Take a look at your design portfolio. Does piece one for client A have distinct similarities to piece one for client B? By that I mean, do the pieces share similar concepts and/or layouts? Do the same typefaces, color palettes, and types of imagery appear project after project? Is there a “look and feel” that permeates everything you do? If so, there could be a problem.

Why? Because each client deserves a unique solution to their specific problem. We should not be shoe-horning the client into our vision, our job is to help them develop a vision of their own. Advertising and marketing is not about its creator, the designer. It is not even its sponsor, the client. It is about its audience, the prospects—the people we want to take notice and move to action. (more…)

Can the graphic design of everyday products be used as anthropological tools? What does the look of matchboxes, notebooks and cold cream jars say about cultural attitudes and history? We invited design expert Alisa Grifo, proprietor of popular New York design store Kiosk, http://www.kioskkiosk.com which features interesting utilitarian objects from different countries for six months at a time, to muse freely on this topic, using favorites of past and present from her own merchandise.

Mexican crayons
“ I love the fun and simple graphics of this box. The yellow font seems so quintessentially Mexican to me. It was a really popular style there in the ‘70s and ‘80s and it reminds me of Spaghetti Westerns. I also love the gorgeous color combinations. When I was shopping for merchandise in Mexico I saw the yellow and turquoise over and over on kids’ products like toys and notebooks. Sadly, this packaging has been discontinued, and the redesigned version just emulates Crayola. It’s too bad that when companies from developing countries go global, they tend to just imitate the look of American products, and you lose a lot.” (more…)

Most designers are pretty familiar with shopping for royalty free photos and illustrations for use in their designs. For anywhere from one dollar to hundreds, you can find just the image you need from various stock library sites.

Interactive designers often need more than images to get the message across. For many Flash pieces and videos, music or sound effects help convey the mood or indicate user input and movement through the piece. A quick search for royalty free music or sound effects will bring up loads of options (some of which are mighty cheesy), but I’ve come across a few interesting ones…

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When most designers create a chair they make a sketch and build a prototype. When Swedish design collective Front create a chair they hook up a motion capture sensor to their index fingers to draw its shape in the air. Then they send the sketch file to a laser sintering beam that slowly builds the final chair from liquid plastic. This and other ground-breaking, rule-breaking hi-tech projects are currently on display in MoMA’s new exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind, which explores the relationship between design, science and innovation.
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I recently found an article that presented the 30 must-have fonts for designers, and it made me wonder what other must-haves that design professionals recommend for beginners…

First off, those 30 must-have fonts I mentioned are found at justcreativedesign.com. Jacob Cass breaks them down by serif and sans serif, and includes some that you likely have handy (Helvetica, Lucida) and some that are well worth the cost, like the lovely Frutiger. Paired with each font is a note on where each is often used, for example Futura is great for large displays, as well as small book text.
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Adobe Systems and the people at Cut & Paste have joined forces to present “See What’s Possible.” All manner of designers, photographers, and animators are invited to submit an animation or motion graphic video no more than 15-seconds in length that speaks to the theme: “Photoshop: See What’s Possible.” A panel of judges will select the five winners, who will all receive a licensed copy of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection. Of the five finalists, one will be voted the Grand Prize Winner, a title that comes with $20,000 and mentions in Adobe’s corporate marketing materials and programs.

Submissions will be accepted up until March 15, 2008, and the winner will be announced on April 4, 2008. You can check out some of the competition in the online gallery. Complete rules and registration forms are available here.

Though it seems like something we should have figured out by now, it is amazing how often the subject of whether to underline or not underline links comes up in design process (or, alternatively, how often links that should be underlined are not underlined). From a design standpoint, underlining links, especially when there are quite a few of them, can create visual clutter and thus is often disliked from this perspective. Links, however, are the lifeblood of any website, so it is crucial — more crucial than a good design, in many cases — to ensure that these links are inherently obvious to users. And, despite the fact that most of us reading this blog are likely people who live on the internet and need little help determining what is a link and what is not, in many cases we still need to design for people who are only familiar with the most basic internet conventions (i.e. text that’s underlined is clickable) and/or use the web infrequently.

Guideline

If it looks like a link without an underline, it probably doesn’t need to be underlined. If it doesn’t look like a link, it probably needs to be underlined.

Though many qualified user experience designers can probably follow this vague-but-simple rule successfully, it may be beneficial to break down into more detailed guidelines, especially as a communication aid to use with designers who may be less familiar with user-centered principles.

Always Underline

When in Doubt: This may seem a tad obvious, but it’s worth repeating. If you aren’t completely sure, underline. It doesn’t look that bad, and it confirms for all users that this is indeed a link.
When You Can: Similar to my last point, if you can underline a link without causing too much of a design problem, you should. It never hurts to make things abundantly clear for your users.
Within Blocks of Text: Absolutely underline all links that are contained within sentences, paragraphs, etc. As users scan text (online, people rarely read from start to finish — they scan for key terms), underlines signify key works to read. Color is important too — but using both color and underline is the clearest, most obvious way to call out the links to users. If you just need to call out a word that isn’t a link, use bold or italics in the same color as the base text to reduce confusion.
Isolated Links: Links that are on their own within a section of a page should be underlined when possible. (more…)

It’s a question as old as freelancing itself. How much do I charge my potential client? Too much and you risk not getting the job. Too little and you risk a lot of things: looking low-end, not getting enough to cover your time and costs, dooming future jobs to similar low rates…

There’s no hard and fast formula to graphic design rates, but it can be really helpful to know what other designers charge. HOW magazine recently published a survey on designers’ hourly rates that sheds a lot of light on this subject.

One particularly interesting point in the survey is that, no matter where you are in the country, the average hourly rate is $68-74. I don’t have any older stats on designers’ rates, but I think this survey goes to show that location is no longer an issue when choosing your rates. Perhaps if you live in New York on California you would charge more because of your higher cost of living, but your clients can simply seek designers from the Midwest instead. Consistent rates nationwide, I believe, represent the Internet’s influence on design job selection.

Another point in HOW’s survey to consider is that 82% of designers surveyed do not share their hourly rate with their clients. They instead opt for quoting entire job rates. As some participants noted, an hourly rate can scare of a client off. And if that quoted job is fair, you have an incentive to work harder and faster on it because that would mean more profit.

There are some helpful links at the bottom of HOW’s article to other information on charging for your work, and a “Webinar” about the topic.

This is all great for graphic designers, but web design jobs can add an extra layer of complexity to the pricing process.

In addition to charging for the design, you may also need to charge for programming special applications or hiring programming or QA help. In my experience, (more…)

Introduction

This is the second in a series of articles I’m writing to cover a number of quick, easy usability tests that designers can do in very little time and at low or no cost. The first article covered testing button label clarity and effectiveness. This article addresses a test for something more ephemeral—branding and ethos.

Test #2 – Branded Layout

Test category: Branding / Ethos

What we’re testing: A web site home page. However, this type of test may be used on any type of layout where the goal is to communicate a brand’s ethos.

What we want to know: Which version of a design best communicates the desired brand qualities?

Why this matters: At a high level, a brand’s ethos can be supported or degraded by design choices, so it’s important to learn as early as possible how the brand’s target audience reacts to a design direction. Closer to home for many designers, of course, is that this test can help a client see design through their audience’s eyes, potentially saving many fruitless hours of discussion.

When to do this test: Typically this type of test is performed in the early stages of a design or redesign project, in order to validate design concepts and direction before major production work begins (especially in the case of a web project).

What the test tells you: This test will tell you the qualitative effect each design has on the audience. That is, what emotional response does each design evoke? What qualities do audience members associate with each design?

What the test DOESN’T tell you: This test won’t tell you whether the layout achieves any other goals – such as whether it’s easy to use or communicates what the company does. This test is also poor at distinguishing between the effects of quite similar designs.

What you need: For this you need a list of descriptive words, and two to five versions of a layout.

- Layouts: The design approach in each version should be distinctly different from all others in the test, otherwise you won’t get truly reliable results. Many companies have a different designer create each test concept for this exact reason.

- Word list: the word list should contain up to four “target” descriptive words identified by the client as the desired brand or ethos descriptors. Mixed in with these target words add about 4X that number of additional descriptive words.

So, for example, if you have two target words, “sophisticated” and “high-quality,” add 8 more descriptive words into the list. Make sure you select words that are reasonable (no crazy outlier words, please!) and quite different from each other, or you’ll end up with less clear test results. Be sure to include some negative words, too!

A sample list containing “sophisticated” and “high-quality” might look like this when you show it to test participants:

Interesting			Dark
Sophisticated			Intriguing
Complicated			Colorful
Dull				High-quality
Expensive			Solid

How to set up: Arrange the layouts so you can show them to test participants one at a time – one per printed page or per screen—to minimize any cross-influence. Make sure you’re able to vary the order in which you show the layouts to remove that potential skewing factor as well. Keep track of (more…)

I know I’ve posted about it once, maybe even twice, but table-based web designers (myself included)… your days are numbered.

I’m always surprised when I see so many web designers using tables for layout, but I can understand it. Most designers started with tables, and while tabled layouts are so inflexible, they’re quick and easy to create. Making the leap to CSS positioning to create layouts means more to learn, and a potential slowdown in your work before you see the true time benefits.

I previously posted about CSS Zen Garden as one way to test your skills, but this works best if you’ve already got some experience with CSS layouts.

If CSS layouts are totally new to you (though I’ll assume that you have some experience with CSS text styling), think back to how you may have learned HTML. One of the best ways to learn HTML, back in the days of simpler sites, was to download an existing page and look at the code. Play with it. See how all those crazy tags worked.

For CSS layouts, you can do the same thing. But the trick is to start with ones that are written correctly. So avoid choosing any random site and downloading its code. Try existing templates from various free template sites.

Freecsstemplates.org is one of many sites that offers downloadable templates that you can play with to learn CSS layouts (or just use as-is for a quick blog design). At this site, all of the templates comply with W3C standards and contain valid XHTML code.

Templates at freecsstemplates.org comes in many layouts and visual styles.

These templates, and others from many different authors, are also available at opendesigns.org. Just download and start experimenting.

Simpler templates, also with valid code, are available at intensivistation.ch. In these, the code is displayed within each content area—this is great if you want to start new docs from scratch and simply copy, apply, and modify the given code.

When working with these templates at first, pay little attention to the graphics and colors—instead, focus on the positioning of page content areas. The content areas (more…)