Hi all,
recently we had the opportunity to respond to some questions put forward by Alex from Crazy Leaf Design… you can read the interview here:
Freelance Graphic Designer London Illustrator
Web Designer, Graphic Designer, London, Illustrator, Logo Designer
Graphic Design Portfolio
Illustration Portfolio
6 Free Cool and Wonderful Nature Wallpapers
June 12th, 2009 | Published in Freebies, Inspiration, Photography
Hi all, find below 6 nature snaps I haven taken, that I think work quite well as background wallpapers. Let me know which one you like the most! Enjoy…
Bluebell
Download monitor resolution links
1980 - Click here
1680 - Click here
1280 - Click here
1024 - Click here
Looking At Me
Download monitor resolution links
1980 - Click here
1680 - Click here
1280 - Click here
1024 - Click here
Savanna
Download monitor resolution links
1980 - Click here
1680 - Click here
1280 - Click here
1024 - Click here
Dandilion
Download monitor resolution links
1980 - Click here
1680 - Click here
1280 - Click here
1024 - Click here
Chilling
Download monitor resolution links
1980 - Click here
1680 - Click here
1280 - Click here
1024 - Click here
Pinkish
Download monitor resolution links
1980 - Click here
1680 - Click here
1280 - Click here
1024 - Click here
Look out for more little packs in the future!
Is Alexa Traffic Rank Important - 4 resources to help you find out
June 8th, 2009 | Published in Commentary, Resources, SEO, Web Design | 2 Comments
‘Is Alexa Traffic Rank Important??’ is something a client asked me the other day, and I realised I didn’t have a definite answer to give them… I found the following 4 articles to be very useful!
1 ) SEO Book: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000944.shtml
Over the last few days my Alexa has doubled from around 13,400 to around 6,800. Wow I am great. Not really!
If you looked at my actual server logs you would see that traffic has been fairly constant over the past week with only a small uptick in traffic of about 5 percent. Why the huge increase in Alexa rankings then?
If you looked at my actual server logs you would see that traffic has been fairly constant over the past week with only a small uptick in traffic of about 5 percent. Why the huge increase in Alexa rankings then?
2) Google Success: http://www.google-success.com/how-important-is-alexa-ranking-for-webmasters.htm
the main problem with Alexa is its rankings are based on users who have installed the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. If your website visitors do not have the toolbar running, they do not affect the rankings of your sites. The next big problem with Alexa is it is very easy to game.
3) John Chow: http://www.johnchow.com/why-alexa-is-worthless/
The main problem with Alexa is its rankings are based on users who have installed the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. If you do not have the toolbar running, you do not affect the rankings of the sites you visit. The next big problem with Alexa is it is very easy to cheat the system. Just get a few friends to install the toolbar and have them surf your site everyday. It does not take many people to break into the top 100,000.
4) http://www.kangainternet.com.au/exploring-google-page-rank-and-alexa-rank.html
So, you’ve heard a few things about SEO and now you are trying to learn some more about what SEO actually is and what your goals actually are. Well, your main two goals in SEO are to increase your websites position in the search engine results pages(SERP’s) and increase website traffic. Google Pagerank represents how important your website is compared to all other websites and Alexa Rank is how many visitors your website gets in relation to all other websites on the Internet. You are aiming to get a high Google Pagerank (commonly refered to as PR) and a low Alexa Rank. What looking at these two measured elements does is give you some idea of how well, or how badly, your website is doing in comparison to all other websites. Lets explore these two rankings in a little more detail.
Do you think Alexa rank is important?
Going to Print Tip - Photography
June 8th, 2009 | Published in Photography, Photoshop, Tutorial | 1 Comment
Morning All,
I recently got some of my photographs printed at A1 size ready for sale for the very first time. At the printers, I was lucky enough to catch some advice from some more experienced photographers who were printing their work, involving post-processing images ready for print.
Add Noise - 5%
- Filter- Noise - Add Noise - 5%
Adding 5% worth of noise to my image, actually brang out some of the details in the image I was getting ready to print. It appears to give the illusion of sharpening the image. Furthermore, it gives a bit of ‘texture’ to areas of flat colour, that otherwise were a bit lifeless. Obviously the grain you witness below is one section of a much larger photo, so the grain is much less pronounced when going to print. Experiment with this, print some photos and see if it will help your images!
The first image is the original with no noise added… The second image below has 5% worth of noise added.
Freelance Contracts
June 8th, 2009 | Published in Business, Finance, Freelancing, Resources | 4 Comments
Hi all,
While surfing forums and the like found a great free contract resource , over at WDF.
Originally Posted by Eskymo
I have had a load of requests over the past year, via PM, to supply my freelance contract…so instead of sending stuff out individually via PM, I’ve decided to set up a template with explanatory text for anyone to download and adapt to their own circumstances.
I have had a load of requests over the past year, via PM, to supply my freelance contract…so instead of sending stuff out individually via PM, I’ve decided to set up a template with explanatory text for anyone to download and adapt to their own circumstances.
This is a contract that I came up with several years ago, with the help of a lawyer [personal friend]. I didn’t want anything too technical or full of legal speak. Just wanted something simple, straightforward, that made sense and didn’t confuse or intimidate in any way. So there are no major legal terms in the document at all…it simply does what it’s meant to - lay out the information that client has supplied [the brief], say what you’re going to do for them and how much your going to charge and what deadlines there are…
A few pointers though:
1. When the terms ‘client’, ‘job’ or ‘your company name’ appear in your text always use a capital letter ‘Client’ - ‘Job’ - ‘Eskymo’ as these are terms that have been defined at the beginning of the document and this is the proper way to refer to things.
2. I generally send clients a contract via email - I export the document as a PDF [so they can't edit it in anyway] and email it to them. They then have the option of printing it out and signing it and sending it back to me via the post, or they can ‘digitally’ sign it and email it back, or I just ask them to respond to the email with a formal acceptance of the contract - I then print out this email and keep it on file. Always make sure you get an agreement either in writing or an email - an agreement in a telephone conversation is no good as there is no way of referring back to it.
Contract, PDF download
Contract, MS Office Download:
Contract, Open Office Download:
Don’t forget to pop on over to the Web Designer Forums for more great resources.
Google Analytics Explained Almost
May 25th, 2009 | Published in SEO, Tutorial, Web Design | 6 Comments
Google Analytics Explained, well almost… sort of
As i continue my transition from flash to html, SEO/Web Stats has become a topic of increasing interest, and one that ha the rare ability to at times dumbfound me. Installing Google Analytics on our site, has for the most part just been used to count our visitors and look at our traffic, so over the past week i thought I’d find out what some of the other lovely little percentages and numbers mean….
Unique Visitors
The Unique Visitors figure you have represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period(the date range you specify). A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.
Bounce Rates
In my forum hunting and web searching for a simple and clear definition of bounce rate, I’ve found people throwing formulae around and others telling me to dismiss it all together if the site is not ad based. However, as with anything there is hope and I worked bounce rate to essentially be: when someone enters my site, lands on one page, and then leaves (exits) the site without ever visiting or looking at any of my other pages. Apparently, the general consensus I have found is that a site-wide bounce rate of over 40% is cause for concern. So for the past week, I was concerned, but the changes I am beginning t implement have brought my previous bounce rate of 71% to 38% in the space of a week. Mainly my navigation made it effort’ for people to just have a peruse, so making things easier for the user, they seem to be staying more. Pretty basic logic.
Exit Rates
This fell into place after figuring out bounce rates. Exit rates detail the amount of people who navigate away from your site entirely from a particular page. So for instance, if your home page has an exit rate of say 100%, this would be disastrous, as 100% of people would look at your home page and go away, not good! Although, there are situations where a high exit rate makes sense, lets say a ‘completed transaction page’ or a ‘thankyou for contacting us’ page. This is because the user has used your service and has no further reason to stay.
Visitor Loyalty
Bar a few certain site scenarios, wanting visitors to come back after they’ve visited in the past is a given for the majority of us. This tool is a decent indication of whether your blog is boring or not and how popular it is.
Visitor Recency
This stat looks at the number of days that have passed since a person’s last visit to your site. So you get to see how often people are coming back to read your blog ramblings. The ‘0′ field means they have never visited before as there is no stored tracking cookie on that computer. This will probably be the highest number by a good margin.
Depth of Visit
In short the depth of visit report shows how many pages of your site, the user took the time to view. The depth of visit 1 goes to constituting your bounce rate. A high depth of visit, basically means user’s are enjoying whatever it is you have or are doing, as they are taking time to navigate through your pages.
There are flip sides to most of these analytic statistics that will be relevant to your website and what it is your trying to achieve, but as I delve further into Google Analytics, I am beginning to realise what a marvellous tool it is. Until next time…
Comments from others:
Quimp
I find the Goal tab to be much more valuable than a lot of the stats you mentioned in the article. As a designer, you should use this tool to optimize your important pages.
- If you’re going to buy ads, the map overlay tool is excellent to identify regions to target.
- The Click Patterns > Site Overlay is awesome. You get to know what works and what doesn’t on your pages. I found out that one of the links I thought were the most important had a click ratio of 0.1%; it had to be moved.
- and so on. Analytics is a very valuable tool with a lot of potential.
Elan Man
Nice post.
There is a lot of functionality in GA that a lot of people probably don’t bother with/know exists (myself included and I’ve been using it for a long time). I too was concerned about bounce rate recently (just over 50%) on my blog.
But then, most of the visits come from google search where they type in a specific search term. I’m assuming they find what they want and then leave? I’ve since managed to get the bounce rate down to about 30%.
But I can’t help wondering, is the bounce rate as important on a blog?
Bus retrospective Illustration Animation
May 25th, 2009 | Published in Commentary, Flash, Illustration
People have asked how we organise files in Adobe Illustrator and how our pieces are composed. This short little video created in Adobe Flash which shows the illustrator .ai file in creation should hopefully shed a little light on how some of our pieces are created.
View our illustration portfolio here
llustration that addresses how civil rights activists once campaigned to not be segregated to the back of the bus and now it is ‘cool’ to sit at the back of the bus.
What Is Graphic Design? video
May 21st, 2009 | Published in Commentary, Graphic Design, Inspiration
During our web travels we came across a nice little video by Becky Nasadowski that attempts to answer visually, the question: what is graphic design?… Enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZDu6de15FA
Clean Up and Speed Up Your Mac
May 14th, 2009 | Published in Software, Technology
During my web travels I found this great article to help keep your Mac firing on all cylinders at the speeds we all need and love:
http://lifehacker.com/5252183/clean-up-and-revive-your-bloated-sluggish-mac
4 Tutorials to Improve Your Drawing
May 12th, 2009 | Published in Illustration, Inspiration, Tutorial
Below, find some tuts that we have found useful. Click the images.
1)How to Draw eyes
2) How to draw human poses
3) How to draw hair
4) How to Draw Anime
Previously
Jun 12, 2009
6 Free Cool and Wonderful Nature Wallpapers
Hi all, find below 6 nature snaps I haven taken, that I think work quite well as background wallpapers. Let me know which one you like the most! Enjoy…
Bluebell
Download monitor resolution links
1980 - Click here
1680 - Click here
1280 - Click here
1024 - Click here
Looking At Me
Download monitor resolution links
1980 - Click here
1680 - Click here
1280 [...]
Jun 8, 2009
Is Alexa Traffic Rank Important - 4 resources to help you find out
‘Is Alexa Traffic Rank Important??’ is something a client asked me the other day, and I realised I didn’t have a definite answer to give them… I found the following 4 articles to be very useful!
1 ) SEO Book: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000944.shtml
Over the last few days my Alexa has doubled from around 13,400 to around 6,800. Wow [...]
Jun 8, 2009
Going to Print Tip - Photography
Morning All,
I recently got some of my photographs printed at A1 size ready for sale for the very first time. At the printers, I was lucky enough to catch some advice from some more experienced photographers who were printing their work, involving post-processing images ready for print.
Add Noise - 5%
- Filter- Noise - Add [...]
Jun 8, 2009
Freelance Contracts
Hi all,
While surfing forums and the like found a great free contract resource , over at WDF.
Originally Posted by EskymoI have had a load of requests over the past year, via PM, to supply my freelance contract…so instead of sending stuff out individually via PM, I’ve decided to set up a template with explanatory [...]
May 25, 2009
Google Analytics Explained Almost
Google Analytics Explained, well almost… sort of
As i continue my transition from flash to html, SEO/Web Stats has become a topic of increasing interest, and one that ha the rare ability to at times dumbfound me. Installing Google Analytics on our site, has for the most part just been used to count our visitors and [...]
May 25, 2009
Bus retrospective Illustration Animation
People have asked how we organise files in Adobe Illustrator and how our pieces are composed. This short little video created in Adobe Flash which shows the illustrator .ai file in creation should hopefully shed a little light on how some of our pieces are created.
View our illustration portfolio here
llustration that addresses how civil [...]
Acuity Designs Blog
Graphic Design, Illustration, Photography and Web Design advice for beginners and intermediates in the fields!
Blog Ranking
