It all started when I was very young, and my sister somehow obtained a thick little grommet-bound book of lighting gel color samples. These transparent rectangles held endless fascination for me. When I could convince her to let me play with the booklet, I would read the type-written descriptions (“Best for afternoon sun effect on interior spaces”), hold a gel up to my eye and look at the world literally through rose-colored plastic, or pull each one away from it’s descriptive sheet to make a shiny see-through rainbow colored fan.

Flash forward to my first one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, and I’m suddenly given the opportunity to choose paint colors for each room. Here’s where one normally learns to try a section of “pistachio” on the wall before assigning the landlord the task of covering the living room in what actually looks more like “pea soup.” Further experiments were equally unsuccessful, until I realized that I wasn’t really interested in using the colors in the swatch book quite so much as I was in just having the swatch book to just leaf through for inspiration.

When my friends Steve and Heidie were choosing paint colors for their apartment, they asked me to use my visual expertise to help them decide. My professional side is a lot more practical, so when it came to picking out colors other people would have to pay for and live with, I was able to reign in my imagination and be much more selective (and realistic), and the results were fabulous.

As a graphic designer. I’ve been using Pantone Matching System (PMS) books for years already. PMS inks are very specific, and aren’t part of the normal four color printing process (CMYK), but Pantone does make a guide that helps designers specify a CMYK mixture that will emulate, if not duplicate, a PMS. They also make swatch books which help designers see how CMYK mixtures will look on paper, as opposed to the brighter, backlit way they look on screen while we’re working.

Enjoy the commercials. Enjoy the possibility.

Here’s why, Uncle Trusting.

Once upon a time, I was an editor for a newsletter whose topic was education. I was also the assigned editor for the Spanish version of this newsletter, because I had studied Spanish since my early teens. This part of the job was only supposed to entail my arranging translations of the English text, making sure articles were the right length. But I was overly confident, because my studied Spanish accent always begged the question “Where are you from?” from native speakers. So when asked to translate a few phrases for a promotion, because it would have cost the company money to pay our translators to do the same, I happily complied.

As a result, a phrase that was meant to read  “All children improve when their parents get involved” became “All children take advantage of themselves when their parents are in bondage.”

As I said, I spoke Spanish properly, but had never lived in a Spanish-speaking country, or regularly read a Spanish language publication.

So while it’s very possible, even likely,  that your nephew can “make” a website, if you want to be sure it’s designed and developed professionally and with the amount of class your business deserves, I urge you to consider hiring someone who has lived and breathed design.

I’m determined to add WordPress templates to my menu of services. So at the moment I’m looking at an excessive amount of code and trying to wrestle it into something functional and fantastic. And to my joy, it’s happening. So please be patient if links don’t go where they should for a few days, or if you can’t make it back to this page.

There will be an official announcement when everything is up and running. Sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of the home page to be in the know!