It’s now been 6 months since I started my crowd-sourced commissions process and I thought this would be a good point to step back and re-evaluate the process. In case you aren’t interested in my review, I should mention first that there are now 12 new design options on the Commissions list, so please click through to the list if you’d like to see what’s new, and maybe pledge towards one or more!

And now to the review…

The Story So Far

It’s been working well so far – too well, maybe, as I’ve tweaked the system 3 times so I don’t get overwhelmed with commissions! We’ve had 7 designs fully funded so far:

• Koala, Platypus, Chameleon, and Sea Otter have all been completed, and I’ve had only positive feedback from the people who pledged towards them. I’m very happy to now also be able to include them in my pattern catalogue.
• AmiDogs Rottweiler is being designed right now!
• Giant Panda and AmiDogs Scottish Terrier are funded and still in the queue to be designed.

If the queue keeps growing, I may need to make another change, as I don’t want the queue to keep lengthening – if too many commissions stack up, I may reach the point where I wouldn’t be able to make a funded design for a year or more, and that wouldn’t make anyone happy! But, luckily, with 19 AmiDogs designs under my belt already, new breeds are typically much less difficult to design than starting from scratch with a completely new animal, so I should be able to zip through the Rottie and Scottie designs much more quickly than the ones I’ve already completed.

Copycatting

One potential concern about putting my design ideas on display like this is that I’ve noticed several other people suddenly releasing amigurumi patterns for the animals on my list. I certainly don’t have a monopoly on animals, so I’m not complaining about that, but I want to add a note of caution to anyone using my commissions list for inspiration: if you’re making animal designs from my list purely because you think that means they’ll be popular, you’re missing the point of the list.

None of my innovative and original design ideas are up there – the reason these animals are on my list is that I don’t think they’ll be big sellers, which is why I want some money upfront before I spend my time designing them! And that’s proven to be accurate: my non-commissioned designs over the same timeframe (Succulents, Baby Bunnies, Polyhedral Balls/Gaming Dice…) have all brought in far more sales than the commissioned patterns, as I expected they would.

Budding amigurumi designers: if you want to succeed, don’t look to other amigurumi designers for your inspiration. You should make designs that fit your style and the things you love – be original and be true to yourself. Do you want to be in competition with me, or do you want to carve your own niche and have no competitors..?

Pledge Review

One of the potential concerns with my idea is that, unlike Kickstarter, which inspired me to try this in the first place, my ‘campaigns’ have no end date. My gut feeling is that people who want a specific design enough to pledge towards it will still want it even if it doesn’t get developed immediately. Still, there is the concern: what happens if a design is fully funded 2 years later, or 5 years..? How many of the pledgers will still want the design enough to pay for it, or even remember they made the pledge?

For this reason, I decided to do a pledge review at this point in the process. I contacted existing pledgers to check they are still happy to honour their pledges, and delete their pledges if not. Nobody wanted to cancel altogether, and only one person reduced their pledge amount, so I may do a pledge review less frequently than 6-monthly in future (I’ve always given the option for people to contact me to delete a pledge if they change their mind before the design is fully funded). Tweaking these details is another part of developing and testing the process for the long-term.

Design Options Review

After the pledge review, I pulled the designs that were less than halfway to being funded from the list, to make way for others that may be prove to be more popular. (They may return in future – the whole point of this process was to test whether a design will be worth making, and maybe the less-popular ideas will be more appealing next year.)

For new designs, I’ve reviewed all the incoming suggestions, and sorted them as follows:

• Do I want to create this design?
• Do I think I can easily create this design within the time constraint of the commission?
• Are there multiple requests for this design?

I’ve added some of the designs that met all these requirements to the list, and I’m saving the remainder of the suitable ideas for the next review. I’ve also saved the suggestions I loved, but that may pose more design challenges, to my regular pattern ideas list (I don’t want my design to be limited by the time constraint – some ideas just take more time to percolate!), so don’t despair if your suggestion doesn’t appear here.

Feedback Review

It’s been really helpful for me to receive questions and suggestions, so I can make improvements based on what people really want to see here.

Review your pledges: Although you always get a confirmation email for each pledge you make, people wanted a way to see everything they’ve pledged towards at once, so I’ve added the My Pledges feature. Just enter your email address and you’ll see a list of all the pledges you’ve made.

More options: I did a poll in my Facebook group to ask if people would prefer to see a larger selection of ideas in the list, or if that would be overwhelming. 75% voted that they’d still be happy if there were over 30 choices (double what I had until now), so I’ve increased the number of options on the list. Click through to the Commissions page to see (and maybe pledge towards) the new additions!

What’s that animal? I’ve also had requests, particularly from non-native English speakers, to include a photo of each animal on the list, to help them decide whether they’d like to pledge towards its design. Sourcing copyright-free images for each animal would be too much work, so, instead, I’ve made the name of each animal on the list into a direct link to its Wikipedia page (which, as yet, has always included at least one photo – I’ll link to a different page if it doesn’t).

If you’re not quite sure what a Capybara (for example) looks like, just click its name on the pledge chart. The Capybara Wikipedia page will open in a new tab/window and you’ll see its photo and description:

Security Review

I ran into a major problem last week: over the course of a day, I received 3 fake pledges from people pledging huge amounts ($102, $42, $114) and giving fake email addresses. Although I deleted the pledges as soon as I spotted them, knowing it could happen again and again at any time was a big concern. The system doesn’t work if the pledge chart may be wrong and some pledgers turn out to be fake!

After a sleepless night worrying about it, I decided I had to code a verification step to prevent prank bids, so I did that on Friday morning. Now you’ll get a confirmation email with a link you have to click to verify each pledge. The added bonus is that any pledges with misspelt email addresses will also get filtered out now – those are useless to me, as I wouldn’t be able to collect the money without a valid contact email address!

This does mean an extra step whenever you make a pledge, but it makes the system far more secure and reliable, so I think it’s worth it. From now, only confirmed pledges will be shown on the chart or in My Pledges. (Do remember to check your Spam folder if you don’t see the verification emails in your Inbox!)

Summary

With a more reliable system and lots of fun new design options on the list, I think I’m ready for the next 6 months of Commissions! It’s always a risk when you come up with a completely new way of doing things, but, so far at least, it seems to be working well. I usually have to keep quiet about the designs I’m working on (to prevent copycatting before I can publish them), so I’m enjoying being able to share more of my design process with the PlanetJune Ravelry group with these designs that everyone already knows I’m creating.

As always, if you have suggestions to improve this process further, please do let me know – the advantage of doing my own coding is that I can keep tweaking and refining the system with no cost (except my time) and no delays (except my other PlanetJune priorities) – and setting myself little coding challenges makes a refreshing change from my usual design and time-management challenges!

I think the changes I’ve made are making the system stronger and, hopefully, more enticing. Why don’t you take a look and let me know what you think?

It’s time for me to take a step back for a while. I’ve been suffering recently with killer tension headaches and I need to take better care of myself.

I’ll let you into a secret: my patterns and tutorials are only any good as a result of endless hours of research, planning, and refinement, but my finished products look so simple and effortless that, looking back, I never really remember how long it took me to make them (especially as I’m always working on several things at once, so it’s hard to log the time spent on each one).

I have so many ideas: there are masses of designs I want to make, and all kinds of tutorials and crochet experiments I want to work on. Realistically, I probably have enough design and tutorial ideas on my to-do list to keep me working full-time for the next 2-3 years – and that doesn’t include the new ideas and suggestions that I add every week or so…

I can’t keep up with myself – I’m so excited about what I’m creating that I want to do everything!

Unfortunately, that’s not practical… Not unless I pace myself. So, here’s the slow-down plan:

• Assigning a timeframe to my creative work puts needless pressure on me. I’ve hinted at a series of cat designs I’m working on, but something still isn’t quite right with them. Sometimes the only solution is to set it aside for a while, so I’m shelving the cats until new inspiration hits. Apart from commissions, my designs should take however long they need to be the best I can make them.
• Another arbitrary deadline (monthly video tutorials) needs some wiggle room, so my next video tutorial will be a little later than planned. I’ve developed brand new techniques to demo in my Perfect Stripes for Amigurumi tutorial, so it’ll be worth the wait.
• As of right now, I’m on a 3-day rejuvenating work-free weekend – I’ll be doing some knitting (2nd project ever!) and maybe designing a new cross stitch pattern as a stress-relieving craft for the coming months.
• I’ll keep trying to figure out a balance. You may not see me online as much as usual throughout July – I’ll be visiting my parents for a while, and just trying to do less of everything.

Yes. Reading back over this list, it sounds good – I feel like my pressure release valve has just been activated…

Yes, that’s right, I’ve now been blogging for 6 years! Somehow, that doesn’t seem as surprising to me this year – usually it’s a big ‘wow’ moment when I realise my blogiversary is approaching…

Year 6 Review

This was a year of acceleration (and braking). After the stress of Year 5 (an intercontinental move and extended sickness and injury) I started Year 6 trying to get back up to speed. In fact, I worked so hard I was stressed up to the eyeballs. I took December off from designing to relieve the pressure on myself, and took 2 weeks off from everything except essential daily admin over Christmas.

This gave me an inkling of the direction I wanted to move towards – producing high quality work and still having some time left to have a life aside from work. But the break also got me fired up and ready to make changes, so I’ve been setting up a lot of new ‘pieces’ to the world of PlanetJune that will make life run more smoothly for me in future.

I created a new commissions system, finished my new logo, built and coded a new blog design and menu, launched a page to promote people who sell ready-crocheted PlanetJune designs, built up my FAQ, committed to producing at least one video tutorial per month…

Unfortunately, the result of all these grand plans was that I ended up even busier than I was before Christmas!

In between all my other PlanetJune work, I managed to design and publish 24 new crochet patterns:

That’s barely more than the 22 I released the previous year, but I’m aiming for quality with my designs, not quantity. I think it’s always worth putting in the extra time to create something special, and that also holds true from a business/profit standpoint: 1 amazing design can easily bring in more money from long-term sales over the years than 10 mediocre patterns.

Goal Review

My strange situation meant I didn’t set myself any real goals for Year 6:

I need to figure out the logistics of operating from here and how to get myself back on track under such different conditions. […] I need to prioritise getting settled into my new life and getting my health back. Only then can I really focus on making PlanetJune everything I know it could be if I only had the time.

While it hasn’t been easy, and I’m still not 100% settled here, I’ve basically met the ‘adjusting’ goals and moved onto expanding and improving PlanetJune and the resources I offer – yay!

What’s Next?

If you’ve read my post from a couple of weeks ago on beating craft business overwhelm, you’ll already know the strategies I’m working on implementing to make the ever-growing PlanetJune more sustainable with less work on my part: automating, prioritising, and re-energising.

I love doing what I’m doing here with PlanetJune; I really do. Even though I’ve worked incredibly hard to reach this point, I know how lucky I am to be in the position to do what I love for a living, and I don’t take that for granted. Yes, I am slightly overworked right now because I’m in the midst of building all my new systems, but that won’t last forever and then I’ll have the payoff: being able to concentrate on the work I really enjoy: creating, innovating, and explaining crochet techniques. I can’t wait!

Thank you for continuing to accompany me on my PlanetJune adventure – now onwards, into Year 7!

My Commissions system for new crochet patterns is working out so well – in only 3 months since the launch it’s already pushed me to create three completely original design challenges, with more on the way. I’d like to thank everyone who’s trusted me to come up with high quality designs by pledging towards these pattern commissions…

None of these designs would exist without the people who pledged towards them!

However, as I mentioned in yesterday’s Chameleon post, my system still isn’t perfect – I’m finding it a bit of a challenge to keep up with my commissions and still make progress on the other exciting designs I have queued up on my to-do list. (If you’re part of the PlanetJune Ravelry or Facebook communities, you’ll have more of an idea about those upcoming designs!) Last week, I had three fully-pledged designs in the queue (Chameleon, Sea Otter, Rottweiler), and, at a promised one-month completion time for each design, that puts a lot of pressure on me.

When I originally came up with the idea for my Commissions process, it was going to be just for new AmiDogs breeds, and the $60 limit seemed fair. At the last minute, I added various other animal designs to the commissions list before I launched the system, without really thinking that through. The pledges went crazy and I immediately had to raise the totals to $90 as things were getting out of control. What I didn’t tell you at the time was that I then pledged $30 towards each AmiDogs design myself, as I still felt that a $60 AmiDogs commission is the right level – $90 for a new dog pattern seemed unrealistic.

Even with that price increase, the commissions system still hasn’t stabilised to a manageable level for me, so it’s time to implement another round of changes…

My new tiered commissions include pre-pledges (see explanation below)

Timeframe Extension

I’m modifying the completion time for newly-commissioned designs from 1 month to 6-8 weeks, starting immediately with the Sea Otter – hopefully I won’t need that long for every design, but I’d prefer to have the breathing room so I’m not constantly designing under deadline pressure and I have time to work on my other designs in between commissions.

Price Increase

I’m raising the total commission cost again, from $90 to $120. The minimum pledge amount is still unchanged at $6. I initially kept the price low because I didn’t anticipate that so many people would pledge at the minimum $6 level. I also underestimated the level of interest in this concept – even at $120, it’ll only need 20 people to pledge $6 each (or fewer people with larger pledges) to get a design fully funded.

The price increase will take effect immediately, but, for the two designs that had already been fully pledged at $90, I’ve already committed to designing those at the $90 level, so I’m making up the difference with pre-pledges (see below) so don’t worry, pledgers, Sea Otter and Rottweiler are still fully pledged.

Now, if you’re thinking that your favourite dog breed will never get fully pledged at this rate, don’t worry; I have another new mechanism to take care of that:

Pre-Pledges

While most of the animals on my commissions list have a wide general appeal, the designs that are similar to others I’ve already made (e.g. a new dog breed) are mostly of interest to people who have an interest in that specific breed. The pre-pledge acts as a discounted commission price on these designs, so, for example, a $120 commission with a pre-pledge of $60 needs only another $60 to become fully pledged.

I’ve deleted my own $30 pledges towards the AmiDogs on the list, and replaced them with $60 pre-pledges, so the price for a new AmiDogs breed is now only $60.

e.g. here the Scottie has a $60 pre-pledge, so, with $42 already pledged, it only needs $18 more to become fully pledged

I called it a pre-pledge because it is subtracted from the required commission total before you have a chance to start pledging towards the design. You can see the pink pre-pledge bars on the chart, and the pledged amounts now only need to fill the remainder of the white space to become fully pledged. I hope that makes sense!

The pre-pledge capability means I can now tailor the total price required for any commission to any value up to the maximum. This may come in handy in future as I add more design ideas to the commissions list – it gives the system a little more flexibility.

Next Steps

I’ll be adding some new design suggestions to the list once I’ve had a chance to sort through the requests and choose some new animals to add, but I’ll be away visiting my parents next month, so I’ll probably wait until August to add them to the system.

Although my commissions system may still need some additional tweaks before it reaches long-term stability, I think these changes are a step in the right direction. Once I find the right price point for the non-dog patterns, I think it’ll work very well as the gauge of popularity I’d hoped for (as it already is for the AmiDogs): for example, without these commissions, I’d never have guessed that a Rottweiler design would be in more demand than a beautiful King Charles Spaniel!

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when I add another dozen or so new design ideas to the list – I’ll let you know when I do that, so you can pledge if any of your favourite animals come up…

Finally! 2 months after I announced my new logo, I’ve finally launched the new blog layout today. (If you’re reading this in a feed reader, please click through to get the full impact!)

Hopefully this won’t look too new and strange to you; the purpose of this redesign wasn’t to give my blog a new look, but to make it easier for you to use, and to incorporate the new logo.

Here’s the old look, as a quick reminder:

And here’s the new and improved version:

The new layout is slightly wider, which gave me space to add an extra sidebar down the left-hand side with quick links to the things people most often look for on my site. The actual sidebar contents are still in progress – I’d like to add some more prominent links to my Ravelry group and Flickr group, a link to an as-yet unwritten page for my crocheted art, and other things as and when I think of them – but that can wait until I have time.

I think the biggest improvement is to the header area. Gone is the ‘patchwork’ of images at the top that confused people into thinking they were all pictures of crochet patterns:

Now there’s just one large clear photo, but if you refresh the page (or click to a different page on the blog) you’ll see that the image changes – you get a random one each time – so it hopefully still gives a feel for the variety of my patterns.

The almost-invisible main menu located above the header is gone (did you ever even notice it was there?!), and these impossible-to-find text links in the sidebar (I finally realised that a heading called ‘Pages’ means nothing to non-bloggers!):

Ugh, big block of random text links (circled in blue)

All replaced by a more complete menu bar below the header. Everything you need to navigate my site is organised into drop-down menus, and there’s a more prominent Search box on the right.

I still have to redo the rest of PlanetJune to match the new blog design and make it all more useable, but that’ll take a lot longer – I’d anticipated I’d need 2 weeks to complete the blog redesign, and it’s taken 2 months! I also need to figure out a better way to organise my crochet tutorials – now I have lots of photo tutorials and a growing collection of video tutorials, I’m going to need to find a clearer way to present them to you. Piece by piece, I’ll keep working on it all in between everything else – my goal is to have it all completed by the end of the year.

But, for now, I hope you’ll at least find the blog much easier to navigate! I’ve built up a lot of excellent resources on my blog (crochet and craft tutorials, free patterns, videos, etc), but they aren’t much use if you can’t find them 🙂

When I launched my pattern commissions page on Friday, I wasn’t sure which of these scenarios to expect:

• I might get no interest at all – I didn’t think that would happen, but as a worst case scenario I’d have lost nothing more than the time taken to set up the database and code the page.
• I might get a few nibbles, and a pattern commission every couple of months – this was my predicted outcome.
• I may get 2 pattern commissions at once – I didn’t think this was likely, but, just in case, I built in a clause that, should 2 patterns get funded within a month, I’d only collect the pledges for the second pattern after completing the first.

Well, I underestimated – in a big way. (I told you I was bad at making calculated business decisions!)

Eek – it’s going too well!

It’s been less than 4 days and I have one design fully pledged and several others getting close. I haven’t even notified my mailing list yet, so there could be a huge rush of pledges at that point. At this rate, my business could turn into full-time commissioned designs, which, while very flattering, isn’t something I can actually do – I still have all my other hats to wear, and a commitment to continue to make crochet videos and tutorials. I cannot possibly commit to creating more than one commissioned design per month – I can’t work more quickly without the quality of my designs suffering, and that’s not something I’m prepared to sacrifice (and, I’m sure, not something you’d want to pay for).

Plus, the commissions are only for basic animal designs. Anything complicated, or unusual, or something I’d be taking a gamble on in trying to create a design for it, is not going to appear on that commissions list – I have to wait for inspiration to strike before I can design things like that, and I need to leave myself time to let that inspiration happen.

There’d be no dinosaurs or succulents if I only made commissioned designs!

So, here’s my solution: I’m moving the goalposts by raising the total commission amount from $60 to $90. Minimum pledges will still be $6. For the koala (which is already fully pledged at $60) there’ll be no change – I’ve already committed to designing that.

The updated system

If you’ve already pledged:

• Your pledge stands at the dollar amount you originally agreed to.
• The change shouldn’t make any practical difference to you – by the time my koala design is finished, I’m sure the pledges will be back up to the level they were when you pledged, or higher.
• As before, you won’t have to pay for your pledge until I’m ready to begin the design.
• If, however, you feel hard-done-by, just email me if you’d like to cancel your pledge. I’m not trying to con anyone – just to set up a system that will work in the long term.

I’m going with full transparency here and I hope you’ll understand my reasons for this – the whole point of the commissions system is to gauge which design ideas may be most popular, but without making a change to the system, all the options will soon look equally popular! It’s an entirely new system, and the challenge (and also the potential reward) of innovating is that you just can’t know in advance how successful an idea may prove to be.

I expect the pledging frequency will drop after the initial flurry, but I may need to tweak the system a little more in the coming weeks/months, and I may, at some point, have to shift the totals again. If I do have to, my rules will remain the same:

• Any design that is already fully pledged will remain so.
• Whichever design is fully pledged first will be created first.
• The dollar amount of your pledge(s) will remain unchanged.
• If you really need to cancel a pledge, you may do so by emailing me before the design is fully pledged.

The first two points mean there’s still value in pledging early if you’d like to see your favourite design(s) made more quickly, so please don’t see this as a sign to stop pledging!

I think this is the fairest way of doing things, but if you have any suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments or by email – your opinion counts too!

I have a lot of design ideas – too many, in fact. We live in an amazing world, and there are just too many wonderful animals and plants for me to be able to recreate them all in crochet. To help me decide which to make next, and see which would be popular choices, I’ve launched a new pattern commission model, so now you can help me make my design choices!

The way it works is like a mini Kickstarter, but exclusively for PlanetJune designs. If you’d like me to design a new crochet pattern, instead of commissioning me outright to design it for you, now you’ll be able to make a pledge towards the design commission.

If you love the idea and want to get the pattern as soon as possible, you can pledge the entire commission amount; if you’re happy to wait a while for some other people to come in with you to make the total amount, you can pledge as little as $6 towards the commission, or anything in between.

There’s nothing to pay at the time you make a pledge; the pledges stay active until a design is fully funded, and, at that point, I’ll collect the pledged monies and start designing. Once the design is complete, I’ll email a copy of the pattern to each of the pledgers.

On the Commissions page, you’ll see a graph showing the design ideas currently available for commission, and their current pledge states. As soon as you make a pledge, the graph will update to reflect it:

These are just test pledges so you can see what the graph will look like when I have some real pledges – I’ve reset them all to $0 now.

You can also suggest new ideas to me; I’ll add each to the Commissions list if a) I’d be happy to make a design for it and b) I’m confident I’ll be able to design it in the designated timeframe. More complicated or unusual requests may take longer to get right, so, if I like them, I’ll either design them anyway, just because I want to, or they’ll be available for private commission, with deadlines and pricing dependent on the design itself.

If you click through to the Commissions page, you’ll also get a first glimpse of my new logo in action! Refresh the page and you’ll see the photo in the header changes, so (in future, once the rest of the site has been updated) you’ll see a different photo there each time you go to a new page on my site:

Ooh, new logo alert!

It’s a really exciting time for me at the moment: I finally have the time to make progress on projects that have been in the works since long before I left Canada – everything got indefinitely postponed when things got too hectic… It was exactly a year and a day ago that I first started planning this new Commissions model, so it’s extra-nice to have it finally coded up and ready to go!

Site navigation will improve once I have the new blog design finished, but for now, there’s a text link to the Commissions page at the top of the right sidebar. —>

*click* – that’s the sound of another piece of my grand plan slotting into place 🙂

I thought I was being pretty clever when I designed my blog header in 2007: 7 pictures, to give an idea of the variety of crafts I do (crochet, polymer clay, sewing, sketching) and tied together into a ‘patchwork’ using the same zig-zag ‘stitches’ I used to make my Japanese-inspired patchwork lunch bag.

When I designed the shop, I used the same header, but swapped the non-crocheted items for more crochet patterns you can find in the shop.

It was all very clear and self-explanatory, in theory, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Over the years, I’ve had several enquiries about each of the crochet patterns in my blog header that aren’t available in my shop, and I’ve had to explain over and over again that the donkeys are pencil sketches, the tiny flowers and avocados are polymer clay, and the poinsettia is sewn from fabric – they clearly aren’t as obviously non-crocheted as I had thought…

The obvious solution to replace the old design was to design a real logo for PlanetJune: a symbol to represent me and to use throughout my website. I started the process in 2009. I read books and articles on good logo design and I knew exactly what I wanted, but I had problems drawing it without adding too much detail.

I’m too stubborn/controlling to ask for outside help: PlanetJune is my baby and it just wouldn’t feel right for the symbol that represents me to be created by somebody else. Then life got in the way, and it wasn’t until I was forced by circumstance (I discovered that my old zig-zag template is no longer on my computer!) that I thought much about the logo again.

Long story short: I drew 2 pages of sketches, made 15 digital prototypes, and now, 3 years later, it’s finally ready. So here it is: the PlanetJune logo…

I hope it’s obvious what it represents!

As you can see below, I’ll be changing the text for the various parts of the site; I have a square version for avatars and anywhere I need a smaller logo; and I even have two teeny tiny ones for my favicon (the tiny square image you see next to a website’s name in your browser):

I was planning to wait until the whole site was ready to relaunch before announcing the logo, but I have some new web projects that I want to launch in the next couple of weeks, and I can’t use the old design now I’ve lost the zig-zag source file. Redesigning the blog and shop while putting my new projects together and running the rest of my business would be a huge job, and I don’t want to delay the exciting new projects until I can redesign everything.

So: a compromise. The new pieces will have the new design, and the homepage, blog, shop, mailing list, and everything else will get their redesign when I have time. (Although the whole site looks the same, each of those things is built with a different structure going on behind the scenes, so updating each one will be a large individual project.)

I do care about looking professional, but at the end of the day, I am a one-person business, and maybe the rules of professionalism that apply to a larger business should be a little more relaxed for an indie business. Until the day I can clone myself so I have a web designer/developer, a customer service rep, and a creative director, I still have to wear all those hats, and, as my business grows, it’s becoming more difficult to fit everything into my day and still have some sort of a life! I’ve realised it’s compromise or collapse at this point, and so I choose to compromise – the world won’t end if my logo takes a while to spread throughout my website!

I’m so excited to finally have a logo for PlanetJune! I hope you like it too. (And, just in case it wasn’t immediately obvious to you, it’s a yarn planet – what else would PlanetJune be made from?!)