabian in April to go independent, I’ve relied on handshakes, cups of coffee, and pints of beer to be my business cards and marketing. It’s worked well enough so far - I’ve been able to eat at least one whole packet of Ramen a day - but this will help.

Speaking of that, I have a couple of posts in the cannon about kicking off a small business. It’s been a ride. I have a lot of questions for some of you.

So that’s that. As always, I covet your feedback and comments.

So I lied. I moved my portfolio from Coroflot over to Carbonmade. Check it out here:

» Design by Brent Dixon

Why’d I switch? Because Carbonmade…

• …is a much simpler presentation. In viewing designs, context is important. Coroflot’s busy-ness distracted from the actual design work. My Carbonmade portfolio is unbranded and the only strong design elements are found in the work.
• …is faster. Coroflot kept locking up and taking for-doggone-ever to load my images. Because of my self-diagnosed A.D.D, this stressed me out.
• …allows you to install Google Analytics on your portfolio. Coroflot had some built in stat tools, but nothing like Google Analytics. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, Carbonmade just opened themselves up to an awesome tool that already existed. Good call.

What do I miss?

• Coroflot’s navigation is better. It’s much easier to hop from section to section (Web vs. Print, etc) in Coroflot’s interface.
•  I wish Carbonmade had some heirarchy built into the blurbs associated with each design. As in “Title” and “Description,” that’s it. Right now all of my text is slapped in one place, and can’t be formatted. It’s not very scannable, and just looks messy.
• Coroflot lets you customize icons for each design, and that was nice.

There’s a list of several more design portfolio hosts on Listible.com.

I’ve been slowly but surely adding some samples of my design and art direction work to my online portfolio.

One internal debate I tossed around was whether to develop a custom portfolio design or use an existing tool. In the name of expediency (big word! two points!) I decided to host my portfolio with Coroflot. It’s a free tool, and if you’re job hunting also hooks you up with job listings and a place to add your resume. The interface is very simple to use. So far I’ve been happy with the decision.

They also let you create a badge, which I sadly haven’t gotten to work in Wordpress. But the badge would look like this:

Hope you dig the work. I’ll be adding more and more pieces as time allows.