Its been a slamming busy holiday and New Year since I last blogged, with post-holiday letdowns wonderfully crushed to nothing between a group of exciting projects in process and the Pittsburgh Steelers hitting their stride in the playoffs.

I’m going to start with this project, partly because its sort of the most unlikely candidate, given how much website design and social media work I’ve been doing here in Pittsburgh, and partly because it makes use of one of the simple digital publishing strategies I frequently recommend to my small business web design clients.

After a few false starts last year, I am now actually engaged in my first real custom art project here in Pittsburgh, a painted faux finish in an old home in Pittsburgh’s Point Breeze neighborhood.

The proposed finish is on the left, the freshly primed surface to be painted is on the right. The surface was last painted 40-50 years ago, and appear to be a heavy plaster float that’s been incised with stone block pattern; the “grout” lines are fully dimensional.

A found piece of alabaster was the inspiration for the finish itself, you can see more images of samples with source and original finish on my Flickr page, which brings us to the publishing strategy.

I uploaded these first pics a few days ago actually for the purpose of sharing with clients currently in Florida, and getting their approval to go ahead with the work. (Small Business Hint!)

I find it easier and faster to upload pictures and have them well displayed on Flickr than anywhere else, and a basic account on Flickr is still free.

And its infinitely easier to make an online album of related pictures and email a link to someone than it is to process pics in to web format, attach pics to email in compressed format, get delivered thru random email programs and then get properly unzipped on the other end for viewing.

After communication-over-distance solution, the first bonus is that I’m actually on Flickr writing this right now, and after I finish talking, Flickr will post this for me to the page you’re reading right now. All I do is hit ‘Post’, Flickr does the work for me, formatting, everything, with every photo, anytime I need to quickly and easily get something up online, share with collaborators, clients or clients-to-be (Small Business Hint!)

There are several other bonuses to using Flickr that I teach to artists, small businesses, non-profits and other clients looking to streamline their digital publishing, social media and internet marketing workloads; I’ll try to illustrate here as this project continues into February.