lello news

I’m finally getting a chance to upload a photograph of a mural I painted back in December for a little boy named Owen, right here in snowy but beautiful Maplewood, NJ.  His parents had purchased a set of really cool removable wooden trees, cars, trains, and other elements, and they wanted a backdrop of rolling hills on which to adhere them.  I worked with colors that were bright, but not too dark, so that the attachable scenery would really stand out.  I think the room turned out great, and I love their take on making the mural interactive so that their son can change around the room as he gets older, any way he wants. Definitely let me know what you think.

From our family to yours… have a healthy and happy holiday season. Thank you for your continued support and look for new murals and t-shirt designs in 2009.

Hi gang – hope everyone is doing well this holiday season. As a diversion from figuring out what my wife really wants for Christmas, I thought I’d kick off a series of posts explaining the process of creating a mural. It’s something customers are always curious about, and perhaps this may be of help to people who are contemplating whether or not a mural is right for them.

So in the next few weeks, as I find the time, I’ll take you through the process of weighing all of the things to consider as a client, securing the job, agreeing on a concept, creating a sketch, getting the right supplies, and transferring the vision to the wall.

Each project is unique, so the process changes slightly depending on what’s being requested, but I generally stay the course step by step, all the while noting adjustments I need to make and/or areas I need to work on and apply them to the next job. This approach ensures that I’ve covered my bases, stamped out any ambiguity on what the mural will look like in its final form, how long it’s going to take to paint and how much it’s going to cost.

At the heart of my process is keeping the client ecstatic while keeping myself sane. The key is to be as transparent as possible every step of the way, listening to their feedback, and adapting to meet their needs. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback - positive or negative – on whether or not this outline is helpful to you.

Next Post: Is a Mural Right For Me?

Hi to all of the Clever Commuters who found their way to our site via their mobile devices. Having done the NJ/NY commute for over six years now, Erika and I are intimately familiar with the joy of double decker cars and the agony of unexplained “signal failure.” Last year, she got hooked on the brilliant-but-simple Clever Commute service, and we’re psyched to support their business in any way we can. And if lello helps brighten the day of even one wayward traveler this holiday season at the same time, our mission is complete!

We admit it. We’ve caught the social networking bug. We’ve known about MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for a while, but our foolish selves never really dove in to any of them to figure out what all of the fuss was about. Now that we’ve seen the error of our ways, we’re all set up on Facebook.com, with a friends of lello facebook page. Come check us out, get the scoop on our latest news, and be our friend. It will be a pleasure sharing our addiction with you.

As usual I’m falling waaay behind in posting news updates to the site.  One of these days I’ll have time to do everything… yeah right.  Anyhow, while I have this second, we here at lello would like to give a big thanks Jessica at funkyfinds.blogspot.com for featuring our pink butterfly shirt!  If you haven’t checked out Funky Finds, it’s a great resource for anyone looking for unique gifts and/or artistic inspiration.

Just want to give a quick shout-out to Cuteable.com for highlighting our yellow zebra shirt this week. Thanks!

Thanks as well to everyone who has dropped us a note of encouragement, or to let us know that you’re a fan of our work. It really does mean a lot, and we love hearing from you!

Another note of thanks to MamaSpeaks.com for featuring lello on its blog this weekend as well, and welcome to all of the moms and first-time visitors to our site! It’s a bit humbling to see our tees profiled on the sites we’ve been visiting to learn about other products for a while now, and we hope you’re not disappointed. If you have any feedback, be sure to send it our way!

It was last fall that I decided to go with WordPress as my blogging tool for lello. And since that time I’ve been working to get WordPress integrated and running on the Website.

My wife likes to remind me often that I could have gone the easier route and set up a Blogger or LiveJournal account, but that would have meant sending perspective customers away from the lello Website to read blog posts hosted somewhere else. This is a marketing no no for me. In-fact, one of my main criteria for selecting WordPress was that it is a fully customizable blog solution that can be seamlessly integrated into an existing Website. You can even use it as a light content management system to update all or specific pages on your site… a nice time saving addition.

But to be fair on myself and to put the time I spent into context, let me first say that I’m not a professional coder, secondly, it’s not like I spent every waking moment working on the blog and lastly, as much as you may hear it from WordPress and people who use it, it’s not something you’re going to get up and running in 5 minutes.

All and all… I’m happy I chose to go with WordPress, though I’m not going to glaze over the fact that it was a lot of work to transform it from the “default” theme it’s shipped with to what it looks like here. I see a few problems here and there, but at some point you gotta say “what’s good enough is good enough” and launch the darn thing right? So I apologize now for any problems you might stumble across and ask that you shoot us an email and let us know. Tho… I can’t make any promises the issue will get fixed sooner than in the next 9 months.

So there you have it… the first post on lello using WordPress. Comments are welcome. Until the next one, best.