Everyone knows the old adage “You can’t judge a book by its cover”, but we don’t seem so lenient with blogs or other websites.
In some cases we often a judge a website before we’ve even seen it.
An online portfolio is likely to be the first place a potential client will look in order to assess your ability as a designer. This may increase the pressure on having a good portfolio, however, this means that we can utilise this as bait for potential clients.
Your portfolio must showcase the best of your work in order to attract as many clients as possible. Place yourself in the shoes of the client, the first thing they will look for is what you have the ability of doing and they will assess your skill level.
Try not to overcrowd the portfolio with too many samples of work and ensure that it is only the best work. You may feel guilty for not uploading an ‘average’ of what your work looks like; however, the client will most definitely be expecting the best of your work.
Perhaps the worst of feeling in the world of design is when your work is rejected. Sometimes you can begin to wonder why you were rejected and then doubt your ability. In actual fact, however, there are hundreds of factors playing part and several reasons why a client may not have chosen you. You cannot control those things which have caused them not to take you on but you can look at ways of ensuring that it will not happen because of something which you can change or control.
The client may have become upset at you, your work or your deadline keeping. You need to get feedback from your client in order to ensure that you are delivering what you perceive as good work. A tell-tale sign that this may be an issue is if long-standing clients leave you or reject your work.
If a client has left you because you were not qualified enough, then this is a better than other reasons, because at least it is something you can learn. If you are not as qualified as someone else then you must check if that qualification is genuinely something which will cost you more work in the future.
If you believe that you can be successful without changing with the times then you are mistaken. Learn those new skill sets which will benefit your ability as a designer and aid you when looking for work.
When doing design work, you have to present your concept for the project to the client, but just how many should you show your client?
It is fairly normal for designers to present as many as 3 (if not more) design concepts to the client, and while it may seem good for the process it can often make things worse. Where possible, or explicitly requested by the client, only 1 design concept should be presented to the client.
As designers our entire career is leveraged on our ability to create a piece of modern art. Some may take this as an exaggeration; however the truth as we know is that we create a miniature masterpiece when we design. From time to time our skills will feel as if they are diminishing and that we don’t have the ability to create designs as we had done before.
With this in mind, I have contrived a list of simple things which I do which have proven to alleviate designer’s block. Other suggestions mentioned are those which I have seen more professional and senior designers undertake when they suffered from this.
Deadlines cause stress to the best of us and the pressure can assemble such that we lose our creative skills. One must start on time and leave enough time to comfortably complete your assignment. This will help you design to the best of your ability and also maintain your respect as a designer.
In today’s world of freelancing it has become harder to find effective marketing techniques. We all know that it is an absolute necessity to have a blog, and knowing this fact many freelancers are now blogging. This leaves you with the predicament: How do you ensure your blog does better than the rest?
Below are eight easy-to-follow points which will help increase traffic to your blog.
A simple way of ensuring that you can have a pool of people who will be regularly reading your blog is to offer your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed. The number of RSS subscribers can illustrate the success of your blog, although this may not be the most thorough check, it is a good indication.
There are several websites which offer the service of creating a “trackable” RSS feed, Feedburner being just one of them. Whichever service you wish to choose, do bear in mind that this will help in maintaining a reader base which can eventually help market your services or product.
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Designers have enough to worry about when doing a design. From trying to decipher what the client wants, to getting a hold of the appropriate assets and choosing the right colors and fonts to use, which only scratches the surface of what goes into a good web design.
Here are a few thing that you are safe to forget about when you’re designing the website, you’ll have plenty of time to think about them later on with the other people involved in building the website.
It can be tough at times for freelancers, especially those new to it all, when the number of clients they have requesting work are small. One can begin to get worried and worked up about how they’ll pay the bills, and get through the year, but don’t fret, just get your marketing hat on and follow the 10 points below to see instant results.
Tags: community, freelance, web design, Web Development
As a designer I’m always trying to optimize my creative process. Since I started, lots of things have changed in my workflow, some things got simpler while others got a little bit more complicated. With these changes came the experience of learning from the mistakes but also from the successes.
Source URL: http://abduzeedo.com/5-steps-streamline-your-creative-process
To mood board or not to mood board. Is that the question? Yes. At least amongst those of us that have ever used them as a means to jump start the design process. Personally, I’ve come to love mood boards as a tool in the web designer’s design process tool kit. Are they always necessary?
Source URL: http://www.viget.com/inspire/perspectives-on-mood-boards/
Tags: reblog
