Business - Page 28

Business / 26 Nov 2010

Building Your First Professional Portfolio: Thoughts and Considerations

After graduating from college, how you present yourself to the job market can have a huge impact on your future career. If you’re sending potential employers to a portfolio website, you want to make doubly sure that you’re putting your best foot forward.

Today we’ll be looking at a real portfolio site and trying to see how we can improve upon not so much the design but the strategy in place to leverage the resource. You can use these lessons to analyze your own portfolio site and gauge whether or not you need to make any changes.

Business / 25 Nov 2010

20 Outstanding Tools to Maximize Your Time

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I’m off stuffing my face with copious amounts of poultry and mashed potatoes but I planned ahead so that you don’t have to miss out on your daily dose of Design Shack!

If you’re like me, the holidays drastically cut in to your work time. You don’t get the luxury of having less to do, only less time to do it! If this sounds like you, check out the 20 amazing tools below to help maximize your time. Dedicating yourself to using just a few of these will boost your productivity levels to an all-time high.

Business / 23 Nov 2010

Networking Tips in the Design Industry

Web designers come at a dime a dozen. These days businesses are not hiring professional designers to create work anymore. Instead most of our progress has shifted overseas where outsourcing web design and coding is common place.

This shows how much industry name really means. The conversion into a well-known and respected designer takes time and a lot of hard work. There are some great networks out there for connecting with designers and once you understand how to utilize their power almost anything is possible!

Business / 3 Nov 2010

Feedback From a Theory X and Theory Y Perspective

This article is for both designers and clients/employers. I have been on both sides of this equation so I know how it feels to give feedback as well as receive it and I firmly believe that there is a right and wrong way to go about each task.

Today we’ll look at both sides of the coin and discuss how employers can motivate the people working for them to meet necessary goals and how designers should react in the face of both constructive and destructive criticism.

As we’ll see, designers and managers are often equally guilty of approaching the problem of feedback in a poor manner. While abusive managers do exist, designers tend to unnecessarily wear their feelings on their sleeves and take offense too quickly.

Business / 16 Jul 2010

5 Tips for Sending More Useful and Effective Invoices

It happens all the time. No sooner than you click the send button does the phone ring. At the other end is an angry client who just received an invoice. Despite the fact that all of your payment agreements were handled before the project ever started, he has still somehow managed to be surprised at the amount that he owes you.

Whether the description above typifies your client base or not, it can still be a good idea to soften the blow of an invoice by showcasing what you did and how it benefited them. There are also a few things you can do to make the whole process easier and therefore (hopefully) speed up payment. Below we’ll look at five things you can do to make your invoices both more useful and impressive.

Business / 9 Jul 2010

Why Money Shouldn’t Motivate Design

Today we’re going to discuss the difference between designing for money and designing for a living because it’s what you love to do.

We’ll take a look at a few things that motivate designers who couldn’t be anything else if they tried and why design is more than a means to a financial end but is in fact a way of life.

Business / 25 Jun 2010

Why Your Great Ideas Will Fail

Everyone has a big idea.

The next Facebook or Twitter is being presented to potential funders by a hundred different startups every year. However, many or even most of these ideas never really get off the ground. So what’s standing between these companies and success?

Today we’re going to look at why many brilliant ideas fail to make an impact and one essential question that could’ve helped them succeed.

Business / 22 Jun 2010

How to Develop Success Criteria for Your Site

Running a website is can be a seemingly pointless and unfulfilling venture if you don’t take the proper steps to ensure advancement.

Today we’ll take a brutally honest look at how you should measure success and develop goals that actually lead to productivity.

Business / 18 Jun 2010

5 Reasons You Should Be Writing for Design Blogs

You may have notice that this week’s theme at Design Shack has been talents to add to your skill set as a designer. First we looked at copywriting, then marketing, and today we’ll examine blog writing.

Blogging has come a long way in recent years. The practice has transformed from a questionably productive hobby into a popular and lucrative profession. The design blog industry is one of the fastest growing niches in the blogging world and here we bring you five convincing reasons to join the fun and begin writing your own design-related articles and tutorials.

Business / 17 Jun 2010

Why You Can’t Ignore Marketing

In our last article, we looked at why designers can’t ignore copywriting, today we examine why marketing is the same way.

We’ll discuss why you should continue to better yourself by increasing your talents and how you as a designer should respond to the increasing need of online marketing for small business owners.

Business / 15 Jun 2010

The Importance of Copywriting in Web Design

Designers often neglect to focus on both well-written copy and structuring a design so that it highlights the copy on the page. Today we’ll discuss why copywriting is so important, who needs to learn it, and how to create content-centric designs.

Business / 1 Jun 2010

The Importance of Personal Projects

Working for other people can be a horrible way to spend your life.

Even if you’re doing something that you love, doing it 40+ hours per week for other people has a tendency to ruin the appeal.

One way to ease this problem is to create and maintain personal side projects. Below we’ll discuss why this proves true.