Develop a Good Reputation

You are going to struggle to start off a graphic design business in the first place unless you are able to show off your work. For this reason, a lot of people start off in a freelance capacity before gradually building up to taking the business full-time. In California, there are plenty of companies that could utilize your services. Therefore, this is a good opportunity to start to develop your niche. While your ultimate ambition may be to work with a major company like Google or Facebook, this is inevitably going to take a lot of time and effort. You are going to need to cut your teeth in the world of design first and show that you are able to do the job well. Not only this, but you need to develop a reputation for reliability and deliver great results on time, every time.

Set Your Branding and Website

Obviously, if you are going to be running a design business, it is inevitably the case that you need to have a beautifully branded logo, color scheme, etc. Not only this, but you also need a website that is all singing and all dancing. This is likely to be the first impression that potential clients form of your company, so you need to make sure that you are doing it in the right way. Of course, when in California, there are also plenty of business-focused events on offer. Therefore, you need to produce a range of business-focused marketing materials that you are able to distribute to leave a good impression a long time into the future.

How to Start a Design Business – Start on the SEO

As so many people search for products and services online these days, it makes sense that your business is as searchable as it possibly can be. A big part of SEO activities should be dedicated to attracting local traffic. This means that you are regularly including California in your search terms. However, when you are first starting out, you may even want to be more localized than this. Therefore, think about being more specific with the name of your town or your region. Remember, SEO is an ongoing battle, and you cannot expect to get brilliant results overnight. It is going to take time to reach the level that you would like to.

Think About Your Price Structure

You next have the task of charging clients to cover off. This means thinking about whether you would like to charge them by the hour or based on the project completion. It also means that you are going to need to compare and contrast what you are offering with other local enterprises. If you are going to position your price point a long way above them, you need to have a clear justification as to why this is the case. At the same time, you do not want to undersell yourself. As California is clearly such a creative hub, it may well be that you want to charge more than you would in another part of the country.

Set Your Business Up for Success

Beyond the obvious skill that you need in the field of design, you also need to be prepared to set your business up for success in other areas. It means that you set up your business to be tax compliant to ensure that you are not going to be hit with a huge bill further down the line. It also means that you should make sure that you get the proper legal advice to ensure that you are compliant. You should also look into how you can get business coverage in California. This way, if you need it, you have it to rely upon. Of course, another central aspect is ensuring that you have a solid business plan that you can follow through as closely as possible and some market research that shows clearly when and where you are going to position yourself on the market.

How to Start a Design Business – Chase Up Your Payments

When you start to produce work for people, it is essential that you make sure that you get paid. Otherwise, you are not managing your cash flow situation properly. In a new business, this can be extremely damaging, and you can easily find yourself in a situation when you are not able to sustain yourself. Making sure that you work with people who are reliable is an important starting point. Also, some businesses find that they are better able to encourage people to pay on time by giving them an incentive such as a reduced payment or a discount on their next order.

Build Up a Referral System

It is important that you are able to spread your good name as widely as possible. One central way of doing this is by coming up with a referral system. This way, you are incentivizing people to pass your details onto others. Hopefully, once you get the ball rolling, you are then going to be able to spread a referral code from one person to the next.

How to Start a Design Business – Keep Innovating

When you live in a highly innovative environment such as California, you need to make sure that you are constantly innovating and coming up with new ways of doing things. This way, you are going to be able to stand out from the crowd rather than producing the same thing over and over again. Of course, when you are setting up a graphic design business in California, you are going to have your work cut out, but these are some of the ways of achieving success.

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Using Textures in Design Projects – Types of Textures

Natural Textures

Natural textures can bring life and warmth to your design. Mother nature is full of many things that have textures on a certain scale. The object’s texture can be smooth, rough, soft, hard, matt, and glossy. The texture will stimulate the sight and touch senses.

Artificial Textures in Design

Artificial textures comprise a wide range of surreal patterns that humans fabricate. They can be washed out texture, fabric, paint-brush, and wall surfaces. Designers can create a wide variety of artificial textures with the use of a modern image editor. You can combine different types of textures to create a unique texture design.

Using Textures as Backgrounds

Background texture can add a perceived appearance of the subject. Background texture can be used selectively to enhance certain parts of your artwork. Certain types of textures in design can make your graphics appear more 3D. It can show that the original graphic artwork is printed on the texture used in the background. Many people like to use texture backgrounds to create a vintage aesthetic appearance. You can use a textured background with distress marks to replicate a vintage appearance. For example, you can use textures in black and white photography, portraits, and buildings.

Overlaying Textures in Your Artwork

Textures as an overlay can offer vintage or worn appearance to an image. The textures in design are placed in a new layer over the original image. Changing the layer blending mode will help you to achieve an effect. You can play with the different options to achieve different effects. Sometimes, the effect will look great. At other times, the effect you create will look weird. The blend mode has to darken for adding darkening effect and lightening group for adding lightening effect. You can move and resize the texture layer and make changes to the layer opacity.

How to Find and Use Textures in Your Artwork

Planning is the Key to Create a Texture

The first step of creating any texture is to plan properly. You can take your time in gathering the references of the final result texture you would like to achieve. It is also possible to use mood boards to plot out the details and coloring of the textures. You can start by working with the broad features and leave the fine features to the end. Now and then, you should render the texture image from far away. It should be looking good at every distance. Remember not to put too many details in the texture. Otherwise, it will look busy.

Download Free Textures on the Web

All over the web, websites are offering free textures. Usually, there is a download button you can press to download the free texture. However, before you download, make sure you check the page for information on whether you need to give any credit to the author. You don’t want to get into copyright issues for not following the author’s instructions to give credit to him. Many of the textures you found online are high resolution and large, so you should not have any problem using them.

Shoot Your Textures with a Camera

If you have a camera, you can take a walk around your neighborhood and shoot some textures. You can check out the moss on the exterior walls, the tarred highway, old wall in the house, grass, anything that has scratches, and marble surface. You must shoot your texture in the highest resolution possible. It should have a balance between darkness and light. It can be hard for you to find enough textures to shoot for building your own textures library. You may want to get started by downloading some textures online for free. In the meantime, whenever you found some cool textures, you can use your camera to take photos of them and add them to your library.

Create and Scan Your Textures

Sometimes, it is inconvenient for you to go outside to shoot textures. You can create your textures by using the tools you have at home. For example, you can use your color pencil, watercolor, or crayon to design the texture yourself. Afterward, you can scan it into the image editor program. You can use your scanner to scan a table surface, tray surface, decorative paper surface, etc., to create the texture you like.

Applying a Texture to Text

Not only can you apply texture to a graphic design, but you can also apply it to text. You must emphasize the legibility of the text to ensure that it remains readable after you apply the texture. Textured fonts are often used in creating beautiful poster art and text logo. By adding texture to the font, it can become the focal point. This is why it is recommended that you use a clean background for the textured font. If you decide to use textured fonts, you should avoid the use of decorative fonts. Sans serif fonts are best for adding texture as they are highly readable and spread your design statement to the public.

Using Paper Texture in Background

Paper texture is one of the most popular choices for the background of modern artwork. Paper texture is perfect for creating a minimalist background for your artwork. You can buy different types of paper with decorative textures from your local stationery shop. It can also be the brown paper shopping bag. The brown paper bag can be crinkled, so you need to flatten it before scanning it. You need to ensure that the paper texture is scanned in the highest resolution to ensure that no detail is missed.

Creating a 3D Effect with Texture

You can use texture to build three-dimensional layers in your design. You will need to use opacity and transparency features in your image editor to achieve the effect. It is also possible to put an embossed frame over the part of the picture where you apply the texture to create the 3D illusion. You need to have at least 2 graphics to create 3D texture. One will be used as the background, and the other will be the focal point.

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One can use mockups not just for designing websites, but also for presenting the final layout for branding, as well as packaging design for products. Product designers can use mockups to demonstrate how the final design will look before it’s sent off for printing.

Wireframe vs Mockup

Oftentimes, mockups have a tendency to be confused with wireframes. And no, it isn’t a case of “tomato, tomahto”. Wireframes are an entirely different concept from what mockups are.

Wireframes can be described as the skeleton of what the product will be in terms of the layout, while a mockup gives people working on the product an idea as to how it is going to look like in terms of aesthetics. If you look at it from an architectural or engineering standpoint, wireframes are essentially blueprints of the product whereas mockups are scale models of what the end product will be like.

Wireframes have their own place in the design process, and one usually utilizes them at a very early stage. From the wireframe, developers have a better idea of where to place clickable buttons or walls of text. This will help them build the site much more efficiently since they will now know how to code it properly.

In other lines of business, product mockups are thumbnails or rough sketches. They contain just enough information to guide the product designer how the final product should be built to meet the requirements.

How long does it take to create a mockup?

Creating a mockup can take time, especially a product mockup. Designers have to create a photorealistic image of the product that they can slap their design on in order to better communicate the design to the client or customer. This time-consuming process can draw away from improving the design even further.

A product mockup database called Yellow Images contains a plethora of object mockups for different types of packaging requirements. This allows designers to speed up the process of creating mockups to present to a client meeting. If you’re a designer, all you need to do is display your design on the mockup. Then once the final draft is ok, you can then send it to the printers. Smaller scale businesses can take advantage of FedEx online printing for banners, brochures, posters, and even business cards.

Utilizing Product Mockup Tools

Web designers can utilize mockup tools like UXPin to design a mockup for the user interface of any website they are working on. UXPin is a particularly great one to use because of its ability to create mockups in any fidelity type. Higher fidelity mockups are especially important when presenting at a board meeting, since it works better when projected on a larger scale. Meeting briefs can usually work well with a lower fidelity mockup, saving designers from long render and raster times, as well as large file sizes.

The Disadvantages of Using Mockups

Using mockups presents its own set of disadvantages too. For example, creating a mockup of a web page to present at a board meeting might result in clients attempting to take on the role of product designers or web developers. They might upend the meeting and try to make some changes based on the mockup that they see. What most clients do not see is the reasoning behind such layout decisions. In order to avoid this common occurrence from happening during mockup presentations, it is vital to include notes or a talkthrough regarding the design choices before the presentation of the page mockup.

Static Product Mockup

For highly interactive user interfaces, mockups might put off stakeholders from the direction the design is going. Product mockups are static, unlike the intended final product. This slight disadvantage can be easily remedied by prefacing the presentation of the mockup with a disclaimer or caveat to remind stakeholders or clients that what you are presenting is only a visual guide to whatever solution you are suggesting. This reminds clients that they are not looking at the final product — yet.

Product Mockups Guiding Audience

So, mockups are great at guiding an audience and a designer into the product’s final aesthetic. However, they are usually not very effective in capturing the entire flow of the webpage. To compensate, most designers will include flow charts and descriptions if an action were to happen to button A. We recommended instead to present mockups with a prototype, if permissible. Prototypes give business clients an idea as to how the end result will flow.

Prototypes are more interactive than a static image of a webpage, which is what mockups usually are. Presenting a prototype in coordination with a mockup helps clients better understand why the layout has to be a certain way, and how it will work in conjunction with the product’s function and purpose.

Why Even Bother Using Mockups?

Despite the drawbacks, mockups are very useful when it comes to putting together products like webpages, user interfaces, and even shirt designs. Prototypes definitely have their place in the design process, but they cannot replace mockups in the design process.

Prototypes have the interactivity and resemblance to the final product in terms of functionality. Making numerous changes in the prototype stage will derail the design process. More time and resources will then be spent on developing the prototype instead of graduating to the final product. Most changes to the prototype should be about interfacing and UI interaction. It is vital to ensure that the design and layout are final in the mockup stage before creating a lot of changes through prototyping.

Product Mockup as a Draft Version

Mockups act like a draft version of a final product. Wireframes serve as the skeletal framework of how a website will be laid out. Mockups help reveal what the final design will look like. In doing so, any visual elements that may not work together can be identified and addressed early on. In the mockup stage, one can easily change elements. Manipulating color palettes, saturation, contrast, even the font size, and style is quicker while in the process of creating mockups.

From a financial and logistical perspective, mockups can also save on resources. Creating code for a website or printing product labels in bulk can be time and labor intensive. Should any errors or changes occur in the production phase, it would mean a huge waste of hours, ink and paper to start over. Mockups help avoid fiascos like this from happening.

Product Mockup as the End User Perspective

Mockups can also put designers in the perspective of the end user. Developers and product designers often get caught up in the details or in the process. Then they fail to look at the product through the eyes of the client or customer. Mockups help facilitate the change of perspective. User interfaces might be very simple to a designer. However, to a user with no prior knowledge of programming, it could be not user-friendly at all.

A product designer may think the font used for a product package is legible enough to a certain demographic. However, a customer might think otherwise. Because of how close mockups are to the finished product in terms of detail and fidelity, developers and product designers can get a better idea of how it might look like to the end user.

What Tools to Use Creating Mockups?

Design tools like Photoshop help developers and designers create mockups. They need to create the visual guides before committing everything to HTML or print. Having mockups allows the project to go through multiple passes that do not require time or money.

But there is other more intuitive mockup software that caters specifically to web design. Designers and developers can take advantage of them.

Moqups

Moqups for one is a web application for creating mockups for Web UIs. The best part about it is it is free. The nice thing about Moqups is it has a very intuitive interface. It has a plethora of drag and drop templates that can easily help web devs create mockups.

Balsamiq Mockups

Another tool similar to Moqups is Balsamiq Mockups. Balsamiq Mockups is another Web UI mockup tool that users can try for free. It was initially a desktop application but has since become a web application as well. It isn’t too good to utilize the demo version. The demo version resets after 2-3 minutes, costing demo users their precious work. They do, however, have a 30-day free trial. Users can take advantage of the many pre-made elements to create a mockup with.

TemplateToaster

Developers and designers looking to create more high fidelity mockups might have an interest in trying TemplateToaster. TemplateToaster is a desktop application that can handle the demands that high fidelity mockups require. Its trial version allows unlimited usage, but the features available have limits. One can easily remedy it by purchasing the standard or professional version to unlock more features.

Sketch

Product packaging designers might have an interest in trying out Sketch. Sketch is similar to Adobe Photoshop, but it is more intuitive and user-friendly than the latter. By simply sketching one’s ideas on the program, a lot of the product mockup will come to life. This makes mocking up or prototyping even easier and less time intensive than before.

Froont

Froont is also another Web mockup tool a lot of big companies like to use. Apart from its competitive pricing plan, its drag and drop user interface makes it very easy to use; beginners to the tool can learn it in a matter of days.

Bottom Line

Overall, mockups are a very useful tool in the design process. Owing to their ability to present details in a way that does not yet directly affect the final design. They can also save time and money in the coding and manufacturing process. This is why mockups are essential to the design process.

The post Product Mockup: The Importance Of Mockups In Web And Product Design appeared first on DesignWebKit.

Project Initialization

Source: Theologicon.org
When a new project comes in hand, designers have a huge number of ideas in their heads. This period is the most anxious for artists. Therefore it is really important to have a look at things with relax mind and take a decision while keeping in mind what the project reflects in reality and what are its basic requirements. For this ask a few simple questions on different aspects of the project.

Ask questions:

Sourse: Pickthebrain.com
Web designers can ask the following questions:

• What as a designer you are looking for in the project?
• What your client is expecting from you to do?

There may be some specific items you may want to include like banners, navigations with different structure, a logo or an influential color scheme.

Sketch Mockup:

Sourse: Techpavan.com
After clarifying the above questions sketch a few mockups that will really be helpful in making the design process easy. If you are not artistic don’t panic even a rough sketch can also be useful and provide inspiration than having nothing at all. With prototype, you will have a proper guideline for your work and also provide you with a wireframe, which will be a base for all your future pages. If the page styles differ you can also modify the wireframes.

Look into Design Galleries for Inspiration

Many designers submit their artworks into design galleries so others may get inspiration. Everyone can borrow ideas from these places and there is no harm in it. You can take up different design ideas and artistic styles and blend them together to have a fantastic design of your own. Many artists oppose this point of view, but if you are a true designer you can master this skill and soon begin to create your own interfaces simply through inspiration without copying anyone’s ideas. Designers need to exercise creative part of their brain and with time they become perfect in it. There are many showcases online including spectacular CSS galleries that can be used for this purpose.

Test Run- Crucial Aspect Often Neglected

Source: hearpreneur.com
Visualize how your project will appear in different browsers before converting your mockup into a coding format. Imagine yourself as a viewer, and see with the user’s eye how the project will look. This practice will help you to see things from a bigger perspective rather than being just a designer. This will also save a lot of time in the long run.

Alternate Designing for Comparison

Source: Artsyville.blogspot.com
The process of creation an alternate design will take time but it’s really worth it, so don’t miss this step. Draw a few alternative designs and choose from them the final version. This can easily be done using Photoshop. The process often takes much time, as I already said, but it can save a lot of efforts while final stages of production.

Keep in Mind White Spaces

Always keep in mind white spaces while designing. When the elements of a page are properly laid out you get a perfect and natural symmetry in design. You can get a good and user friendly website keeping in mind web pages coded in grids and accessibility. Remove any elements that take up space not needed. Check out such kind of content like paragraphs, headings, images and videos etc. Arrange all these elements in a way that users don’t face interactivity problems. Make a list of page elements that seem necessary to you. It may comprise of search boxes, social media sharing buttons, shopping cart icons or links, featured blog posts and a contact form.

The gold rule of designing is to set your mind free during a working process, this will help more inspirational ideas to come.

Media Content.

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