Macarons can make your day! Certainly cheered me up on a cold winter’s day. Check out Macaron Bee in Georgetown, Washington, DC.

2014! How can it be? Time is flying by so quickly. Today is the first day of what we all hope is going to be a prosperous year—for ourselves, our family, our friends, and our coworkers. And, of course, for our beloved furry friends. I don’t have any particular resolutions to make today other than a very general one—to learn as much as I can this year. About what? Anything, everything—small and large, technical and nontechnical, scientific and artistic, spiritual and concrete, written and visual, and everything in between. The ability to learn is a great gift that I believe we all possess. Let’s go for it.

Here’s to a year of learning!

I’m having a great time spiffing up my skills in using and creating with Creative Cloud apps, including Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign–with more apps ahead of me. It’s such a pleasure to be moving into the creative side of publishing, both online and in print.

One thing that I’m learning quickly as I continue working on my site is that Web design is definitely different than print design. I’ve purchase several stock photos to use as the header to the site—antique wooden letters, watercolor paint blocks, and the like. However, although each image is beautiful as the header it doesn’t convey the image or “idea” of my site to a potential visitor. It seems that flatter images work better—at least for the header. My task this weekend is to peruse some other blogs that have been suggested to me as being designed well and get a sense of what they’re doing.

Nonetheless, I’m having lots of fun tinkering!