Posts Tagged work
Designers receive critiques on an everyday basis; from the clients they are working for, friends that want to help, and colleagues that want to share their opinion. As professionals, we need to be able to handle ourselves gracefully in these situations.
But controlling your emotions and accepting critiques in a professional manner isn’t always the easiest thing to do. However, feedback–negative or positive–is important in our line of work, and necessary in order to produce design work that meets the requirements of our clients and bosses.
Receiving critiques is also a great way to grow as a designer Read the rest of this entry »
Want to increase your website’s conversion rate? Want more subscribers, opt-ins, members, customers? How about doing less work while you’re at it?
Too good to be true? Nope.
It’s possible if you apply the 80-20 rule: focus on the 20% that will bring you 80% of the results.
By doing an 80-20 optimization of your website — whittling your pages down to the 20% of things that produces 80% of the results — you’ll not only have a simpler site that’ll convert better, but you’ll have less work in developing and managing it since there’ll be fewer elements to think about.
Okay, so the above claim about less work was only partly true — you’ll have to do a bit more work upfront, but the benefit is less work and more rewards afterwards.
80-20 Whut?
Reminding yourself that you love what you do is an important part of keeping your mind and your work fresh. As creative professionals, it’s easy to get caught up in the business end of things and not actually spending much time doing anything for ourselves. If you are freelancing or working at an agency, it’s important to have something in your pipeline that’s done just for the fun of it.
The first thing to do is look back at your motivation for getting started in this profession in the first place. Why’d you start doing this, anyway?
Each of us has different reasons for doing what we’re doing. Maybe you went to school for design, turned a hobby into a career, or started out in email marketing and somehow ended up doing UIs for iPhone apps.
No matter what your history is, there’s something that attracted you to what you do — and that’s exactly what you should revisit. In this article, I’ll be talking about working on personal projects for the purpose of reenergizing your enthusiasm for your work.
Break Away From the "Minutia Mindset"
For most Read the rest of this entry »
Promoting our products and services can be a time consuming and daunting task. A lot of us get tangled up in online self promotion without realising the value in collaboration more often with other people through the web. It can be a wise way to expand your network, pool resources and save time, money and work.
If you’re a designer, artist, or photographer, chances are that you need to display your work online. And while there are sites out there that will host your portfolio for you, their solutions are often not quite what you were looking for.
Here are twelve tips for creating a better portfolio site. These suggestions apply to all kinds of portfolios, no matter what your particular artistic field. Also included are examples and a gallery of excellent portfolio sites, with what they’re doing right and what could use some improvement.
1. A portfolio site should put the emphasis on your work.
This is one of the most important rules for designing a portfolio site: make sure the emphasis is on the work on display, not the design of the site. While you can certainly have a site that’s visually interesting and aesthetically appealing, it needs to complement your work and help push it to the forefront of your potential clients’ minds. If it doesn’t do that, then it’s not helping your business or your art.
