Post pobrano z: Career Tips for Graphic Designers

Junior graphic designers provide a visual representation of a client’s brief.  This means using typeface, images, animation, color and composition to communicate ideas.  Designers create advertisements, websites, multimedia products and illustrations.

If you are starting out in the field of graphic design as a recent graduate (or even if you’re a design student) the following tips may help you.

Common Responsibilities of Junior Graphic Designers

You might wonder what the job of a junior or entry-level graphic designer entails.

Junior graphic designers often use Illustrator to create and edit illustrations.

They work with typefaces to create a clear message about a product or brand.

They develop guidelines for companies to communicate their brand messages or images.

They create digital interfaces which convey atmosphere and are in alignment with a company’s brand identity.

Join design networks

As a student designer, it is helpful to join organizations such as AIGA.  This way you can network with professionals in the industry.  This will help you to gain insight into industry players.  You will also get the chance to speak to people who will inspire you.

Within a networking organization, you can gain insight into the industry.  You will also be able to obtain knowledge or advice on how to work as a graphic designer.  As a student, you may also gain the attention of key industry players.

Volunteer

If you would like to build up your portfolio while working for a worthy cause, you could volunteer with charity organizations.

This will give you the opportunity to gain experience following a client’s brief.  If you believe in the cause, you’ll put in your best and acquire a stellar portfolio piece.

Working with charities could lead to further work for you (some of this may be paid work).  You could approach animal shelters, children’s homes or even local galleries.  Choose work that is close to your heart to keep you motivated.

Seek out internships

If you’re looking to gain valuable experience with a good design studio, you could look for an internship.  An internship will teach you skills that you can use throughout your career.  You’ll learn how organizations are run, understand how to work with client briefs and how design teams work.

If you work hard and put in every effort, you may be able to make a real contribution.  Make the most of your talents and show your commitment to the company.  By doing so, you may be able to turn your internship into a full-time job.  At the very least, you’ll be able to develop new skills and develop a professional network.

Nurture your networks

Instead of seeing your design peers as competition, develop networks.  Peers become supporters and collaborators for future projects.  It pays to develop professional networks.

Projects are often assigned based on word of mouth.   A busy peer may have the perfect project for you.  Another might know of a job opportunity, which you would love to take up.  Those small jobs an experienced designer will pass over could be a great opportunity for you to build your portfolio.

Become a fan

We all enjoy it when someone shares their appreciation of our work.  Let your heroes know how you feel.

If you send short emails to people in the industry that you admire, this might lead to opportunities.  You may be able to fill a gap in a large project.  You might also be able to do contract work on a project that suits your skills set.

Don’t be discouraged if your heroes don’t always respond.  You could send a follow-up mail and an example of some of your newest work.  By doing this, you could keep recipients interested, as well as remind them that you are available.

Create an online presence

When you apply for job opportunities or set yourself up as a freelance designer, your prospective employers will search for you on the internet.  Creating an online presence will give you a head start.

When you create an online presence, showcase your talents to the best of your ability.  You could set up a blog or website to showcase your best work.

Show all of your skills

If you are a skilled illustrator or an excellent photographer, draw attention to these skills and include them in your design portfolio.  This could catch the attention of talented art directors.

Pull together your best work in either a PDF or print format, and send it to agencies or companies you would love to work for.

Also, make sure you set up a great looking resume. You can use a resume template, if you want, however it’s best to create one yourself, if you have the skills for it.

Submit your work for award

Awards can help you build your reputation in the art industry.  They also gain the attention of significant art directors.

If you have awards linked to your name, it will help you to become a designer of choice for creative directors making a choice between talented applicants.

Use your people skills

In the design industry, emotional connectedness guides a designer’s intuition and builds a reputation.  By being respectful, friendly and genuinely interested in a client’s project you will be able to win contracts, work with a team or attract repeat clients.

Effective communication and respectful relationships lie at the heart of developing an effective design practice.  By using your people skills to the best of your ability, you will be able to develop an excellent reputation as a graphic designer.

Initiate your own projects

As a creative person, you have the option of starting your own projects.  This will help you build a portfolio and generate opportunity.

If you prefer to work in an art studio or with a design team, you could search for work for one part of your day while working on your own projects at the same time.  These projects could include ebooks, postcards, t-shirt designs, websites, logos or invitations for family and friends or even illustration projects that you could sell online.

Your own projects allow you to give your creativity free reign.  You could also connect with like-minded people to develop your projects, expand your ideas and build on the work of others.

As internet culture grows and expands there are a great many more opportunities for designers to sell or promote products and services.  You could search for ways that this could work best for you.

Assess your goals, talents, and interests

Always ask yourself what you can do to make yourself useful to the design industry.  How can you offer the most to your employer, clients or the people you care for.

What would you like to do to expand your talents or work towards your dreams?  Asking what you might do to work towards growth will get you past momentary frustrations or personal blocks.

If you feel stuck in a situation, ask yourself what you would like a year from now?  If this means leaving a difficult situation, you will gain perspective towards the bigger picture.

Focus on your unique talents.  This will make you stand out as a memorable designer.  Too many designers try to shape themselves into a mold.  By focusing on what makes you unique, you’ll create a portfolio which is unique to you.

Share your passions, even if these are outside of traditional graphic design.  Illustration, photography, painting, and sculpture are all aspects of visual design.  It takes talent and dedication to learn each new skill.  The more you share, the greater your uniqueness as a designer.

Develop your interests beyond graphic design.  Passionate designers are inspiring but let your interests roam.  By going beyond your own field you’ll expand your ability to relate to new areas of the world.  Remain curious.  Read widely.  Understand the human body, ancient mythology or even astronomy.  The wider your knowledge, the more you have to bring into the field.

When working freelance, always make your terms clear

As a designer, you want to be clear about the terms and conditions of your employment.  There’s nothing wrong with working on a project at a low rate.

You can even volunteer, but ensure that you know how you will be working and how much you will get for this.  Ask for a deposit.  Don’t let vague terms or employment conditions rob you of your time.

Summary

By following these tips, you can develop your budding graphic design career into the direction you choose.

This will help you get started by putting your best foot forward.  Keep working, stay positive and seize the opportunity to develop your portfolio.

Post pobrano z: Design deals for the week

Every week, we’ll give you an overview of the best deals for designers, make sure you don’t miss any by subscribing to our deals feed. You can also follow the recently launched website Type Deals if you are looking for free fonts or font deals.

ANAPTÁR—WHERE ART MEETS SCIENCE

Anaptár is a unique, informative poster calendar, which is not only a work of beauty but also a source of fascinating new discoveries. Anaptár is much more than a traditional calendar. It provides lots of information beside enumerating days: visualizing data on the Sun and the Moon in a new way the calendar shows the movement of these heavenly bodies in the sky, and because of the radial arrangement this huge amount of data is incorporated in a spectacular, complex and yet easily comprehensible system.

Anaptár is the result of exceptionally meticulous work: all the versions made for various cities are different because the represented data are specific to the given city only. For 2018 Anaptár has versions adapted for the geographic locations of Budapest, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York and Sydney.

Get 10% discount by using this coupon code: dd10dis18 on Anaptar by Anagraphic

Mega Bundle of Illustrator Brushes

Illustrator brushes can add a real dose of realism to any project. Well, things are about to get real thanks to this Mighty Deal from The Artifex Forge. You’ll get 18 different Illustrator Brush sets for a combined total of 486 unique brushes! Easily customizable in stroke size and color, you’ll be impressing your clients in no time flat with these bundles covering everything from pencil to chalk brushes and rope to zipper brushes.

$21 instead of $43 – Get it now!

Elegant Amsterdam Font Collection

Add some serious style to your typeface toolbox with the Amsterdam Font Family! This elegant signature font features four fabulous typefaces, each offered in a regular and slanted variety, meaning you’re getting 8 different fonts! From business cards to photo watermarks, this family is here to elevate your work to the highest level.

$9 instead of $18 – Get it now!

Beautiful Handwritten Madelyn Script Family

Time to extend your family! With the Madelyn Handwritten Script Font Family, you’ll be bringing home two unique font styles: Madelyn Script and Madelyn Black. These handwritten script fonts is a masterful blend of calligraphy pen and casual dry strokes. Packed with 500+ letters, over 100 ligatures and 70+ ornaments, Madelyn can bring your latest designs to a whole new level.

$17 instead of $37 – Get it now!

Designer’s Dream: 8 Premium Fonts & 575+ Fabulous Graphic Resources

Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to bolster your artistic toolbox, this Mighty Deal is just magnificent! A Designer’s Dream, you’ll start with 8 premium fonts ranging from the curvaceously glamorous to the quirky and cool. But you’ll also get 8 graphic resource packs full to the brim with more than 575 professional floral elements, frames, arrows, wreaths, patterns, clipart, icons and so much more.

$17 instead of $239 – Get it now!

Post pobrano z: Tips for Creating Hand-Drawn Typography

Hand drawn typography has grown into a field of its own.  Illustrators, designers and letter artists are working with multimedia to make their own contributions to this growing trend.

From traditional sign making long used by local communities, to illustration used in publishing, hand-drawn typography creates a sense of creativity, uniqueness, and playfulness in illustration and design.

Creating your own lettering, even if it’s just simply by doodling, can be a creative form of expression.  However, with all of the potential opportunities in this field, creating your own lettering is a means of developing your own skills.

There are many different techniques that experienced typographers use in their graphic design projects.  This is because typography is an art and a science, with rules or formulas which create effective pages which are intuitive to readers.

When creating your own hand-drawn letters or fonts, follow these basic rules to help your page look both unique and effective.

You can always download free handwriting fonts from an article or another, but it delivers a bigger satisfaction to actually create one.

Inspire yourself from the best work out there

When you create your own lettering, it is different than handwriting.  Instead, you are drawing or illustrating your font.

To do this, it is helpful to create a folder of inspirational ideas.  You can explore the work of other lettering artists too.

Many publish their work online, so you could always browse Pinterest or YouTube to find inspiration.

Create a formula for your lettering

When you create and design your own lettering, begin by measuring the height and width of the letters you will use on your page.

This will depend on the design of our letters and how you would like to lay them out.  Some fonts are small and wide, while others are narrow.

Many designers use a ruler to layout the type on their page, making lines around the letters they are inspired by to show the width or height.

These measurements are then transferred to a page where the designer begins to experiment with his/her own font designs.

Use shapes to map out your page

When creating the space for a font, designers often map their page using empty shapes.  Thus, a large rectangle may be used to represent the space where a headline will eventually go.  Speech bubbles create spaces to be filled by text.

These shapes give an indication of the length or height you’d use for your fonts.  However, hand-drawn letters do not have to be constructed in straight lines and can vary in height or curve in wave format, depending on the design.

Use different sizes to create hierarchy

When you design your letters or fonts, you can use different sized fonts for different words, depending on importance.

This is an easy way to create hierarchy, or evaluate the importance of a message.  You can shrink unimportant words such as ‘and’ but then increase the size of important words in order to grab your reader’s attention.

Once you have placed your words on the page, you can adjust or resize them as you go along.  If you’re drawing by hand, this requires a pencil and eraser.  Gradually, a sleek, clean-lined page will begin to emerge.

Focus on consistency

When you are working on a larger project, it’s helpful to make sure the different aspects of your design are consistent.  If you create a brand logo, for example, it has to be exactly the same in all areas of the project.

In order to create identical lettering, you can create a stencil.  If work has been done already, make careful reference, as even slight deviations can make a project look messy.  Top level designers work with a consistency which creates a fluid flow across the page.

Do your research

If you’re creating typography by hand, this often creates a historic or vintage element.  Do some research before you get started.

Many contemporary logos use vintage style (exploring what is already out there enables you to set yourself apart).

However, you could also draw on historic images or references in order to create an interesting font.  You could also look at how people used fonts or lettering in years gone by in order to create the mood of the era.

Once you know what you would like to achieve, go out and sketch!  Create more than one design, exploring what works best and refining it until you are happy with the result.

Pay attention to the message your typeface is communicating.  Explore how many different fonts you would like to use in your design, and how to pair them with each other.

Look at your layout, and how you would like to place your different fonts and how this fits in with the mood or historical element you are portraying.

Transform with Photoshop

Once you’ve created your font, import your design into Photoshop.  Your next step would be to change your design from a colored photograph to a high contrast black and white image.  Using Photoshop using greyscale mode.

Choose image > mode > Grayscale

Alternatively, click Layer > Adjustment Layer > Black and White

Within the same menu you can select from:

Levels:  Use the highlighted eye drops on the left of the menu.  You can use the white dropper to define the pure white parts of your image, and the black dropper will define pure black aspects.

Brightness and Contrast:  This can help you to contrast various aspects of your image in a manual way.  You can adjust these two factors until you achieve a high contrast between light and dark.

Selective Color:  Use this to define the texture of your image.  Play with the amount of black you would like within the image in order to achieve a high level of contrast.

Polish your image using Illustrator

Once you’ve created your rastor image, you will need to turn it into a vector using Illustrator.

You will need to import the high contrast image into Illustrator.  Make sure it is selected and then use Image Trace.  You will be able to create a vector sketch from your design.  You can then tweak your image to be as sleek or messy as you would like.

Once you have created your vector, you can make some final changes to the style.  You can expand the object and Ungroup it in order to access the anchor points of your vector.  Using the toolbar, you can add, delete or move these anchor points.

If you’d like your work to be very sleek in order to use it as a logo, you can tighten it up in order to create smoother lines.

Summary

These helpful tips will assist you to create hand-lettered fonts which can be used with consistency, giving a touch of creativity and uniqueness to your graphic design pages.

Post pobrano z: These Japanese memo pads will excavate objects as they get used

If you thought that paper notes blocks could not become a form of art, the Japanese will prove you wrong with the Omoshiro Block. These average looking paper note cards reveal stunning tiny paper sculptures as you remove the paper. These innovative stationary designs are created using laser-cutting technology, they reveal various architectural beauties, such as Kyoto’s Kiyomizudera Temple, Tokyo’s Asakusa Temple and Tokyo Tower.