They will have plenty of copies in stock if you haven’t already got one, but if you want to bring your copy from home you are of course more than welcome to do that as well.

So: Let’s begin with type shops. Here are my faves:

• Veer has one of the best type collections around, and their Flont tool (accessible from any typeface page on their website, once you sign up for a free account) lets you try before you buy. Don’t miss the Veer exclusives, especially Umbrella Type.
• MyFonts is a near-encyclopedic site that’s simply amazing for finding type by keyword. They do sell fonts, but they also provide tons of information on fonts they don’t sell. There’s great cross-referencing here, so if for example you’re just discovering the genius of Zuzana Licko, you can follow the links to all her beautiful font designs. Like Veer, MyFonts offers a “try before you buy” feature that shows up as soon as you’re on a font’s page. But perhaps one of the most incredible tools they’ve got is “WhatTheFont”, an uncannily accurate tool that can decipher a font from a graphic you upload.
• FontShop has an unbelievably stunning collection of fonts for sale. I subscribe to their newsletter, and every time it arrives in my inbox I sigh with delight. Case in point: Parisine, especially Parisine Plus Italic. See what I mean? [Sigh… So pretty.]

I’m leaving out a ton of my favourite type foundries here, because a) most of their fonts are sold through one of the above-listed sites, and b) I don’t want to overwhelm you. Believe you me, I could fill a book with this stuff.

Now that you’ve got your font in hand, what do you do with it? Well, first of all, it’s possible you may need to install a free piece of software in order to install your font. If, after downloading and opening your new font files, you don’t see the font in your font menu, you’d do well to install Adobe Type Manager, a nifty little utility that’ll help you organize and manage your fonts.

Got your font installed properly? Let’s proceed.

1. The first step is to choose the right software. If you’ve got a copy of Illustrator, Fireworks, CorelDraw, or other vector graphics software, that’s perfect. I just heard about a free program called Inkscape that should work in theory, but I’ve never used it. Next in line would be something like Photoshop, but it’s less than ideal. If you don’t have the right software, ask around — chances are someone you know does, and can let you use their computer for this. Worst case scenario: Hie thee to Kinko’s — they usually have Illustrator on their computers, and you can pay a nominal hourly fee for use of their computers.
2. Create a new document, select the Type tool, and type in your company name. Adjust the relative sizing, etc. as needed. (For example, in our corporate logo, “Raised Eyebrow” is big, and “Web Studio, Inc.” is smaller.)
3. I recommend leaving colour out of this for the time being. Your logo will probably be reproduced in black and white in certain cases (faxes, for example, or B&W printouts of documents), and you want to make sure it looks good in those contexts. You can always add colour in later.
4. You may want to experiment with a few different options. Print them out so you can see how they look in print, not just on a screen.
5. Save the file(s), ideally as an EPS file — and while you’re at it, create yourself a PDF as well. Sometimes multiple formats come in handy.

Now that you’ve got your logo file, you can play with colour, and import it into whatever programs you need it for. Dead easy, and I guarantee that a simple logotype (that’s designer speak for a type-only logo) created with a well-designed typeface will put you ahead of 80% of your competition.

Questions? Leave ‘em in the comments. And if you find yourself the perfect typeface, I’d love to hear about it.

(*Are you one of those people who loves the script font we used for the graphics here? It’s Miss Fitzpatrick, designed by the incredibly talented young Argentinean designer Alejandro Paul; you can buy it through Veer.)

We had such a truly fantastic time at The Lab last month in Seattle. Velocity does an incredible job of putting on a great event, attracting smart and talented business/arty folks, and creating an inquisitive environment where folks feel safe sharing challenges and swapping stories. Velocity is putting up podcasts of their events and the podcast from ours is now available for your listening pleasure. For just over an hour of Q&A goodness, check out the Velocity website here.

(Thanks to the super lovely Uncle Beefy for the photo).

Bring Your Own Bag (AKA BYOB) is one of the women-owned business profiled in The Boss of You; they make gorgeous, natural cotton reusable totes (as well as their new produce bag & super-cute vintage satchel lines) right here in Vancouver. Well, they’ve got a wicked sale on right now and I thought I would share: It’s a buy one, get one free deal on any of their natural cotton totes. Of course, my personal favourite is the one they call “Cheeky” (see photo), but there are seven beautiful designs to choose from.

One of the factors that makes pricing a website tricky is that really (and forgive me for getting a bit esoteric here) websites themselves don’t really cost anything. At all. Unless you need to pay for some software licensing for things like a shopping cart or a Content Management System (CMS) or some other groovy widget on your site, there are really not any hard costs involved in designing a website. What you’re actually paying for when you get a website is the time an expertise of your website designer (or boyfriend’s roommate as the case may be) and that time and expertise is always going to vary in how it is priced.

In our case, when we get hired to design a website, our clients are hiring us to engage in a fairly formal and detailed process. A process that involves all kinds of documentation, meetings, research and strategic consulting in addition to the more tangible deliverables like design options (we typically put together more than one design option for a client to choose from), design revisions (typically anywhere from 2 to 4 rounds of revisions), and of course eventually all the code that comprises the final website in question. In terms of hours, our projects typically clock in somewhere around the 80 hours plus mark (some are in fact WAY higher and well into the hundreds). And, of course we need to charge for that time. We also charge according to our expertise level, which is at this point to be fair pretty darned high given how many years we and our staff have been in this field. Add to that the fact that we need to recoup our own hard costs (things like rent, computers, phones, internet and all the things that Lauren so masterfully explained in Chapter 3, the Finances Chapter, in our book) and you get to $10,000 websites pretty quickly.

That said, not everyone needs a $10,000 website. In fact, I’m going to venture that most of you reading this blog don’t. So what do you do? And what should a website cost you? Of course it depends on what your website is going to do, and getting clear on all of this before you go out asking for quotes is a great way to get a more accurate quote out of your website designer to be. Here’s a partial list of questions to ask yourself with regards to the kinds of functionality a website may have to guide you:

• Is your website just going to be a basic online listing that includes a description of your services/products, a bit about your company and how to contact you?
• Will you website actually sell products? If so, in how many different currencies will you sell? How many products do you have to sell?
• How often are you going to want to update your website? And do you want to do that yourself, or do you have the budget to hire someone on an ongoing basis to help with that?
• Do you need/want a photo gallery? If so, how many images will be in that gallery?
• Do you want your website to include a blog?
• Do you need a calendar for events/happenings? If so, how often will that calendar change?

Websites that include e-commerce are as a general rule more expensive than ones that don’t. That said, there are lots of great services out there you can use to get e-commerce up and running on the web on the cheaper end of things. We mentioned Shopify and Etsy in the book and I’ll write another post on e-commerce here next week along with one on how you can get your very own website without breaking the bank. So stay tuned!

(Notice how I avoided answering what a website actually does cost? Smooth huh. Really, I’ve got no hard answer to that. But this article from a few years back at Entrepreneur.com I think does a pretty good job of setting some reasonable benchmarks).

Liz is a publicist in the performing arts sector (we both studied classical music at the University of British Columbia), and with several solid years of experience under her belt she’s feeling like it’s time to go solo. I’m really excited for her and think she’s ideally suited to the entrepreneurial life; she’s smart, ambitious, and has that “fire in the belly” that’s common to all of us who want to be our own bosses. So when she wrote this review of our book on Amazon, it meant a great deal to me.

Congratulations to Emira and Lauren for writing this excellent book. I am half way through, and reading it seriously: I am reading a couple of chapters at night, and going back and answering the questions by day in writing. I plan on starting my own PR business, and this book has become a bit of a “manifesto” for me. What I love most is the basic, practical advice it offers, along with the encouragement. It’s positive and reassuring, yet direct about the pitfalls of making mistakes with your business.

Next, I love the feminist subtext of this book: that us women deserve to be paid what we’re worth, and I loved the urge (“We beg of you, close the wage gap between men and women!”) to price ourselves appropriately, and not modestly.

“The Boss of You” is hitting me on a few levels, inspires me, and is giving me courage to get my ducks in a row for the eventual launch day (still a ways off - but definitely in the works).

I really hope the Oprah producers come across this book and get these two rockin’ chicks on the Oprah show. Talk about “living your true life” - and earning a living while doing so - !

When meeting a graphic designer to work on my logo, she kept grabbing the book and flipping through it and said, “okay. I really have to get this.”

I encourage anyone (men, too) who has a dream of starting a business to get this book. My only wish is that it was edited to remain Canadian with American references (instead of the reverse) but who’s quibbling?

GET THE BOOK, PEOPLE.

Cheers,
Liz Parker
Publicist

(Thanks, Liz, for saying such nice things about our book — and for granting me permission to re-post this here.)

I mean, for starters, I fell in love with their website ages ago, and they carry just about everything Roost makes, and I suspect I may come home with an item or two for my apartment because everything in the store is drool-worthy.

But the owners are also people after my own heart, what with their hosting of monthly business/inspiration/networking events for designers they call “The Lab.”

We’ll be at The Lab next Wednesday, July 23rd from 6-8 at Velocity’s Seattle store: 251 Yale Ave N. If you’re in the Seattle area, please come! And bring some friends, and lots of questions — we really prefer to talk about whatever is most interesting to the people who are present, rather than reading from our book ad nauseam.

Hope to see you there!

And hey, on a totally off-topic note: Anyone manage to see the first episode of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog before the server crashed? Well, I didn’t, and I’m antsy. I may have to shell out for the iTunes version… [Never mind, it came back up, and it’s awesome!]

So I am intrigued by this book: Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy

The blurb begins:

In an era when incomprehensibly complex issues like Peak Oil and climate change dominate headlines, practical solutions at a local level can seem somehow inadequate.

In response, Lyle Estill’s Small is Possible introduces us to “hometown security,” with this chronicle of a community-powered response to resource depletion in a fickle global economy. True stories, springing from the soils of Chatham County, North Carolina, offer a positive counterbalance to the bleakness of our age.

This is the story of how one small southern US town found actual solutions to actual problems. Unwilling to rely on the government and wary of large corporations, these residents discovered it is possible for a community to feed itself, fuel itself, heal itself, and govern itself.

If any of you have read Small is Possible, I’d love to hear your thoughts — or indeed your thoughts about small/local businesses in general.

(I also spotted another interesting-looking book from the same publisher: Ecopreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits.)

Emira and I worked out of a corner of my bedroom when we started Raised Eyebrow, graduated to the living room a little later (when space allowed), and only took on a full-time office schedule after two or three years in business. I have occasional pangs for the comfort & quiet of working from home, but now that we have a larger team, it’s much more efficient to have everyone working in the same location. That being said, we’ve been forced into working from home the last couple of days, due to a massive power outage in downtown Vancouver that took down our office building, and what Jost says about having a devoted office space is definitely true: Now that I no longer have my home computer set up for professional use, I’m nowhere near as efficient…