Please come visit me at thepookster.com and read about my new career as a mom. I’m still teaching and designing, but right now I don’t have much time for maintaining a design/tutorial blog. I hope to return here later when the babe gets a little more independent.

Photoshop Workspaces

Photoshop I Lesson 1a – Rearranging and Saving Workspaces

I designed 60lessons.com to be a resource for teachers. The lessons are meant to be 45 minutes long each, and grouped into units of 10 lessons each.

But anyone can follow them! Please check it out.

I hope you like the new home page design. Since I am freelancing full time now, I want to feature my business more on my home page. The new design keeps several elements from the blog but makes it secondary to my marketing messages. The path to my services, contact, pricing, and portfolio pages should be very clear now. In addition, my latest work panels are nice and large now. Yes, I’m still a blogger. You can find the blog stuff lower on the page. On the interior blog pages, the article content is still high on the page.

Here was the design on May 2, 2009:

Home page on May 2, 2009

Here’s the current home page:

Home page on Jun 18, 2009

And a current blog page:

Blog page on Jun 18, 2009

My full-time high school career now ended, I am fully open for business as Blue Lobster Art and Design. Please contact me for a free initial consultation if you need any of the following services (or check out my Pricing page.) Thanks!

Web Design

• Web site and Web page design
• Search engine optimization
• Installation and customization of Web storefronts (eCommerce), galleries, blogs, and other Web applications
• Banner ad and HTML email design
• Content management and blog template/skin design
• Research to find solutions for advanced needs or troubleshooting

Graphic Design

• Brochures
• Business Cards
• Flyers
• Icons & Symbols
• Illustrations
• Labels
• Letterhead & Envelopes
• Logos
• Mailers / Postcards
• Maps
• Photograph Retouching & Restoration
• Print Ads
• Publications: Magazines, Newsletters, & Books
• T-Shirt / Clothing Imprints

Fine Art

• Charcoal Portraits from Photographs
• Individual Instruction

I’m winding down my high school teaching career this week. My final day of teaching high school classes, perhaps for good, is this Friday. I taught high school full time for the past three years. If you want to know why I am deciding to leave this glamorous and rewarding career, check out my latest posts at dawnsbrain.com.

The good, great, fantastic news is that I get to go back to teaching college kids (and adults) in July. I got a part-time teaching position at the Art Institute, where I will have two web design classes. Each class is four hours long, once per week, for an eleven-week quarter. I could perhaps have taught there full-time, but I want to keep my schedule open for all the freelance design work I hope to pull in.
My other good news is that I have decided to create a new side business for myself. Some of my tutorials here have been very popular. However, I’ve been kind of all-over-the-map with what I create. For the past year or so I’ve been thinking about writing a Photoshop tutorial book geared toward the classroom. So, instead of cranking out a new tutorial a couple of times a week in random order, I’m getting organized. I want to create a comprehensive curriculum and have it all online. This new effort will appear in due time at 60Lessons.com.

Here’s the synopsis:

Art and design lessons tailored for the classroom:

• 45-minute daily lessons
• 10 lessons per unit
• 60 lessons per course
• Instructor guides
• Unit reviews
• Unit projects with rubrics
• Unit quizzes

Subjects:

• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Dreamweaver
• HTML and XHTML
• CSS
• design principles
• drawing
• and more!

My slogan is Daily Doses of Smart™.

I hope to build the site to

• offer 60 lessons for beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels
• invite guest teachers
• cater to people learning on their own as well, perhaps providing paid coaching
• eventually provide a social networking/community setting

Some of the 60Lessons.com materials will be free, and others will be available at affordable prices. Banner ads alone do not pay the bills, I have found.

I’d love to have your feedback on this venture. Is the 60Lessons.com concept of interest to you? What would you want to see offered?

Things are looking up (they weren’t too bad to begin with.)

1. The traffic for this blog is doing very well (thanks, everybody!) In April, the traffic doubled over the March stats. Then in May, the traffic doubled again. It’s nice to see my hard work pay off with so many visitors.

Traffic for February 23 through June 2, 2009

2. I had a second interview with the local Art Institute today, and it looks like they really want me. The only thing that might prevent this is my lack of a Masters degree. They asked me to write a Letter of Justification which they could show accrediting officials to justify my teaching position. I would be teaching two Web design classes starting in July. Here’s the letter I wrote, in case you’re curious (or find yourself needing to write one some day yourself).

Dawn Pedersen
Letter of Justification

Degree: B. A.—Fine art with Drawing and Painting Emphasis (California State College, Sacramento)

Teaching Credentials, State of California: Single Subject—Art; Single Subject—Biology;
Teaching Credentials, County of Sacramento: Career and Technical Education—Information Technology; Career and Technical Education—Arts, Media and Entertainment

Courses Taught, College: Intermediate Web Page Design, Beginning Photoshop (Sacramento City College)
Courses Taught, High School: Web Design, Graphic Design I, Graphic Design II, Life Science (Natomas High School); Art I, Art II, Drama (Esparto High School)

Justification: Mrs. Pedersen was selected to teach design courses because she has extensive industry experience and expertise. Mrs. Pedersen has been a Web and graphic designer for over nine years, working not only for employers, but directly for clients through her own design companies.

Mrs. Pedersen worked as a professional Web Designer at Connectix, a Silicon Valley software company, where her expertise in design, marketing and web usability were a valuable asset in a fast paced, demanding environment. Responsible for both the company’s public website as well as its internal intranet, she developed a passion for best coding practices and project management. As owner of Dawn’s Brain Design, Pedersen designed web sites and printed pieces for client companies in New York, Georgia, Colorado, and Australia, as well as locally. She gained further experience in web and graphic design while working for a printing press company and a small design studio.

Mrs. Pedersen discovered a love for teaching when she was hired by Sacramento City College to teach intermediate Web and beginning Photoshop classes. While teaching Web and graphic design for two years at the high school level, she built a comprehensive Web site for her students which was devoted to the curriculum of her three courses (nhsdesigns.com). It included all class materials, schedules, a forum, and a student gallery.

Mrs. Pedersen is currently the owner of Blue Lobster Art and Design, and a member of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. Returning to freelance design after a three-year hiatus, she has found that her previous clients are enthusiastic to have her back on their team, and have recommended her to their colleagues. She creates popular tutorials on Web and graphic design for her blog at BluLob.com. To keep on top of all the latest innovations in design and technology, she is a constant reader of industry magazines, books, and instructional Web sites. She is currently working toward a Masters in Fine Art.

I am ever vigilant for ways to improve this blog. I have just made three upgrades to the BluLob Blog’s usability. If you have a WordPress blog, I recommend these plugins to super-charge your blog.

1. I added a “Print This” button at the top of each page and article/post, at the request of a reader. WP-Print automatically serves a version of the page with a simplified CSS, stripping out sidebars, headers and footer but leaving your copyright intact. It even includes all pages at once for a multi-page tutorial. You can get this too with WP-Print.
2. I added a “Tweet This” button at the top of each article/post. It has the added advantage of informing us how many tweets a post has received on Twitter. You can get this too, thanks to TweetMeme.
3. I already had an Add to Any button at the bottom of each post, but the default images provided were not informative enough. I found this out when a friend tried to Digg an article but couldn’t find a Digg icon. It was hidden in a popup menu, and now it’s more obvious. You can steal my image below if you use Add to Any. Upload it somewhere and then put the image URL in the appropriate field under Admin > Settings > Share/Save Buttons.

(Please do me a favor and upload this to your own space instead of using my image address.)

I’ve mentioned at my old blog, dawnsbrain.com, that the high school I’ve worked at for two years is not having me back next year. This has turned out to be a real blessing. Teaching public high school has become a horrible chore. Sometimes a nightmare.

Since February, when I learned I would not be back, I have worked on getting Blue Lobster off the ground. It’s been three years since I’ve freelanced. It is a far more appealing prospect than another year with students who hate being in school.

I still love teaching though. I have sought a job at the Art Institute nearby for the past month. AI is filled with students who are out of high school and serious about their education. I am now about 90% certain that I will be teaching two classes there (Web design,) starting in July. The Web design program really impressed me, and I’d have a lot of freedom with my curriculum. And I’ll probably need the money, frankly.

An influential teacher there has green-lighted me after meeting with me yesterday. We just need to wait for me to have a formal interview with the academic director in a couple of weeks.

Wish me luck!

Check out my new Pricing page. It is not exhaustive of all the services I provide, nor of what you might be looking for. However, it might give you a ballpark figure of what I charge for common design needs.

I’ll see if tweeting is so great. It’s what all the kids are doing these days.

twitter.com/bluelobsterart

UPDATE 4/26/09

Check out the BluLob Twitter panel on the right for my recent Tweets. It turns out, Twitter is pretty cool.