Liezl Croft is an utterly lovely wedding and family portrait photographer. A force of South African fabulousness, creative, warm, friendly and with an eye for fun she asked us to create a brand refresh and blogsite that would reflect where her business is today as well as (of course) attracting and retaining lots of new clients.

And whilst we’ve been working with her on her printed literature now for several years, I was delighted when she asked us to give her blog a brandover. Having set up her business less than two years ago, Liezl had previously created her websites herself and felt that her business was at a level where she was ready to step things up a gear.

As well as being a cracking lifestyle photographer, Liezl is also very crafty and I think you’ll see that come through in the look and feel of the site.

We’ve worked on creating direct mail for Liezl in the past (which we won a design award last year for) but this project gave us the chance to really flex our creative muscles! We designed to create Liezl a WordPress based blogsite – a website and blog rolled into one which would give her the chance to showcase her photography without being too onerous to manage.

We put together a colour palette that created an aspirational feel, whilst plenty of texture and elements like the bunting creates a sensory quality and follows on from the work we did previously on the mailers. We all love the icons that Chloe created for each category, and the beautiful pattern that sets off the blog. I’d always known that Liezl’s work was beautiful, but what I hadn’t appreciated was the enormous difference the right surroundings make to her images.

If you take a look at the difference between the old blog and the new, I think you’ll agree they’re night and day apart.

Liezl’s old blog

I don’t want to embarrass anyone by going into this too heavily, let’s just say that the design of the blog had a long way to catch up with the quality of Liezl’s work…

And the new blogsite

Liezl has been so much fun to work with on this project and we wish her lots of luck with the new site and branding. It’s too early to measure the financial success of the blog – it’s been live for less than a month, but visits have doubled and the feedback to Liezl’s Facebook and Twitter page was overwhelming! Do hope on over and take a look (and do leave her a comment too, it’s so lovely to receive feedback when you’re writing your heart out and you know how lonely it can be when you’re first blogging)… You’ll find Liezl’s website and blog at www.liezlcroft.com

These posts are a bit like busses aren’t they? You wait for one In The Studio This Week and then two come along at once!

Harriet Tipping is a very lovely nutritional therapist who has just about to launch her business, Nutribeing. She already had a logo but no brand identity to speak of, so we really had a very free rein (within the confines of the brief of course!).

The brief for this blog design was to create something that felt fresh, uplifting and healthy. I think it’s a great example of a very clean and professional Spring design. You can just feel the energy bursting out of that green can’t you? And yet the purple keeps it restrained and the attention to detail in the layout and typography keeps the whole feel professional and smart.

I really can’t wait to get this live for Harriet as I know it’ll be a great platform for her to start to launch her business. Keep your eyes peeled too because over the next week or so we’ll be sharing the new website design for Nutribeing with you too…

Rarely does a week go by when someone doesn’t ask me the question “How on earth do you find the time to blog?”. I too, have been the victim of the “I don’t know how she does it” type comments. Small children, business, baking etc – where does blogging fit into my time?

I know that many of you find it hard to find the time to blog, and so I thought it might be helpful to talk about how to find the time, and what you might do to carve out a little time for your blog.

Don’t waste energy on what you should have done

First up, I’m the first to admit that I should sometimes blog more regularly. Sometimes I blog every day, sometimes a week or two slips by without me finding time to post. I’m not going to berate myself over that, and I recommend you don’t either.

Right now we are having major renovations done on our house. I’m pretty laid back about a bit of mess, even chaos, at times, but this has really floored me. We moved back in to our house on Sunday (about two weeks sooner than we should have done I think) – no heating, no electrics, no hot water and the back of the house ply-boarded up. It hasn’t been fun, and it’s affected the time and energy I’ve had to blog. I hope you don’t have the major upheaval that I’ve got, but there will be times when it isn’t humanly possible to blog. That’s ok.

Make it part of your routine

As MD of the business, I know that the buck stops with me when it comes to attracting and keeping customers. Sure, I have two fabulous Account Executives, but it’s my job to drive the business forward, and experience has shown me time and time again that this blog helps me attract and retain clients. Therefore I need to make time for it.

I was at Vanessa Langham Day’s Entrepreneur’s Circle yesterday and she reminded us that as business owners we should be spending 20% of our time every day on driving the business forwards. That means an hour and a half a day (or an hour and a half of each of the three days that I work) on marketing. Updating your website, making strategic plans, implementing your website and writing your blog. Do you invest that much time in your marketing? If you work full time that means a whole day a week! Imagine what that could do for your business if you did that week in week out.

So there’s no getting around the fact that you just need to make the time.

Write a “job lot” of posts for efficiency

I’ve taken most of Friday to work on marketing and have already written three posts and will probably write a couple more that I’ll schedule over the course of next week (or this week, as you’re reading this next week!). That means that every week I can go into the week knowing that I have some blog activity going on.

Write posts around a specific theme

I always find that writing a series of blog posts gets a better response from my readers and is easier to write – the challenge is, it takes brain space (which is often quite hard to find when you’re living on a building site )

What else do you do to make time to blog? And what’s getting in your way? I’d love your thoughts!

Angela Marshall is an author and one of the country’s leading image consultants. I’ve known her for years since I met her networking when I first started my business, and I was delighted when Angela invited to give her blog an image makeover.

Angela works with large corporates: often financial institutions and professional services, and sixty percent of her clients are men so it was really important that we didn’t make the website too girly. I love her new strapline which we developed for Angela based on my knowledge of the elements of style and image that are important to Angela and her business.

Angela has had a WordPress blog for some time now, and had been writing a fair bit. She has a really fun, no nonsense style and doesn’t mince her words. We felt that it was really important to inject some of that elegance and style that Angela has into the blog, as well as giving it an authorative no-nonsense look that matches her writing style.

Chloe has done a fab job neatening everything up, making the whole look and feel smarter, easier to navigate and more elegant. And I love how the theme just offsets what Angela is writing now.

We debated long and hard with Angela about which seasonal personality she should be (the joys of bringing colour theorists together from two different schools!) and agreed that Winter was the right season for Angela. Winter is authorative, elegant, expert, loves upmarket things and luxury. We’ve injected a bit of warmth into the colour to ensure that it felt approachable and comfortable to Angela

I know that Angela has had a great response to her new makeover and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for her blog! You’ll find it at http://www.angelamarshall.co.uk/ go on, take a look!

I’ve long been a fan of food photographer Helene Dujardin’s blog Tartelette. Her photography is just stunning and always, without fail, picks me up after a stressful day. I find her styling inspirational and her photography just beautiful.

And so when I discovered that she had written a book on how to take food photography I didn’t need any encouragement to get myself a copy in the interests of research.

I think that most of you will find the styling, information on props and creating a mood with your food photography the most valuable. Helene is so generous with what she shares and the whole book is truly inspiring. I just couldn’t wait to rush out and play about with my lunch, much to the delight of my family.

Styling, props and how to create a mood

I really “got” some of the things she was saying around thinking about the mood you want to create when styling a dish – give a homely dish homely props, an elegant dish elegant props. I think it’s something that’s very obvious once you think about it, but the point is that I’d never thought about it like that before. Haleluja Helene!

There are chapters on styling specific styles of food and Helene helps you tackle some of the challenges, like wilting lettuce or melting ice cream. And best of all, Helene cooks real food, the sort of food you want to pick up and eat, so you won’t find anything dodgy going on with mashed potato in place of ice cream, varnish or any of those other odd food styling tricks of old.

The technical stuff is certainly a little overwhelming for a complete novice like me. I found myself reading and re-reading the chapters on exposure as I’m not much of a technical girl but Helene is reassuring in her knowledge and I value the fact that I can play around with styling and then go back and re read those chapters when I’m ready.

And here’s something I made earlier

I just couldn’t help playing about with our lunch in prep for this post. There’s a lot to work on technically, and these were very much 5 minute snaps while the toddler and my husband chivvied me along to finish so that they could eat their lunch (because we’re staaaaaarving).

It’s also probably fair to say that these are “inspired by” Helene’s work rather than even remotely being on the same planet as hers but it’s not often I get to publish my food photography on the Full Bloom blog so I’m just going to stop apologising now and let you make your own minds up…

Enjoy. Oh, and I happened upon this video from Helene sharing the inspiration behind the book via Creature Comforts blog and I couldn’t not show it to you.

If you do buy the book, or do have a copy, do let me know what you think!

Plate to Pixel Promo Video HD from Taylor Mathis on Vimeo.

Ahead of tomorrow’s sell out blogging workshop I thought it might be fun to combine a little list of my own “must have” tools for bloggers. Looking down my list again it’s probably fair to say that most of these apply mostly to creative bloggers – those of you that write cutting edge, hard-nosed business blogs may wish to curtail some of the girlier elements of my list – but here are some of the things that work for me.

1. A gorgeous notebook to jot down your blog ideas and keep you motivated. A lovely client gave me this beautiful Liberty notebook and it makes me smile every time I see it.

2. A camera. I love my Canon 350D, I love my new 5D even more. Photos bring your blog to life and help you connect creatively, plus it’s a LOT of fun.

3. And if you have a camera then you’ll need something to edit your photos in. I can’t do without Adobe Photoshop CS5 and my recently discovered copy of Adobe Lightroom but if you’re starting out Photoshop Elements is great at £80 a copy.

4. A lovely fountain pen to write in your notebook – just because you’re blogging online doesn’t mean it’s not important to connect with actual writing.

5. WordPress. There are many blogging platforms but WordPress remains my firm favourite: intuitive to use, flexible, and very customisable for your brand.

6 & 7. Blogging Your Way ecourse from Decor8: a fun, creative and inspirational way to help you connect with your blog and take it to the next level. Highly recommended.

7. Vicki Knights Photography Workshop for Creative Business Owners - a cracking way to improve your photography skills.

8. And if you’re going to do all this writing, then you need a nice cup of tea.

So those are my top eight, what would you add to the list?

I’d love to know how you get on and please do comment with links back to your own blog so that we can see your lovely work!

Here’s what we’re making.

Step One: Create some space

Open your image in Photoshop and make your canvas a couple of cm/ 150 pixels or so bigger than the image at the bottom. You do this by going to Image> Canvas Size. To avoid space all around the image change the blocks at the bottom as I have and then the extra space will sit on the bottom only.

Step Two: Create your blocks

Remember drawing a rectangular block from our last tutorial? Well we’re going to do the same again. Depending on your preference you can make these blocks any shape or size. I’m going to go for landscape blocks.

I’ve also switched on the grid (by going to View> Show> Guides). When I’m designing normally I find these guides annoying, but for something like the blocks it really helps me be precise.

Create a new layer and draw yourself a rectangular marquee. Fill the block with your foreground colour. It doesn’t really matter at this stage what the colour is as we’ll do the precise colour picking later.

Step Three: Duplicate your colour blocks

So that we don’t need to mess about getting the blocks precisely the same size we’re going to duplicate them a few times. Ready? Here goes.

Create a duplicate layer by dragging your layer with the block on it (I’ve named mine block 1) over the Create a New Layer tool. This will duplicate your layer so that you have two blocks on top of eachother. Take the new block and move it to the right, a neat distance (I choose one square away) from the first block.

Select both layers and Merge together (I use “Apple E” command). The next job is to duplicate that layer twice so that you end up with six blocks.

It’s not looking inspiring yet but it is looking neat!

Step Four: Add some colour

The next bit involves a bit of creative license. My image is an Autumnal Colour Psychology mood board that we’ve created to illustrate our new website. I want the colours to represent the warmth and vibrancy of the Autumn colour personality so I need to be sure that the colours I end up with are warm, intense and muted. When you colour pick from a photograph, you often end up with quite distorted colours because the shadows add a lot of grey into the colour tones, so you may need a few stabs to get exactly what you’re looking for.

Use the Eyedropper tool to pick colours from your image. On my tools palette – left hand side of my screen it’s 6th down and looks like a pipette (remember those from science?!).

Once you have a colour you’re happy with use the paint bucket tool to drop your colour onto one of your blocks. For this to work remember you’ll need to select the right layer. If you flood the entire screen with colour you’re on the wrong layer! Now that I’ve done my pixel work you’ll notice I’ve turned off my grid so I can see what I’m doing.

How’s that? Delicious I think!

Step Five: Finishing off

It’s looking gorgeous, but I just need to do a couple more things before I use my image on the blog.

That chunk of white at the bottom is annoying me so I need to use the crop tool to cut it down to size. On second glance that teal on the left hand side is feeling slightly disharmonious for the Autumn palette. It’s a bit cool, so I’m going to adjust the colour and warm it up a bit. I wouldn’t expect you to do this, but for a colour psychology freak like me it’s a bit of a must…

Finally I need to save my image for web and try and keep the file size down to about 70-80kb so that it doesn’t take an age to load. This doesn’t always work, but on a file of these dimensions it should be fine.

Over to you

I’d love to know how you get on with these tutorials. If you find them useful, then I’ll keep going Do let me know, and please do post links to your handiwork!

Next up I’m going to show you how to add colour blocks to your own images, but in the meantime here’s a bit of inspiration from Jennie – if you haven’t read her blog, do. It’s beautiful.

I love how Jennie has created a harmonious colour palette from images she herself has taken inspiration from. Doing the same sort of thing on your blog is quite straightforward when you know how. And that’s what we’ll look at next.

I know the colour blocks concept isn’t a new one, but Jennie does it just so inspiringly! Are there any other blogs that you feel do this well? I’m like a magpie with this sort of thing so I’d love you to share your favourites.

Color Dose concept boards: Odessa May Society

Now for my creative work I tend to use Adobe Photoshop (for web and creatively editing images) or Adobe InDesign for the print work. I’m going to show you how to add a gorgeous caption using Photoshop. If you have Photoshop Elements (which is a great non-pro tool at just £50ish) then the workflow is likely to be very similar.

Here’s what we’re creating.

Step One: Pick your font

I like to pick a font that works with the image and with my brand. If you have a strong brand identity you’ll probably have a range of fonts that you know work for your business. It’s a good idea not to go ballistic, especially with the really fancy fonts. Hundreds of fonts peppering your blog posts can get a bit overwhelming if you’re not careful, so go steady, but don’t be afraid to mix it up.

These deer are very elegant creatures and I shot the image in Royal Richmond Park so I’m going to go with something that feels a bit elegant without being prissy.

2. Add the opaque band to help the text stand out

Create a new layer in Photoshop and draw a rectangular marquee about the shape you want (don’t worry about perfection, we can fiddle about with it later). Add some colour using the paint bucket tool and deselect your marquee.

Excuse the vile shading – I wanted to highlight the important area to you (the un-shaded bit). Let me know if it’s helpful or not as I’ll take a view in the next tutorial.

3. Move the shape beneath your text

Move the rectangular shape layer beneath the text layer (see image below) so that you can see your text again. To do this simply click on the relevant layer and drag down below your text layer. At this point your shape will still be a solid colour. You can choose any colour you like – I’ve gone for white.

Then knock back the shape to an opacity you’re happy with. To do this simply move the slider in the appropriate layer until you have a look that you like. It’s a bit of a personal thing and often depends on the colours used and the image that sits behind it.

The finished article. Over to you now.

And that really is it! Easy when you know how. Let me know how you get on, and please do post links to your own experiments on your blog. I’d love to take a look!

In my next posts I’ll do a bit of a tutorial on how to achieve some of these effects using photoshop. In the meantime, hold on tight for a bit of creative eye candy!

1. Polaroid Style

I love this. It’s simple and effective although it can get a little wearing if you use it too often.

2. Numbered Scrapbook/ Editorial Style

One of my favourite treatments of inspirational editorial images. I love the style of the numbers and the clean lines. I love how she’s pulled this together with a cohesive colour palette. Something I have on the Full Bloom development list.

3. Add some text

Easily done in Photoshop and looks gorgeous. I’ll be showing you how to do this very, very soon.

4. Watermark a caption

How gorgeous is this? It works because the font works with the image, the colours have been thought through and the subtle transparent band really makes a difference. I’ll show you how to do this very soon… (Image credit: the very talented Simple as That)

5. Montage by colour

Am I allowed to tell you I love this again? Or is it getting a little boring?! The fact is that I love the way all of these treatments work (just don’t use them all at the same time…). This works because of the fact that the images are pulled together by a very clear colour palette. And of course, because they just look gorgeous. (Image credit: Snippet and Ink)

6. Subtle black border

A favourite with photographers this always looks fab. Just a word of caution from my detail attentive friend and award-winning photographer Matt Pereira – make sure the spacing between your images is even. I don’t always do this on my blog and he’s right, it doesn’t look right unless the spacing is pixel perfect. My wrist is publicly and officially slapped Matt!

7. Montage with white spacing

A bit of white spacing always makes a selection of images look amazing – but do see my note above for caution! (Image credit: All Things Lovely)

8. Scrapbook Polaroids

A variation on a theme is never a bad thing is it? This keeps things fresh with the fun and quirky font and the coloured background. (Image credit: Decor8)

Now there have to be about forty other treatments that you could do with your blog images. Please do post your favourite methods below and I’ll pick a few to run some tutorials on and show you how to do them using Photoshop. Enjoy!