QuickGamma – Calibrate Your Monitor Free
Share A while back, I made a post showing a free utility available for mac that was very comprehensive in calibrating a LCD screen. You can view that here. However, it was only available for Mac, QuickGamma is the nearest substitute for the estranged Windows users. I have not personally had a chance to test [...]
How To Deal with Non-Paying Clients
Share At some point you will come face to face with the worst type of client. The client who despite numerous attempts on your behalf, is refusing to pay outstanding fees on a project. As a business you will at some point have to go after a non-paying client, and as such should be prepared [...]
When Your Client Wants To Become The Designer
Share Every now and then you receive a client who gets involved in your end of the deal, and is questioning / making firm suggestions about directions to take. This could be due to their eagerness, misunderstanding of professional boundaries or personality; but it needs to be addressed when they begin to intrude too much [...]
11 Articles To Stop You Making Designer Mistakes
Share 1) Just Creative Design – Bad Graphic Design Yes, this is a controversial topic, however I hope to raise awareness of some mistakes you may be making in your graphic design pieces that are making you look amateurish, but please keep in mind that none of these are hard and fast rules, this is [...]
Grade/Score/Analyse Your Blog
Share Whilst on twitter, I came across this nice little tool to help grade your blog via a tweet by Rutiso It then provides an analysis of your blog and outputs a score out of 100. It functions/looks vry similar to hubspot’s ever popular Website Grader. The tool can be found here: http://blog.grader.com/
What is the best 22″ 24″ 28″ 30″ graphic design photography monitor
Share Whilst searching the web for a comprehensive resource to help me to decide what monitor to buy, I came across this great thread on the AnandTech Forums: Best Monitor for Purpose The thread is segmented into different purposes you may require monitors for. Here is the section related to Design:
Is Alexa Traffic Rank Important – 4 resources to help you find out
Share ‘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 [...]
Freelance Contracts
Share Hi all, While surfing forums and the like found a great free contract resource , over at WDF. 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, [...]
7 Things To Consider When Starting As A Freelance Designer
Share Many just pick up and go when entering the freelancing world, but to ensure things go smoothly for everybody involved, there are a few considerations. Setting up a small studio, office or dedicated work area within your household; keeping the font police off your heels, invoicing and paying correct taxes etc are vital. Being [...]
How to Calibrate Your Screen/Monitor for free
Share Whilst surfing the web after buying my new Samsung T220 monitor, I was looking for a way to calibrate, as out of the box it was glaringly bright – great for movies etc – poor for design work. What I ran into was Supercal. Is a great tool, and after running a few test [...]
5 Little Tips for Designers
Share These are more focused on just getting into what we perceive as good habits, and its always best to egt into good habits from early on! Some of these are somewhat obvious, maybe even dumb but its easy to forget the simple things. Hope they help. 1) Ensure that your client is pleased with [...]
Free Tool to Select Domain Names
Share Visit the tool by clicking below: http://domai.nr Domainr helps you explore the entire domain name space beyond the ubiquitous—and crowded—.com, .net and .org. Inspired by jish.nu, burri.to and del.icio.us, apologies to Flickr, and a high-five to Dopplr.
Speed Up Adobe Illustrator Performance
Share Speed Up Adobe Illustrator Performance on Windows http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=320782&sliceId=1 Excerpt: By configuring your system to run efficiently, you increase the amount of memory available to applications and ensure that they run smoothly. Increase the amount of memory available to Illustrator, quit applications you are not using, or disable nonessential startup applications or fonts to improve [...]
Read-Write: Use your NTFS Hard Drive with Your Mac
Share Users running Mac OS X are often stumped when trying to write onto most external hard drive’s as normally they are bought, they usually come in the NTFS File System format which you can read the drive natively in Mac OS X but not write onto it. This is because this is the file [...]
5 Ways To Copyright Your Work
Share This post is a short extension and continuation and summary from a previous article: Importance of Copyrighting Your artwork - it would serve well to read this before reading the following, as good background knowledge. 1) Deviant Art By uploading your work to a personal gallery on deviant art, you can protect your work under [...]
Free Business Plan, Projected Balances and Expenses Templates
Share When we first began, a friend sent over some very nice business plan, asset, balance sheet, started up expenses etc type templates. You can use, edit these at your own discretion. Unfortunately, I do not know and cannot ascertain who created them, so am unable to give credit, where its due as these templates are [...]
When Meeting A Client as a freelance designer…
Share When first starting out, the prospect of going to meet a client to discuss the project and work through the nitty gritty details can be a little daunting. This little list is just some things to make sure you have the predictable bases covered: Firstly, I am just going to say remember that they [...]
Designing for Print and Designing for Web Differences
Share Designing for print, and designing for web are two different kettles of fish, and learning some of the basic considerations between the two can save you many of the traditional rookie mistakes that plagued us, in our teething process. this little article should hopefully stop you from making any huge mistakes early on. Firstly, [...]
5 High Quality Photoshop Tutorial Websites
Share Hi all. I learnt Photoshop like many through resources and tutorials available online. We all however know, that there are few quality sites out there, many are filled with the types of effects and filter processes that leave you with amateur and poor results. The sites below, all have a degree of quality control [...]
10 Tutorials and Resources to Understand Typography
Share 1) Typography: The Essential Guide What is typography? And why is it so important to graphic designers? As long as you spell everything correctly and make sure the message is what the client wants to see, why does the font style make any difference? Because everything you touch, see and create is impacted by [...]
How to hide desktop items on a Mac – Use Camouflage!
Share Came across this free great lightweight application to hide all desktop items on your Mac with the click of a button! No more clutter! http://camouflage.en.softonic.com/mac Do you have way too many items on your desktop? Do you hate cleaning up that mess? Camouflage is the right utility for you. It hides all the icons [...]
Long Term Freelancing Success – Part 1 – Dedication
Share Hi all, welcome to what I hope to be a series about some factors I think will be key to long term success..The first is to address your working discipline. Read many interviews of freelancers and a common answer to ‘what do you love about being a freelancer?’ – one of the expected answers [...]
Nov 18, 2009 | Categories: Advice, Freelancing, Resources | Tags: Advice, Business, Commentary, dedication, freelancesuccess | 9 Comments »