I may be a horrible design snob, but I won’t even consider purchasing a product or service unless its design is appealing. This might mean the packaging, marketing materials, the product itself, or, that traveling salesman of design elements, the logo. Now, if you’re a freelancer working on your own, you may not have enough money to pay for a professional logo design.
You don’t have to spend a lot to get something that looks like it was professionally designed. Even if your company name is just your own name, which is the case for a lot of freelancers, you should take the time to make sure it can become a recognizable brand.
A lot of people are daunted when faced with even basic design work, but, even without advanced tools, you can produce something impressive enough to work as a website header or make an otherwise blasé business card design pop. First, let’s assume your only tools are a basic office suite, and you have absolutely no drawing skill.
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As a developer and some-time designer, I’m always on the lookout for tools to make communicating with customers easier. For many things, the textual tools that web workers reach for are sufficient: email, wikis, project management systems, instant messages, and so on. But sometimes you just need to draw a picture to get your point across. The latest tool I’ve run across for this is Balsamiq Mockups - and it’s a nice tool indeed.
When you run the desktop version, you get an empty window that looks like a notebook page (complete with spiral binding) and a menu bar of controls - everything from web browser shells to progress bars to charts to maps to all sorts of widgets. To construct a user interface mockup, you drag from the menu bar to the drawing area, then click and drag and resize things. Widgets that contain data - like a table or a textbox - make it easy to edit that data, so customizing the user interface for the application you’re showing off is trivial.
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I like simple. Simple means I don’t have to think too hard and - done well - has a kinda elegance about it. Mike Padilla’s Protonotes is one such idea, a service that provide a simple and elegant solution to a clear problem - annotating web sites that are works in progress with sticky notes.
Re-launched just a few days ago from its previous incarnation as an Internet Explorer based tool, the now cross-platform Protonotes lets site designers and developers add annotation capability to a web site, service, application or prototype by simply dropping in a few lines of Javascript code.
Though it’s possible to achieve the same effect by wikis, email, IM or discussion boards, there’s nothing like direct manipulation and seeing comments right in context. Try the sandbox demo for yourself here.
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As a former designer who still dabbles in the odd piece of commercial or hobbyist work, I’m sometimes stuck at the inception of a project, trying to discover the initial creative sparks that ignite a design, for those fragments of inspiration that set out the path from a blank Photoshop document to a living design.
Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites - onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.
These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ - I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context - and in a connected era - is strangely unsociable.
Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.
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