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    How to Preserve and Store Your Child’s Artwork

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    Children are constantly coming home with a new art project they’ve created.  While these52154011-ma masterpieces are near and dear to every parent’s heart, they can clutter up your home become a messy pile of paintings.  Or they may end up as a jumbled assemblage of papers stored on your fridge.  Wouldn’t you like a way to compile these creations into an organized collection that you can both display and store for years to come?  Here are a few ideas.

    Before you begin, you may want to choose only your favorites to save.  Or let your child choose.  This will result in an art collection spanning their childhood composed of treasured pieces, rather than every page ever brought home.  One thing recommended by many professionals is to have a back up.  Before you discard anything, consider scanning it into a computer.  Keeping scanned images is a great way to preserve things without the added bulk of storing the actual project.

    The first step in preserving artwork is to decide how you’d like it protected.  Sliding designs into page protectors lets you switch them out as needed.  Sheet protectors come in varying thicknesses.  Be sure you choose archival quality so the items won’t fade or yellow with age.

    For long term protection, we recommend lamination.  Now before you start thinking that a laminator is more expensive than page protectors, keep reading.  While the initial investment of a laminator may cost more than a box of sheet protectors, you can get a decent machine for less than $40.00 that will cover both letter and legal size items as well as numerous smaller things. For just a little bit more, you can find a quality Fellowes laminator that will accommodate pages as large as 11″ x 17″, which is often the size of children’s art.  The protection offered by lamination as well as the versatility in size makes it a worthy investment.

    Once protected, decide how you want to store these items.  If you’ve chosen to put everything into page protectors, you can easily arrange these in a three ring binder.  Putting them in order of their creation date will give you a timeline of your child’s progress.  A smaller binder could be used for each individual year while a larger binder could store multiple years separated by index tabs.

    Laminated creations can be stored a number of different ways.  You can purchase large folders specifically designed for saving wider pieces of artwork created by your little one.  Some people keep pictures in a box or scrapbook.  Or you could bind them together in a book.  A plastic comb binding machine is another inexpensive tool that you can use to save things.  Many of these smaller devices offer a built in manual punch.  This is another way to preserve creations year by year.

    Using these suggestions, you’ll be able to effectively store the masterpieces created by your children without giving up the front of your refrigerator.  And they’ll appreciate the compact storage and the time you put into it more than they would a box full of colored pictures.  Getting a start on this while your kids are young will help keep you organized for years to come.

    Putting Together a Great User Manual

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    B-3-16-Twin-Loop-100-3a-smA having a great user manual for your product makes your company look good, and can save money by reducing support calls. Here are a few tips for creating a fun, user-friendly product manual.

    1.Use Dead Trees. Or at least recycled ones. While a lot of companies out there are deciding to go with online-only manuals (usually in PDF form), it is worth the extra effort and cost to go to the trouble of giving your customers a hard copy. Yes, you should have a copy online as well, but there are many advantages for both you and your customer to printing and publishing a paper version. First, your customer can have the manual in hand while they are assembling the item, or investigating any problems they may be having – not always possible with a PDF (unless your customer has a laptop, or is willing to print out the manual). Second, you can be assured that all your customers have the manual in hand, meaning, long story short, fewer calls to your support team. And the more you can do to prevent support or service phone calls, the better.

    2.Make It Fun To Read. While there are plenty of customers who will only consult the manual when absolutely necessary, there are lots of others who will actually curl up with it, and read it from cover to cover. This is the audience you should be playing for. You don’t have to fill your manual full of jokes or anything, but you do need to make sure that it is written in a conversational style, that is it well organized into chapters and sections and if need be, an index so your readers can find specific items quickly and easily.

    3.Show AND Tell. People learn in three different ways – seeing, hearing, and touching. There is a segment of the population – those that learn best through hearing — that will be just fine with simple words on a page. However, you will be doing a great service to a great many more of your customers if you include detailed and specific artwork in your user manual. If you have been tracking support calls, you can make note of the most frequent issues and take special care to address them clearly in future manuals.

    4.Use Real People. If at all possible, when it comes to translating your user manual into other languages, use native speakers. Translating software is improving all the time, but it is nowhere near ready to take on a task like this with reasonable accuracy yet. You do not want to be one of those companies whose manuals get chuckled over as they are being read. That goes for highly technical language as well.

    5.Choose the Right Binding Style. The more durable and functional, the better. It is always nice when a user manual can lie flat, and/or wrap around, so your customer can read it while his or her hands are busy. Plastic comb and color coil binding are two methods that make this possible. Take a look around online for the option that might suit you best. You can even get your own binding machine, if you find yourself with the need to print a lot of manuals, presentation materials, reports, and proposals on a regular basis.

    Self-Publishing Your Poetry – A Few Tips

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    Being your own publisher is easier than you think. Here are some things to consider.

    Gathering Your Material

    The first thing to give some thought to when you are going to self publish your poetry is whether your book will contain a central theme or not. Often, poetry books are centered around a certain time, place or person in the poet’s life. This is a great way to put your book of poetry together, as it is often easier for readers to connect to your work when there is a theme for them to follow. You can also organize very different themes into chapters. There are, of course, no strict rules to follow. You can put your book together however you choose.

    One thing you might want to do is to gather some of your favorite poetry books together and do a little research. Other than the poetry itself, what is it that makes the book work for you? Do the poems flow from one to another, exploring a theme? Do they jump all over randomly like a stream of consciousness? Not that you will be imitating the book in question, just taking notes on how the separate works play off each other to create a poetry collection.

    Putting Your Poems Together

    Now that you have decided on an overall theme, you can start to pick and choose the poems you would like to include in your book. Choosing from your own work can be a daunting task, so you may want to enlist the help of some trusted writer-friends, or others whose opinions you have some faith in. Once you have gone through the process of deciding what stays and what goes, you can start to compile your poems into one word processing document, choosing a nice, readable and appropriate font.

    Now you can write yourself a short bio (including, if you like, a small thumbnail photograph) and any dedications you’d like to make. You should also create a table of contents, including the names of the poems and any chapters you have organized them into.

    You should also give some serious thought to including artwork such as photography or drawings in your poetry book. If you have an artist friend or acquaintance whose work you admire but who is also struggling for exposure, you can do sort of a joint venture by creating a book that includes both of your work.

    Design a cover with a compelling title and artwork.

    Printing and Binding

    You will want to do the highest quality printing that you can afford. If you have decided on a four color process cover, you will want to have it printed digitally, and give some though as to what kind of binding you will be using.

    If your poetry book is more of a simple chapbook, you can simply fold you pages and staple them in the middle. If you are going for something a little more permanent, you could take a look into thermal (hardcover or softcover) binding, which is inexpensive and easy to do yourself.

    Twin loop wire binding is another option, if you want something a little more elegant than a chapbook, but don’t feel that a hardcover is quite right for you. In all of the above cases, the machines that do the binding are fairly inexpensive and easy to use, and will save you money over a print shop if you plan to keep self publishing.