And Now Announcing...

Some of the changes I said I'd do.

Blog design: check.

Portfolio: check.

Still working on that order form, but otherwise things are definitely coming along concerning the check list.

Hope everyone has a great holiday season- I thought I would post a few noteworthy things today that I find I am especially thankful for.

1. This blog.
   
   In essence, this blog has been my sanity. It has taken me up and down, and given me a real project that I can sink my teeth into. With it, I am experimenting with SEO tips and tricks, and experimenting to see what works and what does not work. It is the fruit of my labor, and while it may only be a small voice in the large realm of the Internet, I hope that it is one that is worth something to someone.



2. The clients who made this happen.
   
   While my work with BDI has taken up much of my time as of late, I would like to thank the people who have asked me to do sites for them. I have had some great freelance clients, many of which return for their half-price site redesign (and sometimes, the occasional free redesign I give under certain circumstances). I put a great amount of thought and research into each design, and with a little bit of care, something that surpasses the expectations of the client always seems to come out. :)



3. The directories.
   
   When it comes to SEO, one of the most important things is link building. As a web designer, this can be difficult to do, unless you are listed in a few directories. I would like to extend a note of applause to web designer directories which connect clients to web designers, and especially ones which do it for a minimal fee.



4. GNU and Open Source
   
   I love NeoOffice and everything Open Source, as I feel that this is a field which allows us to advance and develop technology further and in ways that it may not have been allowed to go.



5. iTunes
   
   Music keeps me sane among a world filled with insanity. BT is a current favorite in this area.

There are countless other things... But these are a few that are especially hitting me at the moment.

Photoshop/Illustrator Tutorial: Cool Golden Globe

A few people have asked me how I created the globe in the logo for Charles Rich Accounting. I decided to take a moment, and go ahead and write a tutorial of it. This tutorial utilizes Photoshop and Illustrator; I will try to explain each step as best as I can with the aim that even a person beginning with these two programs will understand it. I link to images (which will open in a new window) in order to save page load time. :)

Created with Photoshop CS3 and Illustrator CS3, so I am not 100% sure how this will degrade for older versions.

1. Open Illustrator, and create a new document. Make a large circle using the Ellipses Tool while holding shift, and put a Radial Gradient in it. It should look like this (please note that size is not important at this point, but a medium-ish size is best).

2. Open Photoshop and take an image of the Earth as seen from space. This NASA image should work well. Remove the dark area; this can easily be done by applying a mask, selecting a small part of the dark part, and going to Select > Grow, then hitting delete (please note that black will need to be your secondary color, otherwise this will not work). It should look like this.

3. Now copy and paste your circle from Illustrator into Photoshop. Paste as a Smart Object, as it will be resized later on.

4. From the Layers panel, set the Smart Object's to color. The image will look like this now.

5. Now go to your Filters > Distort and spherize the Smart Object twice. To do this quickly, hit Cmd + F (or Ctrl + F for Windows users), like this.

6. Duplicate your Smart Object, and set it to Soft Light. It should look like this now.

7. Now reize the globe with Cmd + T (or Ctrl + T) and hold shift while shrinking it inward. It can now be cleaned up; this can be done easily by placing the layers in a group from the Layers panel and applying a Layer Mask in order to remove any strange boarders. Tip: if the golden part of the globe shrinks differently from the rest of the Earth, Rasterize the Smart Objects from the Layers Panel by right-clicking and selecting Rasterize. Please note, however, that if you were to now resize the image some of its quality will be lost.

8. Return to Illustrator, and draw two lines with the Pen Tool (P) and make them curve (Shift+C or Shift+A), like so. Make sure they are both different lines and not one large shape; it is easier if they are drawn separately and then dragged them so that their tails touched.

9. Now select both of the lines (Cmd/Ctrl + V). Go to Object > Blend > Make; a single line will appear between the two lines. Return to the same menu, but this time click on blend options, and choose the option Specify Steps, with 20-25 lines.

10. If you copy/paste your golden globe into Illustrator, you can then tweak the lines in order to make them fit around the globe, giving it a flying effect. Now, paste them into Photoshop. Apply a mask to these, and clean up the lines again. If you are unhappy with their coloring or shape, you can double-click on the smart object to import it back to Illustrator to put some final tweaks to them.

And now you have a flying golden globe! Here is the PSD if you would like to download it!

Designing, Working, and Ethics

In the 1970s, a college psychology professor conducted an experiment with his students. They were to ask questions of a person; if the person were to get the answer wrong, an electrical shock would be applied to them. The more questions the person answered wrong, the stronger the shocks became. No answer meant a wrong answer.

The students were told that they would fail their psychology class if they did not do as they were told. They applied greater and greater shocks to the person they were asking questions, and of course, the person would eventually stop answering as the shocks became greater and greater - some of which were double the amount of electrical power needed to kill a man.

The good news is, the person being shocked was an actor, and no person was hurt during the experiment (save for the mentality of the students, I would assume). The bad news, the students show how despite ethics, a person will do as they are told without question.

Do we, as humans and creatures raised in a society filled with elders and authority, do as we are told despite our deepest morals? Give a control situation in which one partner of a relationship has somehow gained absolute domain over the other person - how does the other person break free of this domination to pursue the things which they feel are right and proper?

I believe that humans are generally ethical creatures, or at least the majority of them tend to strive to be ethical. No, I'm not stating that there aren't bad people in the world (I, of anyone, know that there are), but I believe that everyone has some sort of set of morals and beliefs.

When I first began designing, I had a head full of hope and thought that I was going to change the world in some way by creating sites for people and organizations that I could post in my portfolio, and that this way I would be able to watch myself grow and progress.

The first design I was awarded was to build an adult site on a CMS for $2000.

I say awarded because I did not do the site. The $2000 looked great and everything - but for what? I was a budding artist, and admittedly, images of women doing that sort of thing with goats and various other farm animals did not seem like something I would want to spend hours upon hours with. I am not saying that adult sites are against my morals, but honestly thoughts of horror immediately sprang up - what if that was all the work I received? How was I supposed to build up my portfolio on a site that I would never want a large CEO to see that I did?

Do we as designers have to accept adult sites? Especially young, budding designers who are fresh from the mill and just learning to crank out code. And say the designer finished the site, and it is one of the best sites the designer has created - would they then display it in their portfolio?

An old coworker of mine once said to me that while it is great having morals, there are times and jobs in which a person has to set them aside in order to survive. While this person's night job was not the most honorable thing a woman could do, it allowed her to survive in a terribly difficult world. It brings me to the question of designers who work in an agency - what if your employer sets aside his or her own morals for what you perceive as immoral sites (whether sites pertaining to various activities with farm animals, or even sites pertaining to subjects which borderline criminal activity)? With the world economy where it is now, a person cannot simply quit their job on a given whim, no matter what sort of decisions their employment makes. A person does what they can to survive - those were the words that a person I admire and respect once told me. A good friend of mine is currently in the situation of a crossroads behind quitting and staying on at his job because of the decisions of his management; while I assume he is going to try better prospects, it is understandable why he is having a difficult decision.

So, what do we do? Ethics or design?

Planned Changes

A few planned changes.

1. Update blog interface.
   
   To be honest with you, I simply selected the first blog design because this blog was hatched before I sent my site's redesign live. I've been planning to make it mirror the site itself, and honestly, have been working on other things instead.


2. Update the portfolio.
   
   Currently none of my print work is showing at all because I have not yet posted it - and it does make up a decent portion of my portfolio. I also need to begin to display my logo designs and illustrations. I plan to do this in a savvy accordion-type fashion, mostly because I hate scrolling :)


3. Send a pricing table live.
   
   Dre has agreed to help me code this up (I could code it myself, but I need to attend to all of the things on this list, so working with other people certainly has its charms!


4. Link to my social networking sites!
   
   I am bad about not updating Twitter as much as I should, but I do keep tidbits on DeviantArt, and my work in progresses concerning illustration.


5. Ideas.
   
   I bought a note pad today to keep with me wherever I may go, so that when a new idea or concept hits me, I have something to write it down with.


6. Marketing
   
   I'm bad at marketing. I need to market my own freelance as much as I help other people do.

I certainly do not think I missed anything.

My Pricing

With the world economy the way it is, it is becoming much and much harder to find work for many people.

In the world of design, I have heard views from different sides discussing the impact that the economy will have on design. Some are stating that design, as a part of the marketing sector, should be quite healthy. Others, however, are pointing out that businesses will be cutting the costs, and design will be one of those areas.

I work for an SEO company during the day, and do freelance at night in order to pay the bills. It is, admittedly, very hard to find clients in this day and age, especially ones which are willing to pay a premium for a service that they can see, but honestly cannot touch or even grab, and the fact remains that not all businesses have fully embraced the power that is the Internet.

The difficult part is pricing. There are thousands of articles about how to price freelance, and they are all correct - you do not wish to come off as unsure of your skills and so you wish to price at a premium, but at the same time, you wish to be able to "score" a client or a project, but with the third addition being that you do not want to waste your time on a project that is completely useless, takes a long time, and is steeply underpriced for the amount of effort you put into it.

This is why I have decided to price my projects depending on what is included.

I am working on setting up an order form and pricing catalogue for my own packages. It is under development currently; given that I work full time on top of freelance, progress is moving slowly, but I am looking to consult Dre to split the workload, as we do with our projects already.

I would say that this gives your client the best view of what they are getting. A base price for the design, hosting, DNS, miscellaneous things (such as Internet Explorer compatibility, E-Commerce, and other programming nitty-gritties), and price per page (or set it up based upon 3-page and 5-page sites, with a base price for additional pages) would be a good starting point. As all things involved in a web designer's site are always under construction, newer features can be added to this order form - maybe you wish to offer a CSS/HTML engineering service as well, things such as that - so, what you start with can be the bare bones for you to build up on.

And, in an economy like this, it is always good for the client to be able to see why they are paying so much for what they are getting. :)