Framing your design brand. Contributed by Perth-based verbal designer and brand architect Bernadette Jiwa. You help people to tell their brand stories every day. Designers give people a visual language with which to communicate to their audience. When a client comes to you for the design, they have, for the most part, already done the groundwork. They know who they are and who their target audience is. How often do you stop to think about how you are communicating to your audience? Where do you start? How do you begin framing your own brand story? I think it’s possible to start by breaking it down into ten steps to consider. Mission What are you doing right now, today? Design brand framing that works Let’s look at some examples of well-framed design brands.
One of my personal favourites because of their fabulous, flexible and evocative name is Believe in. “Work in partnership with brave clients to deliver engaging, provocative and effective brand experiences driven by ideas and solid research.” “This is my website. How to Charge Higher Prices for Web Design Work - Web Design Pricing. When you're trying to set a fair price for a Web design project, there are a number of factors you need to keep in mind in order to get the client to agree to the price. When it comes down to it, your clients are looking for the best possible design and designer to build it for the lowest possible price (free, is of course, best).
While you are looking for a way to deliver high quality designs for a high price (or at least a medium price). Either way, unless you are willing to do all your work for free, you and your clients have completely opposite goals when it comes to the price. In order to reconcile these two goals, you need to be aware of the following facts, and have solutions in your mind for addressing them when they come up.
Aesthetic Can't Be Bought There is a quote: "I don't know what art is, but I like this. " If you've already got a contract, that's good for you in the short term. There's Always a Cheaper Designer Out There Confidence Sells Solution: Be confident. What to Ask a Client Before You Start Their Project. We all know the importance of fact-finding before starting any web design project. We can’t really get started on a project until we know exactly what’s needed, what the client wants, and who the site is aimed at.
In fact, in most cases we can’t even create an effective proposal until we know those things. There are plenty of pages-long web design questionnaires out there. Some have forty, fifty, or even a hundred questions on them. The main problem with that, though, is that your clients or prospective clients are likely to rush through a questionnaire that long, leaving you with either inaccurate or incomplete answers. A shorter questionnaire with more in-depth questions can uncover a lot more about what the client wants and needs, and they’re a lot less likely to skim over it if the questions presented take up less than a page. Below are eleven questions you should ask your prospective clients before you get started on their project. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Build your design business by supplementing your design skills. How to steal design business from your competitors. Portfolio Design Study: Design Patterns and Current Practices - Smashing Magazine.
Advertisement In our recent study on Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices, we asked our readers about case studies they would like us to conduct. One of the most popular suggestions was a detailed case study of portfolio websites. Following the requests of our readers, we have carefully selected 55 design agencies and Web development agencies, analyzed their porfolio websites and identified popular design patterns. The main goal of the study was to provide freelancers and design agencies with useful pointers for designing their own portfolio. We have brainstormed on the most important design issues and asked designers across the globe what design decisions they often have to make when designing a portfolio website. We also asked designers what questions they would like answered or analyzed in our case study. This post presents the initial results of our big portfolio design study.
The second part of the study will be published here, on Smashing Magazine, in two weeks. 1. 2. 3. Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement You’d like to improve the link popularity of your site. Or maybe to keep track on the latest web buzz. It would be nice to inform your readers about it the minute the news occured. Or maybe you just want to monitor the activities of your users and be able to find the best topics they might be interested in – quickly and efficiently. In these cases tracking tools can be extremely useful and improve your search enormously. We’ve taken a look around and listed the best buzz-monitoring, observing and tracking tools a web-developer might be willing to use analyzing and monitoring his/her recent web-projects. Buzz-Monitoring Buzz-Observing – Measure, observe and analyse the Link Popularity In order to analyze the popularity of a page regularly, you have to have some statistical data and values, you can measure your success at.
EgoSurf20 calculates the popularity value of your web-site, based on the quality and quantity of results provided by Google, Yahoo! Never miss a comment! Handy Tools and Tips for E-Commerce Websites - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Running an e-commerce website is a never-ending task, from trying to squeeze that extra bit of conversion rate out of the check-out page to figuring out which referrers give you the best traffic.
There’s also a plethora of tools out there to help you achieve your goals. But which ones do what, and why should you use some of them? This article introduces some of these tools and offers a tip or two on how to use them. If you own or operate an e-commerce webs, you’ll find one or two things that you haven’t tried before. This article is only the tip of the iceberg. Analytics Analytics are the key to knowing what’s going on with your website. We’ll focus here on more advanced analytics with the Google tool and assume that you know the basics of metrics. Analytics Tip 1: Advanced Segments Advanced segments allow you to do everything you normally do with Analytics, but with only on a small subset of data.
Want to find out more with more examples? Analytics Tip 2: Custom Reports (al) Content Strategy: Optimizing Your Efforts For Success - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Content strategy is a beast with many heads, names and trajectories. To approach it is to be sucked in full force. Even so, as crucial as content strategy is, conveying its gravity to a big audience, or to key administrators, is often hard. Being so inherently complex, it’s often easiest to tackle by example. My first job as a Web content writer involved creating a campaign that promoted holiday spending and travel. I came up with clever tag lines that incorporated lyrics from Bing Crosby Christmas jingles. Approaches to Content Strategy by Richard Ingram. When I got to my boss’s office, she pulled up a page I had recently written and asked me what action I thought the content was encouraging.
My boss then said something that has stuck with me and guided much of my work as a content specialist. Indeed, as I had not yet learned, when a consumer is on the Web, they are in a different mode than someone who is scanning a magazine or leafing through the mail. One Last Thing (al) Planning And Implementing Website Navigation - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement The thing that makes navigation difficult to work with in Web design is that it can be so versatile. Navigation can be simple or complex: a few main pages or a multi-level architecture; one set of content for logged-in users and another for logged-out users; and so on. Because navigation can vary so much between websites, there are no set guidelines or how-to’s for organizing navigation.
Designing navigation is an art in itself, and designers become better at it with experience. It’s all about using good information architecture: “the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems.” Organizing Navigation Structure Perhaps the most difficult part about navigation on the Web is organizing and designing it. Primary vs. Most websites, especially those with a lot of content or functionality, need navigation menus. 1SpeckyBoy2 Primary navigation stands for the content that most users are interested in.
8 Sure-Fire Ways Freelance Designers Can Earn Passive Income. Why wouldn’t you want to make some money on the side while you’re building your freelance business? Got your attention yet? Good. As a freelance web designer, I can speak from the heart when I say that there are times in my business building process that I just wish I could work on things I liked all day long and not have worry about anything else. Passive income is the answer to that problem and since I’m sure that I am not the only one who has thoughts similar to this – you need to continue reading :) In this article I am going to list and discuss 8 different methods we can earn some passive income and build the ultimate side hustle.
In my opinion, a side hustle like this is a must have for any freelancer, because we all know about the feast or famine cycle and the troubles that come along with depending on one source of income. You know the phrase “don’t put all your eggs in one basket“? Stock Photography Imagine uploading 10 photos a week for an entire year. Vector/Graphic Files. Useful Resources, Tools and Services for Web Designers - Smashing Magazine. How To Estimate Time For A Project. Whether you bill clients hourly or on a per project basis, a necessary step of all projects is estimating the time it will take.
Not only does the client want to have an idea of how much money they will be spending, but they also need to plan around an estimated timeline. And you need to be able to ensure you have the time and resources necessary to complete the project. Depending on a number of factors, including how much experience you have with the type of work you’re doing, if you are using subcontractors, and the information you have from the client, estimating the time for a project can be difficult. Here is the process I use when scoping the time commitment for a new project. Identify Deliverables The first step is to identify the main project (i.e.
Break It Down Next, I take the project and break it down into simple tasks separated by component – the more specific the better – that will get us to the deliverables. Project Planning Design Testing Add It Up Things to Keep in Mind. FreelanceSwitch | Freelance Jobs, Freelance Forum & Directory. The Roadmap To Becoming A Professional Freelance Web Designer - Smashing Magazine. Why Wait For The Opportunity? Create Your Own! - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement As many people who work in a creative field like design and development may already know, sometimes our clients just do not understand what it is that we are trying to achieve. The boundaries that we are seeking to push are not ones they approve of for their project, so our creative ideas get backburnered until we can find an appropriate project as well as an agreeable client where you can flex these creative muscles freely. In fact, the standard business processes, especially the ones we allow ourselves to be strapped into, tend to work against us in this aspect.
Allow me to elaborate. For most creatives, the most genuine and innovative ideas can often come without provocation. Which is unfortunate, because that tends to relegate these ideas to one of two categories. Don’t just wait for the aces! That Is Just How Business Works Think outside the box! Think of it like the difference in a movie director working independently on a film rather than working for a major studio.
How Many Ideas Do You Show Your Clients? - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement I read somewhere that showing your client the full range of your creative ideas during a project is important, the rationale being that the client is entitled to see the ideas coming from the creative professional who they have hired and invested in. While this approach has some benefits, in some cases showing too many ideas is counter-productive to the natural flow of a project. Proof of how imaginative you are can be shown in other ways.
Spoilt For Choice Scenario 1 You look at your Illustrator pasteboard and see half a dozen cool logo ideas… not just cool, but super-cool… not just super-cool, actually, but practical and appropriate. That client was overwhelmed with ideas and unable to choose one or the other: too many directions, and too many good ideas. Putting your client in the position of a kid in candy store can lead to some of the more frustrating experiences in design work. Too much choice can be a bad thing for clients. Scenario 2 You’re pleased. Be Aware To Conclude. Pricing Tables: Examples And Best Practices - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Pricing tables play an important role for every company that offers products or services.
They are a challenge from both a design and usability standpoint. They must be simple but at the same time clearly differentiate between features and prices of different products and services. A pricing table should help users pick the most appropriate plan for them. A company should carefully examine its product portfolio and pick the most important features to present in its pricing plans. Once you have identified the most important features, go ahead and create a more detailed list of features for users who are interested in a particular plan. For a good grounding in exactly how to design and present a pricing table, let’s examine some that other designers have created and analyze them according to the following important criteria: Design: colors, style, typography, icons.Usability: What happens if we turn off CSS and JavaScript? Best Practices and Guidelines 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Self-employment advice for designers.
This month brought with it my five-year anniversary as a self-employed graphic designer, so I’m taking the opportunity to offer 15 pieces of advice to those thinking of “going it alone.” Wood type photo credit 1. Look at the big picture Creating a modern business plan will help you think through the hard issues. 2. You never know what contacts they might have. 3. But also because it’s too low. 4. Design pricing is something independent graphic designers struggle with at some point. 5. We all do. 6. Along similar lines, if you receive a complaint, allow the other person to do most of the talking. 7.
Your pitch is a very brief description about how you will help your design clients, and is useful when describing your job to new acquaintances (without the risk of boring them into submission). 8. Realise that in order to reach (and stay at) the top, you must never stop learning, whether it’s through recognised design courses, mentors, books, or other options. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. You. Advice for design students. A get a lot of emails from students asking for help. I can’t reply to everyone unfortunately, but I spend a fair bit of time publishing blog posts that answer common questions. With 700+ pages on this site, here’s a selection of content I think’s most helpful. Advice for design students On getting hired On self-employment On learning On commercial printing I also pieced together a resources page on the Work for Money, Design for Love website.
Photo by Steve Kay, thank you Related posts.