24 Free Social Media Network Icons

| March 4, 2010

Download These Social Media Network Icons For Free

I’ve been wanting some icons that would match the blog’s new look, for readers to click on and submit articles to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and others, so I designed a full set while I was at it that anyone is welcome to use for free.  These social media network icons can be used on your blogs, websites, etc. for linking to all the most popular networks.

These free social media icons have a “parchment” or “torn paper” look, and they look great on any background.  The goal was to create some icons that just look super classy.

Here’s how the icons look on a transparent background:

Here they are on a white background:

And, here they are on a black background:

Attribution Would Be Appreciated.

You are welcome to download these icons for linking to your favorite social networks and use them freely.  If you use them, however, I would appreciate it if you would place an attribution link to estimatesoftware.com.

Also, if you use them, drop me a note at mark (at) estimatesoftware (dot) com.  I’d love to see how they look in the wild!

Here are the download links:

These icons are 40×40 pixels, saved as 32 bit transparent PNG files.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Customer Profile: Budget Signs, Bradenton, Florida

| March 2, 2010

Interview With: Christian Slager

How did you get into the sign business?

Wow, this one is a long, but cool story. My parents were going to start “Christian’s Toy Store,” which was going to have non-violent toys and books for kids.

They looked at a unit in a busy shopping center, but didn’t like the idea that the landlord wanted them to be open 7 days a week, insisted that he could audit their books every few months, and if they were making money, raise the rent. They went to the sign shop across the street to find out how much they needed to budget for signage. It was owned by a retired gentleman that had been an engineer in his former life, designing and building RV’s, who did NOT have to work, but his buddy in Indiana had started a sign shop and he thought it was the coolest job he’d ever seen. So, the gentleman had owned it for five years, but being of retirement age and not needing the money, he turned away any projects that were too big or that he really didn’t want to mess with. After my dad told him his concerns about the landlord and shopping center across the street, the sign shop owner said: “Why don’t you buy my business? I’m ready to move onto my next venture.”

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The Biggest Mistake Many Businesses Make

| February 15, 2010

“The biggest mistake many businesses make is to believe that price alone drives sales.” — Elizabeth Wasserman, Inc.com.

Sign Pricing Is Like A Game Of ChessI read Ms. Wasserman’s article titled “How to Price Your Products” this morning, and if you know anything about me by now, you know it inflamed my passions.  She very accurately describes the processes required for pricing products accurately and consistently.  I think we all know a lot of what she says to be true; however, in the sign industry, our products just don’t fit the cookie cutter model of pricing – which means every time we price a job, it’s a real challenge to pull all the variables together and get our prices out the door on time.

Why are you in business?

I mentioned a couple of months ago that I was involved in a discussion on an online forum where one of the posters essentially said that he felt he was ripping his customers off if he made a great profit on his work.  This continues to mystify me because the whole reason we are in business is to make money.  Sure, we love our work, the interactions with customers (well – most of ‘em ;) ), and the time we spend actually creating graphic arts for sale.  At the end of the day, though, our whole reason for being in business is to take home a profit that allows us to save for retirement, put the kids through college, take vacations, and ultimately secure our lives.  Otherwise we’re in business for all the wrong reasons. (more…)

The EstiMate Story – or, why we’re so passionate about all this pricing stuff.

| February 4, 2010

Ivan in my basement sign shop, Ampersand SignsYou may or may not know that EstiMate was born out of my own frustration when I was running my basement sign shop from 1993-1999. I had grown up in the sign industry, in my mother’s own basement sign shop, and throughout the late 70s and all of the 80s I watched her struggle to price her work. The phone would ring, she would answer and listen to the customer’s description of the sign they wanted made, and then she would say: “just a moment, let me go figure that.”

She would drum her fingers on the desk for a while, all the while staring at her “calculator on the ceiling,” and then she would get back on the phone and say, “that’ll be $500.”

Sound familiar?

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EstiMate DiamondMine™ – Discover Buried Treasure In Your Business!

| February 3, 2010

DiamondMine - Find Hidden Profit Potential In Your BusinessHave you ever “just known” that if you were more efficient, or organized, you could be making more money from your business?  EstiMate DiamondMine takes those feelings and boils them down to math. Using EstiMate DiamondMine, you can now very easily see where the financial “leaks” are in your business and learn how to plug them, all by answering a few simple questions and generating a free report.

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Finding Magic In Your Procrastination

| January 25, 2010

Logo from Jessica Hische's website“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”’

How’s that for refreshing?  A few evenings ago while I was cruising around the interwebs, I found this video interview with Jessica Hische on humblepied.com.  Jessica is a type designer and hand-letterer working in Brooklyn, NY.  One of the things I absolutely love is hand lettering and the state of mind I get in when I’m doing it.  Painting and graphic design have always overlapped for me — probably why I ended up so deeply embedded in the sign industry — and it’s just a total breath of fresh air to find Jessica’s work.

Back to the comment above, however, I think she is making a very important point for all of us.  Every day when we are working, we are doing bread and butter type work that often robs us of our creative spirit.  I think Jessica is absolutely correct that the things we do to “play” — those things that inspire us, bring us happiness and joy, and that we can completely get lost in — are the things we should be focusing on when we ask ourselves, “what am I here to do?”  I know that for me it’s some pretty odd stuff – discovering haml the other day, for example, had me re-doing large sections of the website and really enjoying myself.

In addition to using this as a tool to find what you really should be spending your time on, it’s a great way to relax.  There’s nothing that can compare to the good feelings that come from doing what we love, and when we are stressed, there’s a reason we return to the tasks that make us happiest.

Right now my son Ivan, who is a senior in high school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, is applying to art schools around the country to become an illustrator.  He has always been into comic design, and for awhile last term was so overrun with other projects that he couldn’t spend time doing what he loved.  Fortunately this term he is able to do some of that again, and his stress levels have dropped tremendously — a perfect illustration of what Jessica is talking about.

So, thanks Jessica for the wonderful quote, and the fabulous lettering design! You’re a real inspiration to me and I’m sure you will be to others as well.

P.S. Check out Jessica’s Buttermilk Font — it could be great for boutique signs.

New! EstiMate Configurator Available Online

| January 12, 2010

We’ve been asked over and over again to provide an easy way for potential customers to configure and price the EstiMate system that fits their shop. Well, we are proud to announce our new configurator! The EstiMate configurator will allow you to select options that describe how you want to use EstiMate in your shop and will build a system for you, ready to go. Enjoy!

EstiMate Bundles Now Available

| November 19, 2009

Want To Take The Hassle Out Of Selecting Plugins And Just Get Started?

EstiMate is now available in bundles at slightly reduced prices.  We’ve put together six bundle packages that we believe will bring you what you need to get started right away with EstiMate and we’re offering them to you beginning today.

The packages we have available are:
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RateMate Hourly Rate Calculator Coming Soon for the iPhone

| October 29, 2009

RateMate IconLately I’ve been working on a new project, an hourly rate calculator for the iPhone.  RateMate is a port of our ProfitWatch software to the iPhone.  I think calculating the proper hourly rate is so important to small business that I hope this app will bring the concept to a wider audience.

iPhone development has turned out to be a real blast — very solid tools with Xcode and Interface Builder, coupled with a solid iPhone emulator, made the only challenge the learning of the Cocoa environment.

<Nerd Moment>
Cocoa is a development environment wrapped around Objective-C, which is a fascinating addition to the C programming language. Objective-C operates based on objects and messages, much like Smalltalk, and practically abandons any procedural thinking. I remember moving from being a Basic, Pascal, &  C Programmer to programming in C++, Object Pascal, and learning object orientation in those last two.

The difference between procedural programming and object programming is just huge. Moving to Objective-C almost felt like that again, and I had to rewire my brain to think purely in terms of objects.
</Nerd Moment>

For those of you who are programmers and are interested in learning new platforms, I have to say the tools provided for the iPhone are stellar and lack only in tutorial based documentation.  That I ended up getting from the book iPhone SDK Development by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson.

Available through the Pragmatic Programmers website, this will give you the rest of what you need to get started with iPhone development.

RateMate is currently undergoing the App Store review process and I will post again when it is released.