There is a game in this industry: the trade off between graphic designer and client. I have heard this expression in large design agencies many times: “this would be a great job if it wasn’t for clients!” I disagree, I think it’s a great job period. If you don’t like your clients, get out of [...]
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Article filed under: Design on July 12th, 2010 6 Comments
This article comes with a warning: easily offended graphic designers please do not read on! Graphic design is not rocket science, nor does it depend on artistic talent – it just takes a lot of practice. Some designers love to say that graphic design is a God-given talent that only a select few special people [...]
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Article filed under: Design on July 5th, 2010 31 Comments
I wasn’t always a freelance graphic designer. I used to teach English to Brazilian businessmen but that’s another story. I started by working for newspapers and magazines so my background is in print. By a mixture of application and good fortune I taught myself how to create usable, aesthetic, standards-compliant websites and discovered how to [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Freelancing on June 28th, 2010 14 Comments
10 years ago I had a big problem. I was a print designer but I loved the internet and desperately wanted to work with it. I wanted a software package that would let me mess around with drag-and-drop functionality and when I was ready I could click “GO” and miraculously produce perfect code. I was [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Internet on June 21st, 2010 21 Comments
We all know that after writing a great post and hitting the publish
button we’re not even halfway finished! There can be a seemingly endless marketing job to do by submitting a
blog article to various social bookmarking sites like Digg,
StumbleUpon and Delicious. We can also choose to submit to social
networking sites like [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Social media on June 1st, 2010 4 Comments
Blogs are, in my opinion, the easiest and best way to get stuff on the web. With a blog you can publish constantly updated information about yourself, your company or your interests to the world. And what makes it even better is that this information is chronologically ordered and categorized for search engines almost automatically. [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Internet, WordPress on May 17th, 2010 4 Comments
Back in the olden days just after Al Gore invented the internet, designers designed and programmers programmed. The web was full of slow good-looking sites that didn’t do much and useful busy sites that, frankly, looked like a dog’s dinner. But every year since then more and more fantastically usable sites that also look great [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Internet on May 9th, 2010 9 Comments
Here is an in depth tutorial explaining how to create the flat web button below in Photoshop and introducing the concept of the web designers’ secret penultimate pixels! Go cmd/cntl-N or File > New… to create a new Photoshop document of the size of your button. This one has a width of 175 pixels and [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Internet, Photoshop on March 16th, 2010 No Comments
Designing logos are the ultimate challenge for the graphic designer and there is nothing simple about doing them. The logo is the first and most important visual cue of a company or brand. Logos (usually) should be simple, compact and of one or two colors. Because you have less to play with, it’s the design [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Illustrator, Logos on December 28th, 2009 9 Comments
All graphic designers and people trying to create eye-catching imagery for print or web with have at some point used stock photography. Stock photography negates the need for hiring expensive photographers can license individual photos for specific uses. The two largest traditional stock photography agencies are Getty Images and Corbis. They offer mostly photographs that [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Freelancing on October 18th, 2009 15 Comments
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