Karen Nelson Editing and Design

28/08/2024

Oh, man, did that turn out gorgeous or what.

If you ever need an Airbnb in Herington, Kansas, when this one becomes ready for guests, it's going to be as lovely on the inside as the sign is on the outside. The owner's taste is exquisite.

A joy to do the signage design, both main logo and wordmark, for the property.

09/08/2024

A year ago my mother commissioned this sign design for this little church they go to while working in Colorado. We visited last weekend and got to see it in person! This is such a dedicated little congregation, and it was a pleasure to be part of this effort to make them more findable. Plus they make great coffee. Just FYI.

28/05/2024

This is a supercool study. You should definitely get it. The leader guide is outstanding.

It's long, so when you inevitably find a typo, even though I read it twice fully and once in part, then you can let me know. It will have been my fault. 🙃

Sola Publishing has just released a new 12-Session Bible Study. "Ruth, the Adult Version" - A Twelve-Session Bible Study on the biblical Book of Ruth, written by the Rev. Dr. Mark Braaten.

Here's the description: The Book of Ruth is chock-full of theological insights and questions; it invites us and guides us to wrestle with how we see God acting in our lives, especially in times of hardship and struggle. Far from just a children’s “Cinderella Story” — the biblical text is loaded with all sorts of innuendo, suggestive language and wordplays. It is quite an adult book! This study is written to help lead you deeper into the book of Ruth, and to help you start wrestling with the questions and insights the book shares. Our hope and prayer is that, as you read Ruth, you will encounter the God who speaks through its pages.

09/04/2024

I know, this page is pretty quiet, but I promise, I'm doing stuff. Newest project: A print-only, every-Tuesday, table-tent-style kind-of-newspaper for the village of Bertrand.

The inspiration came from a table tent I saw at a hometown burger place in Superior, a piece produced by the Superior Library. I called it Town Square at the brilliant suggestion of my sister. It's four sides. It's a small-town communication device. So clever I couldn't not name it that.

We have needed this for a long time. I think it's poetic that this photo displays the first three (this week was the fourth issue) in the former home of the Bertrand Herald. When I was pregnant with my now-16-year-old, I helped Kay digitize the paper when she bought it from the Engelses. It was one of those things my employer at the time, the Kearney Hub, thought was important to do. And, it was the right thing to do. And, I liked it.

Now, it really seems the most-local of newspapers has to change with the times. Here's at least one solution for at least one moment in time.

No, it's not online anywhere. I know this seems counterintuitive. The purpose is to foster community. You can read it for free at any one of the 28 businesses in Bertrand where it is displayed (yes, including The Gallery). Can you believe we have 28 businesses?! ME NEITHER. What a fantastic thing to know.

If you're not in town to read it, then indeed, please subscribe. You'll get a copy by mail. Really, by mail. I know that's a bit of a dicey proposition, but it's worth it.

So if this intrigues you, there's a place to subscribe, sponsor or donate via bertrandtownsquare.com and there's a place to submit news via bit.ly/bertrand-town-square — hook me up.

Thank you to the lovely people who've done the things to help so far, but most especially to Pam and the Village of Bertrand for being an excellent partner and to my usual stunt double Tara for the name and the brainstorming and proofreading.

Send a message to learn more

24/10/2023

I like designing cards, by the way, if you have photos and want an assist. :)

09/06/2023

One fun thing about being your own self in business for your own self is that you can donate services and make a thing that's needed be more affordable, and unbox it in your kitchen to much glee. Plus, apparently I'm expanding the girls' education as evidence is clear that they have never, ever seen a banner before. (You can see this snazzy new Bertrand Area Community Fund Tyvek banner in real life and in its proper banner exhibit holder thingy in its formal debut at the community building during the Bertrand Fair and Rodeo.)

06/06/2023

It’s so sweet to get to shine a deserving light. Follow Shana — definitely recommend.

https://www.facebook.com/100064272836237/posts/643474644471624/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v

16/05/2023

So, several things of note.

One, I got to do this layout for the magazine that Tara and I edit for US Custom Harvesters, Inc.

Two, the writer is our former Hub coworker and shirttail relative (in the Dunn/Schluntz sector), the multi-award-winning ag reporter Lori Potter.

Three, Duo Lift is based in Nebraska.

Four, if you want a little extra impetus to do your job the very best you possibly can, I recommend simply working with someone who never does anything less.

09/05/2023

Pleased to see a new product from a longtime writer on the Sola Publishing website today ... I had the opportunity to do editing and design for this 5.5x8.5 book format. There's a link to see a sample chapter. This book is written in Lectio Divina style which (I learned!) is a formal, four-step method of reading and contemplation. https://www.solapublishing.com/abide-in-my-word_E-4140

28/04/2023

Got my sample copy of Trevor Brown's book today! This has some super cool facets as a project, including being the first book I've done layout on that's got an ISBN and is on Amazon ... and first one to be converted to epub and Kindle versions. New skillz! Hooray!

This book correlates to the KEARNEY CROSSFIT & PERSONAL TRAINING student athlete camps and you can see the sale page for the perfect bound print edition here: https://a.co/d/bZfDC6f

14/04/2023

Career fair?! I made a mad dash through my collection of products last night and I can talk all day and all night about the many faces of journalism. First, kids, get your CDL and/or learn Spanish. Then, choose your dream knowing you have skills to use and fall back on.

03/04/2023

I do a little bit of a lot of things — one of the newer things I'm doing is print products for Eastern Colorado Seeds. This is the front side of a postcard mailer that's also going to appear in Fence Post and MileSaver as a print ad. If you go to the ECS website, ecseeds.com, you can also see the spring seed guide, which was my first project for them.

I like coincidences of geography and acquaintance, and this has a little of both. The connection with ECS came via my family's harvesting business (and the photo on the second page of the seed guide includes my dad), and also the ECS New Mexico location is just a stone's throw, almost literally, from the house my grade-school best friend grew up in.

10/03/2023

One of my favorite jobs of every year for one of my favorite people.

08/12/2022

As of the first of the year, Adobe is no longer supporting Type 1 fonts. This sounds a little scary, but it probably has little meaningful effect for most users.

I looked into this for my wonderful printer, Service Press in Henderson, Nebraska, and since I did all that, I'll share it in case it helps anyone else somehow.

I had to do a little bit of learning because it's slightly more complicated than I thought. Because of course it is.

The T1 fonts are the old kind of Mac fonts where you have to install both a PFB and a PFM to make the complete font.

Realistically most of those old fonts would've been used in the paste-up era, so they'd have been printed and shot. The only culprits are likely to be the oldest products that are resurrected and reprinted from time to time — a newspaper advertiser's once-a-year Christmas greeting, or a book that had a first edition when printing to film was first coming about, and that same Pagemaker or early InDesign file is being used now.

If you are using T1 fonts and you know it, there's a good chance you are using old standalone desktop versions of Adobe products. So, as long as you don't update your InDesign and Photoshop to a subscription version (Creative Cloud), you won't have any problems. So, for example, old book files in InDesign that happen to use these old T1 fonts will be fine as long as you're on an old version of InDesign and the fonts are still installed.

If you export from those old products to PDF and send that PDF to someone with newer products, you won't have any problems, and neither will they, because Acrobat isn't changing.

Any old PDFs will work indefinitely, no problems.

However, if you update an old standalone version to the Creative Cloud subscription version, then any old T1 fonts you have won't work in anything but Acrobat. And going forward, don't install any PFM/PFB fonts from old CDs or anything. Better to just avoid them unless you need to revive an old book or something and don't have a choice.

If you end up with something that's questionable, I think that in older versions of InDesign you can check using Find/Replace Font under the Type drop menu. I'll attach a screenshot of what my current subscription version looks like. You want it to say OpenType or TrueType or both, not Type 1.

06/12/2022

I love taking Erin's ideas and making them into something people can enjoy. Nothing better than being able to turn out a tangible product.

08/11/2022

It's Election Day! This year, for the first time, I had the chance to work on a couple different sets of candidate materials. For Kendra, we did yard signs and three different handout/mailer items. It's so rewarding to get to support people's ideas and goals.

15/07/2022

Today's treat in the mail — a book! Don McPherson is 100 years old and a World War II ace, plus he's a farmer and retired mail carrier, and he has given to his community through Legion ball and his church — and here's his book! I am so honored to have worked on this publication. It's 92 pages and is illustrated with Don's photos. It's so well written and a joy to read.

04/07/2022

I'm fortunate in so many ways. One is the opportunity and freedom to work at my kitchen table (or under the park pavilion while my kids are at the pool, or whatever) and to work for practically whoever needs something for a print product. There's been a terrific run of logo projects recently — sometimes these take a very long time to produce and sometimes a very short time, but I work with the request until everyone is happy.

25/05/2022

You can't tell by my presence on this page, but it has been a busy, busy spring in this wee entrepreneurship. Today I'm sharing a project with for one of Jody and Mindy's specialty travel photo shoots with their senior portrait reps. They flew from Las Vegas to Miami for this, to a location that I'd never heard of but turns out to be fascinating — Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. Subsequently we built this magazine from the ground up and you can page through the whole thing here (and purchase it, if that's your thing). https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/2241659

18/02/2022

Hehe! Embrace your geekiness whenever possible!

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking ci**rs.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out — we don't serve your type."
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony
— Jill Thomas Doyle

10/02/2022

In the wake of the Andersons' 740 Farms logo, I had several requests for logo designs — and both the work and the word-of-mouth growth are seriously my favorite parts of this invented, kitchen-table career. The Ironmonger's Garage logo was a super fun project that tested a bunch of my skills. (I probably spent twice as long figuring out how to get ideas out of my head and into Illustrator as I could actually rationalize billing for, but I feel like I still came out the winner.) The request for these guys' new venture included incorporating steampunk, bright green, the family brand of three stacked quarter-circles, the euphemism of bending wrenches, and something patriotic. And here we are. It's pretty versatile in that the wordmark can be used alone or the logo can be used in full for everything from signs, caps and decals to invoices, flyers and social media, and it can be used in green and black or gray and black. Many thanks to the Kansans for reaching out to me!

18/03/2021

Two new projects arrived in the mail! The magazine Connections is a Sola Publishing project — not a new publication, but new to me. The Nebraska Grain and Feed Association directory is one I’ve done for a couple years already, but the format is new. Both happen to have historical photos on the covers, which makes me happy. 😊