For a long time I deisgned my own websites. I could never code them, but I always felt like I could design one. I’d spent hours in Photoshop pushing pixels, choosing colors, finding fonts (and apparently alliterating), only to find myself irritable and frustrated.

A few years ago, I finally gave in and started working with a really good designer who’s instincts I now trust (even if I still like to tinker a bit). One of the things I learned about was white space and the idea of letting things breathe a little bit instead of cramming as much as possible into a space.

That being said, if your sales graph’s white space is getting bigger – maybe you’ve got bigger problems.

The post The Plus Side to Low Sales: More White Space appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I don’t tend to do a lot of musical jokes because I put a lot of pressure on myself to get music right. My mom was a piano teacher and I majored in music in college, so I take music seriously.

And I knew going in to this cartoon that a lot of people wouldn’t know what forte and crescendo mean (forte means to play at a loud volume, and crescendo means to increase volume) or even that they are musical terms, but I just couldn’t resist drawing that cresecendo in a presentation slide.

The post Not Our Forte, But Where the Crescendo Comes In appeared first on Small Business Trends.

What’s a good name for a cute little business conference cartoon dog? It’s more work than you think.

Here’s what I went thrgouh before landing on Fifi:

• Pookie
• Snookie
• Mr. Waggles
• Buttons
• Snuggles
• Duchess Ophelia T. Wigglebottom
• Snoofy
• Monet
• FrooFroo

Some are servicable and some are too “trying-to-be-a-funny-name” and some are confusing. I’d originally thought Fifi would be overdone like Fido, but in the end it was the best shorthand for a little tiny dog in this business conference cartoon.

The post Little Fifi The Incompetence Expert appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I read something in the paper recently about how an employer in an interview wanted to be “wowed” by an applicant.

Listen, I give a good interview. I’m a funny guy; I know what to say and I think I know my stuff. But if you want me to “wow” you. . .I don’t know how to do that.

So I took it to an extreme in this job interview cartoon.

Note: I don’t know why this guy wants to be made to feel sad at one point, but for some reason once I’d written that into the caption, I couldn’t take it out.

The post Wow Me, Dazzle Me and Impress Me appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Sometimes the ideas just sort of present themselves in a tidy little package for you.

I was perusing some articles online and ran across “at a crossroads” so I wrote it down.

The next article contained “uncharted territory” and I wrote that down right underneath “at a crossroads.”

Then I looked at what I’d written and thought to myself, “It can’t be that easy.”  Then decided that it was, in fact, going to be that easy and this cartoon came out the other side.

That’s a good day.

The post At a Crossroads in Uncharted Territory appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I fundamentally don’t understand the stock market. Things go up and down for reasons that sometimes make sense to me, and sometimes they seem to move the exact opposite of what I would expect.

Could I in theory understand it? Sure. Do I really want to dig into it? Oh, good lord no.

But to go along with news and data (and this is the stuff that makes me crazy) there’s also a lot of conjecture about how something thinks someone might feel about something:

“Happy investors were afraid that the markets weren’t wary enough about the apparent sunniness of blah blah blah…”

So I played with that idea in this business cartoon and basically gave the markets the blahs.

The post Declining Markets: Tired and Need a Day Off appeared first on Small Business Trends.

“Been there, done that” is sort of an old phrase. Not old like, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”  But out-of-fashion old like, “Gag me with a spoon.”

So I have to admit, when this business cartoon came to me, I was a little hesitant about it. But the idea of “been there, done that” on a resume was too hard to resist.

And now I can move on to Gangnam Yolo. That’s a thing, right?

The post Cartoon: Been There, Done That appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I remember attending some sort of sales seminar where we had to craft an elevator pitch. You know, a short summary of who you are, what you do and why it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

I know a lot of people worked really hard on distilling something great from pages and pages of material. But I’ve always been choosier about my words anyway. So it came fairly easily to me.

If those other folks had to craft additional pitches like in this elevator pitch cartoon, I think they’d still be at that seminar.

The post An Elevator, Escalator and Stairway Pitch: Cartoon appeared first on Small Business Trends.

I love to do cartoons about holidays. They’re usualy ripe with all kinds of images, there’s plenty of material to play with and – well, not to put too fine a point on it, they sell well.

But St. Patrick’s Day is kind of a toughy. You’ve got leprechauns and shamrocks and beer, but that only goes so far.

I’d intended to crank out a bunch of St. Patrick’s Day business cartoons this year, but after two days of literally staring out the window for hours upon end, this is all I managed to get.

Just unlucky I guess.

The post Cartoon: A Tremendous Third Quarter Thanks to a Leprechaun appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Before I was a cartoonist, and even before my first day job, I was a musician. In fact, I went to college and got my music degree playing the trombone.

I was a fairly good jazz trombonist and even played professionally for a very short time before hanging up my mouthpiece. Which means that I’ve spent a lot of time with microphones. And as I’m sure you ‘ve experienced, there’s no worse sound on the planet than that squealing microphone feedback.

Of course, feedback also refers to getting information about how people feel about things.

So, being a cartoonist, you add a little positive feedback, a little negative feedback – and you get a business cartoon like this.

The post Lots of Feedback is Good News: Cartoon appeared first on Small Business Trends.