Polish Festival

This past weekend I went to the Polish Festival in Martinez with my daughter and her friend. It was a beautiful day and I'm very glad I went. This was the first time it was held in Martinez and it was such a success. I saw so many friends and they were all looking forward to the next one. For those of you who don't know,  I am Polish! In the above you can see my daughter and I standing in front a group of Polish folk dancers.

We ate a lot of paczki but I wish I had bought more! Paczki are a Polish desert that is filled with either plum jam or advocaat. This was such a great surprise because in Poland paczki are only made after Christmas so it was great to see them in summer. They are delicious. I'm going crazy thinking about them now!

They were also selling some Polish folk art, such as wycinanki. I had a great time and seeing all of the beautiful folk dancers, art, and delicious food made me proud. If you ever get a chance to go to a Polish festival, do it!

Adventure in Graphic Design... Help?!

Back in January I hired a young successful graphic designer to create for me a logo and marketing materials. He ended up abandoning me after stringing me a long for half a year.  Professional and successful!? HA! Words can not express the frustration and dissppointment I felt when he sent me the final email stating he could no longer work on the project. Reaaaaal professional. He had sent me a few sample logos and I have since then decided on using one of those samples. So in the end, after seven months, he never even created the logo I truly wanted. Thank god I never paid him. Now, I am left with a logo saved in an adobe illustrator format and nothing else. I couldn't even open this logo on my laptop up until a few days ago when my daughter downloaded a free trial of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Now I can open my logo but I have zero clue on how to create a business card, tags, or a mailer. Nada, zilch. Neither does my 22 year old daughter who claims to have taken digital photography classes and grew up on the computer.What now!

Even though this sounds daunting everything will turn out well... right? I have a free trial of Photoshop and Illustrator on my computer and 20 something days left to create my materials before the trials expire. Wish me luck!

Do you recommend any tutorials for using these programs for creating my own marketing materials? Or just any tutorials on them in general?