Is your graphic design work a mess?

Seeing these examples brings back memories... Clean Up Your Mess is a site that explains the most universal principle rules for design out there. Sure, what really makes great design has changed with fashion and fads. These rules are timelesss, however.  They can be broken. Often it's not worth the risk and more times than not fails.

I remember working as a newspaper ad designer over four years ago. The sales and design staff were totally separate. The sales staff was put into the position to care only about making their commission. It didn't matter if the retailers who bought ads had a successful ad. One that had impact. Designers weren't given the access to make recommendations.  So usually the ads requested by the sales staff and retailers were listings and heads. Way too much content. Oh, and it all had to "stand out".  Put this in a burst? Put this in a box? More typefaces please? If only there was a way to get them to clean up the mess.

Clean Up Your Mess, A guide to visual design for everyone (visualmess.com), discovered via Lifehacker

The Journey to Freelance Graphic Design (Infographic)

Tired of your old day job? Even though you're a designer doing pretty well, you could be more independent and have more control. This infographic by wix.com plots out the steps you need to take to build up your clientele and say goodbye to your boss. Have you made the journey or at least are thinking about it? Tell us your experiences in the comments

Courtesy of wix.com

Choosing Graphic Design Work that Matches Your Values

Career Opportunities By The Cleveland Kid

How do you make sure that your work fits in line with your personal ethics? Although this is a post targeting designers and artists, almost every working person deals with this issue at some point. You might have seen a colleague who thinks it's "just business". And chances are you don't trust this person, even if it seems like they're a fine upstanding citizen outside of work.  When taking a job, full time or client based, do you think about the clients ethics?

What are work values? These are the set of beliefs that you've acquired over your life. Mom and dad instilled you with a sense of right and wrong.  There's nothing worse than feeling like you have to do something you're fundamentally against to survive or because you've agreed to a job you don't agree with.

Evaluating your client: First of all, let's qualify this by saying you should understand your potential employer. Go in with an open mind.  Sure this company may have a bad reputation in your industry for it's practices, but without discussing it with them and doing your research you don't really know if it's a good fit. If you're hoping for repeat business, ask your client about any potential for more work.

Take the time right now to do a self assessment. Figure out what your core ethics are. Perhaps it's important to you that you have a certain amount of autonomy with your projects.  Accept nothing less.  There are clients out there that will trust you to complete the work.  I've designed marketing projects where I've heard very little from the client and they're happy with the end results. Your dream client is out there.  Imagine that you want autonomy and have no part in the decision making process. How upset will you be?  Imagine if you thrive in variety and have to do a monotonous job.

In the end, you won't be truly happy with your work unless you're following your own morality. It's not just business, it's a huge part of your life.  Figure out what's really important and use that knowledge in your decision making.  Say no to the clients and career moves that don't match up.

Designing Something You Hate?

I ♥ Graphic Design by Craig Keeling

How do you deal with that tough design project?  The one that you probably shouldn't have taken onto in the first place.  Or it's the part of the project that you knew would be least fun. Whatever the reason, you don't want to work on this project.  This could even apply to a full time job or your whole career.  Here's a few tips on how to deal

Stay positive. Your positive attitude can be infectious. If it's that project where the client is never happy, maybe it's just that they don't know what happiness looks like.  Point out the positive elements to yourself and others.  Don't spend your time away from it complaining. Or at least limit your complaints. Your family likes you better when you're focused on the upside.

Planning.  A plan can make something you hate turn into at least something you can bare until the check clears. Figure out an escape plan, detailing all the steps from here until the end of the project.  If you have an exit route in place, you might find that it's not so bad after all.

Find time for what you enjoy.  If you could afford to quit, you probably would have by now.  You agreed to the work for a reason.  But it shouldn't consume your life.  Take the time out of every day to do something that truly makes you happy and takes your mind away to your happy place.

Learn from the experience.  Next time you're faced with taking up work you don't want to do, remember this day.  Do whatever it takes to never have to tackle the nightmare project again.  If your full time job is one nightmare after another, it's time to move on.  Figure out your exit plan.  Fire your trouble clients.  Get away from the boss you hate. Don't get away from one situation just to end up in a similar situation elsewhere.

Book Review: The Photoshop CS3/CS4 Wow! Book (works with CS5)

Photoshop CS3/CS4 Wow! Book, The (8th Edition)

What's Good: A large book filled with many detailed tutorials. DVD included has tutorial files, layer styles, patterns, custom tools and other useful tools.

What's Bad: Visuals are small thumbnails. Not ideal for beginners.

Verdict: Clunky navigation and inconsistent visuals don't prevent the detailed content from hitting the mark. A great book for day to day reference on very commonly used effects.

Full Text Review

Do you need to apply an image to a texture surface? Have a design concept that includes styling photos into a vintage, old time look? Or just need to tweak the lighting for a photo? These are the kind of day to day problems that the can be solved by The Photoshop CS3/CS4 Wow! Book by Linnea Dayton and Cristen Gillespie.

The massive book is broken into 11 sections starting with "Fundamentals of Photoshop" and "Photo Skills", diving into specific sections of tips and tricks and moving into a chapter on "Putting it All Together".

The first chapters ease you into Photoshop with an introduction to the program and its tools. There are better books for beginners, however, so if you have this book you probably know quite a bit. The essential skills discussed includes many new features that are new in these versions. The book also touts that it will work with CS5 so you'll be ahead of the game if you brush up on smart objects, filters and some of the newer selection tools.

The next third of the book is about enhancing photography. This isn't yet the "Wow" set of tutorials you'd expect from the book title. These are a great reference, however, for day to day photography or design work. In depth discussion on fixing common photo problems, such as an overdetailed background, the content aware scale feature to independently move a photo's background, and toning effects.

The painting section is when the magic starts to happen. Some very impressive and convincing art techniques are discussed and the examples are inspiring for a designer. I only wish that the book would take advantage of it's space and show larger more eye catching images. Tutorials are easily missed in the large walls of text without an image to draw you in. The "Wet on Wet" Acrylics is one of my favorites as it shows a fairly convincing painting technique. The pastel and chalk tutorials are pretty nice as well. Illustrators will be interested in the real life examples of artists using Photoshop to create works and the detailed text describing how they did it.

The clip art effects section looks either dated or amateurish. The techniques behind them are probably useful, but the examples don't look like anything I could imagine being in a real design. This is a set of chapters dealing with using vector graphics and applying effects to them. We don't arrive to the eye candy again until the second half of the type and graphics section which again reviews over illustrators discussing their works and the effects they use.

Finally, we reach the section that puts it all together. It's some of the standard tattoo and object mapping that you'd hope for in any of these books. The info graphics discus using the photomerge techniques to create a panorama. It's pretty informative and explains the concept well. There are tutorials on mapping objects in perspective which you can imagine using to mock up a banner or signage in a photo.

Largely, these book ends up being more of a reference than anything you'd expect to read from cover to cover. The navigation of the book is a bit clunky in that case, but the content is there and if you like what you've read, it's definitely worth it's price.

This post is part of an ongoing series of book reviews. To suggest a book for review, send a message via twitter @sketchee or leave a comment.