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It's that time of the month again!!!!! The April 2024 printable calendar page is up for download on the freebie page. I don't know about you, but I'm not quite sure what to make of April. It feels like an in-between kind of month with the school year not being quite over for us just yet, but nothing really major happening. Mumbai gets really hot around that time, so while most people in Europe and US are happy to see steady signs of Spring, we are just about to go into "Summer Hibernation" over here. It involves only really going out to either a pool or a place with AC and spending the rest of the time at home with a tub of ice cream watching Netflix. Most importantly, in my own opinion at least, it's the month that comes after the worst month of the year : March! So you are kind of a survivor exiting a month that has been energetically draining feeling half proud and half beaten and wondering "What now?" If you are a commercial artist and surface designer, here are a few answer to that question : April is the month you should be focusing on promoting spring themed content, but you should be starting to think about Halloween and Christmas designs idea. Which is extremely hard when you live in the tropics and you are getting steamed like a dumpling. The designs you can upload to your PoD shops right now are evergreen florals or geometric designs, non-holiday or season specific illustrations and travel themed illustration, because at this point the summer vacations aren't too far away and people are going to start looking for fun vacation themed t-shirts very soon. You can also keep uploading tropical, coastal and beach themed designs as well. Which is why my new collection Beach n Surf was the only thing I focused on getting out last month. So what have you all been working on recently? Also I'm really trying to find ideas to keep this blog going, so if you have posts suggestions, please leave me a comment below...truly appreciated.

There is a brand new collection on the block, just in time for summer, and all your tropical and beach inspired projects. Say hello to Beach n Surf by Home Cyn Home! This collection started from a design idea I had to add a fun tropical inspired graphic to my t-shirt designs on Teepublic: Beach Please. I had that vision of using a retro front surrounded by tropical flowers and that's what got me digging in my master files to check if there were some assets I could repurpose. My orange and teal surfboard illustration became a prime candidate because it had those big pink hibiscus flowers I could use, and use them I did. Not only did that surfboard illustration provide me with those gorgeous pink hibiscus flowers, it also ended up inspiring the color palette of the whole collection, waste not want not. After that it was just a matter of creating a series of pattern around both the Beach Please design and the surfboard illustration. The pink hibiscus flowers and cream colored plumerias lent themselves perfectly to create two floral patterns that mix and match effortlessly and in the spirit of keeping a beach / coastal vibe to the collection, I added a broad stripes pattern in 3 different color variation : orange and cream, turquoise and cream and a tricolor orange, turquoise and cream version. Along the way I realised that an older existing design matched the theme of the collection and I added the orange, pink and purple sunglasses to it along with the green fishes in orange and white seigaiha waves, which have enough similarities with the original color palette to make them work within the collection. I quickly uploaded all the designs featured in the Beach n Surf collection to Spoonflower where they are available as wallpapers, fabric and pre-sewn textile items as well as on Redbubble and Society6. All of them are of course available for licensing so if you read this and are interested in a partnership contact me to know more. Till date it's the most fun I had creating a collection. Im a sucker for tropical designs, florals and anything that has pink, mint and turquoise in its colorway. That collection has been so inspiring that there is likely to be a few more add-ons to it in the coming weeks which I'll be sure to share with you all. If you want to see more pictures of products featuring those designs, head up to the Beach n Surf collection page.

The March 2024 printable calendar page is here! It's available in the Freebie zone and if you aren't a member yet, don't worry, it's free to join, and I don't spam. As a bonus you also never will miss a blog post again. So, before we dive into the month of March, how has your longer than usual month of February gone? Here, it's been a creative month, I'm working on a collection that will probably go live in the next week or so and my Patreons got to download cool frog themed rewards (in honour of the Leap year). I also have a possible coastal inspired collection in the making thanks to my drawing a million possibilities for a Spoonflower design challenge. So let's talk about March now shall we? For me it's always a taxing month, for some reason I always end up taking on more than I can chew and my energy levels are not in synch with my ambition. It's always felt like a month when I get out of hibernation and forget to warm up before I get into action. So this year I wrote myself a huge fat reminder in my planner to just take it easy and remember to be kind to myself. Change of seasons can be exhausting no matter what they are. Growing up it was going out of SAD mode induced by the lack of light in the winter, here in Mumbai it's going from pleasantly cool winter months to blistering hot fiery pits of hell temperatures in the matter of a few days. The body needs time to cope with that kind of changes. This means it's no time to want to draw all the ideas, get into five thousands projects and try to do it all. Speaking of creative projects, if you are a commercial artist / designer, here is what you should be focusing on during the month of March : Start promoting all your spring themed designs, people are ready to bring in the cute florals and pastel out as the snow melts and the trees start spouting new leaves and blooms. Start designing or collecting ideas for fall themed designs! Yup, before it's officially spring, you need to start getting into pumpkin mode already so that you have things ready to upload in a few months. It's especially important if you are working of collections to roll in for fall. Keep uploading all those summer themed patterns, summer florals, tropical and coastal designs. If you sell your patterns on fabric, chances are people are already thinking of all the beach and summer outfits they can sew now and are starting to pin and save ideas. You can also upload spring themed designs but it might be a bit late if you plan on SEO alone for people to find them and it's definitely getting late for all Easter themed prints and designs because you never want to cut it too close to a Holiday's delivery cutout date. Here is my little secret when it comes to designing ahead of a season when the climate you live in isn't inspiring. Living in a tropical climate, it's hard enough to get into fall season mood in August, leave alone March. What I usually do, is design seasonal stuff closer to the uploading window because it usually is monsoon season which is the closest to fall we ever get and upload those I created in June - July along with some I created the year before but never uploaded. Or I recolor some older fall themed designs in March - April and put them in a folder so that they are ready to upload comes July. I also keep uploading fall themed designs in October even though I know they might not grab any eyeballs then, chances are they will the next year as Google will have had time to index them by then. On these wise words, I'm going to leave you to plan the month ahead.

Hi everyone! How has January treated you? Do we all agree that it was an extremely long and slow month and that all the internet memes about it being 486 or more days might be on to something? Well the good news is that we are done with January and we are stepping in what has always been the shortest month of the year...even on a leap year where it gains one extra day. For us, it's business as usual, the February 2024 printable calendar is available in the Freebie zone, where you can join us for free. So any plans for the longest shortest month of the year? If you are a commercial artist and surface designer you should ideally be uploading all your summer themed designs on print on demand platforms right now so that Google gets the time to crawl and index them, all the while starting to think about creating autumn, back to school and Halloween designs if you plan on building collections around those themes. Me? I'm more of a design thing during the season itself and shelf them until the next uploading window kind of person, because I need to be in the right mood to design for holidays, but yes, I definitely wait until it's the right time to start uploading seasonal designs, and that time precedes the season by at least 4-5 months. On the marketing front, the first half of February should be dedicated to Valentines Day themed designs and spring florals since it's the month everyone is starting to be fed up with winter (except here in Mumbai) and long for longer, and warmer days. February is going to be the month of the Floral Frog on Patreon with the printable stickers going live at the end of this week and other rewards in the next few weeks.

Did you know that you now can purchase the art prints that were the rewards for my Patreon last year without being a paying member? Since all those flatlays illustrations were part of the 2024 printable calendar that I'm making available on the first of each month in the freebie zone, I decided to release them in several of my shops INCLUDING my brand new Patreon shop (which is public). To avoid overloading my PoD shops with just flatlay illustrations, I'm releasing them one by one over the course of this year, a few days before the new month starts. I already uploaded the January one called "Cozy Winter" and now that February is just around the corner, it's time for the Valentines Breakfast art print to go live with its adorable heart shaped strawberry pancake and mint and pink tea set on a patio tiles table. The illustration is available on select products with Society6, Redbubble, and Teepublic, where you don't have to worry about printing it. Or if you prefer to have the option to print it in different size for your own personal use (that part is really important), you can purchase the digital file on Patreon as a one off purchase. Tier 3 Patreons who had access to that file all along as part of their pledge will continue to be able to do so and can even download it for free in the shop section.

I believe in wasting no time getting things on track in the new year and this year I'm starting with a particularly big bang : my work is now available on spoonflower! For those who don't know it yet, Spoonflower is the leading fabric print on demand company there is out there and they have been on my radar for years. BUT! Unfortunately I couldn't join them sooner because they had policy going that made it extremely difficult for people based out of the US to make it worth their time, especially if you were based out of India like I am. This policy was that to make any designs available for sale, one had to purchase it as a sample swatch and proof it first. I'm not and never was against the principle, the problem was that on top of the swatches being priced in USD against a weak Indian rupee, there was a big shipping fee, and a custom duty fee to graft itself on it all upon delivery, which inevitably would take 3-4 weeks to reach...if all went well. This meant possibly paying 3 times the price of the swatches if you cumulated all the fees and then spent weeks hoping your package didn't get lost somewhere in transit before you could FINALLY check the boxes saying you proofed the design and that yes it was fine to go on for sale. All this is no more! Sometimes in December 2023, Spoonflower announced that fro December 31st onwards, they would do away with the sample proofing via paid swatches and replace it with FREE digital proofing. Yup! No more buying swatches, and waiting for them to reach you via post mail anymore! This is the kind of news I got to learn via the Facebook communities of surface designers I joined, which is why being part of a group is always a good idea. Otherwise I would probably have been totally oblivious to that change and miss out on joining Spoonflower for a while longer. Needless to say that the instant I read that news and got it confirmed, I took my pen and wrote down "Join Spoonflower" in my 2024 planner first chance I had last week. The catch though is that to compensate for the fact they no longer demand a swatch purchase, they limited the amount of designs you can upload each week to 25, probably in an attempt to still encourage quality uploads. But if you pace yourself, that shouldn't be an issue at all. The process to verify your account could take a day or two as well. You have to enter all your taxes information which is quite easy to do and once you filled all the forms they take 24 hours to validate those changes, you also need to validate your postal address and there are two ways to do it : Either buy anything from the website and your shipping address gets saved automatically, or contact their help desk and provide them with a residential address of your choice. I went with option B and it took a day and a half for them to validate it. You can still upload designs while you wait to be a fully verified account, you just can't make them available for sale until that part is done, so get cracking on it as soon as you join. I'm gradually uploading my work over there and started with adding the whole Tiger Safari and Mediterranean Patio collections, and am currently adding the Pacific Beach one as well as I type these words. I'm also working on entries for their design challenges which is something every designers should consider doing on this platform. All in all, I started the year strong already and I am super excited to see what comes next.

Happy New Year!!!!!!!! We completed a trip around the sun, and it is now time to get ready with a brand new printable calendar and a renewed sense of purpose and new goals to make and reach. But let's start with the January 2024 printable calendar page shall we? It's available in the Freebie zone, and if you aren't a member yet, no problem! It's free, and as a bonus you get email notifications each time I publish a new blog post, such as this one, and every now and then, I do send a newsletter with big announcement (don't worry it happens only 2-3 times a year usually). A few days back I also shared another printable, also available in the Freebie zone, and on Patreon (it's free there too) : a Happy New Year postcard featuring champagne bottles I drew in the last week of December and are available for sale on Society6 and Teepublic. If you want to download all 12 page of the printable calendar all at once or get the printable art work that went on illustrating this month, they are both available for sale in my Patreon digital shop which is the place you can do one time purchase without locking yourself into a membership. That said Tier 3 Patreons get access to those shop printables for FREE along with all the other Patreon rewards I shared over the year. So if your resolution this year is to support small artists, Patreon is always a GREAT way to do it, no matter what tier you pledge at. So now that we are officially in 2024, what are you hoping for? Any goals? Resolutions? Things to look forward to? I'm looking forward to another year of growth and business opportunities, and one of my goals in 2024 is to learn more about licensing and take the plunge and start pitching myself to brands instead of waiting passively.

Raise your hand if you've been struggling with getting into the Christmas festive spirit as an adult! I think most of us have been there at one point or another and most of us probably tried to blame it on external factor when our expectation constanlty fell short. I know it's a recurrent theme in expat communities in India. But to be fair, I think we all have dealt with this feeling something isn't right with Christmas as an adult, no matter where we live, yes even if we stayed in our home town all our life! It's probably because we try too hard recreating traditions that made sense when we were kids but not so much when we are the adult having to work toward recreating that magic. There will always be a point in any adult's life when it'll be time to just make new traditions for Christmas. It's unavoidable, and the longer you resist it, the harder you are going to make it on yourself. Trust me I speak from experience. I moved to India in November 2003 at the ripe age of 24, and even though I experienced a few Christmases as an adult before that move, I don't think I really realised that the reason everything fell flat, was that I had unrealistic expectations of what Christmas should be. I spent years half mourning my childhood Christmases and half trying to recreate them at all cost, albeit with slight modifications. No matter how hard I tried to recreate fancy Christmas dinners, I found that all it left me feeling was being cranky and tired. Over the years, I realised that it's probably how my parents and grandparents felt planning a Christmas feast for lunch or dinner. As a kid, I just remember the table decorations, the party food, and the opening the gifts afterwards. I was blissfully unaware of the amount of work that went into making that day happen. And my grand parents idea of what goes into a Christmas feast was probably already a LOT different than my parent's, and they all had sets of social expectations to sort of abide to that fortunately I am free of in my neck of the wood. That said, you don't have to move half accross the globe to have a merry, uncompliocated, fuss free Christmas. You just have to make your happiness your priority and be brave enough to chunk all the festive traditions that no longer make sense in your life. Your kids will not know any better, trust me on that. They will just remember the fun and magic you deliver no matter what form it comes it. They have no way of knowing what YOU grew up with, they can't compare your childhood memories to theirs. What they will pick up on as they get older is how grumpy sticking to some traditions will make you. Honestly by the time I was 12-13 years old, I noticed that my whole family was really going through the motion of it all because "That's what you are supposed to do on Christmas day". I probably internalised this idea that Christmas is supposed to be work, that you are supposed to put tons of effort into it around that age. Let that go! All those crazy ideas that you need to sacrifice your own comfort and happiness for the sake of a festival. This year, dare to make new traditions for Christmas. Traditions that are fun for you, and make sense to you. The first step toward that epiphany for me was when we decided to go out in the evening to watch the pretty lights around our neighbourhood while drinking Starbucks Christmas coffee. Discovering I could feel relaxed and not have to cook! What a concept! The year after that the latest Starwars movie came out on Christmas day, it was "The Force Awakens" and that's when our new family tradition started and still goes on : Every Christmas, we go watch a movie as a family, there isn't formal gifts exchanged anymore, we gift ourselves a fun family outing and eat lunch or dinner outside, after or before the movie screening. I also go out to buy croissants and cake for breakfast on Christmas day and that's about it. Nobody is tired, or grumpy, there are no humongous amount of dishes piling up in the sink and dishwasher, and no pressure to be social at all. I'm not saying that's what everyone should do, but that it's what worked for us. Christmas doesn't have to be about a super fancy home cooked feast and tons of guests, and it certainly not have to be about finding the perfect gift for everyone in your family. It can be something completely different, as long as you are HAPPY and RELAXED! If you don't have the energy for anything but a Christmas "high tea" with store bought pastries, then by all means go for it! That will end up being the perfect Christmas for you and that is what matters in the end. But, you have to give yourself permission to set yourself free and make your own Christmas traditions as you go. They might also change over time, and that is ok too. This year we added watching Christmas movies all through December as a family and eat take out food in front of the TV while watching them, and yup! We will still go out on Christmas day to watch a movie.

Last year I had to close down my Etsy shop because it reached a point at which selling printables in it costed me more per months in listing fees renewal than I actually made in sales. That was when I started offering some of those printables as rewards to my Patreons but becoming a paid subscriber isn't something everyone is willing to do. So imagine how happy I was to learn that Patreon launched a new way for artists and creator to earn an income on the platform with their brand new Patreon shops. These shops are meant for artists and creator to sell any sort of digital content. There are no listing fees, and Patreon only take a percentage of the sale when a sale happens, which is great if all you are selling are instant download digital files. You now have an option beside Etsy. The shop is accessible to EVERYONE, this means if you don't want to become a subscriber and just want to buy the one product you want in the shop, you can do so. All of the purchases in the shop are one off purchases. As a creator, I also have the option to make shops products FREE for some of my subscribers which is exactly what I did with the Printable 2024 calendar. My tier 2 and 3 Patreons get it free as part of their pledge. I'm adding files gradually to that shop and I am excited with the potential it offers, including the possibility to offer videos and tutorials in the future as well. I found out today as I was uploading the Printable Christmas gift envelope and card that the minimum price I can set in my shop is 3$, so with that in mind, there will be a lot of bundle files rather that single files, expecially with things like printable stickers and postcards, which I plan to start uploading next month. Remember that Patreon is a great way to support independent artists either with a paid subscription to their content, or with the new Patreon shop that is now live for all to buy from.

This is it! In less than a month, we are kissing 2023 goodbye and stepping into 2024 with a renewed sense of purpose, new goals and for those who really do them, resolutions (I don't I prefer goals). Like every Decembers, I find myself reflecting on the year that was so that I can map my future and the new year ahead. This year, I used the last trimester of 2023 to focus on self growth and tie loose ends on what I really want to leave behind as the clock strike midnight on December 31st and what I will carry over the treshold. We all have some emotional baggage, fears, concerns and patterns we are all better off leaving at the door and I found that making space to assess that has been a great idea so far. 2023 has been an interesting year over here, with its own special sets of challenges and hurdles I quite frankly am really glad to leave. I spent quality time with my mom in January, but it's also the year we lost our cat, and my mother in law. We got to see our daughter performing the lead in a Snow White ballet production, and our car sustained a bit of damage in an accident (the humans were all fine). There were a lot of unforeseen expenses and several of the goals I had never quite happened. I also saw my best friend move away to another continent. This year was the first year I used a conventional planner over a bullet journal, because I realised in 2022 that I didn't have the time or energy to make BuJo spreads from scratch anymore. I outgrew the BuJo, and I don't regret it one bit. What I do sort of kind of regret though is falling to the pressure of 4 pages to set goals in my 2023 planner and filled them all to the max. I kind of knew then I was setting myself for a tad bit of disappointment, and this is something I am correcting in 2024. All this year I have been using this undated planner, but in an overzealous elan and this compulsive need to not waste any pages. I did fill them all in the first half of the year. All the goals, all the trackers...everything! The result? Lots of the goals weren't clear enough, and it ended up sounding, more like a wish list than an actual goal list. No human being should ever set a bucket list, a vision board, and goals across 6 categories followed by a 2 page spread of things you are comfortable and not comfortable with...before the year even started. Never mind the 3 pages each month to fill with bedtime and morning routines, trackers, mantras, to-do lists, and then weekly to-do lists, and at the end a goal review page!!!!! As much as I enjoyed having weekly spreads all printed already and using it as a planner. I really do think half that planner was over-kill. I think by June, I gave up on most of the trackers and log pages because I could feel the pressure and burn out. Beside that's when the year started to really feel loaded. So in 2024, I will use Alicia Souza's 2024 Wiro planner. It has less goals pages already, and now rich of my wisdom, I will not put pressure on myself to fill all the pages I don't really need like the "meal planning" ones. Setting just one big goal in 2024 Rich of this year's experience, I decided to just set ONE main goal for the whole year and work on the steps to get there throughout the year, bit by bit. That goal will be to take the step into art licensing, and approach companies to license my designs by the year's end. In a way, it's a continuation of what I DID achieve this year : building a portfolio of collections I believe it will be a lot easier if I focus on that one target, and make it happen by taking actionable steps toward it, rather than dilute myself in a million other personal and professional goals like I did this year. Rich of my experience, and writing months recap in the planner and in all past journals, I KNOW that there are two months where I'm inevitably going to be low energy : March and August. So I already put a disclaimer in the new planner about taking those months easy and not pushing myself. After all, the ultimate purpose of planners and journals is to help you navigate your future better. Like every year, I always feel excited with a new journal or planner. It starts blank, full of possibilities and promises, and as the year unfurls, this book become a witness to your story and growth. So which team will you be on in 2024? Team bullet journal or team conventional planner?

One of my goals for 2023 has been to put together a few designs and patterns collection for my portfolio and as of November, I've put 3 collections together and given them a feature page each on my website which you can find on the collections page. The latest of these collections is called the Mediterranean patio collection. I could swear I had a plan of writing a blog post about each of the collections and that I had done that already, at least for the first two, namely Tiger Safari and Pacific Beach, but it seems the plan is yet to materialise. So without any further ado, here is a bit more about this beautiful teal, orange and white collection that brings you to a warm seaside, sun kissed mediterranean villa and garden. The collection was built around this teal and orange minimalist citrus fruits and branches artwork which you can find as an art print and more on Society6. This illustration gave birth to a matching pattern, and it instantly gave me a mediterranean orchard garden vibe, so much so I decided to use the same orange, teal and white color palette to create companion patterns for it. As you probably have realised, I am a sucker for retro geometric patterns with an Art Deco influence and florals and botanical designs, no matter the color palette. I think the honeycomb pattern was the first companion pattern I created, quickly followed by a teal seigaiha wave pattern. At that point I didn't have a name for the collection at all, I just created patterns that could go well together in a fun mix and match way. It's when I created this orange and teal retro lilies pattern that I realised I had a warm garden theme coming together and the first words that came to my mind were "Mediterranean garden". I knew I was onto something. I work better putting collections together when I used a mockup file and start putting all the different patterns together so I went to Creatsy and decided to use one of their free mockup file called the Versatile fabric roll free mockup. Which had enough customisable fabric rolls for me to really put a solid collection together and see how all of them worked together. I had 4 patterns ready at that point : the teal and orange tree branches, the retro lilies, the orange, teal, white and navy honeycomb pattern and the teal and white seigaiha waves pattern, but the mockup had two additional fabric rolls to use. So I dug deep into my patterns archive to find a mid-century modern, 70s inspired geometric rainbow design. With two geometric patterns already this one seemed like a perfect marriage between the light and playful seigaiha and the more structured, patio tiles like honeycomb pattern, so in the collection it went and it worked beautifully with all the other fabric roll. I had a winner right away. The last pattern was a bit tricky, I had a navy blue and turquoise Art Deco floral motif that I used in the Pacific Beach collection that was a strong candidate as a filler pattern. But the navy blue did clash with all the other designs making that one stand out entirely too much. But the motif did feel right at home with my garden/patio theme, so I decided to recolor the background a dark teal to see how it would work. Turned out that move was the right move and just like that, I had my complete collection ready. All that was left at that point was finding a name for it. Because of the citrus fruit pattern, I knew "mediterranean" had to be in the name. I felt torn between garden, villa, patio and orchard when it came to names. Orchard got dismissed quickly, because with so many geometric patterns in the collection, it didn't feel like it was fitting the organic kind of vibe an orchard usually gives. The clear retro geometric elements suggested there was an architectural element to the collection, and the name needed to reflect that. This reasoning is what ended up disqualifying "Mediterranean Garden" as well along with the fact that it's such a generic, overused name I would probably not really stand out in searches with that one. So I was left with Mediterranean villa and patio, and both could have worked to be fair. I just got drawn to the patio more because the honeycomb pattern reminded me of mosaics found in Moroccan courtyard houses called riyads which are similar to patios. The Mediterranean patio collection got officially named! All the patterns in the collection are available as fabrics and wallpapers on Raspberry Creek Fabrics, and on several if not all items on Redbubble and Society6. They are of course all licensable which is exactly why I'm focusing on building collections, so if you are interested in licensing my work, you can shoot me an email.

One of the serious downside of making a living as an artist and surface designer is that art files add up and pile up very quickly on your hard drive and it can become very tricky to remember what you uploaded and where. Many artists will tell you how they swear by some sort of spreadsheet or planner that lives on their computer and how it's a great way to stay organized and stay on top of things. Some even include which descriptions, keywords and tags they associate with each design. The problem is that there are a LOT of us out there who are seriously spreadsheet challenged and keeping a list that way is the surest way to get even more disorganized. I'm absolutely famous for forgetting appointments and events that have been entered on Google calendar and for forgetting I even have lists in spreadsheets. Heck just creating a spreadsheet stress me out and I mess it up half the time which leads to my husband having to help me with it...I'm THAT bad with them. So what if I were about to tell you that it's possible to keep your art files organized and do so without spreadsheets? Two weeks ago I made my comeback on YouTube after a long hiatus showing you exactly how I do it : My method is highly visual and works for everyone who needs to see things to remember them rather than see a name in a list. I also show you how I make an habit of backing up my files regularly to avoid clutter on my laptop, and make sure everything stays safe. To do so, I use a 1TB Toshiba hard drive I bought a few years ago which unfortunately is now only available as a 2TB drive on Amazon but that I still recommend (it's an affiliate link by the way). The system is pretty simple : - Files that have been published on ALL my main PoD platforms are put away in folders with the name of the design inside a bigger folder I named "Cyn's art". Those are files I don't need to see as icons anymore, and I only keep the most recent designs on my laptop or those I might revisit in the near future. - Files that are yet to be backed up on my external drive are left out of a folder and do not have a red dot label (I'm on Mac) - Once my files are backed up on my external drive, they go in a folder if they have been published, or they stay in the open and get a red dot label which indicates that the file has not been published yet but has been properly backed up. - I upload all seamless tiles file in a whole different folder after I published them, it's easier for me to have them all in one place when I build collections and be able to sift through thumbnails image to get an idea of what works together or not. I have a number of "red dot" designs in my "Cyn's art folder" some that have been there for months. The reasons could be that they are out of season, like for example Christmas designs that I created all through December and make no point of uploading past the shipping deadline PoD companies set to get your order delivered before December 24th. Those designs will safely stay on my hard drive until it makes sense to publish them again. Then there are all the color variations of a design I often make in batches but will take a couple of months to be all up for sale as I don't like flooding my shop with 5-6 color variations all right after one another. These red dotted designs always come in handy when I am stuck in a creative block, that way I have something to fall back on to maintain my uploading pace on PoD and keep their algorithm happy. When I publish a design, I make a point of publishing it all within a day or two at the most to ALL my main print on demand platforms, this means Society6, Redbubble, Teepublic and Threadless. That way, I don't have to worry about remembering keywords and tags as I'm doing it all in just a few hours. The only catch is that with Teepublic being most a t-shirt platform, my patterns do not make it there, and it's fine. I have a few other smaller PoD and some of them are super specific like Raspberry Creek Fabric, so I upload separately on those and my content is often curated. If I find a new platform to try at any point, I start by uploading my best selling designs and go from there. For the highly visual person that I am, this system has worked pretty well over time. So if you are allergic to spreadsheets and can't register words as well as images, this is a system that might be a good fit for you.