NateCreates.com

It’s been 30 days now since I first started a daily political cartoon blog at PixelMarx.com where I draw and post and new cartoon every day, under the name, Irishspacemonk.

And today I’m taking a break and celebrating that milestone.

The idea for celebrating a Blog Milestone came from David Airey. Check out his blog if you’re just getting started. His site has lots of great content.

I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned in doing this little project called, PixelMarx.

Top 10 Things I’ve Learned in 30 Days

Ok - I couldn’t resist create a top 10 list. Here they are.

1. A person wastes a lot of time watching TV. I typically spend between 2 and 3 hours on each drawing. I tell non-artists this and they seem surprised. But it’s really not that much time. The average person watches more than that much television every day.
2. Establish processes early. By creating templates, establishing a process for creating a solution, and following that process, you’re able to know when you might be going down the wrong track. This is especially important when you have to get something done from start to finish in one day.
3. Always keep a sketch book. This has been said a million times. You never know when you’re going to get the perfect idea. And ideas are extremely valuable with time sensitive creativity.
4. Learn from your audience. I didn’t have that much of an idea who my audience was when I started the PixelMarx blog. I knew they’d probably have to political, progressive. But other than that I had no idea what region of the country they’d come from, their browser preference, etc. Having gotten lazy designing for designers, I was anxious to make my blog at least 1024px wide. Then I looked at my stats and noticed 15% of my visitors come on 800×600 screens. Yikes!
5. Don’t give up on first attempts, but complete first attempts and see them for what they are. My first cartoons were bad. I didn’t quite know what made up a good political cartoon. I started to learn, and I’m still learning, but I’m glad I got the really bad ones out of the way.
6. Google seems to really love daily posts. I’m surprised at how quickly some content is picked up and starts to generate search visits. The tough part will be to continue the pace.
7. Google AdSense will not a rich political cartoon blogger make….ah yes, this was a sad discovery.
8. Google AdWords is an excellent way to have your money go to bloggers who run blogs for profit and click fraud in various parts of the world - and have it go quickly.
9. When you draw daily, the fastest way to improve your drawings is to learn how to draw simple hands. I’d recently completed a short-story graphic novel, and I’d used the four finger trick. This is great for a story where reality doesn’t matter, but doesn’t work as well in political cartoons. So I had to quickly add back the pinkie.
10. I was too late in discovering that using StumbleUpon for your own content is actually a great way to give a little boost to your site - and why not? If you believe your content is good, and people will like it if they just know it’s there, then I say, go for it. (This is also the much cheaper alternative to Google AdWords.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 1:00 am and is filed under Creativity, Blogs, Politics, Current Projects, Graphic Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.