Installing WordPress on your Mac can be really complicated if you don’t understand the steps involved. And I didn’t. So I searched the internet and was somewhat overwhelmed by what I found, including the videos on YouTube that were either too difficult to follow, or not complete enough to be of much help to me. A bit frustrated, I then stumbled up on this little gem from skillcrush.com. I think it’s the best explanation out there. At least it’s the best explanation I’ve found. I followed the directions step by step, and it works! (www.skillcrush.com)

By Design Partners was recently engaged in a brand identity assignment for FPL Advisory Group. The organization has a 25+ year history and is made up of four companies, which offer professional services in executive and director recruitment; leadership consulting; compensation consulting; and organizational, financial & strategic consulting. Somewhat confused and overwhelmed? Yeah, we were too.

I am honored to have been selected to help promote the rededication of The Rifleman in my hometown of Great Bend, Kansas. The Barton County Historical Society Museum and Village contacted me and asked for a poster to help commemorate the rededication of the 100 year old sculpture located north of the courthouse in Jack Kilby square. Jack Kilby won a Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the first integrated circuit (microchip), and attended school in Great Bend — but I digress. I remember looking at the statue high on its pedestal in my youth, and of course every time I was walking by the court house square I saw it. But I never really paid that much attention to it — or its significance — until today. A highlight of working on the project? Discovering two ancestors (both soldiers) listed among the veterans who served and fought to preserve the union.

Iknow I am not alone in acknowledging that, as a designer, I find it hardest of all to design and produce my own marketing materials. I am never entirely comfortable tooting my own horn. Between the perennial refinements and my sometimes-painful perfectionism, I am, unquestionably, my most difficult client. Then, there’s the time element. Inevitably, another, more pressing, more time-sensitive project jumps to the head of the line. So, like the cobbler whose children have no shoes, I am — like many of my colleagues — the first to put off this most demanding assignment.