Gumroad, The best platform for selling online merchandise

So today I stumbled across a post while reading through design forms, I believe it came from an article on Smashing Magazine. If you're interested in giving it a read here is Part 1 and Part 2.

The article gives you some pretty useful information on how to sell materials that you have already created, maybe in the past for a client or just for fun on the side. It gives you insight on the tools that the author used to create a stable passive income that they are now supporting themselves with, and they don't even have to lift a finger once it is all set in place, they literally watch the money roll in. It sounds too good to be true but it actually can and does work. With a little planning and understanding of how markets work and how to entice your customers you can actually earn a comfortable income without having a full time job.

The main reason I haven't given much thought to selling digital content online yet, was because of how confusing and difficult it is to get a marketplace up and running. Gumroad makes that whole process a breeze. I set up my account in about 10 seconds by just linking my Facebook and Twitter accounts,  after that i filled out the information to receive payments to my PayPal account. An awesome feature about Gumroad is that they don't charge to process payments to your PayPal account.

That's It! Your account is set up in minuets and you are ready to sell to your hearts content! Don't have anything to sell yet? Gumroad allows you to create a test product so that you can see the whole process from start to finish.

Luckily I had a poster that I made for fun one day after seeing a cool piece of reference online. It was so simple to upload the files, I had a number of files that I wanted to include so that people could use the poster however they would like. Instead of uploading multiple files, I was able to compress them to a zip and upload the zip file instead.


Hope that this article peaks the interest of a few and introduces them to the world of online digital content sales. If you found this post helpful or would like to purchase a copy of my poster Check it out here.

Giant Tiger Photo Challenge

So this week Giant Tiger, my current employer,  hosted a photo challenge for all the stores across Canada to compete in.

The theme of the photo challenge was 7 modern wonders of the world, they presented the stores a photo of some very nice architecture and asked which county that the photo was taken. This being a photo contest they also asked the stores to create the flag of the country where this wonder resided and take a photo with the location of the wonder clearly visible.

Below is the photo that the Giant Tiger stores were sent and had to base their guess off of.  Take a minute before reading on and see if you can figure it out too.

Photo submitted by Giant Tiger head office for the 7 wonders of the world photo challenge.

At first glance this photo reminded me of a shot from a third world country. Almost immediately i guessed Israel as being the country of origin. The next day at work sure of my answer I went up to a co-worker and asked if she had guessed the location of the photo yet. She said "yep, it's Canada". I was surprised that something like that would exist in Canada so i decided to search it on my iPhone, and to my amazement she was right! The name of the building complex is "Habitat 67" located in Montreal, Canada.

Habitat 67, or simply Habitat, is a model community and housing complex in Montreal, Canada, designed by Israeli–Canadian architect Moshe Safdie. It was originally conceived as his master's thesis in architecture at McGill University and then built as a pavilion for Expo 67, the World's Fair held from April to October 1967. It is located at 2600 Avenue Pierre-Dupuy on the Marc-Drouin Quay next to the Saint Lawrence River. Habitat 67 is widely considered an architectural landmark and one of the most recognizable and significant buildings in both Montreal and Canada.^[1][2] It has been reported many times as one of the top 10 ugliest buildings in North America and the world.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67 

So to my surprise, the designer of the building was Israeli-Canadian. Ha! I wasn't too far off after all.
Anyways, enough with the history lesson.

 So after finding that information out it was time to compose our photo to submit. I came up with the idea to design the flag out of Giant Tiger branded candy. We used a real flag as a stencil to lay the candy out, Once we had the shape of the flag we began to lightly trace out each area with pencil on to white bristol board. We then used white cake icing to glue red candy to the bristol board to make the side banners and maple leaf, for the white space we decided to use our GT branded marshmallows.

I decided to bring in my Nikon D60 with custom white balance to shoot the photo as it was in really bad fluorescent light. I took the photo home for a little post processing and to add the location and name of the wonder at the bottom. Take a look at the finished product, fingers crossed. We find out this Saturday which store won the challenge.

Portfolio Website up and Running

Finally, I made the jump and purchased my domain name, thank god it was still there.  I was a little unsure at first because we never really took our websites past the design stages in school.  This was the first time I had ever used a hosting provider.

The one that I went with in the end was DreamHost, they had an amazing deal going at the time. $29.95 for the purchase of a domain name and hosting for one year, and after that 119.99 a year for the hosting, not a bad deal if you ask me. I heard about this offer on Gizmodo in the Dealzmodo section. Definitely a worth while place to check out daily!

The site is just basically a skeleton right now to promote some recent work and give people a more professional outlet to contact me with. Check it out at www.danbeauchamp.com