How Do You Squarespace? UPPERCASE

UPPERCASE founder, Janine Vangool, does it all: graphic design, blogging, magazine & book publishing, and even some party-planning. And she does all of it with an impeccable eye for beauty, style, and whimsy. Though most people know her now as a magazine publisher and blogger, Janine began her career as a graphic designer, specializing in print design for arts and culture clients. It was in 2005 that she made a few key decisions that would ultimately land her where she is today.

The first of these was moving her business out of her home and into a studio space in downtown Calgary. The studio lease came with a hitch, which Janine remembers:

At the time, the mandate of the building was to promote the arts and each tenant was required to have a space open to the public in some way. So I started UPPERCASE as a side project—it began as a gallery, bookstore, and paper goods store. I was mostly selling products made by other companies, though I quickly started making things of my own to sell as well such as notebooks and greeting cards. Folks could wander in and see a graphic designer at work.

Opening a store would have been enough of a challenge, but 2005 also marked Janine's venture into blogging. While many of us now first associate Janine with her gorgeous magazine, her blog actually predates her entry into print publishing by several years. She's the reverse of many others who begin in print and transition to web to keep up with changing trends.

It was really the combination of opening a gallery/store alongside running an active blog that eventually led Janine to consider print publishing as well. For her, print was the logical outgrowth of online publishing: 

As my blog readership grew, so did the desire to develop my own products. I could see that I had a nice loyal following who loved print and paper as much as I did, and so in 2009, I launched UPPERCASE magazine. My hope was that if just a modest percentage of these people subscribed, the magazine could do alright.

Janine's gamble was a success and her readership has grown steadily in both media — she recently published issue #12 of UPPERCASE, and now has over 2000 subscribers worldwide. With growth in both arenas, she is a true believer that print and web are integral to one another. "I don't think you can have a periodically printed paper magazine or newspaper without supporting it online," she says.

Janine also believes that each type of publication fills a separate need. "Readers expect a lot," she says. "They want the immediacy of a blog to get a daily dose of inspiration but they also want the more sensual experience of holding a beautifully produced print production." By having a blog, Janine can also gauge readers' interests as she develops content for print—many issues of UPPERCASE have themes that emerged from trends she's seen online. For the next issue, she's even asking for reader contributions on a theme: the weather and how it impacts creativity.

Seeing everything she's done, we're so pleased that Squarespace has been Janine's platform since the very beginning. We're even happier the feeling is mutual. "One of the best things about Squarespace is how steady and robust it is," she told us. "My site contains an incredible amount of information from all these years, and yet Squarespace is always there... It has been great to be able to adapt the site configuration as my needs change, especially since my business has evolved so much."

We've also had the distinct pleasure of getting to know Janine personally over the last few months, after the Alt Design Summit wisely paired her up with us to plan a party at this past weekend's conference. Her work on the concept, decorations, activities, food and drinks for the party was simply phenomenal. (See for yourself in this gallery.) We're incredibly grateful, and if we've learned anything by working with her, it's how right she is when she says: "If you're making something special, there will always be people who take notice."

To find out more about Janine, read the UPPERCASE blog, subscribe to UPPERCASE magazine, or follow her on Twitter. 

The Great Style Revival

Over the past several months we've made a tremendous effort to continually improve the Squarespace experience. We've released beautiful new templates, expanded our help system, and built in powerful features like slideshows that you've always wanted. Today, we're thrilled to push that effort even further and offer a colossal update to all areas related to templates in Squarespace.

13 TEMPLATE REDESIGNS, 85 NEW STYLES, 2 BRAND-NEW TEMPLATES

Our templates have served us well over the years, but the time has come to reinterpret the Squarespace classics and improve our entire collection.  In this release, we redesigned every template in the system, top to bottom. We explored everything — color, fonts, button styles, key art, and the overall proportion — to ready our templates for an evolving web and far beyond.  In addition to the 13 template redesigns with 85 new styles, 2 brand-new templates (Principle and Transfigure) are included in this update.  

GOOGLE WEB FONTS – ALL OF THEM

You asked for Google's complete web font library, and here it is. Over 300 fonts are now fully integrated within Squarespace, giving you an unprecedented selection of fonts to choose from. There’s nothing for you to install, no Javascript to add, no CSS to write. Everything is available within the Fonts, Colors & Sizes menu. It's like magic.

DEVELOPER-FRIENDLY CSS EDITOR 

As web designers and developers, we know how limiting it could be to write and edit CSS within a small window. Now you can do it all within our beautiful new editor; pop out the entire window and see everything at once. The new editing toolbar allows you to find & replace, undo & redo (even post-save), insert style variables, and format your code like a pro. 3 new color themes are also available for easy-on-the-eyes editing. 

AND MUCH MORE...

• Add style to your blog post elements with 8 new icon sets, available in both black and white and 4 different sizes. 
• Keep the background image but change the color thanks to alpha-transparent PNGs available in many of the redesigned templates.
• Customize buttons in the new styles, like “search” and “submit”, right within Fonts, Colors & Sizes.

There’s a lot to explore within Style mode and you can access the full set of features right away. Enjoy!

New Template: Blueprint

Browse through the templates in your Style Editor and you'll find our newest offering: Blueprint.

Blueprint was designed by Senior Designer Stephen Parker to be a new starting point for a modern website. To get there, Stephen explored color schemes, proportions, and shapes and forms of text. For an extra-polished look, Blueprint boasts some subtle-but-cutting-edge improvements like CSS transitions and image-width calculations to make the experience seamless for customers. 

Blueprint has five unique styles to make sure there is something for everyone. It's also the first template to come with equal column height for both main content and sidebars, so your columns will always align at the bottom. "Templates in the future will benefit from the work done in Blueprint," Stephen says. "And there's a lot of incredible new design on the way."

Since it was created to be a new starting point, Blueprint is now our default template for new customers, a crucial component in our freshly redesigned onboarding experience. This new experience includes a helpful tutorial of our editing modes that gets new customers started on their sites quickly. Current customers have the full benefit of the new tutorial too — just click on the Help icon in your menu bar while logged in to see the updated Help features.

To try Blueprint on for size, just follow this guide to switching templates. We hope you enjoy!

New York Dribbble Meetup

Dribbble is our morning cup of coffee.

Each day our design team pokes through Dribbble, sharing beautiful shots with each other, finding inspiration in UX elements, iconography, print layouts, 3D design and more. We love Dribbble for the instant feedback we receive on our work, for the always enthusiastic community of designers, and for the powerful interface and experience.

What's more, Dribbble is a wonderful place to identify unique talent. We're incredibly lucky to be adding three new members to our design team this summer, all of whom we discovered on Dribbble.

Here at Squarespace design and technology are given equal weighting. Respecting design is core to our culture, so hosting the NYC Dribbble Meetups couldn't make us happier. The more designers we all can reach and interact with, the better each of us becomes.

We are thrilled to host the first NYC Dribbble Meetup on Wednesday, June 15th at 7PM. Please join us for an evening of networking, demos & showcases, and refreshments. RSVP here so that we'll know how many new friends to expect, and be sure to drop us a line if you'd like to be added to the demo list. We are located at 459 Broadway (entrance on Grand Street behind the drug store), on the 5th Floor.

We look forward to meeting you! In the meantime, check out our team on Dribbble here, here, here, here, and here.

How Do You Squarespace? Matt Stevens

Matt Stevens was the kind of kid who was always doodling on pieces of scrap paper. Which is to say his future as a designer was fairly obvious at an early age, especially to him. "I think around early middle school I realized what a logo is and it just made sense to me," he says. And he's certainly grateful for the clarity. "Taking a message and figuring out the best way to communicate that idea through words and pictures just felt like the thing I had to do." 

From there it was a simple matter of deciding whether design or illustration would win the battle for his creative career. He went on to study both in college, eventually choosing to stick with design. Most of his career since then has been in small, design firms. But if you take a look at his recent work, you'll see the strong illustrative element creeping back in, which just goes to show you can always revisit the path not taken.

These many years later, Matt is still the kind of grown-up who fills scraps of paper with drawings and ideas, which he says strike entirely on their own schedule. To make sure he doesn't lose them, he keeps notepads and sketchpads with him at all times, even in the car. "[I'm] not condoning sketching and driving," he clarifies. "Red lights only please."  

What's been one of your favorite projects to date?

I am currently doing a branding project for a group of cool folks in Manhattan, Kansas, starting up a unique donut shop. It's a labor of love for both them and myself, trying to do something fun and special that adds to their community. They're taking over an old art deco post office in downtown Aggieville, to create a gathering place in an area that is primarily bars. They have a neat vision for what this place can be and are letting me tackle all kinds of pieces: logo, apparel, glassware, signage and even graphics for a cool old bread truck that they are converting into a place to make donuts outside the shop. They've been awesome to work with thus far. 

As a designer in North Carolina, do you find there are any advantages or disadvantages to being outside of the New York design scene? 

North Carolina is great. I grew up in Asheville, NC, since the age of 9 up until I went to college in Charlotte. We have settled here to remain close to family in the Southeast and it's a great place to have a family. It's certainly not as active or packed with design as many of the larger cities, but the connections you make online have really shrunk the world in my opinion. Where you are matters, but a fraction of what it used to.  

How do you keep the job interesting and challenge yourself?

I am a firm believer in doing work for yourself. As a designer, I have to find that angle or that hook that really engages me on a project. The more personal things I have going, the easier I can find those insights into client work. It allows me to exercise those muscles. The constant pursuit of ideas and thinking lead to better ideas and thinking. 

What other creative pursuits are left to try?

I would love to speak more. I really enjoying taking the design battle scars and using those experiences to give someone else some insight or enlightenment. I spoke about doing personal work to the Dallas Society for Visual Communication last year and it was one of the most satisfying experiences I've had as a designer.  

How long have you been using Squarespace? How did you find us?

I've been using Squarespace for around 2 years. I was looking for a simple way to get my current work up online and be able to share my process and thoughts. In my search, I had many folks recommend Squarespace to me personally as a good platform.  

Why does Squarespace work for you?

I'm not a super technical guy. The simplicity and ease of use was key for me. I love things that "just work" without having to dive deep and have a ton of developer skills. I know the basics and that has allowed me to do what I need to do. I also have seen a lot of other Squarespace sites that have been customized, so I know that should I need to do a lot of customization, I can. I love the built in analytics. The whole UI of the analytics are so well done and easy to use. I also love having all of that available in the iPhone app.  

What's next for you?

I've been obsessed with sneakers since middle school, and I started a kind of mad scientist personal project, taking the Nike AirMax 1 sneaker, and doing a slightly different version each day. It was just an excuse to illustrate more, but I really got hooked into the project and ran with it, producing 60 originals and 15 tributes to other designers over the course of several months. It really got a great response, so I've been building it as a KICKSTARTER project over the last several months. I really learned a lot from the success of Frank Chimero's "Shape of Design" project and Simple Scott's "Designing Obama" book. So the goal is to produce a great book with the 60 originals and 40 new ones and some behind the scenes kind of content. I'd love for people to support it.