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Will Design for Dollars: Considerations for Setting Fees

February 18, 2011 – 6:55 pm

Image by sniphe

When you go into business for yourself, setting the right fees could help determine your success. It can be difficult to figure out what to charge; after all, it’s much more than knowing how much you want per hour. Start brainstorming by thinking about the following considerations:

Overhead. What are the actual costs of your business? Between rent, office supplies, insurance, salaries, any legal services, and other necessities, what do you need to stay in business?
Billable hours. If you’re freelancing, a lot of your working hours are going to be spent marketing and attracting future clients, as well as accounting, doing paperwork, and networking. These things can’t be charged, so you’ll need to base your per-hour fee on the number hours for which you can actually bill your clients.
Competition. Obviously, you can’t charge too little or you won’t make a profit. At the same time, charging too much means you won’t get any business.
Expertise. What you can charge will depend on your level of expertise. Obviously, if you have years of experience creating ads that sell, you can charge more than if you’re just breaking into the industry.
Outside services. Are you ever going to need to hire a photographer, copywriter, or delivery service?

To get started on the details, look at AIGA’s Center for Practice Management to learn about setting your freelance rate, or check out this blog post for a thorough explanation of knowing how much to charge clients.

Diflucan

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Design Careers, Graphic Design 101, Salaries & Wages & Rates, Self Promotion & Marketing 2 Comments

Career Growth through Professional Mentorship

February 17, 2011 – 7:14 pm

Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Have you ever thought about getting a professional mentor? If not, you should. There are a variety of advantages to having a graphic design mentor if you’re wanting help with career guidance, and finding a mentor can be a way for you to continue your graphic design education even when formal classes are over.

Advantages of a Mentor

A mentor can help you develop in a variety of ways. Mainly, mentors are there to be role models and offer constructive criticism, even when it occasionally hurts your pride, and a mentor can offer a wide variety of advice. A professional mentor doesn’t just need to be an excellent artist. You could choose a mentor based on technological savvy, business management expertise, marketing—whichever area you feel you need the most help to grow.

Where to Find Mentors

There are many places you can find a professional graphic design mentor. To get started, think about who your ideal mentor would be and the areas in which you’re looking to grow. Once you’ve figured out what you want, pay attention to every connection you have, and network like crazy. Let others know you’re looking for a mentor. If you’re currently attending a graphic design school, consider professors and instructors, or perhaps even other students you admire who have more experience or education. Look to your professional contacts, professional organizations, and the place you did your internship; is there any person you’d like to emulate?

To learn more about finding a mentor, check out this Forbes article about professional mentors.

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Design Education, Graphic Design, Graphic Design 101, Graphic Design Resources 1 Comment

Tips for Presenting Your Portfolio

February 11, 2011 – 7:55 pm

Congratulations! You have a portfolio presentation coming up. But presenting your portfolio in an actual job interview can be just as challenging as putting the portfolio together. (If you’re still designing your portfolio, check out “The Dos and Don’ts of a Successful Portfolio,” Part I and Part II.) Once you have your portfolio prepared, let these tips help you feel confident in the interview.

Research the company. You want to be able to discuss the connection between the designs you’ve chosen and the focus of the client. Each client will have their own design problems, so what specific pieces of work show best how you can help them?

Go beyond the what. A potential employer will be able to see for him or herself what a particular design piece is (an ad, logo, etc.). You’re there to discuss is how it was created and how it helped the client. Clients want to know that you are there to help them solve their communication problems, so discuss how you have provided the best solutions for other clients’ problems.

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Don’t hide. Remember that in today’s world, any prospective clients have already seen samples of your work on your business card or website. They’re already interested in your design, so beyond the portfolio, you are also selling yourself. Make sure to let your passion, knowledge, and enthusiasm out as you discuss your work.

For more ideas on what interviewers are looking for when they ask you to present your portfolio, check out this AIGA article.

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Design Careers, Graphic Design, Graphic Design 101, Portfolios 7 Comments

Business Classes for Freelance Designers

February 9, 2011 – 8:44 pm

Going into business for yourself can be intimidating. Now, in addition to finding clients and completing design jobs, you’re also your own boss, accountant, janitor, art director, and IT specialist. But luckily, there are ways to prepare yourself for a freelance graphic design career, including business classes at graphic design school. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that business and related classes could help aspiring graphic designers. If you’re wondering what classes could help prepare you for a freelance career, consider taking the following:

Business Principles: Understanding pricing, overhead costs, technology uses, data-based decision-making and client relations are only some of the business principles you’ll need to understand to have a thriving career as a freelance designer.
Marketing: Finding clients can be a challenge, and while a great portfolio and resume are important, you also want to make sure that you know how to present and promote yourself before that initial contact.

Image: Matt Banks / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Math/Accounting: You’re going to have to keep track of your own finances, and knowing the basics will help prevent you from being thrown off by software glitches or computer failures. You’ll need to calculate what you charge per hour or per project, taxes and business expenses, among other things.

Knowing what’s involved in starting your own business and working from home can be extremely valuable as well. Check out this post for a look at one freelance designer’s typical day, or this one about keeping your freelance gig.

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Design Careers, Design Education, Self Promotion & Marketing 4 Comments

Eye-Catching: Making Pictures Stand Out in Print

February 4, 2011 – 1:54 pm

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How do you choose the right photo for a newspaper story, magazine article, or advertisement? It can be difficult to balance headlines, photos, and texts, so today we’re focusing on selecting the right images for storytelling. How do you make a photo really stand out on a page? Here are some tips to help you.

Know the story. The photo should complement the story, adding to it and not just repeating what the text already says. Yet it also shouldn’t distract from the story.
Follow visual-interest rules. While the photo must complement the story, it should also be interesting on its own, so choose photos with interesting angles, intimate close-ups, shots from far away that offer surprising perspectives on a situation. For more tips, check out this post on camera tricks that create an interesting photo.
Choose a photo with emotion. Capturing a heated moment, a spontaneous outburst of laughter, or a couple weeping makes the photo eye-catching, and most readers will want to go on to the story. Just make sure the emotion really captures the focal point of the story; don’t use it merely for surprise or shock value.
Don’t crowd the photo. A Society for News Design article discusses the importance of letting a photo speak for itself. When you want a photo to stand out, give it a little white space so it stands on its own. Make sure that any text or headlines are complementary and not competing. While you don’t want the photo to distract from the story, you also don’t want surrounding text to distract from the photo.

If you’re interested in using eye-catching photos for advertisements, check out this post about creative print advertisements.

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Design Education, Graphic Design 101, Photos & Clip Art, Print Ads Design, Uncategorized 3 Comments

Psychology and Graphic Design

February 2, 2011 – 3:59 pm

Illustration from acobox.com

The Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that graphic designers get a broad liberal arts education, and specifically mentions courses in psychology. However, if you’re tired of taking classes, it might be difficult to motivate yourself to take one more. After all, you’ve already learned abut how color and shapes affect graphic design. So what could you learn in a psychology class at graphic design school to help you as a designer?

Gestalt Theory. Gestalt Theory posits that the whole is often more than the sum of its parts, since the human brain tends to seek completeness and will fills in gaps to achieve this. Graphic designers can use concepts such as continuity (the human brain tends to see patterns or lines with gaps as a whole rather than discontinuous) and closure (the brain tends to complete incomplete stimuli) to their advantage. For more information, read this post on Gestalt Theory.
Primacy and Recency. The Primacy and Recency Effects explain that the brain tends to remember the initial and final information of new stimuli. So if you’re making a list and you want the consumer to remember a couple of items particularly, put them at the beginning and end of your list.
Perception. Someone’s perception of your graphic design will depend not just on your design, but also on the person’s experience, attitude, and expectations. Learning about perception will help you know your audience and create a more effective design.

If your graphic design program doesn’t specifically include classes that cover pyschological aspects of design, consider taking a psychology class to round out your graphic design education.

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Colors and Design, Design Education, Graphic Design 101 5 Comments

Specific Fonts: A Short History Lesson

January 28, 2011 – 2:45 pm

Posted by Ben on B&K M Online

Knowing the history behind various typefaces and why they were originally used can be a graphic design education in and of itself. If you know why and how typefaces were originally used, choosing your fonts could become not just about current aesthetic sensibilities and preferences, but also about referencing the technological and typography past. So why were these fonts chosen by the Modern Museum of Art in New York?

At the beginning of the computer age, typefaces needed to be machine-readable, and in 1966, OCR-A was adopted as the standard.
For those of us who can’t imagine getting hints about what’s going on inside a computer or interacting with it directly, it might seem incredible that computers originally didn’t have monitors. But when monitors became standard, a typeface that actually looked readable on-screen was necessary. Hence New Alphabet, designed to avoid the traditional curves of the traditional alphabet.
Reinventing classic typeface designs is another way of producing modern fonts: ITC Galliard is a reinvention of a 16th-century French typeface designed by Robert Granjon.
HTF Didot, designed in 1991 by Jonathan Hoefler, was commissioned specifically for Harper’s Bazaar magazine as a throwback to the magazine’s style in the 1930s to 1950s. This font is another reinvention, based on typography by Parisian typographer Firmin Didot in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Of course, these are only four of the 23 fonts chosen by MoMA. For more fonts inspiration, check out Specialized Fonts for Design Inspiration, Part I and Part II.

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Design Education, Design News, Fonts, Graphic Design 101 4 Comments

Significant Fonts

January 27, 2011 – 8:40 pm

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The above photo, posted on Flickr.com by arnoKath, illustrates the art behind using different typefaces. A fonts gallery can seem like a graphic designer’s dream, an endless playground of symbols that can be combined to convey a message not only in words, but also through shapes. But of course, typefaces are often designed for more than aesthetic purposes, and a history lesson in the development of various fonts can be a lesson in technology and social change. So what makes a typeface worthy of being honored in one of the nation’s most prestigious museums?

Well, on Monday, January 24, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced that it had chosen 23 typefaces to include in its Architecture and Design Collection. The announcement mentions the following criteria as among the reasons why the fonts were chosen:

Historical relevance
Functionality
Social significance
Technological ingenuity

These criteria add depth to the graphic designer’s purpose when designing a font or choosing a particular typeface to use in an advertisement. It’s an exciting idea as a graphic designer that you could design a typeface that is both visually pleasing and manages to mark a particular moment or movement in history.

A typeface represents more than just adjusted shapes and serifs for the computer screen, t-shirts, posters, books, advertisements. It represents culture, social change, innovation, and technological progress. Check back later this week for highlights of the digital fonts chosen for MoMA’s collection. Or if you’re interested in the full details, check out the article “Digital Fonts: 23 New Faces in MoMA’s Collection.”

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Announcements, Design News, Fonts, Graphic Design 3 Comments

10 Tips for Landing that First Graphic Design Job, Part II

January 21, 2011 – 7:04 pm

Okay, you’ve got things prepared for the actual job hunt: your own goals, your resume, and a great portfolio. Now here are the next five of ten tips about landing that first graphic design job.

6) Be patient. The economy is tough, so don’t panic and start sending generic cover letters to all job possibilities if you don’t get instant results. Take time to research companies and tailor your cover letters and portfolio to their needs.

7) Engage in serious networking. Know anyone from graphic design school who graduated ahead of you? Call them and see if they know of any job openings. Talk to your design professors, and if your school has a placement office, call for job leads.

8 ) Know yourself. Before an interview, know how to brand yourself to potential employers. Be prepared to discuss your strengths and how they can be an asset to the company, as well as your weaknesses and how you can work around those.

9) Make education part of your goal. While employers want a competent professional who won’t need constant supervision, learning curves at first jobs are steep. So what do you want to learn on your first job? Make sure you come across as knowledgeable and experienced, yet with no intention of letting your graphic design education halt with your first job.

10) Value yourself as a designer. While it may seem counter-intuitive, don’t just jump at the first job offer you get. Know the amount you need to live on and the salary you are being offered. Good employers will understand and respect your caution.

For more tips, check out this article about finding your first job or this post about turning an internship into a job.

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Design Careers, Design Education, Graphic Design, Self Promotion & Marketing No Comments

10 Tips for Landing that First Graphic Design Job, Part I

January 20, 2011 – 9:15 pm

Landing your first graphic design job is just as much about working smarter as working harder. To improve your chances of success, before you even send out an application, check out these first five of ten tips about getting a job in graphic design.

1) Know the job market. Read every graphic design job ad that you can find. The more you know about available jobs, the more you’ll get an idea of the overall graphic design market.

2) Take your resume and cover letters seriously. Your portfolio can’t always show specifics of your work history, experience, and education—that’s the job of your resume. Your cover letter should be tailored to the individual job, and should highlight how your experience and strengths match the employer’s needs. Take a look at this post about creating a graphic design resume.

3) Be strategic with your portfolio. Beyond presenting your best work, a good portfolio is about creating a flow. Since people tend to remember the first and last items in a sequence, make a great first impression and finish well. For ideas on putting yours together, take a look at “The Do’s and Don’ts of a Successful Portfolio,” Part I and Part II.

4) Know your goals and job options. Is it your dream to work in a design firm full-time, or would you be willing to freelance at first? While freelancing can be challenging, it does have its advantages and can give you more experience before a full-time job.

5) Consider creating a website. Not only can your own website give you perhaps a more professional e-mail address, but it can show employers that you take graphic design seriously.

By All Graphic Design Staff Posted in Design Careers, Graphic Design, Self Promotion & Marketing 3 Comments