SpyreStudios

Web Design and Development Magazine

Archives for January 2011

10 quick tips for first time freelancers

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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.

Showcase of 40 Pricing Tables and Signup Pages

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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.

5 Reasons Travel Can Improve Your Design Work

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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.

Sticker Mule $100 Giveaway – Enter To Win!

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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.

How to Create an Awesome Retro VW Beetle Vector in Illustrator

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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.

5 Ways To Streamline Your Web-Design Workflow

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Productivity and efficiency are all the rage these days – and for good reasons. As a freelance designer, my income greatly depends on my ability to produce quality work, and if I can do that even slightly faster than the other guy, I will not only have happy clients, but returning customers.

In this post I’d like to share some of the things I’ve learned throughout the years that I use or do on a daily basis to help me with my workflow. Of course the more experience you gain the more time you’ll save, but let’s try to point you in the right direction. Those tips might be quite useful especially if you’re getting started as a freelance designer :)

3 Reasons Doing Other Art Makes You a Better Designer

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Want to be a better designer? Silly question – of course you would. Who wouldn’t, right? There are plenty of obvious ways to improve: practice and design relentlessly, try different styles, get outside of your comfort zone and thus force yourself to learn new techniques, and so forth.

But did you know that by doing other art forms – music, film and video, painting, writing, developing – you can actually improve your designs?

Applying a Clean & Imageless Design to an Article – Part I

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For Christmas this year, my beautiful wife gave me a copy of The Web Designer’s Idea Book, Volume 2. Obviously, I have been perusing the book, and I am finding that there are tons of awesome web designs to take in. I’m super happy with the gift and I expect that it will prove to be a highly valuable resource throughout 2011, and beyond.

Yet, even just a quick perusal of the book reveals the prevailing influence of Photoshop (or other graphics programs) on the industry at large. Today, the web is full of beautiful, rich and colourful graphics that continuously amaze and impress us in all manner of very legitimate ways. But just because we can include all of this incredible imagery, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we have to. Sometimes, the simple use of colour, shape and typography can create an attractive and elegant design all on its own.

Why Freelance Designers Should Use Invoicing Tools

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There are a plethora of tools out on the Internet today that help designers and developers alike. Many times however, we believe they fall short because “we can handle it ourselves” without the extra cost of such tools.

Conversely, we find ourselves spending quite a bit of time trying to complete such tasks which respective tools would reduce the time spent by a fraction. With this being said, within this article we get our hands dirty and discuss several reasons as to why freelance designers should use invoicing tools.