Dragonfli Girl

Graphic Designer-At-Home-Mom turned beauty entrepreneur as owner of Dragonfli Tropicals™ . Care for yourself, for one another, and our world.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Make a Negative into a Positive!

This week I decided to clean up my desktop, both online and on my physical office space. During this process I found my Lulu.com account online! The short story (of the long version): Back in 2000, I received first honors [yay!] with my design thesis with the University of San Francisco's 1st Student Gallery show in addition to a standing ovation from the design thesis committee at the California College of the Arts. Eventually, I decided to self-publish my project (which was told through a book arts) through Lulu.com. Note that I was a complete novice and naive about the whole thing, and although the subject of my design thesis was about my leukemia survivorship, I categorized it under "Self-Help" as opposed to "Arts and Architecture"—a more appropriate category for the audience who would be looking at it.

So after all these years, I actually checked back with my account and found a negative review from the one person who actually downloaded my book! What is to be learned here? Research BEFORE you publicly produce anything. In this case, I failed to research and instead, I got negative feedback (1 out of 5 stars) from someone expecting completely different when she downloaded my book. My book is an interpretation of my diary through design and art concepts, so anyone looking for an actual written diary would be disappointed of course!

LIVE AND LEARN: I did fix the mis-categorization among other things, and I suppose the books are more of a printed version of the actual project. Although my project can is best experienced by seeing the original project (which I have at home), the book(s) will also be available for free download soon at Lulu.com.

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