Heart Shaped Skull is taking comic books into the digital age using Pulley to deliver high-quality PDF downloads of their horror/comedy hybrid known as ELDRITCH! At less than a buck a piece, you can’t pass up on this e-entertainment that was once dubbed “winner” in a DC Comics’ Zuda webcomic competition. Dig into ELDRITCH! and more here: heartshapedskull.bigcartel.com
Check out the full shop at: finegoods.bigcartel.com
FG: I’m (Rogie) a designer, front-end developer and illustrator. Fine Goods has been a dream of mine for a long time. I’ve always been designing goodies for the design community and also been obsessed with quality, fun shirts.
Fine Goods was created when I got the inspiration for the scripted type. I drew it up, made it into a logo, and a year later, here we are! Fine Goods, as a brand, is sort of an anti-brand. It’s really generic and feels like you’ve known about it forever. That’s why I like it.
FG: The response has been great! Everybody’s loving the goodies and all of the cool design details on the site. Oh, and yeah, sales aren’t too bad either.
The first immediate lesson I learned: If you have a mechanism to bring you massive traffic, turn on overselling at the beginning of launch and closely monitor your inventory levels. I found that tons of people were adding things to their carts, and lots of other shoppers couldn’t add an item because it was in another person’s cart, who may or may not have bought it.
FG: I keep all of my products really close to my chest and I’d like to think I have an eye for detail and quality. Because of that, I’m not farming designs out, and I truly care about each product being quality. Quality is key.
At some level, I’m inspired by people all around me. When it comes to icons, Tim VanDamme, Benjamin DeCock and Tanya Maifat do a wonderful job. When it comes to graphic design and lettering, I appreciate Jon Contino, Drew Melton, Chris Sandlin, Ryan Clark, Simon Walker and DISNEY.
FG: What I love about Pulley is the design. It’s dead simple and easy to use. I love that you upload a zip, enter a name, and bam! You’ve got a link to sell.
FG: I designed Fine Goods in the same way I’d design a site: limitless, without regard for the technology. I don’t want to think of how I have to cater my design to the e-commerce solution. Rather, I designed the site, implemented it as static HTML files, and when I was done, applied it to Big Cartel. With the awesome api you guys have, I just plugged it all in. You really have made a nice product with plenty of extendability.
FG: I love how Big Cartel followed up on Twitter just to double-check and make sure that I didn’t need further help. Keep on keepin’ on! I’m loving your product.
Providing the finishing touches on websites around the globe, Web Icon Sets uses Pulley to seamlessly and securely deliver sleek icon files right to your inbox. Purchase individual icon sets or become a member and get instant access to the entire line of icon sets. View the full range of sets at: webiconset.com
Good news Pulley fans, we’ve just released some new and improved charts to your dashboard. These charts were initially displayed using Flash, which at the time gave us the right look and user interaction we wanted for Pulley, but unfortunately didn’t work on most mobile devices. Since we know you like keeping tabs on your Pulley orders on the go, we’ve now updated our charts to use JavaScript, giving you the ability to more easily load and monitor your digital sales from any desktop or mobile device, anywhere. We sincerely appreciate the feedback from those that requested this feature, and hope you’ll appreciate a more accessible way of monitoring your sales with Pulley.
We had a chance recently to sit down with the wildly talented and extremely gracious Christine Tafoya, the brains behind Dear Miss Modern.
Check out the store here: dearmissmodern.com
The rumors are true. I was seriously born a hyper-active design fanatic.
I designed a birthday invitation (on a teeny tiny little mac) when I was about 20, with absolutely no computer skills at all. I did it in Microsoft Publisher, printed it out, and glued little confetti hearts to it. I made a bunch of copies and everyone loved them. That was kind of a turning point; I was hooked. After that, I would design anything I could get my hands on, and kept creating new little “businesses” so that I could design the branding for them. Finally someone (ok, my mom) said, “you know, you could make a business out of doing that for other people.” And here we are.
I create what I like to look at. I don’t really know where the design-style itself came from, but like any designer will tell you, I’m influenced by everything. The little Asian market on the corner has the best packaging. I’m a foreign film and magazine junkie, and simplicity always wins.
Just paying attention is the best influence. Every day I’m amazed by my business; how much I love it, how well it’s doing. That’s inspiring.
I was actually really against selling anything pre-made for a long time. People would ask me if I had pre-made logos and I would cringe. I truly do feel that design should be specific to the client, the personality, and the feeling of the business, but after so much interest in the templates, combined with the wait list for custom work (and the instant nature of technology), I couldn’t say no anymore.
I’ve had the Dear Miss Modern shop for a little over a year, and I couldn’t be happier with it. It’s a creative outlet for my creative outlet, and it’s fun, pretty, instant gratification for my clients. It’s really satisfying to come up with an idea, run it by the facebook crowd, and put it in the shop the next day with smashing results. That’s instant gratification for me.
I love custom work, and it’s the main part of the business. My husband and I opened a restaurant in Northern California, and I have to say it was my hands-down favorite design project. Because it wasn’t just design. It was the whole nine. Company name, (complete with fun story behind it) logo, menus, tag line, website, events, decor, marketing, facebook—all of it. It all has to work together, all the time, and it all has to come from the same voice. No excuses.
Honestly, time. I can design things all day long, but when it comes to getting the files ready for the shop, which means setting them up in a way that my clients can edit them and use them, it takes me forever.
I have the most awesome help now though, so problem solved. (Say hi to Michele everyone).
I cannot say enough good things about Big Cartel and Pulley. I mean it. I LOVE what your service has enabled me to do with my business, and the way it’s set up is so clean, seamless, and easy. I was a little afraid of having the shop and dealing with technical difficulty, but there’s been none.
I will tell anyone who will listen how fabulous you are, and I can’t imagine ever using anything else. Keep up the good work you guys- it’s seriously brilliant.
Get your jQuery plugin fix at: metafizzy.co
MF: I’ve always been interested in visual arts, math, and geometry. Years ago in college, I started a photography blog. I became more interested in tweaking the site than posting the photos. Learning web design was fulfilling as it satisfied my desire to create visuals and work with logic systems. The reward of putting your creative output online for thousands to see is intoxicating. Web design does an excellent job at bringing this all together.
I wanted the name of my business to be something fun and playful. What’s more joyous than tiny bubbles? Superficially, “Metafizzy” is a derivation from “metaphysics.” This topic can be a highfalutin, full of wacky concepts. Switching it to “fizzy” almost mocked it, which I think is cute.
MF: CSS transitions and transforms are that game changer and they are ready for prime time. While animation and movement have been around for years, the CSS implementation of transitions and transforms put them in the front of the web developer’s tool set. Together these features can be leveraged to create new layout paradigms and design patterns. Designers and developers will need to consider not just the visual composition of their sites, but also how movement plays a role. Dan Mall wrote a terrific article on this subject, discussing how animation can establish a brand in Real Animation Using JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 Video.
One of my projects, Isotope, relies heavily on animation. In fact, you could argue that it does nothing more than add a layer of animation to the sorting and filtering functionalities that have been available with server-side development. But the animation is not just a whizz-bang effect for sugarcoating. Animation significantly adds value to interaction. Movement and animation help the user understand what changes are currently transpiring. This comment on Hacker News in response to Isotope put it best:
“If you didn’t have the animation it would not be easy to see which items had risen and which fallen. You would have to compare your memory of the order before the change with what you’re looking at. This is cognitively very difficult.”
MF: I love riding my bike. My commute is short enough that I can easily bike it, which I truly enjoy. Lately at home I’ve been reading comics like The Walking Dead, Empowered, and Ex Machina.
MF: It’s a great time to be in web development. Specs are being proposed and re-written, browsers are racing one another to add in features, and developers are creating little demos that try to play around with a couple of them. I feel this push for experimenting is especially healthy for the dev community.
I love picking apart a demo or a small feature on a site to see how the developer got it done. I especially enjoy when somebody breaks the rules. That can be using a horizontal layout, adding gigantic imagery, deconstructing typography, or overloading the computing power on a web browser.
Pulley has been a tremendous boon for my business. When I first started planning out how I was going to monetize Metafizzy, other solutions required too much time-investment and offered unnecessarily complex features. As a web designer and developer, I am comforted by how you guys at Big Cartel are cut from the same cloth. You get it.
The dashboard is downright gorgeous and a pleasure to use. So much so, that it pains me to take a look at PayPal when I have to. Implementing Pulley was especially easy, and it requires little maintenance. Pulley enabled me to profit from my work, without costing me the hassle of managing online transactions. I’d recommend it for any designer or developer looking to do the same.
Rina Miele (honey design) is a full-time freelance creative director and designer from Sleepy Hollow, New York. She uses a seamless mixture of Pulley and Big Cartel to bring her fans everything from free vector critters to fonts, patterns and textures.
Check out the full shop at: honeydesign.bigcartel.com
The crew over at iA(information Architects) use a very specific and refreshingly-simple formula when approaching each product.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in these beautiful templates offered securely through Pulley. Their store (also an example of their beautiful work and a stunning example of Big Cartel customization) showcases these templates and products in a way that clears everything not completely neccesary out of the way and organizes the good stuff for concise visual consumption.
Liam McCabe is a young student and designer getting his feet planted in the world of UI design. He’s put together a shop showcasing a few collections of his best icons and web elements. Pulley is a perfect way to sell anything downloadable— automated, secure transactions so designers like Liam can focus on that meticulous pixel-tweaking.
Digital Abstracts has set up a well curated, digital font shop of sharp, modern typefaces from artists all over the world.
From best-selling offerings like GHS and Norpeth, to charmers like Berque and Minta One, everything is available for instant, secure download thanks to Pulley.
