X.CO - fun tip

http://app.x.co/


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"How much am I worth?"

Designers and non-creatives alike, have all ask themselves this questions at somepoint or another. Personally, you are the ultimate source of your self-worth. This can be tricky to figure out though and can depend on a number of factors ranging from, experience and education to emotional maturity.

A few things to consider:

1. Conduct yourself in a professional manner and always get everything in writing. Email works fine, but some sort of contract with an outlined pricing structure and timeline is always best.

2. Ask yourself, “What are they asking in terms of design?” (Seems you have this with your comments on what design projects are expected.) Is this a new logo build or an adaptation of the old one? Will you be handing their corporate identity standards manual along with a logo design, letterhead, business card template and so forth?


2. Ask, “What are they asking in terms of leg work?” Will you have to provide the materials and negotiate printing costs and budget for final product shipping? Do you have to provide the finished pieces and do installations for said artwork? Basically you just need to know if you are strictly designing the art and handing it over for them to send to processing.

3. What is your time worth? Are you currently employed with a 40hr+ full time job and this will break into any other time you have or are you freelance with more time to devote? I say never charge any less, per-hour, than you would if you worked for a corporation as a base price point.

4. How much time will this take? Day? Months? Year? What is the timeline they have in mind? (The shorter the time the higher the price for rushing.) Make your time valuable so you have incentive to continue when it looks like your drowning. If the answer to number 3 was x amount for 1 year of work, and they want the same amount of work in 6 months, be sure to double that.

5. No matter what, always always always design in vector format - Illustrator/InDesign. It’s the mark of a seasoned designer. If you go into Photoshop thinking your design will be amazing in print, for the most part, you’d be wrong. It’s not the smart, or cost effective thing to do and they’ll end up asking for it in vector format later anyway and then you waste a ton of time trying to figure out how to recreate it in vector without losing what the client has built in their mind from the original proof they signed off on. Then they get angry and have to pay more for replication cost by outside vendors.

Take the overall time in hours you plan to work or think it will take to finish this project and be sure to add padding room. It’s always best to over-estimate time and budget. Under-Promise and Over-Deliver as they say. You should multiply that time estimate by the base per-hour rate you feel your time is worth, (I’d say for a seasoned artist, no less than $45/hr.). You can then demand half up-front before submitting the logo design. This is a common practice with freelancers that I know and I myself use.

Also, NEVER, EVER, EVER give them high-resolution composites before you are paid at least your up-front fee. When you present to them, outline your timeline, cost expected for the project and the 50% up-front / 50% upon completion compensation you expect. I also make the up-front amount non-refundable in case they back-out half way through proofing and demand money back.

If you’re looking for Pay-by-project vs. hourly salary breakdown, then I’d say,(depending on what you have to do in totality.), you should factor in your experience a little more heavily. Will this take an art-house intern a week do vs. your highly skilled and efficient, two days? Figure out what your competition might charge for the project, before submitting the first round of proofs. If they back off from that amount and request to see the proof first, offer a low res jpeg proof. This keeps them from using your vector file illegally by shipping it off to FedEx/Kinkos for letterhead reproduction. Also, demand a smaller up-front fee of your choosing. If they say no, chances are they are using you and will take you for a ride and not pay you in the end citing some “technicality” or “miscommunication” when pricing was concerned and now they have you tied up in litigation for years and they got a complete re-design for free. Always remember, a designer’s work is valuable even if it’s not used. Never do something for free that includes a first proof. Be clear about this from the get-go and never back down. Show a backbone and they will respect you in the end.

Good luck!

That Newborn Client Smell

We’ve all had that client. Those difficult days where you have to deal with someone who just doesn’t get it. Maybe they have a lack understanding, time, education, resources or a mixture of any of these. They complain about their CMYK print outs not looking like the low res proofing PDF viewed on a monitor in RGB on a third party distribution site. They feel like you are cheating them by putting too much “white space” on an ad that, “they are paying for”. As if the negative space is some sort of trick to rob them of valuable starburst or coupon or menu “cram” room. They get pissed when you try to offer world class suggestions backed by Ivy league marketing engineers studies and the best psychology money can buy. They refuse to accept the benefits of a balanced layout and color schemes that make sense or the fact that 35 fonts is just much chaos. Any of this sounding familiar? Thought so. The point is, you need them and they need you, for better or for worse.

So how do we deal with these types of cry babies? Treat them like a wise and patient parent, not a deadbeat nitwit. Sometimes we have to hold their hands, tell them their special, give them warmth and food and clothing and pay for all of their mistakes until we reach year eighteen and can legally boot them the heck out if they fail to launch on their own. Tough love. Okay maybe we’ll wait till twenty-one when they graduated college or something, but you get the point.

Now, there are varying levels of design maturity your clients may be at. They levels go a little something like this:

The Infant: Aww they’re so cute and smell new! They listen and actually want to be helpful, but have no clue what you are asking when using industry terms like bleed, margin, glue gap, trim, fold, .eps or .PDF. Basically they just nod and smile and make spit bubbles expecting you to clap and make noises at them. Severe hand holding must be initiated. You’ll get them there but they may have a melt down in the middle of the produce department when they smell something like broccoli. Irrational fears must be calmed. Prepare for worst case scenarios with this one as normal print tolerances / web functionality expectations meet reality tend to set them off in fits of rage.

The Toddler: A.K.A., Jon Snow, they know nothing. “What’s a font?” “My brother’s step-son made my logo for me and I really like how he made my website with a clown gradient background. Can you guys do something like that?” “Do you guys accept Gimp files?” “Starbursts, starbursts, starbursts, gradient, registration black text. Oh also, can you put a picture of my dog in my cupcake/cell phone/title loan company ad?” Key here is to Educate, educate, educate. School is in session. Permanently.

The Pre-Teen: They aren’t misunderstood, but they do misunderstand. “Can you use my low-res business card scan and this PowerPoint slide as a layout? Why is it not fitting the 10.25″x12.125″ dimension? My design looks good on my 1024x768 powerpoint slide on my monitor! Can I put my entire menu on the back side where you originally had the coupons?” You’ll be constantly reminding them to do the necessaries like package documents or send hi resolution images for the four-hundredth time.

The Teenager: They understand the need for good design, but aren’t willing to do anything to get what they want. They don’t want to pay, or listen to half of what you suggest. They also tend to be the know-it-all’s. “Hey I saw something cool on instagram I think would be awesome to put into my advertisement.” They also have a tendency to say, “Make it cooler!”. They make eight revisions from scratch. They are basically every ignorant sales rep chasing nothing but the sale I’ve ever worked for, with few exceptions. (No, Shane and Corey, you’re cool.) Basically, they want to drive a car that’s way to fast for them. The expectation is a Lamborghini, when in reality they have a ‘92 Ford Taurus budget. They know what InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop is, but they only like Photoshop, because it’s cool. “So I should just Photoshop everything?” NO, use data protection! Vector anything scale-able for print. (You should know how to convert for web though.)

The Young Adult: They understand you’re doing your job. They trust you. You’re the working professional. They aren’t. They still want to tweak things and make it “original”, though. They “get” Photoshop and InDesign, but they are running a few versions behind because it’s just not something they worry about. It’s recreational for them. They know just enough about the programs and system and design to make your job slightly difficult, but for the most part they are fairly knowledgeable and you can get away with taking risks here. Sends some high res photos, maybe some fonts, half of which may be corrupt

The Actual Adult: Has great design sense, a clear vision, may even know exactly what they want. Perhaps, so much so, that they don’t need any proofs or layout options and just need you to put it together for them. “What’s that? You have a clear mock-up of what the ad should look like, included high resolution images and fonts that have punctuation characters included for multi-lingual support?! You sure you aren’t a graphic designer?”. They are always up to date with their software and may even challenge you to be better.

At one point or another you WILL run into each of these maturity types of clients. The important thing to note is when you get on one of these phone calls or go into one of these meetings with clients like these you keep your cool. Escalation is what you don’t want and it’s easy to avoid. Regardless of their level of design expertise you have to maintain control.

So, based on the different levels of maturity you should be able to come up with a plan of attack for each so you can fill in the gaps where they may need your professionalism, experience and parental guidance. You want them to respect you and you can’t get respect by just yelling at them. You need to know what you are talking about, have subject matter experts with you if you aren’t one already and if you don’t have one on hand you need to network more or know where to get the answers for them. Never say, “I don’t know.”. It’s okay to say “I’m not sure about that, I’ll need to check with a colleague, let me get back to you on that.”. Sometimes it’s comforting for a client to believe It’s not what you know it’s who you know. You want the client to feel that YOU are that person that they know who has the answers. Stay confident, stay in control, have a plan of action for each of the levels of maturity and always maintain a helpful attitude and never escalate emotional outbursts regardless of the clients position. These simple things will help you negotiate some rough terrain with even the most heated client. Trust me. Congrats, it’s twins! Good luck!

Design Like a Vulture

Sometimes we need a little help. Luckily the design industry has lots of free resources available out there, but sometimes you gotta go nomad and scavenge the interwebs for it.

Here’s a list of designer resources I’ve used over the years to help me in a pinch. A lot of designers already know about most of these, but just in case you forgot about some…

STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY: Good old fashioned royalty-free stock photography, you can’t beat it. especially when it’s got Vince Vaughn in it. Check it out!

http://www.fastcocreate.com/3043138/use-these-generic-stock-photos-of-vince-vaughn-businessing-for-all-your-business-needs?utm_source=facebook

Okay, here’s a more reasonable site to pull royalty-free, high-quality stock photography from that has a broad spectrum of subject matter.

https://unsplash.com/
STOCK VECTOR GRAPHICS: Don’t forget the ever important shortcut wormhole in case you forgot your thumbdrive full of social media logo types. They have a few links to many other helpful pre-canned, trendy, flat design icons and map elements, useful for various things.

http://www.dreamstale.com/free-download-72-vector-social-media-icons/

Oh and if you can’t find a popular brand’s logo because the franchisee doesn’t have access to the corporate FTP library, a lot of elements new and old can be found at:

www.brandsoftheworld.com

Just make sure you check with the client before sending a proof to validate your using the latest version of the logo. This includes all major credit card logos as well.

FONTS: There’s obviously nothing more important to any text based design layout than the font you chose. It has to be legible and you can’t be missing punctuation or capital letters. FontShop has the best variety of safe, well designed fonts and have free selections as well as those for pay. It’s a lot better than dafont.com which is for chumps in my opinion.

https://www.fontshop.com/

On the other side of this coin is when you have some mangled locked and undocumented font on a poster the client likes and you need to match it. Here’s a cutesy website that helps identify those pesky fonts.

http://fontsinuse.com/

COLOR SCHEMES: Helpful in a pinch when you aren’t sure what triad might go well against a burnt-orange logo element in your layout.

https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

WEB DESIGN / CODING: Maybe you’re a newbie trying to cut into the web design space or maybe you just need to brush up on some coding languages.

http://www.w3schools.com/

SOCIAL MEDIA MADNESS: Maybe you need to manage your time a little better and want to save some by pushing a status update to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and App.net? There’s an app for your phone called Buffer (Android, iOS) that does just that. 

Want to manage more than one Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumbler, ect. account at the same time? You gotta go with Hootsuite. They have a free version for PC/Mac that supports up to 3 social media accounts. You can pay a fee if you need more than than to upgrade to Pro or Enterprise levels of service.

TUTORIALS: Looking for assistance in a design program or three? There’s YouTube of course, but how do you know you’re getting a legitimate designer behind the wheel or anyone with real world experience that won’t lead you down some dark alley of personal trial and error that may or may not be the fastest or safest method or performing the actions you are inquiring about? You don’t, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t research but I recommend getting some tutorials from…

http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/tutorials/

or

www.Lynda.com

or the native video tutorials that come with an upgrade to any
Adobe Creative Cloud software.

BONUS APP!Install Odrive (PC/Mac) on your computer and hook it up to your various cloud-storage services to keep everything in a single folder. It’s free for up to five accounts.

Hopefully this will be useful to you in your efforts to manage your resources more efficiently.

Copyright Law in a Nutshell for Designers.

http://myows.com/blog/copyright-basics-for-graphic-designers-part-1/

I was looking for something to help better explain the rights a designer has over their work when this just fell in my lap. It’s specifically dealing with copyright law. Very informative without needing a law degree. Check it out.

Free Design Resources

32 Free-ish Interactive Design Resources: HOW Design

Oh look, more resources that are free! Thought I’d share.


-Jason

Good Design for $5?

Would you design a logo or business card for five bucks? Previously, I had written about our worth as designers and how to properly calculate your personal worth. (See my blog entry here.) So, to place such a low price on your work might seem in opposition to that entire idea, but let's consider a few things.

1. Does your experience entice repeat or word-of-mouth business without marketing yourself?
2. Does it generate a revenue stream?
3. Do you have enough stand-out logo work or business suite design in your portfolio?
4. Do you hate creative exercises that help push your abilities and allow you to make money in a real world environment filled with client requests with high demand and quick turn around times?

If the answers to any or all of these is "No", then you may want to consider that five buck design option. Okay so #4 was a bit of word sorcery meant to challenge your self-esteem and pull out the answer I wanted, but hey, I don't like uneven lists!

Now, I'm not trying to promote a third party here, but I've recently fallen into the Fiverr realm. Maybe you've heard of this low cost gig opportunity driven revenue stream building app/website.

The premise is you can offer a service, literally for anything, that is built on a $5 price tag. This might sound like a waste of your talent but consider this, creating one logo a $5 a piece might be, but creating templates from which a client might choose from then recycling that same design over and over and over again could become extremely profitable. One Fiverr I saw had been doing just that. You can check out some of his work on Fiverr here 

Maximizing his design potential with the power of copyright law. You retain rights to your designs, unless you sold them specifically to the client. (In case you didn't know that, see my copyright blog.). 

It's pretty genius when you think about it. Tack on the added fact that you can add services as an up-charge like your selling a large fry to someone who should of only gotten the small and you're in the money. It's called "gig economy". The gig is simple, singular and gives supply to demand in a way that hasn't been tapped since the early garage band days of bar shows and Why pay thousands of dollars for services someone is willing to give away for five? It's all about marketing yourself. If you can do that successfully, there's not a lot that can stop you. I see it as another form of experience from a self-branding, self-marketing standpoint. You don't have to relegate yourself to the above mentioned design skills either. You can do anything from social media headers to website reviews. Just get your foot in the door and let the money roll in.

The selling point for me was when I read that "Logo Design" was literally the second best selling service on the site. Along with testimonials and featured blogs from some high level sellers promoting their new purchases like a new car or house based off of their Fiverr profits, I was hooked. 

I highly suggest you check it out, if you haven't already. I'll be testing out the service as both a buyer and seller over the next few weeks and I'll report back to see if it's as good as my research is leading me to believe. I've already put up two test "gigs" and have received over 800 impressions. I'm excited.

Type-Cast Designers

I remember in college a professor told us that you should ,"Be careful what you put your name on, it will follow you through your career.". What he meant was if you chose to take a paycheck over your personal or moral values and weren't mindful of the content you produced it could come back to bite you professionally and keep you from getting work.

Not unlike, Jennifer Aniston, you can become type-cast as a designer. Sometimes you just fall into it and maybe it aligns with your personality, which is okay. There are however times when you become locked in to a specific type of design world, specifically because of the work you accepted. The biggest example of this is the pornographic industry.

There are, however, other stigmatic design niches that can create a preconceived notion of you as a working professional. A few of these might be: Production work, Club promotion, Editorial layout, Pagination/printing press work, and work for any taboo industry such as dispensaries for medical marijuana usage.


Production work: This is considered anything but creative. This is a misconception in a lot of cases. What some people DO get right is that a majority of the work can be repetitive and less creative than a six-teen page insert for a clothing retailer that required coordination between an art director, photographer, designer (sometimes that's all one person) not to mention modeling agency bookings, set stage designers, key grips and managing permits for city owned backdrops. Let's face it, production work is just that, production, it's meant to be fast and cheap so it appeals to the masses as a marketing. Areas of design this work lends itself to?
Newsprint, shared mail marketing, variable data postcards, yellow page ads, lower end small run 2 color inserts and ROP inserts.

Conception: Unimaginative, dated, busy design that a trained monkey who slaps coupons and starbursts put together.

Reality: Stable, underpaid and unappreciated work that requires the designer to create art they don't always agree with and are always conflicted about. It's a simple case of uneducated clients lead by cut throat sales teams making promises that the designer then has to deliver on. This is why you see a full Chinese food menu on one side of an 8"x11", non-bleed product with 8 starbursts. The designers hate doing this as much as a future employer may hate looking at it. It's not all bad though, sometimes the co-workers are nice.


Club promotion: The dreaded promotion work is considered the lowest form of freelance work because it caters to those that typically are the antithesis of the artist. Those considered worldly, popular, cool and "fun" by the rest of the world go there. While the majority of artists I know would rather spend their time at a festival or book store or behind a computer screen creating kick ass artwork. The work is not completely unrewarding but it's not exactly a gold star on our resume. It's usually tucked down under our "freelance" section at the end of our experience when we're trying to pad some negative space to balance out a finely tuned one pager.

Conception: By some, trendy, flashy, sexy and in some cases lucrative.

Reality: By other designers? It would take a hell of a lot of Photoshop magic to trick us into thinking it's anything other than a really nice school project for the entry level portfolio.
However, it's a paycheck and when you need to make rent, you'll take anything to make ends meet. We've all been there. The struggle is real.

Editorial Layout: This is solid work and taken by a more intellectual designer that loves solving Rubix Cubes. Mainly you work with text and not the sexy custom headline/logo type text. Oh no, this is straight up columns of text and sometimes incorporates boxed images. In some cases you're allowed to push the envelope but it's really up to the creative look of the magazine/newspaper/advertisement.

Conception: It's a necessary evil, but unless you worked on a cutting edge experimental Swedish newspaper that revolutionized the editorial world, it's a blah stain on the resume that will only lead to more editorial work without the supplementation of some serious design chops.

Reality: Respected by their piers for their typographical knowledge and text spacing prowess. They are under the assumption that this is a niche and it is where that person should stay...because "real designers" don't like working with blocks of text day in day out and would rather apply filters to photographs and use text sparingly for impact.


Pagination/Printing Press: This is pretty self-explanatory. It's layout for a publication or printing press. It's Tetris using other works that have already been created instead of little blocks. It's the design of others designs. It's not a far cry from editorial layout but it requires a little more visual intensity since you're having to fit together not only columns of words but the entire layout of a magazine including any advertisements and page setup from a printers perspective vs. a readers perspective. The printing press work requires knowledge of different printing presses and plate generation and when working with items that simply need to plate together, not necessarily part of the same final product it takes on an additional layer of difficulty. It's a similar methodology but can lock one in to a lifetime of apprenticeship or a loss of actual common software use. This can create a layer of rust that's hard to shake.

Conception: You're the custodian of other designers and do the physically messy work that designers only read about. Okay, maybe they took a tour in college of a printing press, but a press check is as close as they want to get to you.

Reality: This can be the physically demanding portion of the design process and includes many facets of the design to print process that few designers consider during file creation. This information, if known would create a more efficient and consistent workflow from file upload to product delivery. It would also save money for all involved by saving time that goes into press work. For example, items that could be fixed at press with approval the client doesn't need to be aware of, press fixes that HAVE to be fixed BY the client while the press has been stopped awaiting new files. There is also paper cost and color corrections for reprints needed due to improper color usages going from a design in RGB that is ripped as CMYK creating color inconsistencies that had nothing to do with the pressman and everything to do with the uneducated designer who sent the files. Bottom line? These guys have info that can save everyone money, but no one wants to listen to them because they aren't the creatives.

The Taboo Design: Here's what we really want to talk about don't we? Porn, drug usage, vice design. It's sexy, it's wrong, it's legal some places, illegal in others. No matter what you do you're going to get dirty doing it and if it gets out that you made it, it could wreck the rest of your career if you decide to jump into mainstream. This is typically the most lucrative of design avenues but it can hurt your chances at other companies if they find out you put your name on something they might find morally repulsive. I remember a guy in my class came in late, stood up in front of the class, told us to "suck it!" slapped a copy of his $500,000 check he just got for creating a pornographic subscription site well before finishing his degree and just left.

Conception: Designers with this on their portfolio are obviously deviants who do drugs and hang out with the wrong crowd. They chose a paycheck over morality and didn't care how they got where they were. Maybe their untrustworthy? DENIED!

Reality: The pornographic and medical marijuana industries are booming nearly everywhere and are legal in all but a few areas depending on what you are talking about. There is so much money in these industries right now that they require a high level of skill to work for as there are security measures that need to be considered that rival any fortune 500 company. Skill-sets are high, cutting edge and sharp as a tack. These people should be hired on the spot and coveted for their particular insites into the abyss. They can think further outside the box than that girl with the dragon tattoo from Sweden.

So, what's the point to all of this? Well on one hand it was to open some peoples eyes to those areas of design that many seem to view as a type casting. There is value there, don't just write them off because you feel they won't transition into your particular marketing agenda or follow format. They are the treasures that will take your marketing capabilities to the next level and if you write them off you'll be shooting yourself in the foot if your competition picks them up and blows you out of the water.
On the other hand, it's a wake up call to those in these industries to broaden skill-sets. You can't help what other people think, no matter what blog they read or what they know vs. what they will actually do. It's a crazy, stupid world we live in, so keep sharpening those skills in other areas so you can become a jack-of-all-trades and become the water that will fit in to whatever glass you are trying to be poured into. Just remember, that guy I just told you about with the huge payday? No one has heard from him since that day. Word on the street is he blew through his money and was never able to find work outside of that niche market and doesn't even do design anymore because it wore on him how people viewed his choice of work. Not exactly something you can bring up at anyone's dinner table. Know what I mean?