SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

Beginning your freelance career can be a scary time in your life, no matter how excited you are at taking the plunge. On one hand, you’re excited to know that you are going to be leaving your job and doing something you’re passionate about & on the other hand, you’re scared out of your mind because you’ve never done this before and you’re not sure where the money is going to come from to keep your family secure.

Luckily, this article will outline 10 quick tips for first time freelancers, so you’ll be able to put a lot of your nervousness to rest. I hope you enjoy it and learn something from what I’ve written for you.

A more readable website means improved usability and an enjoyable reading experience. We all want that for our users, don’t we?

In this article we’ll go through 5 simple ways you can improve readability on your website. Of course feel free to chime in and leave a comment at the end of the article, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

A well-designed pricing table and sign-up page can make or break your online business. Getting users to hit the signup button is one thing, but making the actual signup process easier and helping people chose the right plan or package is a science in itself.

Today we’ll have a look at some great pricing table examples. I hope you’ll find some inspiration from the examples showcased in this post.

Traveling rocks. Practically everyone likes to travel, whether by land, sea or air. And why not? You get excited to see new environments and people, try new things, and be surrounded by fresh and inspiring surroundings. But did you know that traveling can actually help your design work as well? Yep, there are at least 5 reasons travel can improve your design work.

Now, to be clear, traveling doesn’t directly help your designs (except for reason #4 below). Rather, travel can indirectly improve your design work by improving yourself. When you become better/happier/more excited, your work becomes better as well. It’s like fuel for your brilliant work, and traveling constantly refuels you. The reasons explained below will show you just how traveling does that.

I think we can all agree that getting your name out there is important. For example, putting a sticker of your logo on your laptop when you go to a design conference or skin your iPhone with your own custom design can be a great way to get people to notice you!

From laptop skins to die cut stickers, Sticker Mule makes it easy to order custom stickers and skins at very affordable prices. The good news is, we’ve partnered-up with them to offer a free $100 order to a lucky reader of SpyreStudios.

In this tutorial we’ll be using Adobe Illustrator (CS4 in this case, although can be completed using most versions of Illustrator) to create a vector image of an original Volkswagen (VW) Beetle. We will be making use of one of Illustrators most-used tools; the Pen Tool, as well as adding some finishing touches using a graphics tablet (an affordable Wacom Bamboo tablet in my case) to give the vector a nice hand-drawn style.

If you like this tutorial, keep your eyes peeled for the follow-up tutorial, in which we’ll be using our vectored VW Beetle to create a lovely retro and textured poster in Adobe Photoshop.