A REAL Fresh Beginning…

Ahhh, and finally it is a brand new year! A chance to go out with the old and come in with the new. Typically at any given point in time, we as people can make changes in our lives from day to day. But for some reason, it is the beginning of a new year when we feel changes are much more REAL and profound. A REAL fresh beginning.

Having said that, I have chosen not to blog about something design specific, but about something that overall shapes my drive to become better at my profession every single day and that is inspiration. My inspiration comes from a very wide variety of outlets. Advice and the success of others being two of the more apparent outlets. I am sharing some advice that I’ve taken in for the new year of 2013.

Hopefully you can gain something from this and make tomorrow better than today.

Here is a link to a blog I found that I stayed on for hours listening to noteworthy advice from business professionals, mentors, and teachers of all sorts. There are some great suggestions here for changes in your life and and things that might spark some thoughts! Thanks TED for this post!

Ted Blog-New Year Resolutions

Tis’ the Season for Christmas Card Designs

This is by far my favorite time of the year! I absolutely love the Christmas holiday. I do my fair share of designing Christmas cards around this time of the year as well. And because it is the season of giving, I usually don’t charge for any of my designs.  If I am not too slammed with work, it is actually a nice outlet and allows me to have some fun! Here are a few designs I used as inspiration this year!

Tip: During the Christmas holiday is always a great time to catch up with clients. Thank them for their business, and remind them that you’re still available in the year to come. Make cards to compliment your business, add a message inside, and for a professional touch, your logo on the reverse.

Merry Christmas Everyone! &  Happy New Year!

5 Ways to Successfully Use Social Media

As a designer and you’re NOT using social media to help market yourself, then you’re missing out on some big opportunities. Your competitors, co-workers and clients are all using social media, which means if you’re not, you’re getting left behind. Social media provides many different ways designers can use it to advance his or her career. Here are six ways you could be using social media to help your grow your design career.

1) Promote Your Work

This is probably the way most creative types would think of using social media. Most designers know about sites such as DesignBump.com or WPVote.com. But there are also communities like Coroflot and deviantART where you can share your portfolio and get feedback. For instance, Dribble.com is a site where you can share small snapshots of your designs for comment and assessment by your fellow designers. Whatever platform you use, social media has changed the way we share, promote and often improve our work.

2) Blog Away

A blog will help in several ways – it can be a platform for quick comments about design news, sharing links or workshopping designs. More importantly, it can help your work and name get found online. A blog can serve as your base of operations on the web, providing a regularly-updated home to your ideas and what inspires you.

3) Profiling

Definitely create “the big three” – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are extremely useful tools for finding work, sharing information and connecting with colleagues and clients alike. As someone who’s trying to exist online, you need to be able to show that you understand these technologies better than the average bear.

4) The Real World

Social media is great for connecting online, but it’s just as important for you to  network in the real world. If you live in a decent-sized city, then chances are there’s a group of tech professionals getting together to discuss business. There are meet-ups of social media professionals, designers and developers, WordPress fans, bloggers – if you can imagine a group of people, then they’re probably out there.

5) Stay True to Yourself

Don’t compromise who you are and what your dreams are just to become more marketable and get work. As designers, we are all unique in our own ways and the the right clients are out there for us, we just have to find them and using social media can greatly increase our chances of doing so.

Source: Desgin.mag.com

Photoshop Bloopers

Ever since photo editing programs have been developed, the limits to touching up photographs are virtually nonexistent. Photoshop however, was the beginning of an era in photography and photo manipulation among the masses and still is the greatest photo editing software out there. But Photoshop doesn’t make everyone a designer. Non-designers should probably NOT try to work miracles.

You can’t help but laugh at some of the horrible things that actually made it to the viewers! Perhaps these were mistakes of non-designers, so people claiming to be designers and have false advertised themselves. Here are a few bloopers I found that are literally breathtaking, and not in a good way.

 

Designing Email Templates

One of the trickiest things I have ran into lately is designing email templates. Nowadays a lot of advertising comes right to your inbox especially if you are a store card holder or have signed up for email notifications.

There are two things to remember to achieve a good email deign: Effectiveness and functionality.

Effectiveness: Simplicity is a key factor in effectiveness. Chances are the reader is skimming through his or her emails and will glance at this design. So the key is to sell whatever you design advertises in a matter of seconds.

Functionality:  Like all web design, you need to incorporate testing, testing, testing.  Email templates need to be tested in a variety of different programs to make sure that the reader will be able to read the email fast and conveniently. Make sure your design is easy to read and won’t force the reader to take multiple steps to get to the point. Also, making sure your images display as quickly and easily as possible is important. Often our images will do most of the selling and when they don’t display right away, it causes the readers to have to follow a link somewhere else, which can make them hesitant to do so.

Here are some examples of some good email templates:

Less is More…

Doing a lot with very little. It’s a hard sentence to wrap one’s head around, however, it is important, if not the most important thing I’ve learned about design. Many designers have trouble creating a minimalist (simplistic, clean) design; either they have a hard time making a page with so few elements look good or the final result just doesn’t seem “complete” to them.


When you create a minimalist design, the design is at it’s most basic state, free from superfluous colors, elements, and textures,– CLUTTER, if you will. The purpose for this is to bring the most important visual/content to the forefront and minimize distractions for the viewer or reader. When people get distracted they often miss the message in the design or story, because they are confused on where their focus should be. Part of minimizing distractions is creating SIMPLE design by using less texture, color, shape, lines, content or type–kind of like the clutter that I mentioned earlier.

This is KEY: When you as a designer can portray the message you want and bring it to the forefront with as little elements as possible, you have a minimalist design.

When thinking about minimalist design think about accurate use of white space, alignment, movement, and contrast. One last piece of advice for an over-designer, when the thought, “something is missing” enters your head, the first thing you should try is take something out and then go from there, even if that means starting over. There is nothing like admiring basic design elements used at their full potential.

“Design should never say, “Look at me.” It should always say, “Look at this.”

Here are a few to showcase:

THE Site for Designers

As a designer, we want feedback to our work. To both improve and grow. Online communities help designer, developers and creative types showcase their work, gain thoughtful feedback and most importantly help expand networking possibilities.trans – 10 Essential Sites for Designers – designer design inspiration design angel ceballos

One that has most recently caught my eye is Dribbble.

 

Dribbble is a online community for designers who feature their work or work in-progress as screenshots and get feedback. Dribbble is currently an invite-only and has become a great  place for inspiration due to the quality work.

People who aren’t a part of the community can still sign up as a spectator and follow your favorite designers.

You can also add yourself to the Dribble Prospects directory to get a chance to get an invite. There are also sites that show you ways for obtaining an invite. So far, overall a great place to get some feedback from experienced designers.

Visual Storytelling

It is one thing to attract a reader visually, it is quite another  to attract a reader visually and emotionally. Another task layout producers face is keeping the readers attracted visually and emotionally throughout a story. This particular task is what peeked my interest in graphic design back in high school. It was a task I enjoyed to conquer and learn about. We are consistently bombarded with information that lacks empathy, disjointed and watered down to capture the attention of the viewers. Which is why in college, news reporting wasn’t my favorite. Storytelling is much more versatile and interesting.

Here is a few inspiring magazine layouts that are both visually and emotionally attractive:

Graffiti is Art

Graffiti is a form of art that I take personal interest in. Although my experiences with graffiti are minimal, I enjoy the complexity of what some artworks I’ve seen. My favorite pieces have underlying social and political messages through artistic expression and are based upon spray paint styles. Graffiti is inspirational to me because although technologies and design software allows us graphic designers to create so much, there are still some things that are better left handmade.