You’re your own worst critic. I think we have all heard this one, and it has never been anymore true. Designing for yourself may bring on some of the hardest projects you will face during your life as a professional designer. If you’re good enough to design for others, you’re good enough to design for yourself!

I thought I’d address four  points that will help you when creating your own personal brand or rebrand.

Don’t take advantage of your own skill set and talent

One of the biggest problems when designing for yourself is taking advantage of your own skill set and talent. Our personal brand is our public image and we want it to attract potential clients, but there comes a time in the design process where we just need stop and reflect on what we are capable of and how we want to market ourselves. If you are a designer off all trades, but you choose to focus on developing CSS websites, don’t go above and beyond by designing your site in Flash just because it’s cool and interactive.  A designer should offer themselves what they are willing to offer to their clients.

Don’t compare yourself to other designers

This is a hard one to abide by but it is important to realize all designers are different. All designers have a different forte and different strengths. It is always nice to browse online design showcases to spark inspiration, but when you’re rebranding yourself it is hard to look at design showcases and not think “wow, that logo is better than mine.” When you start to compare your work to another designers work it can really damage your creativity. Remember, you are designing for yourself, you are not designing for a competition. There is meaning behind a brand, and another designers brand is not better than yours, it is only different.

Design for yourself as you would a client

Sometimes it is hard to be your own boss. If you only offer your clients 3 design templates to choose from and a limited amount of design revisions, do the same for yourself. When you allow yourself to scrap your designs and start over you will start to ruin your initial vision. Take yourself back to high school testing and remember your first answer is probably the right one. This means your initial designs are most likely your best ones because you have gone into them with a virgin mind. As soon as you start critiquing and questioning your designs is the moment you start destroying them.

Why you should rebrand?

You should never rebrand just because you are tired of looking at the same website or the same logo. I do think it is important to refresh your presence yearly just to keep things moving, but sometimes a rebrand is a bad decision. We can all take a lesson from the 2009 Tropicana rebrand. Before rebranding you must take a look at your statistics and reassess why you feel the need to rebrand and decide whether a rebrand or just an update is the correct solution.

If your clientele is slipping and your website is getting fewer hits it just may be time to rebrand yourself to let people know your’re still alive and you are back stronger than ever. If you still have a strong clientele, but you seem to be getting more web clients than print, reassess your strategy and make an effort to change certain things to enforce this boom in web clients. Make it easier for potential clients to approach you about the possibility of a new website they have in mind and showcase more of your web design and development in your portfolio.

Designing for yourself is difficult, but it doesn’t always have to be. Always keep in mind that we do what we do because we love it. Designing for yourself should be a fun and relaxed experience, don’t make it more difficult than it needs to be.

Even though designers don’t have traditional degrees like journalism or business it is still important for us to be able to spot grammatical and commonsense mistakes. It is truly up to us to be 110% positive that we deliver flawless final projects to our clients. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always the best speller and I don’t always use proper punctuation, and that’s why I am spell checks #1 fan.

I’ve compiled a list of 5 quick tips to makes sure you tie up all your lose ends before finishing your design projects up when working in InDesign.

Extra spaces can cost you
Find/Change is truly one of the simplest InDesign features. There are ways to utitlize Find/ Change so that it benefits you every time you are finishing up a design project. It is very easy to accidentally add extra and unwanted spaces to your document. So, what I like to do is open Find/ Change and tap the spacebar twice into the find field and type one space into the replace field. InDesign will automatically pick up any double spaces that you’ve mistakenly keyed into your document and replace it with a single space.

Hidden characters
It can get a little distracting working with your hidden characters turned on but it is good to give your document a couple of final proof reads with them turned on. Hidden characters will help you locate and unwanted paragraph breaks, spaces, tabs, etc.

Colors
Before I even think of starting my design project I take the liberty of deleting all of the default color swatches from my library. By doing this I don’t allow myself to mistakenly use any colors besides the ones I manual create. A big no no is sampling colors from other images or elements using the eyedropper tool. When you sample color in InDesign and then use that sampled color it usually samples in RGB and is never an exact match of a chosen color swatch.

Image PPI and color space
Another handy little feature InDesign offers is Preflight. By going to File > Preflight you are presented with a column of preferences to click through. You can check your fonts, links, colors, and a few other elements that are present in your document. By clicking on Links and Images you will be able to scroll through all of the links and images in your document and view what type of element they are, what their effective ppi is (effective ppi is what’s important here not actual ppi) and what color space they are using. This is a fast way to make sure all of your elements are the proper size, type, and using the right color space. (Usually if you’re working in InDesign you want all of your images to be in CMYK given that you are using InDesign for its print purpose.)

Last, but not least, Spell Check
Spell check is very important. Of course spell check doesn’t always offer the right word to change a misspelled word to (if it is even misspelled) nor does it always offer you the correct grammatical suggestions and that is why it is important for you to read over your document as well and not to 100% rely on spell check. Spell check will catch all of your misspelled words and perhaps offer proper grammatical suggestions, but it is up to you to make sure that you use your knowledge to catch anything spell check doesn’t.

Like any business, it takes time to build a strong and trustworthy clientele. So where does someone new to freelancing find new clients willing to pay for their services? The easiest way to find clients is through family, friends, and word of mouth. The downfall of this method comes when these new clients expect discounts and think that your work method is customizable to fit into their schedule just because you are acquaintances.

Design is a very new and unknown territory to many of the clients you will accumulate over your professional design career and new things scare people. Expensive services make people runaway as well. It is important to establish from the very beginning that you are a professional and just because you happen to work from home doesn’t make it ok for these types of clients to take advantage of your craft and your services.

Example: Your mom has been getting her hair cut at the same salon for the past 10 years and her stylist mentions that the salon is in desperate need of a website redesign. Being the amazing mother she is, she tells her stylist that her son/daughter does web design for a living and leaves a business card with the salon.

You now have a new client who has a long-lasting relationship of 10 years with your mother and because of that relationship they assume it will reflect in the price that you quote them for their redesign. Not to mention your payment plan doesn’t work for them!

So, how do you maintain a balance between business and pleasure while keeping both parties happy?

First impression means everything!
Chances are your new client contacted you by either being directed to your email through your business card or website. These two mediums are your first impression. Even though you are a freelancer it is important that your marketing material look professional. This lets your client know immediately that you mean business.

Keep the casual conversation to a minimum.
Even though your client was introduced or referred to you in a casual setting the last thing you want to do is devalue your professionalism by allowing your client to have ongoing casual conversations with you. By keeping the majority of your client conversations on a professional level they will realize that you are serious about your job and their project.

Bind them to a written agreement and contract.
Paperwork sometimes makes people feel like you can’t trust them, and the last thing you want is for your client to feel like you can’t trust them, especially when they are a family friend or a friend of a friend. Let it be known that paperwork is part of your workflow and design process and that you provide it for the protection of their business.

Educate your client.
Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of potential clients haven’t the slightest idea as to what a logo, website, or a brochure costs and why it costs what it does. It is your job to enlighten your client to every reason why you have quoted them at the price you did. It is unethical for anyone to pay someone else a large amount of money and not to know why. It makes your client feel 1000% better about paying you your desired fee once they know why.

When is it ok to give a discount?
Discounts are tricky because designers aren’t mind readers. Do I give my new client a discount on their first design project because they are an acquaintance, or should they understand that I am running a professional business and charge them full price? If I give them a discount the first time will they expect one every time? Or do I not even consider a discount at all until they are proven to be a trustworthy client and quote them for my services and risk the chance of being too expensive and potentially lose a new client?

Discounts depend solely on the information you have gathered from your client before quoting them. If you have assessed your client and let your professionalism shine through, then hopefully you have learned enough about them to make the decision to offer them a discount or not to. Discounts also are determined by your affordability. Can you financially afford to cut the price for this person? Do you see promise of them using your services in the future?

Giving someone a discount is 100% up to you. I wouldn’t recommend giving discounts out to one-time clients. Discounts should be something earned, and if you are only doing one project for someone with nothing lined up in the future for them they don’t really deserve a discount unless they have brought other paying clients to you.

I have made every mistake in the book when it comes to freelancing. I hope that these few areas of concern enlighten you and help you make the right decisions. It is important for all designers new to freelancing know the power of saying NO. You are not obligated to provide your services to anyone who isn’t willing to pay for their appropriate price or to someone who takes advantage of you just because they are paying you. You will encounter all kinds of clients throughout your freelance career and you should always stay in control of your own work. Jeremy Jaymes of Papertree Design has an excellent article about the types of clients he has encountered over his time of being a freelancer. I’d suggest reading his article: It Takes All Kinds, Be Cautious before jumping into any design project with a new client.

Fortunately, I attended a college where their main goal was to set you up for life after college. Everything I created throughout my college career was meant to be a tool that I was able to use in the real world. Aside from learning art theory and how to use software tools, we were taught how to market ourselves every step of the way.

Which is more important: a fun college experience, or living financially secure for the rest of your life? Clearly, we all want a secure future and the only way to do that is to strive for success while in college. This isn’t about eliminating Friday night beer pong from your agenda to study, it’s about finding time to implement what you are learning in college to the real world while you are still in college.

I can’t guarantee these suggestions will land you a job right out of college, but I can tell you that they won’t hurt your chances of doing so.

1. Freelance. Freelancing is a great way to build your portfolio while you are still in college. Future employers really don’t care that you graduated with straight A’s. They want to see what you are capable of as a designer. Many design students aren’t really sure what they are worth while still in school or how to find freelance work. The value of a designer has many different factors, such as educational background, real world experience, years of working as a professional in the industry, and design capabilities. Taking those factors into consideration, it is ok to freelance for other forms of payment while in school. I often worked with professional athletes throughout college, and would trade design work for shoes, year supplies of energy drinks, and clothes. (Energy drinks were a great form of payment for a teenager going to college for 40 hours a week.) The best way to find freelance work in college is by keeping it local and through word of mouth. Go to your favorite burrito restaurant and offer them your services. Restaurants always have different specials hanging up in their windows, so why not trade them a flyer for a couple free meals. Anything beats cup-o-noodles! Perhaps you are at a concert and you know that one of the local bands playing doesn’t have artwork for their CD or a website. Approach them and offer them your services for a small fee or other forms of compensation like free concert tickets.
2. Intern. It is extremely important that you intern while you are in college. Even though many interning positions these days offer hourly pay, a good amount of these positions are still unpaid. Could you imagine being a college grad living on your own and working 8 hours days for free? That’s not a very pleasant thought! If you can’t find intern positions while doing job searches, try contacting local companies and let them know you are interested in doing an unpaid internship with them. Choose the company you want to intern for wisely and go there every day with a smile on your face, willingness to learn, and your best foot forward. Don’t let the fact that you aren’t being paid discourage you. You would be surprised how many companies notice the drive and dedication put in by their interns and because of this, end up hiring interns for design positions within the company as soon as they graduate.
3. Show off your talent! Employers always want to see real work from real clients in your portfolio. Yet, if you are called in for a job interview and your prospective employer is aware that you are straight out of college, show off your skills! Create mock companies and brand them by creating their identity and all of their marketing material. It is ok to include personal work in your portfolio if you don’t have a big collection of real work, but choose it wisely. Don’t put a picture of your dog in your portfolio that you made green in Photoshop. It may be impressive and amusing to you, but it is an amateur move to put work in your portfolio that doesn’t involve much design, skill, thought, or meaning.
4. Have a portfolio. All of this talk about creating work for your portfolio and I haven’t even talked about the importance of a portfolio in general. Your portfolio can be your make it or break it tool. Some may consider it old school, but have a portfolio book. Before I graduated college I went to an art store and bought a black portfolio book with clear sleeves and printed out what I considered my best work at a local printer and placed my work into my portfolio. To be able to sit with a prospective employer with your work in front of you and explain the meaning of your work and why you did this, and used a certain color really shows off your knowledge and understanding of effective design.

   These days the internet is everything. Have a portfolio for yourself on the web as well. If you ever apply for a job over the internet it is ideal to have a web-based portfolio. Some positions require that you just attach a PDF of your work or provide a website through e-mail. You can promote yourself much better through a website. By having your own website it gives prospective employers the chance to view your work and learn a little more about you on a personal level.

   It’s not the size of your portfolio, it’s what you put in it. I have had many recent design grads ask me if they should put a good amount of mediocre work in their portfolio or a small number of well-designed pieces in their portfolio. I always tell them to go with a small number of well-designed pieces. You are only as good as your best, so why display anything less than your best?

5. Market yourself. The best way to get noticed as a designer is to market yourself. Earlier I talked about implementing what you are learning in school to the real world while still in college. They teach us in design school how important logos and marketing material can be to a company. Fact is, these things are just important to us when job hunting. If you don’t plan on going the freelance route after college it is ideal to market yourself, as yourself. Don’t get fancy and disguise yourself as a company and promote yourself as ‘The Best Design Services Ever!’ Instead, use your real name and your job title. How simple and professional does: Joe Smith, Graphic Designer sound? It is ok to have a different website name that may reflect your personality as well. Just because you are selling yourself doesn’t mean you have to have a domain such as joesmith.com. My site name, VelvetAnt was originally just the name of my site, and later I evolved it into my way of marketing myself as a small company to pick up freelance work.

The most important marketing materials a designer straight out of school can have are business cards, a logo, and a web presence. You never know who you might meet in your every day endeavors, so always carry business cards on you that consist of at least 2 different ways to contact you. Don’t just give someone your business card and expect to have an e-mail Monday morning stating that they want to hire you. Get their card as well. If you don’t hear from them within a week, take it upon yourself to shoot them an e-mail offering a friendly hello and the reason why you are contacting them. Don’t beat around the bush with a bunch of small talk. Be direct with them about your reason for getting in touch with them. This shows confidence and determination.

6. Don’t be cheap! If you want to land a good job you must market yourself professionally. Buy an actual domain name opposed to just heading over to freewebs.com and creating a home page. If you decide to make a physical portfolio book, buy a good looking book. There are so many out there that you can find great deals. I recommend buying a portfolio book in person opposed to over the internet. It is good to be able to hold a book in your hand test out its weight, durability, and decide what material you want to go with. Decent portfolios can range anywhere from $40 to $500. Print out all of your work on card stock or better. Your work isn’t flimsy, and your paper shouldn’t be either. If you want a prospective employer to view you professionally and put together, make sure you display your work that way.
7. When do you want to start looking for a job? You want to start looking for a job when you have all of your marketing material and portfolio’s finished. Landing a job is a time consuming process. I have spent hours applying for different jobs over the internet and following up on leads. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t receive an e-mail or phone call for a position you applied for. Companies have so many possible designers applying for the same position that it is hard for them to e-mail every single person back explaining to them why they are going with another designer (though that would be nice). Apply for more than one job at a time. It isn’t unheard of for people to apply for 5 or more jobs a day. Applying for multiple positons with different companies gives you a better chance of landing a position. It is quite the process of landing your first job, and because of this you want you start applying for jobs and going for interviews about 6 months prior to your college graduation.
8. Be creative when applying for positions. Do you know how many cover letters and resumes that look the same are being sent for the position you are applying for? It is always important to research a company before applying. It is really impressive to employers when you know a thing or two about their company. Let them know that you think their company is kick ass and how much you love their work ethic. If you are applying for a job over the internet and it is OK for you to send them physical mail, try sending them a small and uniquely designed booklet of your work with your resume attached, or an interactive version of your portfolio on a disc. If you don’t hear back from anyone regarding a position you applied for, follow up. E-mail them a week or two later asking them if they have gotten all of your information smoothly and if they have any questions for you and include your resume and link to your portfolio again.
9. If you have landed a job interview you are on almost there! Holding job interviews is one of the last steps and the make or break it step of the hiring process. If an employer has called you in for an interview that means the position has been narrowed down to you and only a few other people. Look good, smell good, and be cheery! Always shake the interviewers hand and keep eye contact. Even though they may have your resume printed out, hand them another one. There is always some sort of comfort found by both the interviewer and interviewee when making some kind of personal connection. Try to connect on a personal level with your interviewer, and I can’t say this enough ‘Don’t lie! Be straight forward with your skills and capabilities. If they ask you if you are efficient in flash and you have never opened the program a day in your life, don’t say yes and then run out to the book store and buy every book under the sun about flash.
10. Follow up! After an interview, ask for a business card from the interviewer. This way you have all of their contact information. As soon as you get home either e-mail them thanking them for their time and the opportunity, or run out to hallmark and purchase a thank you card to send to them. If you want to go above and beyond, you could always create something like a custom thank you card you have designed specifically for them to send by mail.

I wish I could tell you to follow all of these tips and you will land your first job with no problem, but in the end it is up to you how you present yourself and how good your work is. Landing your first job in the real world is a very exciting accomplishment. A designer’s first job isn’t always glitz and glam and it probably won’t be everything you expect it to be. We all have to start somewhere, so don’t be upset when your first job consists of saving out Photoshop files as PDF’s and managing files. It is astounding how quickly a designer can move up within a company as long as they are dedicated and eager to reach their goals.

For many designers, the start of any new project is always the toughest step. I am going to share five tips with you that will help you get started on any new design project without developing designer’s block. These tips will also save you a lot of time.

1. Make sure your client has presented you with a design brief. A design brief is very important because it establishes a sense of direction for the designer to start from. If the client has not provided you with a brief, create your own design questionnaire that acts as the brief and present it to your client. The questionnaire is a great way for a designer to kick-start any project. If you are not sure what a design brief is, David Airey has broken down different parts of what a design brief is, and what it should consist of. To get an idea of how to write your own design questionnaire you can view my design questionnaire.
2. Sketch, sketch, sketch, sketch! Even if traditional drawing and sketching is not your forte it is important to put your ideas somewhere. Some designers don’t incorporate sketching into their workflow, but over the years I have found that sketching and writing down keywords is a great way to identify a projects theme. Finding the theme of a project allows the style of the project to emerge.
3. Create your own document templates. Creating your own InDesign and/or Illustrator document templates is a great way to help get over your initial design block. By having a library of templates, all of your bleeds, grids and columns are already setup and ready to be executed. Don’t let a blank canvas scare you. Being able to spaciously visualize your workspace before you begin designing allows your brain to layout your design with greater ease.
4. Establish a list of 10-15 fonts that you feel are well-designed. There are so many fonts out there today, that narrowing your choices down to just a few fonts per project is a time consuming task. Having a list of fonts that you feel are usable is an excellent way to start your new project without having to scroll through 2000 different fonts. It is important to know that you are never limited to the fonts on your list. You always want to choose your fonts based on the style of the project at hand.
5. Put yourself before your client. What!?! Following briefs and requests may not work well with your initial design visions. Instead of trying to make your visions work with your client’s requests provide them with both options. Work with you own visions first to get your creative juices flowing and your client’s visions and requests second. By using this work method you can inspire yourself to design something following your client’s requests. This is also a great advantage because it allows you to provide your client with multiple and different design prototypes to choose from.

Other tips and ways to find inspiration to help you start new projects and avoid designer’s block:

• 101 places to get design inspiration
• 15 tips to avoid designer’s block
• A guide to choosing colors for your brand
• 34 places to get design inspiration- online and off
• 60 more places to get design inspiration- online and off