Posts Tagged ‘graphic design’

Have photoshop will design seems to be the motto of many “designers” these days. They have customized some buttons on their blog, created a header and feel on top of the world. So then they start thinking that it could make them some money if they did the same thing for other people. No, no full designs. No, no real research into the user of the sites, what the site really needs or how to create a compelling design. Just a few “cute” buttons is all they do. And they call themselves designers. On top of that, they charge ridiculously low prices for their work and the novice looking for help is ecstatic to get an “awesome” price!

This is like me, calling myself a golf instructor because I can hit a golf ball, charging really low prices, and convincing people that I can teach them to play.

Look, I understand that we all want the best price possible on things – and no one wants to pay more than they have to for services. At the same time, you get what you pay for. When you compare designers and compare prices, there is always going to be the high, middle and low ground. And while I am not suggesting to always go with the most expensive, I am suggesting that you be realistic. If you receive 5 quotes, and 4 of them are between $1000-$1500 and then one is only $500…there is a reason for the discrepancy. They are cutting corners somewhere, and they are definitely not delivering the same quality. When you choose a designer, you need to look at 4 different areas:

1. Their experience. What type of design do they do? Are they familiar with the type of work that you do? You are better off with a designer who has worked with many industries than a designer who has only ever done one type of site. Versatility is important!
2. Their portfolio. Is every design they do the same look, with different image? Probably not going to give you anything different then either. Choose a designer who designs with the client in mind – not with templates.
3. Their demeanor. This one is tougher to determine, but can usually be done through a few phone calls or a meeting. Choose a designer that you click with – that is easy to understand and makes you feel comfortable.
4. Finally, their price. Just like clothing…there is always the Target, Nordstrom and Couture Designer option. Choose the range that you feel comfortable with, but understand that you will get the quality that you pay for – there is a reason that couture designers can charge $2000 for a pair of shoes, and Target only charges $20.

What are your thoughts on “cheap” designers? Or “cheap” versions of any service provider?

1. Twouble with Twitterers: yeah, ok, so I may be this bad sometimes…

2. Redesigning the Stop sign – if a marketing team was in charge of designing a stop sign…definitely true for some of the large agencies.

3. Font Fight – for the Web Geek in all of us (first shown to me by Creative Whirlwind)

4. Hulu and Dennis Leary – bliggity blogs, facey spacey’s, tweety pages…yeah, I couldn’t help but laugh

5. Your printer is a brat – for all of us who have dealt with the evilness of a printer…

Have you ever reached your creative breaking point and wondered where to turn for help? The usual coffee/glass of wine/rock music/running/etc just isn’t cutting it? Try breaking out your favorite tools from when you were 6 (okay, my favorite tools still!): A coloring book and crayons.

I am serious! I even talked about how my 10 year old niece reminded me of how powerful coloring can be last Christmas! But, as we ‘adults’ seem to do too often, we forget that it’s okay to turn back into a child once in a while, let our hair down and turn up our creativity. Next time you are in a rut, try letting yourself have a little fun – color outside the lines – and give your inner child the chance to show you how creative you can really be.

When is the last time you gave yourself the okay to be silly? Have you ever tried the crayons/coloring book for creativity method?

Last week, I had a proposal for a new website design turned down. Unfortunately, it was because of the size of my portfolio. Since I have only been doing freelance work for a few months, my portfolio is rather limited. It doesn’t mean my talent is, it just means that I have not had enough clients to really show off my talents. Frustrating? Yes. Surprised? No. I can understand that it is difficult to know how a person is going to perform without a lot of work to review, but does that mean you shouldn’t work with them?

The benefits of working with someone who is just building their portfolio can be massive. First, my cost is much lower than someone who has been designing for 20 years. Second, I am going to be 100% focused on making sure that your project is perfect. Since I have very little room for error, as I must prove myself, I am going to make sure that every detail is exquisite. I know that many people who have been working for years are still as meticulous as they were when they started. But, there are many people that let small details fall to the wayside as they get more popular and can book any job they want. Third, we all have to start somewhere. I understand the desire to work with a ‘tried and true’ professional, but how did they get there? Someone had to give them a chance. A lot of someones. Think about it for a second. You can’t become a talented designer without people giving you a chance when you’re just starting out.

Think about who gave you your first chance. What about your second? Most of us were not born prodigies at anything. We need training, practice and work in order to become the best. It’s that silly ‘catch-22′… you need a strong protfolio to book work, but you need to book work to build a strong portfolio. So what can we do? We can help eachother out! My suggestion? Next time you are looking to hire someone for a project, find someone who is talented, but may have a little bit less under their belt. Ask for them to draw you up a sample and provide references. Let them know that you would love to work with them, and would appreciate a small sample or ideas of what they would do with your project. If it is good, you can hire them. If it’s not exactly perfect, you can offer constructive criticism and maybe they can suggest someone else to work with.

The point is to help. We all deserve a chance to become great at what we do – and if you can help someone get that chance…why not?

Although a bit tongue in cheek, this list (Pointed out to me via Twitter, can be found at nheerdesign, and originally put together by someone on facebook) is the ultimate list of ‘ways to know you are a graphic designer. Although my career is not 100% a graphic designer, I definitely had to shake my head at a few of these. Oh, and I added a little surprise at the end (no fair scrolling to the bottom first!).

• You have bags under your eyes so big you’d have to check them in at Heathrow Airport
• You watch the Superbowl just for the commercials
• You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away
• You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas
• You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes
• You are completely immune to subliminal advertising
• You look upon a well-designed project with either: sympathy OR extreme jealousy
• Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse
• You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride
• You practically take caffeine intravenously
• You have an appreciation for everything unique
• You’ve been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.
• “You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement.”
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you buy a CD or DVD for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music or film is like”. (even worse, you don’t actually watch or listen to it, just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration)
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you look at the clock and see it’s about midnight and think ‘I’ll go to bed now’… and you actually go to bed about 2-3am”.
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you need someone else to point out that you’re sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off, and haven’t noticed”
• “…when you know what “kerning” is and you really, really like it.”
• “… when you wear two [ke] [rn] pins on your bag, and only you know what they mean. To others its probably a band of sorts..”
• Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’.
• You don’t wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche.
• You have a thing for chairs. You don’t know why.
• You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD
• You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under.
• You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.
• Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure
• You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.
• You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.
• You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come.
• You’re up ’til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.
• The hottest dream you ever had was “Trace contour… Find Edges… Pinch… Extrude… Smudge Stick… Motion Blur…. Sprayed Strokes…”
• You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• The preschool teacher complains your child won’t color inside or outside the lines – only indicate colors on a separate sheet.
• Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash
• You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it.
• You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s Satin.
• You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”
• Looking at a menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”
• And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture…
• You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.
• cntrl+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something.
• You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed.
• You refer to your privates as “the Magic Wand”.
• You know that rivers are more than just water.
• Your best friends are all employees at the local print shop
• The only people who seem to know what you do for a living are other Graphic Designers (ex: Graphic Design? What’s that? You’ll never be able to make a living being an artist!)
• Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don’t see a problem with that.
• Several South American economies suffer noticeably any time you try to give up coffee, or even cut your consumption of it by half.
• You know that “bleeding” doesn’t hurt.
• when your significant other/ friends have threatened to never speak to you again if you point out one more font to them.
• when you know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon.
• If you could go back in time you wouldn’t go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you’d go back in time to destroy comic sans and papyrus.
• ….You can understand everything on this list.

Ahh the lovely world of creativity and graphic design.

Now, to make it even worse, here are 5 great graphic design sites you must check out!

1. Amazing seamlesss patterns for the backgrounds of whatever it is that you want to design.
2. Photoshop actions for really cool images (or more professional ones).
3. Photoshop disasters (because we have all had one…)
4. Increbible textures to use on any surface (ohhh, imagination is starting!)
5. Ahh fonts, fonts and more fonts (maybe someday we can get a petition to remove comic sans from existence!)

Did I miss one? how many of the “you know you’re’s” did you agree with? What is your favorite graphics site?

For those of you who remember, throughout the month of November and December, I spent endless hours and a lot of swearing at my computer, re-designing Wright Creativity. It took me forever to decide on a design, and to make all the elements work. Unfortunately, I am still not happy with it. I absolutely love the background image on my blog, and I love the fun look that the notebook and the tags give my site – but I have a lot of problems with the design. Rather than just fixing the issues, I figured I could share my thought process as a learning experience for anyone looking at their own site and deciding whether it needs a re-design. After looking through everything, analyzing my blog has given me a quick list of 4 easy ways to decide if your site needs a re-design as well.

1. Does the navigation take care of everything you need? Right now, mine fails to do so. I have about 6 pages to my blog, but most people have only ever seen the home page and the about me page, since those are the only page’s links that exist at the top of the site. I want to direct people to my portfolio, and have done so by creating an image on the sidebar, but since the sidebar is so crowded (and entirely different point) most people don’t even see it. You want people to be able to get to the important pages easily, and return to the homepage just as fast. Your navigation should let people know where they are just as much as where they want to go.

2. Can people find what you want them to find? Well, as I pointed out with the portfolio, no. I want people to also see my twitter updates, the fact that I am on alltop, and to connect with me on social networking sites. But, my current sidebar/layout, do not make this an easy task. I have even had people ask me where my rss button is (honestly, I thought the big pink button was pretty obvious, but it has happened more than once that they thought it was just decoration). People will not hunt for things very long, so if it is important, make sure that they can find it without much effort.

3. Is it easy to read? This seems like a no brainer, but you also have to remeber who your readers are. For the most part, my blog does this – I use black text on a white background in an easy to read font. But it is something to remember for yours. If you are using a hard to read font as your main font, or are writing in a light color on a dark background, you may want to think about your readers. As eyes get older, it is harder to read light writing on a dark background. And if you’re anything like me, your readers are all ages.

4. Does it fit your blog personality? Does the look of your blog fit the message of your blog? Right now, mine kind of does. It is creative and colorful, which fits my message, but it is not the most organized or easy to navigate, which goes against many of the ideas that I talk about. For your own site, make sure that if you write about funny stories, the blog isn’t too serious looking and vice versa. The first thing that someone notices when visiting your site is the look, make sure it gives off the right impression.

With all that said, I think that I am going to have to do an overhaul on the look of my blog. I haven’t quite decided what I want to do with it, or when I will have the time to do so, but I am definitely in the brainstorming process.Unfortunately since this is just a a personal fun blog, I don’t really have the finances to spend, the re-design is left up to ‘when I have time’ or if you want to help be a part of the overhaul, either by donating money or your coding services (I can code, but prefer to just design…) let me know! kirsten (at) wrightcreativity.com

There are hundreds of great graphic design posts – and endless lists of tips and tricks. But, most of those lists are for graphic designers that design for a living, or for people who need advanced tips and ideas. I have found that while helpful, we often forget some of the basic design rules that everyone should know. Regardless if you design for pay or just for fun, these rules will help everything you do look more precise, professional and powerful.

1. White space is your friend. Step away from the color, the boxes and the images. Leaving white space on the page will cause the eye to draw to the important factors in the page – allowing the reader to understand the key points. If a page is too cluttered, the reader doesn’t know what to look at, and you run the risk of your message getting lost.
2. Don’t let your font’s overpower the message Whether creating a piece, whether it is for a website or a magazine the font you choose is important. You’re not going to use BOopee (or a goofy font like it) when talking about a funeral home, nor would you want to use Edwardian Script (or a formal font) when talking about what your 10 year old thinks of his snack food. With that said, you also want to make sure not to pick too many fonts. The best rule is to choose 3 fonts: a font that is for the main writing, a font for the headers, and a ‘fun’ font for highlighting specific words. This will allow your message to get across cleanly, and still allow you a little fun.
3. Pick colors that compliment, not detract I talk a lot about color, how it affects you, and places to find it. I talk about it so much because it is so important. How many times have you seen something and your first thought was ‘the color is wrong’. If this is what you are thinking about, then the message can’t get through! There is no such thing as the right color – mixing things up is a good thing. But, trying to mix too many colors can be overwhelming. Remember, color may surprise you, you just need to know where to look.
4. If people have to hunt for it, they won’t find it Want people to call you? Give them your number. Want people to email you? Give them your email. Simple huh? It seems that this is not common sense. Many times, we get so carried away with making a design ‘look pretty’ that we forget to make it useful too. Unless you are entering your piece in a contest, more than likely the goal is to get a response, so make sure that the people can respond easily.
5. Spell check. Grammar check. No matter how beautiful the site or the design is, if there are spelling or grammar errors, it will be ruined. Do not trust your computer to check the grammar, it won’t. This also includes double checking that your contact information is right, and all the links work. A non-working design fails, no matter the beauty of it.
6. It’s okay to break the ‘rules’. See? I just did, and the sky didn’t fall. Sometimes it is okay to step outside what is expected, to get that surprised response from your audience. Just remember, do it too often, and like anything else, it gets old and boring.

What do you think? Do you have a design trick that everyone should know and use to share? Disagree with any of the above, or have a great example to share?

8 hours of Photoshop, graphic design and images = difficulty getting my mind focused on writing.

The designs that I created today were great (if i do say so myself…) but I was having a lot of trouble pulling myself a way to write. And even when I did, the most writing I could do was on twitter (and even there was hit or miss). After using Twitter to discuss the writing melting powers that Photoshop has on me, @beachpig sent a great message that clearly explained what I am suffering from and what I need:

“Rental creativity…when the Wright side of your brain is tapped out.”

Of course, that led to a great question for my readers: Do you find it harder to do a different type of work after you’ve been focused on one type all day? Where do you find your “rental creativity”?