Three Design Business Concepts
Filed Under: Web Design
I am reaching a point where I think I need to brand my creative services with its own website, portfolio, and so on. So I’ve been trying to brainstorm some business names and concepts I can design the site around. I haven’t really hit on anything solid yet, but here are some of the ideas I’ve bounced around on my IM list and in my own head. Sarah’s tired of hearing about them, so now you get to instead!
“Monster Stomp Studios”
Logo Concept: A daikaiju monster from a low angle, lifting a massive foot to DESTROY!
Tagline: “Small Studio. Big ideas.”
Disadvantages: I am not the world’s greatest illustrator, and I want a cartoony illustration for that logo, I think. Like a chibi Godzilla knockoff. So I’d probably have to outsource the illustration to another designer and that doesn’t look good on my main work site to have done that. I need the design to be completely my work. So if I stick with this one, I’ll have to really work hard in sketching and illustrator to create a good logo. I need to learn to draw better anyway!
Write Design
Site Concept: Natural media, paper, pencils, inks. Lots of editorial style marks on things, correcting typos. Focusing on the written word. Great typography, lots of handwriting.
Tagline: “Design solutions for authors and publishers.”
Disadvantage: My concept is meaningful, but there are a million Write Design websites out there. It’s too common of an idea, and I almost certainly won’t be using this one, which is sad because I like the idea of making a website with real paper. Which leads me to the next
Little Fish Big Pond Studio
Logo/site concept: construction paper! Blue sea background, stylized fish and other sea cutouts here and there. Maybe some javascript animating a few moving around. Masthead involves a bunch of little fish in a school, with one solo fish a different color out leading the pack.
Tagline: “How do little fish survive in the big blue sea? They stick together.”
Disadvantages: A few other design companies out there using a similar concept. This one positions me specifically as being a small business designer, which may be a niche I don’t want to put myself into. I really like the design concept though, and now I just cannot help but want to build a site out of construction paper cutouts. It would look awesome!
Other ideas/concepts that aren’t ripe yet:
- something that can play on science fiction
- something spinning off of Roundbottom?
- something super grungy and crunchy
- something that I can use my photography skills for
- Something about Kansas, using the tall grass prairie as a design element
- dinosaurs! (no, I don’t know what that means)
It’s hard work being a creative genius, but someone’s gotta do it. Eventually, I’m going to hit on the perfect concept that’s going to show my skills at their best. I know it. I just need a bit more time and thought. Advice is gladly accepted.
To Save SF Short Fiction, We Had to Destroy It
Filed Under: SF Business, SF Publishers, Speculative Fiction
(Warning, the below is poorly thought out and written hastily. I will write more later this week.)
Doug Cohen has recently launched a subscribe to a SF magazine drive via his Livejournal.
I have a suspicion that telling the SF writing blogosphere to subscribe to short fiction magazines in an effort to save short fiction is like instructing a bunch of buggy whip makers to buy buggy whips to save the buggy whip manufacturing industry. I know Doug means well, and I don’t mean this as a criticism of him, but I am very doubtful that telling a small group of active online fandom to subscribe to magazines will make a bit of difference in the general decline. I’ve been just as guilty
The gorilla in the room that we rarely acknowledge is that nobody wants to read short fiction. If they did, then there wouldn’t be this mess. I’ve heard and read hand waving about the changes in distribution models, but honestly, I don’t buy it. In this day and age, if you have a burning desire to read science fiction short stories, you can Google up a magazine in less than a second.
Do I think that the public could be marketed towards to encourage the reading of more short fiction? Maybe. A good marketing team can sell just about anything. Do I think anyone has the money to back a large campaign like this? No. SFWA would be the only organization that I could see such an initiative coming from, and they’re a massive joke; an organization dedicated to internal politics and rumormongering more than the decline and collapse of the industry around it.
There is no solution. The public’s interest has moved on. If you’re a writer, go write video games, movies, television, or books, in that order of popularity. That is where the public’s interest is right now, and if you don’t like it, then I’m afraid that you should probably get used to the idea that short fiction is a small, niche hobby of little importance. I’m fine with that. I find that I enjoy writing it, and that’s enough for me. Short fiction for me is a way to learn writing, but I won’t regret leaving it behind if I were to crack another (more popular and better paying) medium, or find some amalgam of several of my own.
I don’t support the record industry for its failing business model. I don’t think the SF print magazine world deserve special treatment either. I do, in fact subscribe to quite a few magazines. But it’s not out of any effort to save them from the dustbin. There’s plenty to read online, and will be as long as weirdos like me keep writing it.
I’ve been around and around the funding models for online magazines in my head. I’ve concocted the most ridiculous Web 2.0 models for online publishing that you can imagine. But none of them will work, because there’s no evidence what-so-ever that there is enough public interest to justify the building of such a thing. Every model fails, because there just aren’t enough people interested in reading and supporting a magazine monetarily for it to even sustain itself. Don’t quote Strange Horizons at me, either. Their fund drive doesn’t seem to be doing too well this time around.
Science Fiction, meet the long tail. It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last.
