Have you absolutely had it up to here with your boss? Sick and tired of the demanding schedule, the stressful deadlines, the abysmal pay and office politics? Dreaming of days when you can work anytime, anywhere while still in your pajamas? Looking forward with gusto to long, creative-fueling walks spent with exotic coffee in hand?
If you’ve decided to go solo and become a freelance designer, congratulations! There are certainly a lot of benefits to working for yourself. You’ve got the flexibility to set your own working hours and to choose who you want to work with and how. There’s also no annoying boss or co-workers and no stressful daily commute to contend with...
For many web design professionals, there was no option but to be self taught. Years ago, the academic qualifications simply didn’t exist. Sure, you could study design, but you’d be left to learn the technology by yourself. You could take an I.T. course, but you’d be lacking design skills.
It seems that too often great designers get lost in the mix simply because they don’t take the time to market themselves well. I mean let’s face it, most designers — especially those of us working independently/freelance — find ourselves continually juggling the roles of accountant, salesperson, and marketer, and rarely do we find the energy or resources to really develop big marketing strategies after all of our other tasks are done. And, while many do just fine with personal web portfolios, growing competition is making getting noticed harder and harder.
But, this stuff — marketing ourselves and getting our name out there — is really important for business.
And while self-marketing efforts may sometimes seem like a waste of time — because we want to spend our days actually designing and making things — it’s the difference between an unending flow, or a trickle, of design projects.
Throughout this article, we’ll discuss a few approaches to creating things that can help build your swag in the design sphere, and maybe even get you a few clients along the way...
I have read this book and would like to share a few secrets with you on how to use knowledge about emotions in website creation and in the promotion of your products and services. To understand the issue better you can watch Don Norman’s video "3 Ways Good Designs Make You Happy" , one more experienced specialist in this field.
Once you’ve got a newsletter set up to bring you in new clients, you may start to think about what else you can do with the newsletter format to promote your freelance business. One of the options worth considering is sending a newsletter to the clients you’ve already landed.
The logic behind this is clear: if you’ve knocked the socks off of a client already, that company may be more than happy to work with you again. But you need to remind them that you are available and point out the services you offer, particularly beyond what you’ve already done. A newsletter can provide a useful reminder to past clients of your existence.
Of course, you have to be targeting a specific niche of clients if you really want to make sure that your newsletter is effective: it’s much harder to create a broad newsletter that appeals to every client who has ever hired you to design a website than just writing for those clients who operate ecommerce sites. When it comes to newsletters, narrow is good...
Large companies aren’t just spending on social media in a way that touches customers directly. They’re also investing in developing social media capabilities within their own organizations. According to a study of worldwide companies with over 1,000 employees conducted by the The Altimeter Group, companies dedicated between 20% and 37% of their total social media development spending to “internal social media” in 2012. Larger companies were the biggest investors in internal social development, both in dollar terms and as a percentage of total social development spending. Companies with revenues between $1 billion and $10 billion spent an average $562,069 on internal social media, compared with $968,548 on external spending. Companies with revenues over $10 billion spent $1.3 million on average on internal measures and $2.9 million on outward-facing ones...
In this article I’ll explain how we think during the process of being creative. This knowledge will help you understand creativity and will form a foundation in helping you understand why we have creative blocks and how we can combat them.
Before we start, let’s glimpse back at the previous article. Did you take my advice in exercising your creativity every day, regardless of the form or outcome? Consider it a challenge to maintain this habit until the end of the session. Who knows what brilliant ideas you might have in the meantime!
The actual fact of User Interface (UI) as well as User Experience (UX) is that both UI/UX are the two sides of the same coin. Both are keeping up the relationship between the users and their products. The User Interface (UI) describes the dealing with the as well as and the products, while another, the user experience (UX) is dealing with the user’s experience and the observation of the products. Moreover, simply saying, the User Interface (UI) deals with technical as well as formal features of a site and the user experience (UX) is dealing with the understanding and response to the user.
One of the most important techniques for effectively communicating (or “honoring”) content is the use of typographic hierarchy. Typographic hierarchy is a system for organizing type that establishes an order of importance within the data, allowing the reader to easily find what they are looking for and navigate the content. It helps guide the reader’s eye to where a section begins and ends, whilst enabling the user to isolate certain information based on the consistent use of style throughout a body of text.
A commentator on Bloomberg, Princeton student Evan Soltas, writes that Bitcoin is an “existential threat to the modern liberal state,” a line that can be read in two ways. One reading of his op-ed suggests we are all in danger and that the inability to tax and track bitcoins will result in a thriving black market and reduced fiscal control that will be disastrous for all of us. Taken another way – and given Soltas’ biases, I suspect he’s focusing a bit more on the “liberal” part of the title versus the “modern” part – it suggests that the modern nation cannot afford to fritter money away on the welfare of its people because it will no longer be able to tax the rich unfairly, leading to a fiscal nirvana for men and women of a certain breed. Either way, it’s a goofy way to look at what will remain, for the time being, a blip on the economic radar.
Whether you’re looking for something for personal use or something for a commercial business, there are quite a few things that you need to consider when it comes time to decide on a web design. One of the biggest factors you’re ultimately going to have to think about is the price.
Decide if it’s something you want to take on yourself or have someone else do for you. There is quite a large number of options out there for people who want to try their hand and making their own web designs, some of which are even free. Many web hosting companies will allow you the option of building your website right from their services.
Some call it the most famous pizza purchase in history: In May 2010, a programmer called Laszlo asked an online forum if anyone would buy him a couple of pies in exchange for 10,000 Bitcoins, an experimental online currency launched in 2009.
"No weird fish topping or anything like that," he wrote.
With each Bitcoin fetching less than a cent at the time, the order was worth about $41. Today, it would be valued at about $1.4 million (1.08 million euros).
It’s a different era. The digital world is molding children in a way that is completely different from their parents. Some may say that it’s always the case as technology, culture, and societal norms change, but this is different. It’s faster. This isn’t just a matter of, “I don’t understand the music you kids listen to these days.” It’s a major shift in the way that kids interact with the rest of the world.
New tech industries start small but can grow into permanent, billion-dollar slices of infrastructure. Sometimes that seems to happen overnight — like with smartphones.
And sometimes it takes years — like with the dumbphones that grew like mold from the mid-1990s through the late 2000s.
And now, for example, the prevalence of smart mobile devices has spurred the mobile app industry, an entirely new piece of infrastructure which supports thousands of companies and billions of dollars in sales.
Facebook, despite any criticisms, is still the social network - but its engagement problem is no secret. We’ll cut to the chase: Facebook needs to provide users more value to keep us coming back – before it’s too late.
The problem is that Facebook has always been a passive listener of everything we’re sharing, and sometimes that’s leading to regurgitation. That’s why the company has been busy pulling out all the stops with feature updates that are trying to keep everyone happy. The result? A Facebook we hardly recognized. Think back to when you originally opened your account – if it was more than two or three years ago, you know what we’re talking about.
The Facebook of 2004 looks nothing like that Facebook of 2013 … so what is the Future Facebook going to look like? Consider this a look into the Internet’s crystal ball, full of hypotheses about what the Future Facebook is like.
Now that 3D printing — the process of making three-dimensional solid objects from digital designs — is available and affordable to individual consumers, it's piqued a lot of interest across the tech space in the past few years.
From scale models, gifts and clothing to prosthetic limbs, hearing aids and the prospect of 3D-printed homes, the possibilities seem endless.
Let’s establish one thing immediately. Despite the shock journalism and uneducated claims out there saying that the internet attack was so severe that it almost break, the reality is this. It was a big hit that was felt by a lot of people. That’s it. It would be like saying that a 6.5 magnitude earthquake hit a big city. Sure, there was probably a lot of damage depending on which city it was, but at no point during or after the earthquake was the entire planet about to explode.
You shouldn’t be a philosopher to understand that we are living in the world of “more”. Everyone wants more money, more new gadgets, more intelligent computers and more and more. Well, this mentality isn’t quite necessarily wrong, in fact it’s the base of human evolution, but when it reaches a certain level, the further progress is unbelievably hard to achieve.
The idea of “more” is welcomed in industry or in other specific domains, but in other fields, as art or design, it’s unfair to impose such a rule; for usually the effects are destructive. Willing or not, the scientific term for “more” is efficiency and in subjective matters “more” is associated with inspiration and creativity.
It’s a personal opinion, therefore don’t take it as a fixed rule, but when it’s about subjectivity, no one may say something about efficiency. A logo designer can’t be efficient…period, nothing more. Instead, he/she should be inspired or/and creative. It’s impossible to impose to someone “hey, until next Friday I want you to finish these two logos and maybe you can make some fine tuning to other three”. The respective individual might or might not be inspired; it may happen to finish all the tasks in just few days or he may need some additional time.
When you first see a website, you’re immediately confronted with the look and feel of the design; the overall aesthetic is your first impression, and it’s often what makes a user want to explore further.
As such, it’s an essential element to a good design. But it sometimes starts to overshadow the second and equally important component to a good website: its functionality.
A great user experience is far more dependent on how the site works than how it looks, so take a minute to make sure that your work is up to scratch, and that you’re holding true to the five essential principles of UX design outlined below.
