New Releases, New Designs, and New Ideas
The past few weeks have been incredibly busy for me, with several projects moving forward at the same time across Elevate Design Space and Max Planet Studio. Between publishing, product development, promotional design, and starting another story, there has been a lot happening behind the scenes.
Elevate Design Space: Impact and Goal Counter
One of the biggest recent milestones has been completing Elevate Design Space – Impact and Goal Counter, a new WordPress plugin designed to give websites an easy way to display progress, goals, milestones, and impact statistics.
The idea was to create something flexible enough to work for nonprofits, businesses, organizations, personal projects, fundraising campaigns, and other websites that want to visually communicate progress.
Like my Recovery Milestone Counter plugin, the project gave me another opportunity to combine product design, user experience, web development, and WordPress development into a finished product.
The Impact and Goal Counter has now also been approved for the official WordPress Plugin Directory, which is an exciting step for Elevate Design Space and something I hope to build on with future plugins.
Max Planet: The Fading Eclipse
I also recently released the third book in the Max Planet series, Max Planet: The Fading Eclipse.
This story expands the Max Planet universe with another distant world, new characters, new conflicts, and another challenge for Max and the crew.
In The Fading Eclipse, Max and his friends must travel to a planet inhabited by a civilization convinced of its own superiority while trying to rescue Doctor Flex. What begins as another rescue mission quickly becomes a much larger challenge involving competition, pride, and what it really means to be strong.
With every Max Planet book, I have been trying to make the universe feel a little bigger while continuing to develop the characters and the ideas behind the stories.
With three main books and an activity book now part of the series, Max Planet is beginning to feel less like a single project and more like the world I originally imagined it becoming.
Max Planet T-shirts are now available in the Elevate Design Space store, featuring designs inspired by the series.
Max Planet: The Fading Eclipse is also available now on Amazon.com.
Getting Ready for Book Fairs
A lot of my recent design work has also been focused on bringing Max Planet into the real world.
I have been creating new promotional cards, graphics, character artwork, QR-based materials, bookstore and library sell sheets, and other promotional content that I can use at upcoming book fairs, bookstores, libraries, and community events.
Designing material for print has been a different challenge from designing something for a website or social media. Everything from typography and spacing to print dimensions, QR placement, paper quality, and how someone will physically interact with the piece matters.
It has also been exciting seeing Max Planet develop beyond Amazon listings and digital promotion into something I can actually put in someone’s hands and introduce to readers directly.
The next goal is to start attending more events and getting the books in front of families, teachers, libraries, bookstores, and young readers.
The Next Max Planet Adventure
And, somehow, I have already started working on the next Max Planet story.
The working title is Max Planet: The Eternal Nebula.
I don’t want to reveal much about this one yet, but the story explores a strange region of space where some of the normal rules of time may not work quite the way Max and the others expect.
It is going to take the series into a slightly more mysterious direction while still keeping the adventure, science-fiction concepts, humor, and characters that make Max Planet what it is.
There are already a few scenes and ideas developing that I am especially excited about.
Coming Soon
Building Across Multiple Projects
Looking back at everything together is a little surreal.
Recently I have been designing and developing WordPress plugins through Elevate Design Space, publishing another Max Planet book, creating physical promotional materials for upcoming events, expanding the Max Planet universe, and already beginning the next story.
Each project is different, but they all involve the same thing I enjoy most: taking an idea and figuring out how to turn it into something real.
There is still a lot I want to build, improve, and learn, but it has been exciting watching these projects move from ideas on my computer into actual products, books, websites, and experiences that other people can use and enjoy.
And there is definitely more coming.
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