For the past couple of weeks now, I’ve been working with a super talented musician from Enid, Oklahoma by the name of Scottie Noonan on numerous designs for his solo acoustic project titled A brighter Day. He is currently trying to promote his project and expand to a wider audience. And so that’s where I come in.

Scottie came to me because I worked with his old band Shake The Shores on a Myspace Layout and T-Shirt design. He liked my style and asked if I could help him create some new stuff for his solo project A brighter Day. I agreed and we immediately got to work. The first thing he asked me for was a T-Shirt design. I started by creating a new logo for him in Illustrator that I was planning on using in the T-Shirt design.

The next step was to take the logo into Photoshop and add some subtle colorful paint strokes to it.

There is still one more project we are working on and that’s a brand new Myspace Layout! It should be done fairly soon. I’ll post it up in the Graphic Section when it is. So in the mean time, head on over to his Myspace Music Profile and listen to his music!

On Wednesday, August 11th, 2010, The new DesignByRaul site was launched. I managed to get a lot of people’s attention by utilizing social media to advertise and make sure people were aware of the upcoming launch.
After receiving a ton of good feedback from fellow designers and personal friends of mine, I was eager to check the statistics of how well I did and how big of a jump traffic did the new site get on launch day. But Google Analytics only allows you to check a day’s statistics a day after. So I had to wait until August 12th rolled by to see how I did.

Surprisingly I did a lot better than I expected! Here are a couple screenshots of the Analytics Dashboard.

These first two images show that there was an 87.25% jump in traffic when compared to a month before!

These next couple of images show that there were over 271 visits, 1,576 pageviews, by 90 unique visitors! Thats huge!

These next two images just blew me away. Those 271 visits came from 16 different countries! Looks like I’m officially internationally known!

These last few images show how people got to my site.

Not surprisingly the majority came from referring sites. But what I did find surprising is from where they were coming from.

The #1 site that brought the most visitors was……. Google, bringing in a whopping 62 visitors!

I was expecting maybe Twitter would be the highest ranking but it ranks at #8, only bringing in 6 visitors.

All in all, it was a great launch day. I got a lot of attention and compliments from fellow designers. Its good to see that my hard work has not gone unnoticed.

I’d like to welcome you all to the new and improved DesignByRaul[dot]com! This new version of the site has been in the works for the past few months and as my fellow colleagues can vouch for, has gone through NUMEROUS changes and redesigns. But I decided to stick with the first original design I started with when I set out to teach myself WordPress theme development.

While I’m not new to the whole WordPress blogging platform, the whole process of learning the PHP driven side of WordPress was quite the task. But luckily I handled myself pretty good and decided to keep at it because I knew that by the time I finished this site, I would have a much greater understanding of web development and design.

But I digress. Anyway, this site is meant to be a lot of things. An online design portfolio, a personal blog, a link to my other projects, a place where I post updates, and anything else that I might think of down the road. I plan on updating this site as regularly as I can with a variety of content. To make things more accessible, I’ve added RSS links to each section of the site. So while on the News, Graphic, Web, or Motion pages, on the right hand sidebar are links to subscribe to receive updates from that specific page.

And underneath it is also a sign-up form to receive The Los Angeles Trifecta Network Newsletter via email. It will act as a carrier of information on all the latest updates from the upcoming new sites from The Los Angeles Trifecta Network.

So I hope you all like what you see and keep coming back to check for updates. I’ve got a lot of big things planned for the near future.

Thanks!