I can relate. Just 8 years ago I was a senior photography major at Tyler School of Art. Oh, I’m getting old. Take a look at “young, pensive Beth” in this polaroid from around 2003 or so. Deep.

Hearing my students express their concerns for the future reminded me of my own fears at that point in my life.

If you want to make art not only your passion but also your profession, prepare yourself for a truly fulfilling and challenging life. I decided to make being creative on a daily basis my number one priority. The creativity part came easy! It was all of the other stuff that required a bit of a learning curve. In the spirit of offering some advice to current art school students, here are five tips that I wish I had known when I was 22.

1. Don’t listen to your parents, you know better.

Mom, if you’re reading this on your iPad… sorry!

Let me preface this tip by saying that my parents have always been extremely supportive. For the longest time, they just didn’t “get it.” Throughout my four years of college, they expressed their valid concerns about what I would do with an art degree. They had similar concerns about my attending graduate school, but again they supported me and my decision.

The point here is that if you really want something, you need to go for it despite what most people will tell you. Many people will think it’s foolish to not want a full-time, nine-to-five office job. But those people do not know what’s right for you. If I had been swayed by parents’ fears, I would be living a very different life.

2. Get smart, ASAP.

Are you going to work as an independent contractor or set up an LLC? Do you need business insurance (tip: wedding photographers do)? What about your personal health insurance? There are lots of questions to ask, so educating yourself is extremely important.

As an independent contractor, you’ll need to figure out hourly or per project rates. Want to work as an independent contractor or start your own business in Philly? Well then you better start putting aside 30-40% of what you bring in for taxes. That’s right, you might owe up to 40% between federal, state and local city business tax. Get yourself an accountant, or at least go and meet with one (most accountants will set up a free consultation with you). Don’t forget to consider how taxes, insurance and other expenses might effect your net income. Take all of this into account when you determine your hourly rate!

3. Love what you do and make friends.

If you don’t love what you do then it’s probably not going to work out. You will need to perform so many roles from marketing associate to financial coordinator and everything in-between.

Along with loving what you do, you need to “make friends.” Seriously, start meeting people – surround yourself with people that are doing what you want to do. Set up meetings, go to lunch or treat someone to a coffee if it means you get to pick the brain of someone who is living the life you want. It’s so simple but it works; it just requires a strong personality. You can also join networking groups, local business associations and attend events and seminars that are related to your business. I am a member of the Young Professionals Network in Philadelphia and the yearly dues I pay are well worth the multitude of opportunities the organization provides to meet people. I also attend Philadelphia Interactive Marketing Association and Philly Build Guild networking events to meet fellow freelancers and potential clients.

4. Be Alec Baldwin.

I don’t mean 30 Rock Alec Baldwin. I am talking about Glengarry Glen Ross Alec Baldwin. If you haven’t seen this amazing 1992 film, get on that pronto. Although the film deals with real estate sales, Alec Baldwin’s classic phrase “A-B-C, Always Be Closing” is a mantra for everyone to live by. To be successful, you will need to eat, sleep and breathe your business.  As Blake (Baldwin’s character) says, it takes “brass balls” to sell real estate. I’d say it takes brass balls to run your own business!

On a side note, the salespeople that work with my Dad have compared him to Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross. This fact makes me extremely happy.

5. Don’t work for free.

The idea that a project will be “good for your portfolio” and therefore you should do it for free is a myth. If a potential client wants your talent and unique skill set, then they have to pay for it! How much money went into your education? How much debt are you now carrying on your back? Most people who strike out on their own to offer creative services take a lot of time to build the confidence necessary to demand the price they are worth. I know it was hard for me. But you need to assert yourself. Make that expensive education MEAN something! And don’t let a condescending tone from a potential client who assures you that their niece could do this project for $50 bully you into lowering your rate. Stay strong and determined, and you’ll find clients who appreciate your talent and hard work, and will pay accordingly.

Let me take a moment to point out that as an avid Mad Men fan I realize that while there are many fashion highs for the female characters, they are often accompanied by career lows. Back to the wardrobe… the Mad Men era is my dream time period for fashion. Also, part of the fantasy is getting to have Christina Hendrick’s amazing body.

To me, there is nothing greater than a fabulous dress and a pair of pumps. As an amateur seamstress (thanks to my BFF who taught me the basics), I love to make skirts and dresses. I found the perfect Joanie-inspired pattern from Butterick. The best part about the pattern is that it’s a “Fast & Easy” pattern – perfect for this somewhat impatient seamstress!

My favorite element of the dress is the collar option which definitely adds the vintage flair or “the Joanie element” as I will call it. The BFF and I set off to Philly’s Fabric Row located on South 4th Street which is chocked full of amazing textiles. Be careful while browsing as the price per yard of fabric in this area of this city is often a bit more expensive than what you might find in Jo-Ann’s.

I had to scan the fabric I ended up using for the dress (check it out below). I guess it’s a wool of some sort… I don’t really know! But it’s gorgeous. The blend of orange, yellow, pink and a bit of lime green makes for a fantastic palette. I didn’t cut the fabric for the longest time because I was nervous about screwing up… and because this was the most expensive fabric I’d ever worked with (about $30/yard).

And voilà! My very own Joan Holloway dress! What do you think? I love it! Now I just need a business meeting to attend…

Are you interested in learning to sew? It’s really not that difficult to get started. Decent sewing machines can cost about $150-200 (I have a Brother machine that I bought from Overstock.com). Vogue, Butterick and McCall’s all carry great “easy” patterns that are perfect for beginners.

Spool on South Street offers a 2-session “Learn to Sew” class for only $52! All of the materials are included and you get to use their machines – what have you got to lose?

Of all my dork-level obsessions, music is the first and foremost. Ever since early childhood, I have voraciously devoured every record I could get my hands on. After years of refining lists, analyzing songs, memorizing liner notes, and most importantly, making mixes, it came time for one of the most important mixtapes in a man’s life: the Wedding Mix.

As Rob Gordon tells us in High Fidelity, “the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many dos and don’ts. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.” We knew early on that we would make a mix for our wedding guests to receive on the Big Day. We would compile our favorite love songs, tunes that appeared throughout our courtship and ended up on several Valentines, birthday and anniversary mixes. A melange of old and new, featuring standards, Doo Wop (and Hair Band) ballads and indie anthems. But as always, we needed to go that extra mile. So why not design four alternate covers and record a few of the songs ourselves?

One of my favorite “art projects” from when I first started learning how to use Photoshop was re-creating the look of classic record sleeves, complete with the aging marks they’ve earned through the years, as A Christmas Present from Beth & Andy! shows. For our Wedding Mix, I though we should re-create some classic duet sleeves. Our wonderful friend and Beth’s colleague (and dare I say mentor?!) Sam Fritch offered to do a photo shoot at his studio for all of our covers, to be photoshopped later.

The first that came to my mind was Dylan’s Freewheelin’. Even though it’s not a duet record, the image was too iconic to pass up.

Beth was thrilled with her coat choice!

Using a Philadelphian winter picture (“Snow on League Street,” thanks Brian Biggs!), Beth photoshopped us right on in, added the film coloring, aging and Franklin Gothic font to reproduce the cover:

One of Beth’s favorite films is What’s Love Got To Do With It, which becomes obvious the umpteenth time one hears her quote it (“Five… Dollar… Fine.”). I knew we had an incredible cover to work with in my record collection: Workin’ Together.

For this one, Sam took what was our favorite photo of the day:

I handled the photoshopping on this one. It only needed some earth tones, a little subtle texture, aging and the ICBM SS-20 font (the closest match I could find) to recreate Ike & Tina:

Our third cover was photographed by Beth at Penn Treaty Park when we realized our ordering configuration for the CDs would be for two sets, each containing a cover on each side. It was our fourth concept, left out when we thought there would be only three covers. We’re both huge Johnny & June Carter Cash fans and wanted to use one of their more playful album sleeves:

Beth really captured the spirit of the sleeve in her re-imagining:

For our final cover, I thought it would be fun if we could do Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, with Beth playing all three sisters. I wasn’t even sure if there was an album featuring all of them on the sleeve, but sure enough we found what we were looking for:

Sam took pictures of the both of us separately, with Beth changing up her poses for the three sisters.

As I went about photoshopping this sleeve, I realized that Beth’s hair pulled up and hidden wasn’t going to cut it. Luckily, I was able to find a great higher-resolutuon picture of the Andrews Sisters to “borrow” their hair, and then got a little help from the beautiful Lauren Bacall when one didn’t work:

In the end, with the hair transplants, age filtering and Bing’s pipe addition, i think this cover stands as some of my finest Photoshop work to date:

With the album covers complete, it was time to record covers of some of our favorite love songs. We decided on six special selections:

• The New Pornographers’ “Challengers,” a song very special to us when we started dating,
• “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” in honor of our love of the Brill Building era, done in the style of Carole King’s recording off of Tapestry,
• two classics, “You Belong To Me” (a song I discovered through Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters’ lovely rendition in The Jerk) and “Blue Skies” (a tune we sing out of our mutual love of White Christmas), both done with the arrangements recorded by husband-and-wife musicians Devon Sproule and Paul Curreri on their highly recommended set of Valentines Day EPs,
• “I’m On Fire,” the Bruce Springsteen scorcher, also based on a Sproule/Curreri arrangement, and
• “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” one of Beth’s favorite Whitney Houston tunes done with a sad-boy Indie arrangement by me.

The songs were recorded over two weeks in our office in Fishtown with nothing but my MacBook Pro, GarageBand (thank you Steve Jobs) and one condenser microphone. Keeping out the sounds of the neighborhood from our very much non-soundproofed apartment was a constant struggle, as was learning a lot about recording and GarageBand as I went. Luckily, my Fender Strat and Hot Rod Deluxe amp did a lot of the heavy lifting for me.

We hope you enjoy our little Wedding Record! Check it out:

When Beth & I first talked about tying the ol’ knot, there were certain aspects of our personalities and tastes we knew we wanted to include in our event (e.g., we knew it should certainly be “an Event”). One of the first tastes we giddily discussed was beer.

As some of my family and friends know, I was a virtual mess before Beth picked me up and brushed me off, so to speak. She used her powers of Keen Fashion Sense to zap some decent clothes onto my person and recommend a stylist. She also refined my liquid pallet, delivering me from the watery, flavorless wasteland of Miller Lite and into richer brews, gradually from Blue Moon to Hoegaarden and then Walt Wit and DreamWeaver. Now I wouldn’t say that I have the chops to claim the title “Beer Snob,” but I’m certainly on my way.

During my transformation, two of my best friends were tinkering in their basement labs and concocting beer recipes. When they heard about my proposal, they had one hell of an idea: they would prepare a nuptial ale for our festivities.

Beth and I discussed some beer theme ideas and decided to name the proto-brew GingerBury Ale, a combination derived from my red hair and her homophonic last name.

Our two brewmasters, Jay “Hype Man” Slowik and Dan “The Man” Friel, joined forces under the Friel-conceived FancyPants Brews and decided that, true to its name, their nuptial ale would incorporate ginger and cranberries. Their trial brewing run was a huge success, yielding a rich, weizenbock-styled beer. When we all sampled it, Beth and I immediately knew that our wedding would reign supreme.

As I’m sure you’ve gathered from our previous wedding posts, we push all of our ideas to the extreme (Doritos-style son!), so simply having this beer available at the wedding wouldn’t be enough – we had to dress it up.

For logo inspiration, I turned to Ian Brignell’s ultra-classy redesign of Miller High Life (even as an aspiring beer snob, I know full-well that it’s The Champagne of Beers) as well as Dan Becker and Lance Wilson’s excellent photo collection Beer: A Genuine Collection of Cans (check out their Flickr here).

Incorporating my favorite label elements of circular series, slanted type, etched shadow strokes and some color inspiration from Philadelphia Brewing Company’s Kenzinger, I 23-skidooed the look of GingerBury Ale.

Everyone agreed that the look fit the brew. The logo also looked dang sleek in black & white, so we figured “let’s get our wedding guests some GingerBury pint glasses to enjoy their beer in!” Thanks to the quick and top-notch facilitation by local company Penn Graphic, we had our glasses in no time!

After FancyPants spent some Beatles-fueled sessions bottling, I spent a few days inhaling photo mount spray fumes to dress up our toasting beer.

This beery wedding idea couldn’t have come to a better fruition, and we owe a lot of thanks to Dan and Jay at FancyPants Brews.

Oh, did we forget to mention they rock out as well? More on that when our wedding series gets to the BlineGowan Sound! But next up will be Beth & Andy’s Wedding Record! Stay tuned.

As per both of our design tendencies, we agreed that we wanted to create something tasteful with a creative use of fonts, but still add a splash of bright, fun colors. And then it hit me: We’re design dorks who want fun colors, so we need to go CMYK!

While looking at different print materials on the web, I came across Mucca Design’s incredible brand identity work for restaurant and bakery Balthazar and we looked at their bakery wholesale division emblem as a rough framework for how the crux of the wedding announcement could look. Beth put some rough sketches together, but couldn’t find the right combination of elements to make her happy, so in the true spirit of almost-married teamwork, she passed the torch to me for a fresh perspective.

My favorite aspect of Beth’s Illustrator sketches was a string of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black-pattern circles as well as her ornate rules. The circles brought such a burst of color to the white surface that I knew the type need only be black. I used Birch Std as the main typeface, then chose Honey Script Light, ITC Kabel and the wonderful new Lost Type Co-Op’s Duke to round out the text. I carved out shadow strokes on our names, set the magenta ampersand back as the center of a logo, placed the CMYK circles and…

When it all came together, we loved the slight carnival poster feel it conveyed. To complete the invitation, we framed it with a black slit card from Paper Presentation that has a scalloped edge that matched our circle theme. We were thrilled, and it would go on to set the look of our entire wedding, from our huge CMYK balloons to our dessert table! (stay tuned for more on those).

Our programs and wedding signage followed suit, printed on Epson’s beautiful Hot Press Bright 100% cotton fiber paper.

Next up, our Groomsmen-brewed nuptial beer, GingerBury Ale. Stay tuned!

Stop worrying about not knowing the web design “lingo” – I am here to help. I present to you Web Design: one OH one! Below I’ve included screenshots (and links!) from a handful of Beth Blinebury Design projects to give you all of the specifics on the what’s and the why’s. If you’re not sure what a “splash page” is or how “tabbed content” looks, well take a gander at the rest of this post.

The Splash Page (also known less dramatically as the home page)

The home page of your website is important, right? You want to make a splash! Sorry, just couldn’t help myself with that bad joke. The home page of a website is often called the “splash page.” The home page is where you can (and should) do things a little differently from the rest of your website’s layout. The home page for a recent website project for BigFatHomeRebate.com features three colorful photos that function as entry points for various sections of the website. The four boxes together form a rounded box that is a featured graphic element throughout the rest of the site.

The home page often features a blurb about the business (or artist/musician, etc.) along with some additional featured content – like an excerpt from a recent blog post or two. The home page for Massage & Lymphatic Therapies does just this.

Adding more punch

The home page for Tempesta di Mare, Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra includes a featured content slider which adds a major amount of visual impact. I love this slider and the whimsical background images that are included on each individual slide. See it in action right now.

Details Schmetails? No way!

As I begin any new design project – whether it be a logo & branding project or a website re-design – I always spend a lot of time conceptualizing the design details. The website design created for NYC-based archival digital printer Fiber Ink Studio is simple and sleek with bursts of bright CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) colors. My favorite aspect of this design (apart from the right-side menu that pops off the main site box) is the pixel background image. This is a custom background image created just for this website. Do you remember why you NEED a custom design? It’s all about the details!

Making it work

The menu or navigation of your website is crucial. It needs to be properly integrated into the design and perhaps even more importantly, it needs to function perfectly! For websites with a whole ‘lotta content, I will incorporate a drop-down menu to organize the content into sections. The new BigFatHomeRebate.com website incorporates a drop-down menu for this very purpose. The navigation of a website is generally going to appear at the top of a website or in a sidebar of some sorts – generally on the left side.

And once a user has made their way to your content, how do they experience it? Take a look at the “Flat Fee 101″ page on the brand new website for Simple Choice Realty (the “parent” website of BigFatHomeRebate.com). On their website, tabs were implemented on pages with a lot of content so that users could easily click through different sections. The first section also features custom, impossible-to-miss graphics created for the client which communicate vital information to site visitors.

Showing it off

Once your website is designed beautifully and you’ve got the navigation sending users to your amazing content, it’s time to show off the rest of your content. As I discussed in a previous blog post, Beth Blinebury Design has created a ton of portfolio websites for artists, photographers and illustrators. A clean, easy-to-use gallery (also know as slideshow) is definitely in order. But there are lots of questions to ask – do you need thumbnail images (those small ones) and do you want your slideshow to auto-play? Should the images slide or fade? The image galleries on the website of New York photographer Lesly Deschler Canossi feature a slideshow viewer with customized navigation and big thumbnails.

The brand-spankin’ new blog developed for Ardmore-based Janice Martin Couture features loads of media including images and video. Incorporating video content into a website or blog is always a fun task – but the first step in the process is determining where the content is located. Are your videos posted publicly on a site like YouTube or Vimeo or loading directly from your website? Either way, finding a way to integrate them seamlessly is top priority.

Blogging in style

Newbie bloggers – there’s no need to beware! Blogging is a great way to draw traffic into your website and it can be a great way to communicate to prospective clients your business philosophy. It’s also a great way to show off the amazing work you’re doing like the article above from Janice Martin Couture‘s Blog. Blog articles often contain some additional fun features like social media “sharing” links, blog tags and a commenting area. All of the features promote site visitors to share your content and to continue browsing through your website. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Another blog-style area for Baltimore-based MCB Real Estate, LLC has been stripped down to just article content. MCB uses this “news” area to share industry trends with their clients. Their blog has been customized with multiple “categories” allowing them to also post their recent transactions on their website – check it out! A blog can be customized in any way you can imagine. What could a blog do for you and your business?

Web Design 101

So… do you know more than you knew three minutes ago? I hope so! And remember, a designer should always be your guide through a project.

The man-friend and I wanted to make our wedding website unique, so we designed it as if it was a promotional website for a movie entitled BlineGowan. It really played off our Save the Date cards well since that also felt like an advertisement for an upcoming movie. Each page of the website is styled like a different Quentin Tarantino movie. We decided that the home page of the website should resemble the most popular of Tarantino movies (see the screenshot above). If the typography and 10¢ “sticker” in the upper right-hand corner didn’t clue you in, here’s an extra hint: The last good movie (in my not-so-humble opinion) that John Travolta starred in.

The Premiere page of the website is styled after Kill Bill – Volumes One and Two. Did you hear that Volume Three has been announced? Holy crap! And yes, those are blood stain graphics.

We included a Special Features page to inform our guests of the yummy treats, delicious craft beers and spectacular entertainment that await them come November! Can you guess the Tarantino movie that inspired this page? It’s Tarantino’s directorial debut – the amazingly bloody Reservoir Dogs.  Wow, I feel really old after searching IMDB for this film – it came out in 1992?!

The crème de la crème of the wedding website has to be the Cast page. Styled after Jackie Brown (Point of Fact: The last good movie Robert DeNiro starred in), this page features my favorite rendering of the BlineGowan logo. I made sure to use accurate fonts from the actual movie titles. Figuring out the Jackie Brown font took some Googling, but I finally decided on Emfatick NF as the font of choice. The ‘l’ and ‘n’ characters required some extra detailing to correctly mimic the Jackie Brown title.

The Cast page lists our entire wedding party as characters from Tarantino films along with memorable quotes for said characters. And believe me, the characters were not chosen randomly! We spent a whole lot of time (more than I’d like to admit) deciding who should be who. Choosing characters for all of my bridesmaids was a particularly tough task as there are a lot more male characters than female. There are actually no women at all in Reservoir Dogs!

The decision to add character quotes meant that we would be adding a lot of profanity onto our wedding website. I’m going to go ahead and assume that *most* wedding websites do not feature profanity. But that’s how we roll son!

I’m proud to say that my Dad has been personally showing BlineGowan.com to his colleagues. My Dad’s Tarantino character is Joe Cabot from Reservoir Dogs, a perfect choice if I do say so myself considering that he is dry, sarcastic and – if nothing else – in charge.

And if my Dad thinks this wedding website is cool, then I guess we’ve done our job!

Then I got to thinking about the amazing number of portfolio or “artist websites” that Beth Blinebury Design has out there in ol’ Internetland. BBD has created unique web presences for artists of all genres including illustration, painting, photography and digital media. The trick with any artist website is to create a design that does not overshadow the artwork itself but one that supports and compliments it. And it’s easy to find design inspiration in the clients we have!

It’s an amazing time to be making art because anyone with access to technology (something we should never take for granted, by the way) can see the work in ever-changing ways. The way in which we experience art has completely changed. Most people know what the greatest works of art look like but how many can say they’ve seen them in person? And does that even matter anymore? We can see anything we want at anytime and usually on little screens we pull out of our pockets! So how should art be displayed on the web? We try our best to create high-functioning portfolio websites for a variety of devices and ones that communicate the emotional tone of the artwork presented.

In 2010, Beth Blinebury Design worked with Philadelphia-based studio Philip Gabriel Photography on a rebranding project. We also launched a brand new website for this local studio that specializes in stunning, editorial-style imagery. The studio is lead by photographer Gabe Fredericks (a fellow Tyler alum). Let me tell you… these guys are busy every weekend shooting weddings all over this fine city and beyond. For the new Philip Gabriel Photography website, both the design and functionality had to be impeccable and communicate the experience of working with Gabe and his awesome crew. Check out the wedding gallery albums that offer first an album-style view of an entire wedding and then a more intimate viewing of individual images.

So how does the look of a website change when it’s viewed on an iPad? A portfolio site like the one we created for photographer Kim Budd looks as if it was made for the iPad! Of course, BBD designed it with mobile browsing in mind. Kim’s stunning, colorful images of the American landscape reference a long tradition of the photographic-road-trip. We wanted viewing her site to be like opening up a coffee table book – an intimate and classic photography experience!

For Philadelphia illustrator Jon Krause’s portfolio website, BBD had another visual problem to tackle: presenting Jon’s unique and imaginative illustrations in a simple, non-obstrusive gallery viewer while also creating a visual “tear sheet” section. For those of you not in the ad biz (watching a lot of Mad Men totally counts), a “tear sheet” is the term given to a physical page cut or torn from a publication that functions like a “proof” of an advertisement. Many commercial illustrators and photographers create tear sheets of their work used in conjunction with articles from magazines and newspapers. For Jon’s site, the tear sheet comes to life on the web page, allowing the user to easily shuffle through recent publications with the small movement of a mouse (or of a finger for those of you using Apple’s super cool Magic Trackpad!)

So in conclusion… Yowza, we’ve made a LOT of artist portfolio websites! And we look forward to making many, many more, so if you are an artist or know of one that needs a fresh and exciting web presence, contact Beth Blinebury Design!

If you haven’t seen “True Romance” please do so immediately (at least watch the trailer posted below). It’s worth watching just to see Gary Oldman play a pimp – so bizarre. The list of awesome actors in this movie is pretty impressive: Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt and the guy who played Balki Bartokomous in “Perfect Strangers!” Of course Andy (the fiancé/man-friend) and I would have to embody the lead roles – Clarence Worley (played by Christian Slater) and Alabama Worley (played by Patricia Arquette).

As I do not have Patricia Arquette’s amazing body, I was in a bit apprehensive about my costume. But I dared to wear pink leopard tights anyway! There should be some kind of award for that. I also made the red polka-dot dress myself in just a few days from a cute 1950s-esque pattern. The man-friend had an easier go of it with jeans, a white tee and a hawaiian shirt.

Our good friend Sam Fritch (of Sam Fritch Photography) shot studio photographs for us. We knew we wanted the final product to have a grungy, 90s movie poster feel. Andy put together the final design for the save the dates and I absolutely LOVE the way it came out!

We printed the cards through Modern Postcard’s SimpleCard.com and they look great! We went for the deluxe postcard size (5.7″ x 8.5″) ’cause we wanted to monopolize all of the space on the refrigerators of our friends and families. That’s just how we do.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of “Love Meets Dorkiness” in which I will show-off our ridiculously fun wedding website.

Working with “International” was a great experience. Their previous website needed a MAJOR overhaul. The new look brightens things up with a fresh, custom-designed website that is easy-to-manage thanks to WordPress. International Food Distributors, Inc. is new to social media and blogging so I created a simple blog-style area to get them started.

I worked closely with Scott Selkowitz who is the president and CEO of International. Scott and his wife took over the family business in 1999 and have made International the area’s premiere importer and distributor of specialty cheese and gourmet grocery items.

Some kind words from International Food Distributors, Inc:

I am new to Facebook; I desperately needed to update my web site. Needing assistance, I called a number of individuals who do this type of work. Beth Blinebury was the only professional who understood my needs as a small business.  She related to what I wanted and needed. She understood my fear of “Facebook.” She also agreed to teach me and  support my efforts to control my own website. And, I know that she is only a text, call or email away from assisting me.

We just launched our new website and our business Facebook Page. This is a new venture for a company that is almost 74 years old.  Yet, Beth simplified the process for us and was extremely easy to work and communicate with.  Thank you Beth for the start of a new and hopefully, a very long-term friendship and working relationship.

Scott Selkowitz, President and CEO
International Food Distributors, Inc.
Philadelphia, PA