Taking care of business (cards)

You know that thing about pride goeth-ing before a fall? Yeah.

A friend asked if I could help her Mom (a very VERY talented lady) do some business cards on VistaPrint. I said sure, no problem, I'd never used them before, but I could do the design. I promptly opened up a Word template, and within a few hours, had a decent prototype. No sweat. Design was finalized, everybody's happy, woop!

I offer to set it up on Vistaprint's site, and get to work. It was bad, y'all. Every which way I could do it, that preview looked awful. Word, my old friend, was no longer good enough. Photoshop, I discovered in short order, makes me feel incompetent is an elitist and I refuse to associate with it (read, I gave up, in tears, after it took me two weeks to figure out how to draw a dashed line, and I still couldn't get it right). Illustrator, luckily, came to my rescue, and the finished product turned out well, I think! Plus the name of the business is genius (alas, not mine). Check it out!

I then did some for another friend, and I think these turned out pretty good, too!

Materials

• Adobe Illustrator
• You Tube (God bless you, Internet!)

Method

I can't tell you how long it took me to figure out this stuff, because it's kind of embarrassing, but I will share with you the wisdom of others.

• How to make a fancy frame shape (here)
• How to make a chevron pattern (here)

Conclusions

I failed at using Word and I failed at using Photoshop with both of these projects. I hate failing at anything, but especially when it feels like I'm being held back by my own ignorance. What I learned, though, was that sometimes you have to stop beating the dead horse with the same stick, and either get back on the horse or beat it with a new stick. Sort of like that right there. I am going to walk away from that horrible head-on collision of equine metaphors and instead refer you to this video, which is sweet and inspiring and if you've ever failed at a project or had it rejected, you should watch, because you aren't alone. My horse and I are with you.