Home Office Workflow

Well, I finally got Holistic Home Office, the book, published on Lulu.com. I ended up finishing it with Adobe InDesign. Scribus was working fine, but it would not upload correctly, because I had installed Scribus before I installed Ghostscript and Scribus couldn’t find Ghostscript.

To fix that on Windows 10, go to File > Preferences > External Tools and browse your files in the Name of Executable selector, until you find the Ghostscript executable, mine is at C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.53.3\bin\gswin64c.exe. Select it and then select Apply and OK.

My impatient in the process of trying to get Holistic Home Office published, led me to install Adobe Creative Cloud. Now, I’ve signed up for that for another year. I’ve had it before and now, I have all these free and open source creative art tools and one of the best commercial digital art suites installed on this desktop computer.

Adobe Creative Cloud could be comparable to Qt SDK. One important advantage of the Adobe Creative Cloud is, it is made in America, which I like. The disadvantage is that, Adobe does not like Linux and configures their software to not be able to run on Linux or support free and open source software like Scribus.

The really big difference between Adobe and Qt is that Qt is an IDE for creating native applications that run on your computer. Adobe is a set of Graphical User Interface tools that you can use to create content for your website or for printed documents. I say they are comparable because, they are both very advanced commercial development software.

I will spend the next year, at least, using adobe and the free and open source tools I have installed. Comparing them and using them and becoming the best digital artisan that I can be. You can do this along with me. Get the tools installed and configured the way you like them. You can use the free and open source tools, the commercial ones or both.

You’re going to have to get in the habit of writing and using the other tools on a regular schedule, rather than whenever you feel like it. It is your professional career. You need to write every day, whether you feel like it or not. It’s your job.

And learn how to use the tools. You’ve got Inscape, Krita and Illustrator. All three of them are world class tools that you can use to make all kinds of digital art. Practice using them. Start by creating your company logo. Make some drawings to decorate your websites.

Get yourself a decent DSLR camera and start working on your photography strategy. You can use your DSLR camera to make videos. You can also use your smart phone to take pictures and make videos that you can use on your website.

Each week you could write a blog post and create a certain number of images with your drawing tools. Use a different tool every time, so you go from creating a Krita painting, to an Inkscape drawing to an Illustrator image. Just keep producing art. Be a prolific artist.

Keep working on your websites and the presentation of your art in general. You develop your websites and other formats, like YouTube or other social media outlets, depending on which applications you are creating your art in.

Work on writing your books. At least one book every year is a reasonable schedule. I can tell you that writing books and self publishing them is hard work. Very complicated and frustrating. I imagine it will get a lot easier with experience.

Once you get started working with Scribus or InDesign, you learn the basics pretty quickly, because you repeat the operation over and over again for every page of the book. And you go through the book several times. I ended up doing the whole operation twice, once with Scribus and then with InDesign.

Scribus is a simple utility. InDesign is professional book publishing software, with all the bells and whistles. You can do projects other than book publishing, on both of them. You can produce magazines, brochures and all kinds of professionally printed documents.

And then there is the publishing company and its process. It’s another complicated project you have to figure out. Remember, repetition is going to be an important learning tactic. Read the manuals and then use the tools, often. Start producing a lot of art. Set up several different outlets to publish your art. Set up several different channels of entertaining education.

You are not going to do this because I told you to do it. You will do it because you want to. It is your free enterprise. Select the tools you like and practice and get really good at using them.

Taking notes while you are working on your projects is a good idea. It’s very difficult, because you are so focused on figuring the process out, and writing notes is a distraction. You can learn how to use the tools by repetition. It would just be a lot easier and faster if you take notes and refer to them the next time you work that same or similar processes.

Get your whole family involved. You’ve got stories to write, photos to take, manage and edit, you have drawing and painting tools you can use to create digital art, you can make 2D and 3D pictures and videos, and you can make live or recorded videos. Create multiple channels of entertaining education.

Teach your kids a good work ethic while you are all working together. Teach them to manage their capital well. Teach them how to increase their capital with their art. Teach them the rule of law of personal finance, business and economics. Make sure they get a holistic education that includes mathematics, science, history and religion.

Be realistic. Assess everyone’s talents and interests. Develop a business plan for your family. Develop strategic plans to accomplish individual projects. Remember, just like you must want to create your own free enterprise to do it, your kids must want to work in the family business. If they would rather work on something else, then help them do that.

We want and need big businesses to be successful. They do things no small business can do. We also want and need millions of family farms and family owned and operated shops and family oriented websites. Building family owned and operated websites is one of many options available for your holistic home office based free enterprise.