Graduation day is a very crucial day for every graphic designer. It is the point in life where you make the all-important decision regarding your graphic designing career. Believe me, if you're still about to graduate, now is the ideal time to start thinking about your future and career prospects.
Having spent nearly a decade in the field of graphic design, I believe it is my duty to impart knowledge and guidance about the practical world of the young and aspiring graphic designers. I would like to give a few career advices for graphic design students that you will want to remember your entire life.
Practical Tips for New Graphic Designers
One of my friends recently joined a design agency as an entry-level graphic designer. For the first few weeks, he was running around like a headless chicken. Being relatively new in the professional field, he was unaccustomed to working in an office environment. As an experienced professional of graphic design, I helped him by providing some insightful tips that I picked up during my stint as a graphic designer.
Planting CSS Sprites
Spriting is a term that many web developers and designers have come to know over the past couple of years. But what are sprites, what are they used for and what exactly is their purpose? The word sprite has many meanings, the word sprite originated from fairy tales and was later adopted by game developers. Spriting was a technique game programmers used to make use of one graphical image and only show it in sections inside a screen. Think of 8-bit Video Games, they had their limits, game programmers had to decrease processing by use of sprites, to request one image took less resources then it took to request anything more than one, this made for smoother game play and happier customers.
Site Navigation: Best Practices
Navigation is a topic that's almost never taken into detail and great consideration when designing, but no one can deny that navigation is one of the most important elements on a website. They have the important roll of helping people find their way around a network of website pages, pages that are important on a website. Yet there are still a number of sites that don't really understand the importance of how a good navigation system works, and how it should be designed to promote user experience through structuring navigation into something simple to understand and use.
5 Simple Ways to Increase Your Ranking on Google
It's clear to see that Google is the search engine of choice today with around 60% of Internet users using it daily, there's good reason for this. Google has a good way of weeding out the best websites or web pages relevant to a search query. It's every search engines main focus, the more relevant the content in your site or web page, the more likely it is to rank higher in a Google search.
38 Tools for Web Designers
I've used a fair share of tools and websites to help streamline the process of designing websites. Nowadays I try to stay as efficient as I can in the web creation process. Just about every tool/website listed here I use on at least 90% of my projects.
Don't Freelance if...
Freelancing has treated me very well. I've been able to make some decent money while doing something that I love to do. However, freelancing isn't for everyone; here is a list of reasons why you'd want to avoid it
10 "No's" for Freelancers...
When I first started freelancing as a college student, I was eager to do any website and would say "Yes" to anything, regardless of my skill set or the time involved. It was just nice to know that someone needed me for a skilled task. Unfortunately, I quickly found myself working all the time, eating noodles, and not getting anywhere in terms of paying off my wonderful debt. To make things worse, these people were also giving my contact info out to other such people
Hiring a Freelance Graphic Designer
Creativity is the most important quality needed for a Graphic Designer. Organizations may hire a graphic designer for marketing, advertising, or for any other purpose. There are some criteria based on which any organization would hire a freelance graphic designer. These are some of the guidelines to be followed while hiring a Freelance Graphic Designer.
Top Reasons to Hire a Freelance Professional
Sometimes outsourcing your business needs is the best way to cutting costs. That also frees you up for more (or less) important tasks. And the question is - who is more preferable to hire, a freelance individual (or a small firm) or a large company?
oDesk Readiness Test: Why it Matters
oDesk Readiness Test
from oDesk website:
from oDesk website:
What is it?
oDesk is a unique place to work. As such you are expected to familiarize yourself with our policies and best practices so your can take advantage of everything that oDesk has to offer. The oDesk Readiness Test is a straightforward tutorial, designed to be a quick introduction for users new to oDesk. It has the following specifications:
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