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It’s lights-out for Nava Designs. We’ve upgraded to HTML5 and CSS3, along with a new look. There are still some things to finish, but all-in-all, it’s pretty much done.

Oh, what big changes! Where do I start? How ’bout the obvious . . .

Nava Designs is now on Twitter! And, best of all, the YouTube, Flickr, and Etsy accounts are all connected, so you’ll be kept up-to-date on just about everything.

Portfolio websites are notoriously difficult to design for, especially if it’s your own. They don’t exactly work like other websites do. In fact, they have a completely different function. A portfolio website is basically just some visual samples, a contact form, and maybe some artist information. That’s it.

Redesigning Nava Designs, I had an epiphany. Create a simple design for a simple site. It doesn’t have to be complicated or have a lot of bells and whistles, because it’s never going to have all of those. So, keep it painfully simple. And, that’s what I did . . . and I love it!

The Halloween papercrafts that I’ve been working on are now available for sale through the first week of November. Grab ’em while you can!

There are also two new videos of the piranha and vampire bat in action.

Nava Designs is now officially up and running! There are a few last-minute things to include, but certainly nothing that would hinder the use of the website.

New to the site is Paper Engineering: Designing a Paper Model. The new section explains what I go through to design a paper model for the masses. It’s still a work-in-progress as I continue to work on the current paper model with the most current techniques. I hope it answers a lot of queries that I’ve gotten over the years. If there are any unanswered questions that anyone has, feel free to contact me.

Speaking of contact, I do have a brand-new email address. If you have the old one in your address book somewhere, toss it out.

Now I need new business cards, stationary, customer invoices . . .

I recently had a memory flash of my High School art teacher. I remembered that she used to have what are called “source books.” A source book is a thin book that is filled with nothing but artistic clipart that can be copied and used in arts and crafts . . . usually royalty-free.

In school, I never thought much about them, because they usually had to be copied and enlarged using an inaccessible copy machine. Getting an image enlarged to the right size can be tricky. Plus, where on earth do you find these types of books? Nowadays, the images can be easily scanned at high resolution right from my computer.

Of course, many source books now come with the images on CD-ROM. I doubt that I will ever use the CD-ROMs, because I’d rather be original. But, the books alone are invaluable reference materials that can inspire.

I did a search for these lost treasures on Amazon.com (tons of products), and found a publisher that creates some very nice source books. What shocked me was how many are available, each with their own theme. To begin my collection, I bought Treasury of Victorian Designs and Emblems and Banners, Ribbons, and Scrolls, both by Dover Publications.

Inspired, I am already thinking of re-designing this website. Maybe. I’m thinking of an early Americana design.

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links—as an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying products.