Creative Independence

Bob interviews professional illustrator Cedric Hohnstadt. In this episode Cedric and Bob discuss marketing techniques, networking, social media and self promotion.

Cedric is an extremely talented character designer and humorous illustrator who specializes in mascot design, cartooning, animation, logos and other forms of marketing entertainment. Some of Cedric’s clients include Disney, DreamWorks, Wal-Mart, Target, Crayola and many, many more.

If you’d like to see some a Cedric’s art please visit his site at:
http://www.cedricstudio.com

or his blog
http://cedrichohnstadt.wordpress.com/.

Cedric’s Downloadable portfolios:
http://www.cedricstudio.com/portfolio-download.html

More about Cedric: http://www.cedricstudio.com/bio.html

Bob welcomes Carlos Castellanos back to the show. Carlos is a wealth of great business and marketing information. Whenever we have Carlos on the show we make it a point to get out out our notebooks and take notes so I don’t miss anything... We know you’ll want to do the same. So grab a pencil and some paper and check out the latest episode of CI. We know you’ll be glad you did.

This episode is full of comedy and adventure! Come along for thrills, chills, explosions, guns, fisticuffs and hilariously sarcastic retorts. Join us as Dan Thompson, creator of the syndicated cartoon strip Rip Haywire talks to us about his journey to get his strip syndicated and published. While we think he’s got a real winner here, his journey is littered with trial, error, dead cartoon strips and great discoveries along the way.

One of Dan’s first syndicated cartoon was Lost Sheep:
http://content.uclick.com/content/lost.html

Here’s a collection of Lost Sheep Sunday strips
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/lost-sheep-sundays/2081730

Dan’s Blog:
http://riphaywire.com/

The Rip Haywire daily strips:
http://comics.com/rip_haywire

Contact Dan @:
twitter: @riphaywire
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RipHaywire
email: riphaywire at aol dot com

Other comics/sites mentioned in the interview.

Comics Sherpa
http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/index

GoComics
http://www.gocomics.com/

If you’ve been on twitter, Ustream or any of Dani’s many websites you know what an amazing and talented artist Dani Jones is. Chris and I had the privilege of interviewing Dani a little while back. It was a fantastic interview unfortunately the sound quality was so poor we weren’t able to release the episode.

Dani was kind enough to grant us another interview. In this episode she talks about social media, twitter, her blog, her on line comic My Sister the Freak and much, much more.

Here are a few of the many places you can find Dani:

• Blog
• Website
• My Sister The Freak
• Artcast Network
• Twitter
• Space Dock 7

General Text Messaging definitions

There are scores of places on the web to find the definitions for this texting shorthand that is developing around short-form messaging, but here’s a decent on to start with:

http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/textmessageabbreviations.asp

Twitter Tags – what do they mean?
@<username> – Use this tag when you want someone <username> to see your post, such as when you’re talking about her or asking her a question.

.@<username> – If you want everyone to see the post regardless of whether or not they follow <username>, don’t start the post w/ @. You can use anything, even a simple period to accomplish this.

D<space><username> – Use this if you want to send a private message to a user.

#<keyword> – Use this if you want a tweet to be picked up by twitter search for a topic.

RT @<username> – Use this when you want to pass a tweet along and want to give credit to the originator.

Twitter Search – http://search.twitter.com/

Setting up email (for MAC)

Go to http://search.twitter.com/set up your search term. Find the RSS feed link. From the options “Subscribe to this feed using” select applications. Under applications find mail. Hit subscribe. Apple mail uses an RSS feeder to send alerts. They’ll show up just like an email.

If you want to have search terms sent directly to an email address there are several 3rd party apps you can use.
If you have a favorite please let us know which one you are using and why you like it.

Setting up rss reader alerts:

The easiest way to follow search results is to add a search column to Tweetdeck or whatever Twitter application that you use. However, on the results page from http://search.twitter.com/, you can grab the RSS Feed link and add it to whatever feed reader you use, such as Google Reader.

Trending Topics

Use trending topics to find out which topics are hot in a specific area. Especially if you use current events to draw attention to your blog, or for inspiration for your comics, art, writing or what have you, trending topics is a great tool to see what might be relevant.

Listed

Dunbar’s Number is a concept that basically states that most people can only handle about 150 people/connections in a single organization before you get too big to really manage. Lists helps you break down a large group of people into more easily manageable sets, and also lets your followers know who’s who in your follower list.

By putting someone in a list, you define why you follow them, and let people know who you feel is worth following in a certain topic. You and your friends can all list each other to help other people find you.

Favorites

Favorite tweets that you or others make that you want to remember or be able to more easily find again. I’ve been told that there is also some Google juice to this, but I’m not entirely sure of that.

Retweeting

When passing along tweets that you particularly like, use the tag RT before a username (for instance – RT @username) to give them credit. Its polite, good web karma, and will keep people from thinking of you as a plagiarizer.

Creative Independence Twitter Page

http://twitter.com/thecinetwork