Inspirational Designers, and how to get recognized as a Web Designer

Want to get recognized in the graphic and web design world? Here are some tips on how to get yourself out in the design spotlight and promote your work. We’ll also be looking at some of today’s most inspiring designers, and what makes them famous.

1. Focus on your strengths. Are you better at illustration? Designing web layouts? Creating graphics? Try to pick your strongest skill and use it to your advantage. This will help you stand out and better display yourself. Of course you never want to spend too much time on one thing and leave no time for anything else, but if you can use your strengths to your advantage you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.
2. Eliminate your weaknesses. Surround yourself with people who are good at what you’re not. Have them help you get better in those areas. Ask for resources you can use to get better at those things that have always frustrated you. The worst thing you can do is avoid something simply because it’s challenging.
3. Challenge yourself constantly. Always go a step further to learn a more advanced technique. One new technique may open up thousands of possibilities in your work. If you always take the easy way out, you won’t learn as much, and you’ll never try anything new.
   
4. Broaden your skills. Even if you’re exceptionally good at one thing, if you don’t try to learn new things you’re going to run into a lot of walls down the line. Broadening your design skills can be an easy and fun process if you use the right resources and put your mind to it. Also, being stuck with an obsolete skill will get you nowhere.  Web and graphic design is constantly changing, and if you can’t keep up, you’re going to be left in the dust.

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Tags: attractive websites, awesome design, design success, enhance your site, famous, famous designer, guide to succcess, inspiration, rock star designer, web advertising, web recognition

Color Branding and Corporate Identity

Color is a very important factor in design can be quite significant in defining the identity or branding of a company. Companies use colors to brand their products so that we are reminded of the product simply by recognizing a combination of colors. Not only these large companies but many designers and small companies use colors to identify themselves to stand out. Here are some examples of websites where the color contributes to the company’s identity:

Apple

Apple has always been known for their use of silver, both in their products and their advertising. The Apple website clearly displays this by the use of a silver gradient navigation, and light grays and white for the rest of the site. With their common use of silver computer casing, Apple has indeed branded themselves with the color silver. Apple also uses bright colors for some of their product lines, including the iMac and iPod shuffle/nano.

(For an interesting article documenting the change in Apple’s design between 1977 and 2008 click here) › Continue reading

Tags: apple, attractive websites, brand, color, corporate, Design, design success, ebay, enhance your site, Marketing, nintendo, sprint

2009 Website Trends

Web and Graphic Designers such as ourselves are very creative and always looking for new and exciting ways to dazzle our viewers. This in turn creates many new trends as more and more designers pick up these techniques. We are going to show you some of the biggest of these trends for 2009 and explain the advantages to using these techniques in your own work.

To begin, typography and font trends are becoming more and more prevalent.

Embossing letterpress in order to give titles a “pressed” look has rarely been used until now. This technique adds a refined style to titles, and gives it a solid look that really looks nice.

Embossed Lettering

Embossed Lettering

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Tags: 2009 web deisgn, alex buga, attractive websites, delete, design success, dragon interactive, I am second, logo design, mobileme, rustin jessen, trends, Typography, web advertising, Web Design, web design companies, web sites

Guide to Success for Web Designers

If you are a free lance web designer or developer you will know just how difficult it can be to earn a dime in the world of web design. I have learned a lot of lessons, most of them the hard way. Being great at web design and being great with clients, are two very different requirements. By setting yourself these basic rules, and sticking to them you will save yourself becoming victim to a number of pitfalls. That’s why I have put together this guide to help maximize your projects success.

Price Projects Realistically

A classic mistake many freelancers make is to guesstimate a figure when costing a project. You need to be realistic when you work out the cost of a project, otherwise you are guaranteed to run at a loss, either in the time you spend, or the money you make. The best method is to work out a realistic hourly wage you want to be paid. Then take that number and multiply it by the number of hours you honestly believe it will take to complete the project. This will give you the magic number you should look to put forward in an invoice.

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Tags: design success, guide to succcess, Web Design