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The design pricing formula. A lot of designers struggle with pricing, and I’m regularly asked how I work it out. As much as I want to, I can’t tell you what to charge, and the design pricing formula explains why. No-one knows better than you how much talent you have, and every project specification is different. If your client is asking for a rush-job, they’ll expect to pay a higher rate. The physical location of my clients doesn’t change what I charge, but it could alter what the client is willing to spend. Update: September 2013 If you join the mailing list I’ll email you the “Pricing your work” chapter from my new book, Work for Money, Design for Love. Here are a few pricing resources to help. And when you have produced a quote, here’s how 20 designers charge their clients.

Related posts. 10 Excellent Services To Get Feedback For Your Design Works. Everybody wants to receive feedback from friends about their hard work, but sometimes we also need opinions coming from complete strangers, maybe some rough critiques about aspects we might have overlooked. This way we could get some ideas on how to upgrade the work. Here are 10 excellent feedback services you should start using right now. PS: You might also like this one: UX Madness – 20 Fantastic Resources For User Experience Know How Five Second Test A simple & Free online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces. Concept Feedback Designed specifically for small and medium business marketers, graphic designers, and web developers, Concept Feedback provides a simple tool to get quality feedback on marketing concepts.

Design Critique Challenge: Respond to any of our tweets critiquing a site design. If you make an account, then push Broadcast and ask the awesome community for a design critique, you’ll get some feedback right away. Usabilla 1. Trends in Logo Design: Understanding the Evolutionary Nature of Logos and Web 2.0. There are logos that are iconic … logos that stand the test of time. You might think that you have such a logo for your business. However, the reality is that you may be so personally intertwined with both your business and your logo that you cannot view matters as objectively as one would like.

You really do need to understand that the vast majority of companies and businesses recognize the need for re-branding over time. This includes logo redesign. Through this article you are presented with an overview of trends in logo design, an overview of the evolutionary nature of logos. The Influence of the Internet on Logo Development As has been the case with many other aspects of marketing the Internet has had a profound influence on logo design and development. The fact is that when it comes to logo design at this juncture in time, the most elementary focus is placed on how will a particular logo play and translate on the Net.

The Impact of Web 2.0 on Logo Design Conclusion Image by: emob.fr. How to create a great landing page. You create a landing page when you are running a promotional campaign or when you want to create a compelling online presence where you want your visitors to just buy from you. You should also create targeted landing pages for your social media profile pages because people coming from there are generally looking for different information compared to those coming from your ad campaigns. Traffic to your landing page normally comes from PPC ad campaigns such as Google AdWords…you can create different landing pages for different keywords so that people get to do precisely what is mentioned in your ad campaign.From banner advertisements you place on various websitesFrom your newsletter campaigns and from your ezinesFrom your own website or blog Creating a great landing page takes lots of experience and you need to be aware of precisely what you want to achieve out of.

If you want to create a successful landing page, create it to achieve just one purpose. Systematizing the Graphic Design Process. Unlike other forms of art, graphic design is not just about taking paper and pen and letting the work flow. Graphic designers have to help viewers get the message and help sell a service or product. Creating a design for a client with little or no strategy just doesn’t work. Unlike traditional art, graphic design has to convey a very narrow message. Developing a system for the graphic design process can help the designer achieve the best results. Systematizing any sort of project, whether graphic design, web design, programming or otherwise, gets the work done faster, keeps the project organized and yields better results. Here is a simple six-step graphic design process, which you may want to take wholesale or build on. 1. You might be tempted to jump right in and start designing, but collect the necessary information first.

Most clients will probably contact a graphic designer in this kind of way: I need a poster made for my new product X, [followed by project description]. Systematizing It. Drupal Themes by TopNotchThemes | Premium Drupal Theme Templates. The Anatomy of a Corporate Site | Build Internet! This is part three of the week-long “Website Anatomy Class” series A corporate website, just like the business, is a prime example of large scale thinking. As you’ll see in this article, a company’s web identity is brought together by a combination of several websites, each with branches and divisions of their own. In this edition of our Website Anatomy Class series, we’ll take a look at some of the best practices and design trends behind successful corporate websites.

Along the way we’ll also be looking at some design elements to avoid, as well as how corporations are using social media to expand their customer service reach. What is a Corporate Site? We’ll start with an important point to keep in mind. A corporation’s web presence may span many different domains and departments, but there is always a top tier. Don’t confuse Pepsi with PepsiCo. More Information, Less Promotion Corporate sites don’t need to be flashy or exciting. The Business of Design Office Stock Photography is Cliché.

The World’s Best Web Designers Are Unknown | John O'Nolan. I'm a fairly positive person, and most of the posts on this blog have been pretty positive, but today I'm feeling very negative and frustrated. I'm not going to bitch and moan, I'm going to try and give a constructive insight into the issues that I'm uncovering as I continue down the road of self employment. How It Started The last couple of weeks, but today in particular, I've just had too much to do. I've got accountants emailing me about late tax returns that I didn't know were due, clients emailing me about website problems, prospective clients emailing me with enquiries, other half-done things that I'm trying to complete (such as the redesign for this blog), articles that I've got to write for other websites, and personal finances that I need to sort out too.

It's not just an issue of prioritising work either, I had a small revelation today which is this: Being the director of a business, and being a web designer are two separate full time jobs. But Is This The Right Direction? Online Checkout Process Web Design. The checkout process has become widely known over the years on the internet and making purchases online is fairly common for most households. With such popularity you would think the checkout process has been nearly perfected, however astonishingly 59% of all users abandon the checkout process. This could be for a number of reasons but the most important being users are not given a clear direction through the process. This leads users to get confused, frustrated, and abandon the process.

Ideally an easier, friendlier, and dependable checkout process will do the trick and increase conversions. Checkout processes are fairly dynamic and span across multiple pages. Acknowledge common checkout process goals. While the checkout process is most commonly used for the exchange of money for goods or services, it can also be used to accept donations, take membership payments, or to even transfer money into a virtual equivalent. Be aware of, and address, visitor's questions.

They can stop working. 75+ Excellent Collection of Tutorials, Inspirations And Resources For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In July @ SmashingApps. Don't Forget to participate in a contest where you can win an amazing e-Commerce template from TemplateMonster. We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps.

In this, we made a list of 75+ Excellent Collection of Tutorials, Inspirations And Resources For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible. You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of July which our readers/viewers may like. Design Tips, Tricks and Tutorial””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””” Web Design Tutorials: The Ultimate Roundup Three Short Tutorials for Photographers and Photography Lovers 22 Very Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials. 35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design | CSS. CSS-design is not easy. We need to find workaround across browser inconsistencies, not that easy CSS-concepts and quite counterintuitive CSS-solutions.

However, there are effective and useful CSS-tools and Smashing Magazine reviewed many1 of2 them3 in our previous posts. Now it’s time to present you with some fresh (or not mentioned earlier) tools that can assist designers in their work. Today, we will look at 35 new and useful CSS tools, generators and resources that can significantly improve your workflow and reduce your time efforts for CSS-coding.

You may want to take a look at the following related articles: Extend CSS with advanced selectors, variables etc. Less CSS7 Say goodbye to bloated CSS code with LESS. Sizzle9 A pure-JavaScript CSS selector engine designed to be easily dropped in to a host library. Haml11 When it comes to templating languages for Ruby, Haml is our pick of the litter. DtCSS: Variables in CSS15 DtCSS is a PHP script that preprocesses your CSS file.