Summer 2011 Lookbook

I've been wanting to make a One Mango Tree Lookbook for ages. Every time I see a new Anthropologie catalog (my mom always sends me the ones that show up at home), or some cool indie designer who put together a video with a neat little song, my creative itch starts up. I get all sorts of ideas in my brain, but then sit in front of the computer wondering where to start - or rather, how to get the ideas from my head onto the computer screen.

anthropologie lures us to exotic lands with their gorgeous lookbooks

In January I bought myself an SLR camera. I don't really know how to use it. I have an HD video camera, but no editing software. Last weekend I put Adobe Photoshop on my netbook, and then, after it crashed about 15 times, I finally accepted that netbooks are for the INTERNET, not for ginormous design programs.

What I do have, however, is Lauranne Boyd, PowerPoint, and dafont.com. Lauranne's already a brilliant photographer, so I took the photos from the shoot she did for Summer 2011 and put them together on PowerPoint. Amy directed me to dafont (awesome), so I added some fun font descriptions and PDF'd the whole thing (using Primo PDF, free download).

Voila! A bootstrapped Lookbook.

cover of the OMT Summer 2011 Lookbook

I mean, hey. OMT started with $500 and a suitcase of products. The website is still Yahoo! Sitebuilder (free) and the blog is still blogger (free). The shopping cart is still PayPal (though I finally figured out how to get rid of those fugly yellow buttons). I use Excel to do accounting in Uganda (at least our US office is upgraded to Quickbooks), and I "edit" my own photos using Picasa (free).

I will learn Photoshop, and Illustrator, and InDesign. I will learn how to use my SLR on manual. I will learn about lighting and photographing models, and how to take video footage and make it into gorgeous little riffs that make you want to live in OMT products.

But in the meantime, I've got a business to run.

FYI - I wrote this entire post with the repeat of the song in this little DACE video streaming in the background. A girl can dream.

Spring 2011 from Dace on Vimeo.