I am launching an experimental web project in the coming days…

A site (mini-site really) around the question of If we can and if we should try and shutdown the Weblo website.

A brief synopsis of Weblo… Weblo is a virtual world game. Their shtick is selling real world assets for you (the gamer) to make money. You can buy countries, states, cities, basically if it exists in the real world (and already in the virtual world) you can buy it and set up a, for a lack of a better phrase, mini-site revolving around each asset. Once you set up this area you can jam it with advertising and make some real world money. This sounds benign enough, right? Well hold on… there is a slight legal question to ask here. (By the way I am not a lawyer and I don’t play one on tv either.) How can you buy and sell something that doesn’t belong to you? Let me elaborate. I first became aware of Weblo after running a search on myself. I was surprised to find that my logo for my freelance design endeavors was associated with them. Right smack dab in the middle of their web page was my logo helping them advertise a list of domain names that were available to buy and make money with on their site. Wow I don’t remember signing anything that gave them rights to my logo. So I signed up for an account to check out this Weblo thingy.

The long and short of it is, after poking around in their site and researching a little on the web, that they and their team of lawyers don’t believe they are doing anything wrong. They state that you can buy anything other than brand names. That was one of the the only legal restrictions they had. While poking around on their site I found that someone could buy my domain name, conanrobbins.com, and do their advertising voodoo to make money off my name. And, if they were smart enough they could pull traffic away from my real site and direct it to theirs. I know that I am no Google or Johnson and Johnson. I don’t have that strong of brand, but as a freelancer my name is my brand. The same for every other company or person. Your web address, if named after your company, is part of your brand. You probably don’t want people to use it to pull traffic from your site and or to make money from it.

There is much more to discuss, hence the construction of the mini-site. As stated before I am not a lawyer. If there are any out there that can give their interpretations of the law; I welcome their input. Heck I welcome anyone’s input. Whether you support my views or the other.

Weblo is used in reference to Weblo.com a privately held company with Rocky Mirza operating as CEO. The use of Weblo in this post is not meant for monetary gain. The term”Shutdown Weblo” is not intended to slander or defame Weblo. It is intended to open a dialog about the legality of said company.

Invitations, directions and church programs… oh my. If you have stopped by lately and have been disappointed that there is nothing new posted maybe I can shed a little light on as is to why. I got married… again. The ole’ wife and I had a civil ceremony back in the states and the church extravaganza here in France.

Being as I have never been married before I never realized exactly how much work was actually involved. Hence the reason I have been shirking my blog responsibilities. The good thing is I have a little something to show for it. I’m not going to regale you with the photos of my cutting grass and meeting with my priest, but I will show you some of the design that was created for the wedding.

First off the invitation.

The invitation was a bit of a battle. I am American and my in-laws are French. There was a large difference in the way we perceive wedding invitations and the way they should look. The parents wanted something more conservative and direct. Me, I was thinking, like many Americans, something super designy with tissue and textured paper and envelopes… lots of envelopes. My initial ideas were met with much resistance, and in hind site, rightfully so. I had forgotten for whom I was designing for. Who was my target audience? The answer was French folks. If we would have sent out my initial ideas people wouldn’t know whether they were going to a wedding or a circus.

some of the initial concepts

It turns out that the in-laws expected something a little more “scripty”. Something entirely in “Embassy” or “Bickham Script”. Not my favorite fonts, especially when it comes to legibility. Again I had to pull myself away from my own preconceptions of what I thought the invitation should look like, and remember that the people receiving these things were in fact from the same culture and had the same anticipations as my in-laws. So a compromise was reached. The MC in “Bickham Scropt” and the smaller copy in “Mrs. Eaves”, with a simple clean straight forward lay-out. Different enough to please me, and a hint of the norm to allow the people who received it to identify it as a wedding invitation.

The one thing I wasn’t going to budge on was the map.

Fortunately I didn’t meet much resistance. It was simple and turned out to be rather effective. The map also doubled as the “Dinner Ticket”

Yes dinner is written by hand. We didn’t forget to have it printed. It was easier than having the printer print 200 cocktails and 200 cocktail and dinners. (and cheaper)

After the invitations were sent and the replies started coming in, (along with a couple of compliments), I was allowed to do whatever I wanted for the “church program”. Again simple easy to read and follow was the idea. To tie it together with the invites I carried over the “Bickham Script” MC and the illustration of the church.

Then there was the question of production. Fortunately I have a fairly decent laser printr. An Epson Aculaser CX11N. Not the top of the line, but not a cheap piece of crap either. We decided that could be done in-house. Why spend a few hundred Euros printing something at a print house that we could do ourselves? So after a couple of days and probably 50 paper-jams later… the programs were printed. While designing them I was thinking about the easiest way to fasten or bind them. Staples didn’t sound right, and it seemed like it would be too time consuming. A hole punch with ribbon was time consuming and didn’t lend itself to the design. Then finally I figured it out… stitching. My wife already brushed up on her sewing after making the ring pillow and the ties for the men. Why not have her run a seam down the middle of the program? It turned out to be quick, strong and fit nicely with the design.

When I look back I find that I ended up learning a great deal about the French culture, and more importantly I learned how to compromise. Not bow down to someone else’s ideas of design, and not let my preconceived ideas ruin a project.