Price quotes and estimates for graphic design

20 dollar notes in blue

One of the most asked questions on graphic design forums is: “How much I should charge?” Well, the answer is, I don’t know! But here is a list of my most recent price quotes. These design estimates include image sourcing and copy editing but assume images and most text have already been supplied or paid [...]

How to save money running a graphic design business

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Here’s my top tips for saving money whilst running a graphic design business or as a freelance graphic designer. Work from home. Use of house as business means that you can put some of the cost of home improvements and numerous other things to offset your profit and therefore pay less tax. Meet clients in [...]

Designing web icons

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Here are some icons I designed for a friend’s website. He asked me to make them at three sizes: 20 pixels wide, 80 pixels wide and 300 pixels wide. There’s a real skill to designing icons. You have to make them simple enough to be understandable at small sizes but interesting enough to be beautiful [...]

Freelance designers blog to find work and make money

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I would advise anyone who wants to make money and find more work to get blogging. I was encouraged to get a WordPress blog by a friend but I didn’t really realise what blogging was at first. I thought, what’s the point of writing “I woke up this morning, had breakfast …”? I really only [...]

Freelance designer vs Design agency

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Independent freelancers often outperform agencies in quality, price and timeliness. To some the word “freelancer” may have a certain stigma of a maverick who ignores rules and misses deadlines. In reality freelancers have usually been around the agency block already and know their stuff. Nobody starts work as a freelancer. There used to be advantages [...]

Designing screen PDF newsletters – Why and How?

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Question: How can you disseminate a graphically interesting, beautifully designed small book to a large number of people cheaply? Answer: Email a PDF. Almost every computer has Adobe Reader (formerly called Acrobat Reader) and PDFs are widely used as a way to present information with a fixed layout similar to a paper publication. Question: Why [...]

Photoshop flame effect

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Choose and bold sans serif for your type. This is Arial black. Rasterize Type. Rotate canvas by 90º clockwise. In order to get points coming from the top of the type it needs to be white out type on black on the same layer. Go Filters > Stylize > Wind from the left. Then invert [...]

Designing PDF newsletters

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The first rule of making PDFs is easy… do it in InDesign, don’t even think of doing it in Quark. Navigation, linking to the web and even playing movies can be sorted out in InDesign first before the PDF is made. This way when the client has added his changes these elements don’t have to [...]

Designing at Tate

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I have been doing some work at Tate Britain recently. As you can imagine, designing a booklet on contemporary and modern British art compares favourably to some of the more corporate work I’ve been doing. I’ve also been very impressed with their design guidelines, typeface and logos that were set up by Wolf Olinns a [...]

Runaround/Text Wrap in InDesign

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We all know how to stop text running over images in InDesign – go Window > Text Wrap (Command/Control -T if you have selected the Quark keyboard shortcuts) and choose one of the self-explanatory icons. But what if you want some text boxes to wrap around images and others to flow over? Move to front [...]

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