Casey and Candace at Thursday Club
A Thursday Club wedding reception with rich tones, bright pops of color, gorgeous linens, and a very fun cake!
Menu
A Thursday Club wedding reception with rich tones, bright pops of color, gorgeous linens, and a very fun cake!
Top Sirloin & seared salmon
The garden theme in this reception was tied together by the wheatgrass provided by Personal Touch Dining for the placecards. The centerpieces each featured a different, beatiful flower, provided by Rainbow florist. My favorite are the calla lilies on the head table! After guests feasted on Top Sirloin and tender, flaky Salmon, Ed hayes kept the music going. The cupcakes were actually made by a friend of the lucky couple. They were not just pleasing to the eye, but delicious as well! Personal Touch Dining provided the glass tiers for the cupcakes.
When you’re just not ready for the party to stop, why not have a brunch the day after to continue the celebration? These lovely brunch stations featured a savory carving station with Roasted Turkey Breast and Honey Glazed Ham, a French Toast station with Strawberry Compote and Whipped Cream, and a Build Your Own Omelete Station. Guests were also treated to Bloody marys and mimosas at the bar. Delicious!
A classic reception featured in the Bayview Room at Marina Village. Black satin stripe linens keeps it elegant with a little texture and shine. Chair covers from Touch d’ elegance helped bring the look together. As the sun went down, the twinkle lights accented the room adding to the romance. Guests were treated to a plated dinner of savory Top Sirloin with Garlic Butter and Caramelized Onions or a Mushroom Herb Chicken Breast baked to tender perfection.
Nozbe – A great tool for time and project management.
Open Atrium – An online intranet. It helps teams communicate when working on projects.
Evernote is a great way for people who always take notes and snippets online, to save them and be organized online.
Share Den is a great and free way to store, send and share files with people you are working with.
HiTask – A great tool for designers to stay organized with task management.
One of our weddings was featured on a blog I love and read daily! Add this blog to your bookmarks if you haven’t already, there are tons of gorgeous photos, tips, diy projects and advice for your big day.
And here is the gorgeous Darlington House wedding she featured – we handled the rentals, linens, and layout for this. I love when the photos are just as beautiful as it was in person!
Oh happy day! Steve from Blue Wave Photographic sent me some beautiful shots of this La Jolla Woman’s Club wedding. Bill Calhoun kept the dance floor full until after the dinner hour, when guests were treated to a Cherries Jubilee station. The station featured brandy marinated cherries flambed right in front of the guests and presented on top of vanilla ice cream with a butter cookie. This in addition to a delectable cake from European cake gallery! I love the skinny vases on the cake table to dress up the table and showcase the bridesmaids bouquets. My favorite little detail is the gorgeous holder she used for the table numbers.
For a little something extra, a room shot from one of our own cameras:
Here we find ourselves at our favorite cliffside ocean view location again! The yellow and white put everyone in a sunny disposition. The surfboard acted as a guestbook for everyone to sign, what a great touch! By dinner, everyone was ready to partake in the slow roasted tri tip and baked chicken breast covered in a morney sauce garnished with marinated artichokes and sundried tomato. After dinner, guests were treated to the bride’s favorite Uncle Biff’s Cookies, and carafes of ice cold milk.
One of the best ways for a freelance designer to get work is to get a nice brochure or business cards. Go around to local businesses and sell your self and the quality of your work. Sales is a big part of freelancing so sometimes walking that pavement is the best way to really show clients who you are. Most businesses get spam from web design companies all the time asking to do their websites cheap. With a personal meeting and introduction of yourself and what you do will increase your odds of getting these clients instead of the big web design companies. Make sure to leave your business cards at local businesses and bulletin boards as well. Any chance you can get to promote yourself with help find new clients.
Online now there are a lot of freelancer sites where designers can bid on multiple projects. These sites are pretty competitive and most of them don’t allow you to leave your contact information. The reason they do this is so the payments have to go through them and they can middle it. I built a site online with no contact info and its basically just like my portfolio without any contact details. Think of a nice catch phrase to get their interest and let your portfolio do the rest of the talking. Another site that is similar to this is craigslist. You can browse through projects and email the potential client, give them a bid and a sales pitch. Beware of scams and also beware of fake posts on there looking to get free quotes. What I mean by this is sometimes designers make fake posts only to get an idea of what they should charge their new client. I generally do not give a bid until I can get a better sense of the potential client.
I have noticed that I get more then 40% of my clients through word to mouth. This is one of the biggest reasons why new designers must do a great job and keep their clients happy. Clients will tell their friends and family that they have a great designer. If early on you don’t think you can handle a project then I would recommend not taking it. The project will not only overwhelm yourself but also will give you a bad name. Keep your clients happy and build them quality work. Your portfolio is your strongest weapon because a sales pitch can only tell them so much about what you can do. Make sure you put it in your client contracts or at least ask them before hand to promote yourself on their website you build them as well. Most of the time when anyone goes to your clients site and they have a good user experience they will look at who designed it.
Building close relationships with other freelance designers or web companies helps a lot as well. I have a lot of my work out sourced to me from designers or companies that are jam packed with work at the time. They won’t always send you work but if you keep enough of them around it will bring you consistent work. Network with designers and also make sure to give them a discount so they continue to send their extra work to you. The reason it is okay to give designers and companies discounts is because the work will be consistent.
A more expensive approach is to pay for marketing. Google adds is a way to put a link to your site with a little advertisement on sites all over the world. You can pay to have it go a few sites or thousands all depending on how much money you can afford at the time. Also facebook has a marketing add space for users. These options are a lot more pricey and sometimes work so well that you could get blown up with emails for weeks. Sometimes it begins to be too much to handle so make sure you only go for what you can handle.
We all know how overwhelming this business is but with some hard work and a good attitude you will make it.
Here is a gorgeous wedding at the Rancho Bernardo Courtyard with the Jacaranda Trees in Full bloom. Simple florals from Nannell’s Flowers dressed the tables without distracting from the surrounding fauna. Edelweiss did it again with a delicious cake! Guests enjoyed our pecan crusted chicken with a fresh pineapple citrus relish.
