This post is a followup to Advice for Design Students & Grads. I asked my network of fellow designers and creatives for the advice they’d give, and received some insightful responses. Q: What would you tell a new design school graduate? “Learn to draw. Put down photoshop and illustrator, grab some charcoal and some conte crayons, some good paper and spend some time learning composition and form. Its often not covered adequately in design schools anymore, and is treated as an afterthought in many art schools, but drawing is fundamental in making your ideas come to life. If you can’t sketch out an idea well in paper during a client meeting, you may find that you loose the jobs to…
Advice for design students and grads
This time of year marks graduation for many design schools in the Lower Mainland, including the IDEA program at Capilano, my alma mater. It wasn’t so long ago that I was nervously putting together my portfolio, furiously brainstorming self-promotional pieces and panicking about getting interviews. It’s a stressful time for any new designer, and I can only imagine job opportunities are few and far between with the weak economy. I’ve learned a lot since I stood anxiously at my grad show booth: Stay positive. While a good three- or four-year design program will give you the tools you need to succeed as a graphic designer, it’s up to you to ensure you launch a career for yourself. Part of…
Building Your Online Brand: Social Media Marketing via Facebook and Twitter
As a small business owner or freelancer, you’ve probably thought about using social media to promote your business or expertise. Most people have come across Facebook and used it as an individual to connect with friends. Many people have Twitter accounts and follow friends and celebrities. But connecting with clients or customers using social media requires a very different strategy. First off, some general advice: Don’t confuse personality with personal. Your brand may have an outgoing, friendly, and approachable personality, but that doesn’t mean that you will bring your personal views, politics, and opinions to your business’s social media campaigns. If possible, lock down your personal social media accounts (e.g. your facebook profile, your regular Twitter account, your fan tumblr…
Building Your Online Brand: Website Terms Demystified
So, you’ve decided you need a website and you’re talking to a highly-recommended web design, developer, or studio. They start babbling on and on, using words that make no sense, and you understand about half of what they’re saying. You nod and smile, because you don’t want to appear unhip. In an effort to help the non-nerds, I’ve put together this cheat sheet of handy website-related terms. Accessibility: Don’t confuse with usability. Accessibility refers to the (happily, standard) practice of making your site’s content available to the visually impaired. This includes practices like using a legible font, a colour scheme that’s easy for colour-blind individuals to distinguish, and offering screen-reader compatible images. API: Documented steps to help developers access a web-based service.…
Building Your Online Brand: Before You Start – A Questionnaire
If your business, cause, product or service doesn’t have any kind of online presence at all, you’re probably considering (at the very least) that you’ll need a website. Unless you’ve got extensive experience designing and coding for the web, you’ll want to contact a designer, developer or studio to create your site. But before you take this important first step, you should sit down and determine what you really need. Use this questionnaire as a starting point to plan your website.
New Column: Building Your Online Brand
I’ve written articles in the past on branding and my ongoing experiences as a small business owner. Now, I’d like to cover some of the questions we get asked all the time at the Pixel Foundry about building an online presence. Clients often ask us about website redesigns, starting a new website from scratch, what they need to begin, and how to work with social media to encourage customers to interact with their brand. We get asked everything from “how does hosting work?” to “should I worry about SEO?” – and I’m sure smaller business and individuals have the same concerns. After all, these topics can be pretty baffling to someone who knows they need a website and online presence,…
