How to Be a Better Client

Freelance designers know how to be freelancers, and if they don’t there are plenty of quality articles that can tell them how to.

There are the ‘How Much Do I Charge’ articles the ‘How Do I Write A Service Agreement’ articles and of course the ‘But How Much Do I Charge If It’s A Good Friend” articles. What seems to be missing however, are articles that describe what should be expected of the client. Or in other words, the ‘How To Be A Good Client’ article.

The really good freelancers have learned by trial and error the detrimental effects that lousy clients can have on thier business and sanity. Many have even learned to smell a crooked potential client a mile away.

But at times, even the best of us can end up with the short end of the stick, doubting our skills and our worth.

Although this article may not be read by the one’s who need to see it the most, It may be just as helpful to freelancers who don’t yet know what SHOULD be expected of a client or potential client.

Addressing this to someone who is looking to hire a freelancer and assuming that said freelancer is somewhat seasoned, here are a few guidelines of note.

Figure Out What You Want – A designer needs a little more than “I want a modern looking site for my business”. You may not be the most tech savvy dude on the planet, but you should at least have a solid idea of what you do and do not want. A little research goes a long way. Check out some other sites or logos on the web that interest you and refer to them when talking to your freelancer.

Dont’ Be Cheap – If you hire a designer for $25 an hr. your design is going to look like you hired a designer for $25 an hr. Designing is more than just pixel-pushing. It takes a plethora of various refined skills, from understanding of typography to extensive knowledge of various software design platforms, not to mention the industry and market research that your designer engages in before beginning your project. This is your web presence, corporate identity or possibly your attempt at becoming the next Google or Facebook, either way it is being custom made to your specifications. How much is that worth to you?

Sign the Bloody Contract! – Yes, It is standard for a freelancer to send you one. Yes, it is standard for a freelancer to deny you speculative work and require a deposit before they begin working on your project. Remember a service agreement is not a ransom note, the designer most likely does not have an evil master plan to kidnap your project details and mocks until you pay up. it has been designed and put into place in order to protect the interests of all parties involved. If you have concerns about the terms and conditions set forth in the agreement you can negotiate some mutual changes, but first make sure you’ve done the following:

1. Read the contract.
2. Respond to the freelancer and let them know that you will be looking it over and getting back to them shortly.
3. Read the contract.
4. Make note of anything that you might find suspicious or disagreeable.
5. Read the contract.
6. Have your lawyer read the contract (although rarely necessary).
7. Don’t skip to step 4 if you haven’t yet done step 2.
8. Don’t do anything until you READ the contract.

You get the idea.

Send Them What They Need to Work With – Do you have a logo? Did you provide them with a project scope or details? Some examples of what design elements interest you? You don’t need to do the work for them, but letting them know that you hate bright purple or that you like tabbed navigation can save you alot of time (and money) down the road.

Don’t Call Them if You Get the Urge to Change the Header Font at 6am – The designer needs time. Time to do a little research or look over the project scope and details that you provided them. Tiny technical revisions are annoying when they are trying to get thier creative juices flowing and conceptualize the project. Make a list of all the things that you think you might want to change. Bring them all up at the appropriate time. Keep in mind that many freelancers keep strange hours and may end up working on your project while the rest of the world is sleeping. Don’t worry it WILL get done.

The Designer Knows Best A persistent client who doesn’t take the advice they’re paying for is cursed to get what they insist upon. The freelancers first mock is a sea foam green logo with a nice Sans-Serif Tahoma for the site content. Sure, you like the color red and you really really want to use that cool Captain Podd font. But what you may not know is that Captain Podd will look more like Captain Illegible when rendered in any web browser besides your own, and unless you’re sending out an SOS, red might not be the best choice for your healthspa logo. Have you thought about that? No? Well your freelancer did.

It’s Teamwork – Never mind the ‘client’, ‘freelancer’ labels, in the end you’re just collaborators on the same side of the line whose ultimate purpose is to produce great (and hopefully lucrative) work. Work that with a little cooperation might just surpass either one’s expectations.

Case Study Part 1: Logo Design with a Taste of Ginger

Every once in a while, I come across a great design project with just the right balance of technical challenge and creative freedom. The recent restaurant logo design I did for Wild Ginger was one of those projects. The owners of Wild Ginger Japanese Restaurant wanted a unique look, something with traditional Eastern flavor but with a modern edge. They planned to use the design for their restaurant building sign as well as feature it on their menus, take out boxes and the like. I was particularly excited about this project because I had never designed a sign for a building before and the prospect of having one of my creations glowing in neon at the entrance to a restaurant sounded really cool : )

This post is part creative encounter, part design tutorial, as I thought there might be other designers out there stepping into the print world for the first time, that could benefit from a recount of some of my design foibles and triumphs.

Where To Start

The only compulsory design elements that needed to be incorporated into the logo were a ginger plant and the restaurant’s name. Everything else was pretty much up to me. Now I’ve seen a ginger root, but a ginger plant? I decided to start with a little research. Using a few pictures of vibrant green ginger plants that I found around the web, I tried to sketch something that reflected their best angles and qualities. I wanted it to look fresh, clean, but also a little bit wonky and well… wild! My doodles resulted in this:

Not much to look at yet, but my mind was already bubbling with ideas for color and shading. I jumped into Photoshop to setup my workspace. To keep things nice and tidy, I setup my layers panel like this:

Next I created a single image made up of a few different vector shapes that resemble my sketch.

It’s All In The Name

Time to move onto the wordmark. Just to refresh, in logo design there are really three main types of logos.

1. Wordmark – Which consists of the company name in a stylized type that may include small abstract or pictorial elements. Examples include:


2. Abstract Mark- Which uses abstract shapes and symbols to convey an idea or attribute about the organization. Examples include:


3. Emblem- Which features the name of the company typically enveloped by a pictorial element or shape. Examples include:

Regardless of which of the three design types I’m working on, I think it’s the wordmark that is most important. The brand name is what represents the business and it’s also how people will find the establishment and how they will associate their style. Only a handful of companies are privileged enough to go ‘sans wordmark’ so unless your Nike’s next trainer or on the McDonalds dollar menu, the focus and emphasis should be first on Wordmark (typography, kerning and layout) and second on Abstract Mark or Emblem incorporation.

In the case of Wild Ginger, their logo design needed to be a combination of a wordmark (the restaurant name) and an abstract mark (the ginger plant). Since this was going to be on the restaurant building (and thus blown up to Google Maps sized proportion), I didn’t want to go with your average Helvetica or Arial, no, this needed to special and one of a kind.

Typography

I knew the perfect font to start with, a little something I purchased a while back and have rarely if every used commercially. It’s ultra modern and a little playful, yet not too so much so that it’s unreadable or unprofessional. You can download this font for free here!

Now while I adore this particular font in it’s entirety, It just wasn’t custom enough for my client, so I decided to deconstruct it, keeping the letters that I really liked and replacing the ones that I wasn’t so keen on with others. But I saved a copy of the original font for the Wild Ginger text untouched on a hidden layer so that I could refer back and always have a fresh working copy.



Then I retyped the letters that I wanted to keep from that font, with each letter on a separate layer, so that I could manually adjust the kerning (space between the letters).

I had a pretty good idea of the attributes I was looking for in the letters and with a little trial and error I came up with a 5 font combination that really fit. I kept each letter on it’s own layer so that I could change the size, height, baseline etc of the different fonts. Because as you know, not all fonts are created equal :)

Next I messed around with the placement of the wordmark in relation to the abstract mark. At first, I sort of just stuck it in between the two words because I didn’t really like how it looked anywhere else. But something was definitely missing, some sort of punctuation or separation, that’s when I started to get creative with color.

Layout and Background

I was a little stumped for ideas, until I started thinking about the various applications of the logo. “What will it look like on the menus”? I pondered. I decided to play around with this thought to help spur my imagination.

I started with a horizontal separation using blocks of color. I wanted to go with red for sure as an accent and to give it an Asian feel and then another more subdued color for contrast and balance. The charcoal gray worked perfectly with the red gradient.

I thought that the logo needed a tag-line or some sort of phrase to go with it. Well it’s a Japanese Restaurant right? Let’s go with that.

Perfect, that fits, now there’s more of clear cut purpose to this separation idea that I was feeling it needed. And the ginger plant doesn’t look so randomly placed (although it kinda was ; ). Also, the vibrant, rich red color of the background told me exactly what color the ginger needed to be. I got to work on a nice lime to light lime green gradient that sort of mimics the sun illuminating it from above. I also inverted the text color to make it pop against the background. Now this is looking pretty good, time to see what the clients think.



The response was unanimous and positive! They really loved the overall concept, typography choice and colors, just a few minor changes to accommodate the building sign company and the menu company before the logo is finalized.

One thing they requested that I change was the tagline from “Japanese restaurant’ to “Pan-Asian Cuisine”. Now, the only thing left to do was to convert the whole thing to a vector so that it is fully scalable for whatever medium they decide to display it on.

Now Photoshop and vectors aren’t the best of friends, so for the next post I’m going to jump into Adobe Illustrator to do a few quick and basic things to make my logo print ready.

Stay Tuned!

Free Download: Wefunction Icon Set

The nice fellas over at Wefunction have rolled out a shiny, sexy new set of 128 completely free icons. All the standards plus a few of those oh so popular social media icons. Check em out, and don’t forget to spread the word.

             

128 Free Icons | Download Here

72photos on Read Write Web

Thanks to Sarah Perez for this thorough and insightful write-up.

Breakdown of Modern Web Design

          

Thanks to Alan Foreman of poisonedminds.com for this unsettlingly accurate depiction.

72photos featured on Ajaxian

An interview with XMG networks CEO Eric A.

...and in my opinion a far too modest account of the phenomenal photo hosting service that is 72photos.

Web's Modern Bottoms

“Modern web designers have finally decided to utilize thier bottoms”.

And even those that don’t supplement their income with prostitution have begun to do something productive with the bottom of their web pages.

This once fledgling amount of site known as the ‘footer’ usually reserved for credits and disclaimers has finally been acknowledged as the valuable pixel-holding space that it is.

Many modern footers now contain a plethora of supplemental and/or irrelevant information including but not limited to such things as bios, 72photos and flicker streams, subliminal mind control messages, tags and contact forms.

Personally, I am proud that we have finally broken through the self-induced perception that footers are less significant or unimportant in comparison to the rest of the page.

Yet for every innovative idea there are always those who insist upon imparting their own particular slant of silly into the mix. Case in point: Logo Pond.

Naturally, one begins at the top of the webpage, perhaps a quick glance at the nav, then down a bit further eyes darting left to right from ‘Featured Showcase’ across to all the lovely little logos fashioned into square boxes and laid out into rows, scrolling further down making mental notes of your favorites designs, you may even decide to…

“Quaaa? Is that the nav again?” “wait was I scrolling up or dow…MY GOD MAN! “There’s an entire site down here under this entire site?”

Now, In no way do I mean to slander the good name or the good vision of Logo Pond itself. On the contrary I oft find myself in sheer admiration of it’s compiled content.

This is merely a dramatic reenactment of a possible user response evoked by a designer’s complete and utter disregard for web design common sense in favor of unnecessary and repetitious tom-foolery involving the footer.

In the following ordered list, I have attempted to identity, label and categorize (in much the same way we did to each other in high school) the modern footer:

1. The Gobstopper – It never ends, you don’t even remember when it started. The color has changed midway through along with the texture, tone, and flavor. And yes, like the everlasting gobstopper, jaw detachment may occur due to design induced shock.
Example: Logo Pond.

2. The Sims – Imitating proximity to the ground by tiling dirt patterns and grass textures or re-creating little villages of people living at the bottom of the website. It’s strange, its bizarre and I don’t know who started it or why.

http://www.vimeo.com

3. Michael Jackson – Distinct or contrasting color change. When done tastefully, it can add a nice bit of pop drawing attention to specific content. On the other hand don’t scare people with abrupt color changes that don’t correlate in any way to the original color you started with.

http://www.ungarbage.com

4. Reality TV Web – Realistic looking things taken from still life such as notebooks, pens, fruits and flowers. Am I on a webpage on in a salad bowl? One should never have to ask this question.

http://www.catalyststudios.co.uk/

5. Mini Facebook – Contact forms, portfolios, maps, search bars, tag clouds. They’ve got so much personal information packed into this footer that anti-stalking plans are provided with their hosting.

http://www.jasonsantamaria.com/

Any of the aforementioned styles of footer can and have been done in acceptable, useful and creative ways. So by all means put your best ‘foot’er forward, but do not under any circumstance allow me to continue to use these horrendous puns by being reckless with your bottoms.

Efficient Photoshop for the Web

A recent post on the 37signals blog has prompted me to analyze my own approach to the design and development process of web applications. The article over at signal vs noise entitled Why We Skip Photoshop was an interesting (albeit unsurprising) declaration about the 37signals design approach. While I am inclined to agree with them, I do think that there are specific reasons why foregoing Photoshop works well for them but would not for others.

Read the rest of this entry