The VelvetAnt blog had it’s one year birthday January 16th. Even though I am late giving the blog a present I hope this spruce up makes my belated blog birthday a little sweeter. Here’s to a new year for the VelvetAnt blog and many new articles to come!

Here are some of my favorite articles from the past year:

1. Helvetica Love, my tribute to Helvetica
2. Establishing a positive relationship with your printer, a must know for all print designers
3. Stay motivated while freelancing, 7 tips to keep freelancers going
4. Influential female designers, a round-up of 19 awesome female designers
5. Ghosts of design work past, 18 designers share some of their first designs with the public
6. 45 logos that utilize negative space effectively
7. 13 examples of new retro and vintage packaging

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.

1. Minimal Exhibit
2. TYPEInspire
3. Dieter Rams and his 10 Design Commandments
4. How To Improve Your Branding With Your Content
5. 37 Places To Get Free Stock Images
6. 30 Artistic and Creative Résumés
7. 10 Awesome Free Handwritten Fonts
8. Do You Want Fries With That Logo?
9. Ten logo design tips from the field
10. 100 New and Beautiful Seamless Patterns
11. 15 Typography Books To Help You Learn and Love Typography
12. 25+ Inspirational Folded Brochures
13. 30 Interesting Brochure Layout Ideas
14. How to Read the Mind of a Client in 3 Easy Steps
15. Ways and Links to improve the Typography of your WordPress site
16. 26 Professional Photoshop Retouching Tutorials
17. 10 Ways to Beat the Hell Out of Creative Block
18. Typographic Elegance Letterpress Wedding Cards
19. Hiring a designer: a client’s perspective
20. 20 Retro Wallpapers to Spark Inspiration

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.

Going green

Now more than ever our planet needs all of the help it can get to reduce our human footprint. I know this may sounds pretty blunt and harsh, but our work is trash! The marketing and advertising material that we are so proud of is literally ending up in the dirt! In a way, all litter and garbage starts with us. Unrecycled printed materials aren’t the only downfall of design. Have you ever considered how much electricity it takes to power multiple computers and printers? Of course you have! You think about it every time you get your electricity bill.

What can we do as designers to give back to our environment? What can designers do to keep our planet beautiful and please our clients at the same time? A simple solution to help our planet is to educate ourselves so we can educate our clients. By educating our clients we are able to teach them environmentally friendly ways to be successful.

Here are a few environmentally friendly tips for designers to share with their clients. These tips will not only help shrink the carbon footprint created by designers, but some of these tips will also help save you and your clients money!

Going green with print

Find an eco friendly printer.

1. Ideally we would like to find printers who use post-consumer recycled materials and 100% chlorine free paper. The word ‘recycled’ has somehow adopted the meaning ‘cheap’ is some people’s eyes. Many consumers think that all recycled paper is dull, grey, and not as white as virgin paper. Recycled paper that appears off-white hasn’t been de-inked. For bright white recycled paper use de-inked paper. The ink that is taken out of the recycled paper can be burned to create energy to power the paper mill or outsourced for other usages. Ironically, recycled paper is just as good, if not better than virgin paper.
2. Find a printer that uses soy and vegetable-based inks opposed to petroleum based inks.

Here are a few eco friendly printers you should considering checking out (some may even be cheaper than who you are currently printing with)

• Moo
• Greener Printer
• Print Pelican
• Green Printer Online
• pixxlz
• a local printer
• clientel systems

Going green in web

1. Use XHTML and CSS. The less code you use on a web page lowers the transfer rate over the network, which in return lessens the amount of electricity used. Learning and using XHTML and CSS will also make you a better web developer.
2. Recycle your code. By using php and javascript you can call certain images and media that appear on multiple pages of your website only one time  instead of over and over again. You can also recycle code by calling certain scripts for multiple sites that are on your server that may be using the same code.
3. Create single page websites when possible. Once again, this reduces transfer rates which reduce the amount of energy being used.
4. Find hosting services with carbon-neutral companies. Carbon-neutral companies are businesses who have measured all of the carbon dioxide they are using and then alter their work ethic to remove as much of it as possible.

Dreamhost has gone carbon-neutral. If you are currently looking for a new host or thinking about switching your hosting services you can google ‘Dreamhost coupons’ and get amazing hosting services for an insanely cheap price!

A few environmentally friendly ways to save some extra cash

1. Power your computers down nightly.
2. Replace light bulbs around your office with energy-efficient light bulbs, which also last longer.
3. Keep a recycling bin near the printer. Lets face it, we run a lot of proofs to make sure our design looks right. If you aren’t able to decrease the amount of proofs you run per project, the least you can do is recycle them!
4. Stop faxing, start emailing! I know we have a lot of old school clients who still prefer faxing opposed to emailing. Using email as an alternative to faxing will save you the cost of paper, ink, and the cost of electricity it takes to keep a fax machine running 24/7.

If you are looking for a way to slowly wean your client off of faxing I’d suggest investing in an eFax account.

How have you reduced your carbon footprint?

The following 18 designer’s took a trip down memory lane to dig up old design projects from their archives and were kind enough to share them. The following showcase of design work was created by designers I feel have grown tremendously from their early days and are living proof that time and experience will only better you as a designer and as a professional.

Antonea Nabors, VelvetAnt (@antonea)

This was the 3rd project I ever made in college. It was my 2nd time ever using Illustrator. I drew all of the elements in this project, but clearly had total disregard for typography and readability. By the way, the bolted border is not uneven on purpose.

Colin Wright (@colinismyname)

This was the very first magazine spread I put together, I believe in one of my intro design courses. As you can see, I was very interested in mixing scanned illustration work and computer-based design from early on in my education!

Anthony Sanders, Freelance Designer (@anthonydsanders)

This was (and is STILL live) a website for a record label I did for very cheap about 6-7 years ago.

Rob MacKay (@svgrob)

This was a site I “designed” for a friend a good few years now, who was setting up a monthly bands event for showcasing new talent within churches in the Northwest of England – I’m very, very sorry.

Lauren “LaurenMarie” Krause, Creative Curio (@creativecurio)

Type specimen poster for my Intermediate Graphic Design class, 3rd quarter

Chris Spooner, Spoon Graphics (@chrisspooner)

This magazine page mockup was created back when I worked at a local design studio while studying for my degree. Looking back the design itself isn’t too bad, but there are a few mistakes around the grid layout, margins and typography that I can point out now.

Jacob Cass, Just Creative Design (@justcreative)

Anno Domini Logo & website designed back in 2004 when I was 15 years old for a heavy metal rock band. This was my second ever logo design and the third ever website design

Shannon Farrell (@dolceshan)

This was something I made for Package Design class. We had to create a unique container for an item of our choice. I find this completely laughable now with the shiny cinnamon, horrible shadows, and the fact that the round container looks very flat

Lee Munroe (@leemunroe)

Did this site about 6 years ago (when I was 18) for a local cinema, featuring tables and even a marquee. It’s still going too. www.iveagh.com

Matt Fouty (@mattfouty)

This logo was created in Adobe Illustrator 10 on an old crappy Dell PC laptop. I’m not real proud of it, but it really reminds me of how much I’ve learned since then!

Andy Sowards (@andysowards)

Wow, This post brings back a lot of memories. This is one of the earliest things I can remember creating in Photoshop.I believe I was using Photoshop CS, and I think I was 18 or 19 and in college when this was done. The image was mostly created using Brushes(some of my first attempts at using these) and some crude and simple layering effects with some hue/saturation modifications. I remember this was the first year that I had decided that I wanted to be a web designer/developer as I created many other images similar to this. Although my early work in those days revolved around pictures of myself taken on my camera phone, and sadly most just ended up in my myspace, where I also began showing interest in HTML/CSS. So I guess as much as I hate myspace now (for many reasons) It helped me realize a lot about my interests back in the day when it was still popular . Thanks for the opportunity Antonea, and Thanks to the visitors for reading, hope you found this flashback into my life insightful and interesting and learned a little about where I came from professionally!

Liz Andrade, CMD+Shift Design (@cmdshiftdesign)

Magazine cover for fictitious magazine, Voice. There just seems to be no regard to typography or grid on this, the only thing I actually like is the image concept – but that’s about it.

Andrew Kelsall (@andrewkelsall)

This was a Billboard Design I created back at University, about 9 years ago (when I was 21). The design was part of a D&AD brief, whereby all the students in my class were to create an advertising campaign for a company called “Breeze”—an organisation set in the future who took passengers on holiday to Mars.

I still think that this Billboard Design has a good concept, however, there are many elements I would change. Firstly, I would change the font, I feel it just doesn’t fit well. Secondly, I have no idea why I had chosen to enclose the logo in a white box—and that “exclamation mark” in the top right corner…what’s that all about? Thirdly, I would take away that dire purple border. I now see that it serves no real purpose.

If I were to produce this same design knowing what I know now about design with years of experience, needless to say it would look more professional and straight to the point. I would do-away with the clutter and produce a sleeker, more coherent design.

Jeremy Jaymes, Papertree Design (@jeremyjaymes)

On the left is a drawing from a 9th Grade Art class project in which we had to use grids to recreate a photograph to scale. I believe the photograph I choose came from a National Geographic but I am not 100% sure on that. On the right is a sketch of my hand taken from a sketchbook I have save for years. I would date this sketch sometime during my college years. On a side note I never actually completed a degree. Most of what I studied while attending either fell outside of the Art department or in the areas of Art History and Film.

Kawsar Ali, Desizn Tech (@desizntech)

This the first background I created for my portfolio site http://i-exist.co.cc I just had learned how to use photoshop brush and patterns. I kind “Od’ed ” with the patterns and brush. However, still I was so happy that I created something. I struggled for days just for creating that. I am still learning from all great web designer I meet online and I still feel like I  do not know anything about web design.

Stuart Thursby (@sthursby)

My degree was in history, and one class was so mind-numbingly boring that I did almost anything except pay attention. In one class, I was playing around in Photoshop and came up with this. Pretty garbage now, but hey, that’s the point, right!

Niamh Redmond (@nredmond)

A perspective on being Irish – Digital Imaging project. This was one of the first photographs that I experimented with in PhotoShop when I was 18.

Chad Engle (@chadengle)

An awesome school piece for a newspaper ad.

Thank you all so much for taking the time to participate. I am sure many of you were blowing the dust off of your old external hard drives to dig up some of your outdated work!

Web standards are a hot topic when it comes to the web design/development community, and a big part of web standards is having a flawless website consisting of no XHTML errors. It is very rewarding to get the green light from W3C verifying that your website is error free.

With so many considerations and requirements a web site must live up to, the last thing any designer or developer needs is more confusion. User capabilities, browser capabilities, and the headache IE causes are enough to worry about when juggling multiple web projects, right? Recently, web designer Nick Hand has created a solution to simplify a web designer/developer’s workflow. I sat down with Nick to talk about his new web project ‘StayValid,’ which is a web application used to manage the validation of all your web projects from one central location.

Enlighten us by sharing a little about yourself.
Well, I grew up in Palmer, Alaska, and wouldn’t trade that for the world. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Digital Arts and Design from Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida – graduated at the top of my class in June 2007, and had a job waiting for me back home in Alaska. I’ve been working as a Sr. Web Designer in Anchorage ever since. No I don’t live in an igloo, yes we have cars and electricity (obviously), no I don’t eat whale blubber, and yes I know Sarah Palin.

How did StayValid come about?
I’ve become somewhat of an advocate for valid and semantic code over the last couple years. The realization of just how much time and money is spent on making corrections for inferior browsers just blew me away.

After the many facepalms, tears, fits of rage, and more tears, I began to realize the problem wasn’t so much the browser’s fault – but the fact that we as web developers haven’t pushed strongly enough for a consistent set of standards to make our lives easier. How could we possibly expect Microsoft products to behave anything like other browsers without some set rules of how certain behaviors are rendered?

Since this realization, I began spending a decent amount of time running pages through the W3C validator. This can be time consuming in itself, when running page after page, at least for the core pages of your site. It just seemed like there should be an easier way to manage the validation of your entire site, and for that matter, multiple sites. Alas, the concept of StayValid was born.

How does StayValid work exactly?
The functionality of StayValid is a very simple premise. Essentially what you’re doing with our service is creating a hub for you to store and access all your validation scans in one place, so you can manage them with an easy-to-use interface to drastically simplify the process of making your sites validate.

For example, if you are a freelance web designer, or even a small studio that makes a new site every week, you can add each site subscription to your StayValid Dashboard, it is immediately scanned and your validation results are directly accessible on a per-page basis under that domain.

Making your site validate can be time consuming, and you may not have time to get it completed in one sitting. No worries, you can just visit StayValid at anytime, log in to your Dashboard, and your site subscriptions are waiting for you to continue reviewing errors. No need to scan your site again or scroll through endless unorganized code outputs that generally are the result of current online validators. StayValid has each page’s output neatly organized by URL. You can even choose to hide valid pages so they are out of your way. There’s a nifty new feature that allows you to scan an individual page directly from the error details view, so you don’t have to rescan your entire site just to recheck validation of one page!

Can you give us a briefing of your design process for this project?
My first thoughts for StayValid were mostly functionality-based, which lead me to trying to find if there was a service that provided what I was wanting to create with StayValid. As I searched – and came up empty handed – I found the sites that provided ANY validation functionality were painfully drab and unattractive.

Not only did this reflect poorly on the use of the sites’ functionality, it seemed to create a sort of ‘old fashioned’ feel to the whole process of validating. I wanted site validation to seem current, modern, and part of the future of web design and development – which I feel it is.

So I wanted the core of StayValid to be productive and stay focused to the goal, but I also am hoping to make a bit of an impression to show the ability to put a beautiful face on the somewhat code-based tedious functionality. There’s enough difficulty in sorting through your nonsense code to make it validate, I didn’t want it to be difficult to make your way around StayValid’s interface. That meant creating a slick, clean-cut environment that is easily navigated and keeps the power of the service at your fingertips while making it an enjoyable experience at the same time.

Sell yourself, why should designers/developers use StayValid opposed to a browser validation plugin or by visiting w3.org to validate sites?
Designers and developers all know that our time is valuable. Especially when it’s spent on things like cross-browser fixes, debugging javascript, or Search Engine Optimization. There’s no need to add site validation to the list of tedious time-consuming processes we tack on to the end of a project.

Using StayValid not only keeps all your site validation results organized in an intuitive, simple environment, but adds powerful tools like the ability to automatically have your site scanned every night, have your scan results emailed to you, and individual page scans on-the-fly while reviewing page errors. Knowing you can add a few site subscriptions, leave it, come back later, check the errors, fix them, rescan, be emailed when it’s complete, is just a comfort of having that much more control over your site’s maintainability. With each scan also comes the number of pages found with our site crawler, and a list of every page found on your site through internal linking. These can also be very powerful tools in site management.

What do you want people to know about StayValid?
I’m not going to claim that there is anything groundbreaking about the technology behind StayValid. It’s just a simple, yet powerful tool that has the potential to save very valuable time for designers and developers who feel it is important to maintain site validation.

StayValid will not stop at just producing site validation output, there’s more in the works, and I’d love to hear what people think of it, and what they would like to see come in future releases in areas of functionality. What would save you more time in your site development? What tools and time-saving options do you want to see? I value user feedback greatly, and I see a lot of potential to continue growing the power of StayValid to meet needs of today’s web developers.

Along with most web applications, StayValid is fresh out of the box, so bare with them as they work out the rough patches. You can help by giving feedback about your experience using StayValid – all user feedback is greatly appreciated and will only be used to make StayValid more useful and enjoyable for you. So be patient, but take advantage of the tools it provides!

Want a FREE Premium StayValid subscription? All VelvetAnt subscribers will have a chance to win 1 FREE Premium StayValid subscription or one of 2 FREE Basic StayValid subscriptions for 6 months! Click here for more information on StayValid and how to win your own free subscription.

I have compiled a list of inspirational and well thought out digital portfolios that I’d like to share with everyone. These are just some of the portfolios from agencies to individuals that I love to look at for inspiration. If there are any portfolios that you think are beautiful and inspirational please e-mail me or leave a comment about the portfolio, and I will try to post the most inspirational ones to share.

160over90 Branding Agency

ilovedust

loveleft

ACCENT CREATIVE

FARB

Tyler Askew

Stereo

Sea Design

TAK!

Le Caid

The Plant

Matt Keers

BB Saunders

Design Friendship

Alva Design Studio

Serious Situations

Black Belt Monkey

Yolo

Jamie Delaney

LOWMAN

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.