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So as of right now, I got my membership to LVR reinstated and with a new company. I gave my new broker a little gift which was building him his first website for the brokerage. It took me away from my own project for a few days but now I am back and just continuing checking off tasks I created in Notion so that I could pick up where I left off. So today’s tasks: theme content.
Obviously one of the most important part of branding is consistency and having logos, icons and images that can be carried across the brand is what I am looking for. I did try taking the space guy I use for my logo on the site and see if I could find an AI tool to just upload and reconfigure. I wasted another couple hours (at least while watching football) looking for a lazy solution to a problem I knew I could find a solution too. So I decided to do a little bit of graphic design my own way and these are the tools I used and what I needed each program to do for my designing:
- Notion – I need a place to organize everything (including this blog post) and to keep progress on my task completion
- Canva – Where I planned to do most of my graphic designing and just minimize having to use something more advanced
- Gimp – Just in case I couldn’t do what I needed in the other tools, I could tailor to the more custom nature of my branding.
- Drive – Most important! If you are like me and work across several devices, storing your assets in a cloud based environment means you can access any time you need your files.
Well while I am doing this and already have all of these programs open and working, I need to ask myself an important question when doing stuff like this. Do I think it would be worth my time to be proactive and just make a few extra assets in the case I need them later? I decided I would be more upset with myself that I didn’t make more while I was already in here working on stuff. So I decided to find some images in Canva while I was in there to just tailor for broad-use cases on any of my projects. Working within Canva first as what I imagined would be my one-stop shop, I quickly realized…it was not. Even despite having the pro addition, it would not let me accomplish what I needed.
My theme that I wanted to make for my website (which I decided to make it space themed since I love outer space so much) needed to be congruent in every matter and I did not know when I would want another one of my new little avatars I found on Canva. I typed in “astronaut” to match the logo their AI logo maker made that I selected and decided to run with their colors and everything included within their graphic design. To my surprise, that query yielded me a bunch of versions of that same avatar but it would not be as easy as just having their AI create new poses or paint them to match my new theme colors. No problem, I can just download the file on a standard 500×500 px template with transparent background then use my GNU Image Manipulator (GIMP for short) and change the color by swapping it out right? No…
New issue at hand, the graphics that Canva provided were part of their pro elements and could not be downloaded on their own nor recolored within the software. Now the quick solution was to just add another element to the file and create a new image that I could in fact export. This worked out to my advantage because now my avatars had a little more depth to them and could illustrate what I wanted them to emulate. All I had to do was create the asset and download it as a PNG file with an alpha channel to carry over transparency. Now within GIMP I could just add or remove the colors I needed to as I can just download these new avatars and call them my own.
Now as far as organization goes, I like to always create a folder for either the same type of project or to create a folder with a date where I can store anything I worked on that day. As I mentioned before, I do work across several devices so making sure they are also stored/backed up to a cloud based setting is essential. There are a couple methods of doing this with Google Drive… First method is the easiest and the one I use most often which is just uploading my folders right to Drive using the drag and drop method. The second method (which I guess in theory should be easier) is to download Drive for Desktop which makes a folder in your local path that will sync with Google. I do not need to store in more than two locations and I run the risk of having duplicate names in my files since I use several devices, and for that reason I just keep it simple.
To wrap this up I will go over why doing this was so important to me and what it will do for my path in life going forward. This new Real Estate venture of mine is the most optimistic as I am in fact building my tech along with it and realistically staying focused on pumping content MY WAY is crucial to my success and just overall posting high quality stuff so that I can have all my ends covered and whatnot. I wanted to build a brand that would be different but yet empathize with the hard work and effort I put in to making it all happen while documenting every step along the way. If it ends up being too much work and not useful; at least I did it and do not have to live with any “what ifs” when it comes to establishing all my endeavors. Basically write now as I struggle with perfecting the vision of this project, I will write these little articles as an avenue to kind of vent while also giving myself content to reference later. (I haven’t even decided what blog category to put this in, nor have I designed anything but the real estate template.)
