I’ve traveled to many art schools, being asked to review senior student portfolios and speak on professional practices in the design business and the one thing I always notice is the lack of direction in student portfolios. Even with professionals, there is often no idea what or even how to present work to a client. Without senior level courses on portfolio preparation or classes taught by those who have been out of the field too long to know current trends, it is confusing and students are left with their own thoughts on what a client wants to see.
The biggest misconception is you need printed or live web pieces to show a client. To this end, as many professionals complain, students will do free or lower paying work just to garner a few "professional" samples to say, "SEE! Someone has actually hired me."
For a full-time freelance designer, hardly a day goes by without hearing about or reading some nightmarish client story. Whether I hear about it in person, by email, over the phone or on the web, one thing seems clear: designers like complaining about their clients almost as much as they enjoy taking their money.
While screening out Bad Clients before signing the contract is best, it doesn’t often happen that way. In this article, we’ll go over the warning signs of demon clients, who you should avoid at all costs. You must not only be able to identify clients who will do more harm than good for your business, but also learn how to handle these clients, or you could find yourself living a nightmare.
When you create a color swatch with Illustrator you may need to know some easy settings which the software proposes. Particularly the difference between Spot Color and Process Color is really important for a good printing result. Moreover, properly choosing the type of color between these greatly affect the final costs of the printing whole process. In this article we will see which options are the best for the job, why, how to properly manage Illustrator Swatch Options window, color options and book library.
In order to better understand the different kind of color options in the swatch manager we have to inspect first a couple of important related issues: Color models, such as RGB or CMYK, describing the colors we see and work with in digital graphics, and Printing methods, such as offset lithography or digital printing.
Nowadays, for each web designer or developer is awful not to have a good connection to the Internet; much more I believe that there are few days in their life when they do not read a post or see an inspirational article from various blogs.
Blogs represent an inestimable resource for everyone who needs help and it is almost impossible not to find out the information you need by referring to such sources.
Another huge advantage of blogs is the access of every person to the complete and accurate information that sometimes, in addition to the hard work and strong will, can replace university studies. I know many developers and designers who have finished amazing projects and have many customers, people who don’t have any studies in the field, but their passion and the never ending hours spent in front of the computer made them truly professionals.
Mind Maps are useful tools which allow you to create a scheme from fuzzy ideas, organize, and prioritize making visual connections. They may help the productivity in the creativity process giving an order to the chaos.
They are a graphical method of taking notes which involves a huge use of bright colors, symbols, icons and words. The shape is that of a tree with a main core idea and all around branches reporting visual representation of associate words.
As you’ve already seen in our previous posts about Single Page Website Designs that showcasing your work in single page design is a hot trend now days. It's kind of ironic to see what designers can do with single pages as modern age designers love to experiment with things and observe how people interact with their work. Even though this is not a common trend to follow but still as the new design styles come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them in their work, this kind of trends emerge.
In this presentation, you’ll find a variety of highly-creative, beautiful and most importantly inspirational designs which is following the same trend of single page designs.