Whats your Favorite?

If you are willing to do more than you are paid to do, eventually you will be paid to do more than you do.

Which One Do you like the Most?
#Whats your favorite

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Ways to market your work as a graphic/web designer

Get the most out of business cards
Business cards are your most important publicity items. They tell people how to contact you (don’t rely on email signatures—clients will wipe off your emails without hesitation and will not be able to contact you when a job comes up).
Executives normally keep vendor business cards in a case or card-box. Make sure you’re in it. And make sure your card has ALL your details: mailing address, telephone, cell phone number, email, and website address.
Your business card should be smart, clean, and easy-to-read. Don’t be too flamboyant. I know a designer who had his details printed from left-to-right on one side, and his details printed backwards from right-to-left on the other side. Whilst filing it away, his biggest potential client clipped it onto a backer card inside out. When she called upon it later she couldn’t make sense of it. Consequently she trashed the card and called another designer.
Print plenty of cards. An extra thousand won’t break the bank. Give several cards to new prospective clients at meetings (they may give them to their colleagues), and if you have existing clients or contacts, make sure they are well stocked with your cards so they can recommend you. Add a few cards in with your invoices. Leave a few cards in company reception areas, at sports clubs, and anywhere where your prospective clients are likely to congregate. Get them in people’s hands.

Create an online portfolio
Unless you are a web-designer, creating your own website is not essential, although it does give you some advantages. A website will help you to communicate your portfolio via email without sending attachments (clients will be suspicious of emails with attachments from unknown addresses—a link to a website is preferable). A website is also a good opportunity to sell yourself with some hard-working copy. Good copy can help you to win new clients, so buy yourself a good copywriting manual and learn the basic copywriting tricks of the trade.
If you have no experience of designing websites, or you don’t have time to create one, don’t be put off, you can buy inexpensive templates online as a temporary solution. Buying a dot.com address and uploading it onto a website browser should cost around R250.

Market yourself with mailer-postcards
You may want to print some mailer postcards at the same time you print your business cards. Direct mail postcard designs are a great way to show off your creative talents and get noticed. In an age when executives are familiar with receiving emails from scouting freelancers, postcards received through snail-mail are a novel and memorable way to sell your freelance services.
Showcase your best visual/visuals on side one, then write some marketing copy to sell your services on side two (and remember to include your full contact details). Your copy should focus on the benefits your clients will get from using you.

Think about who you are targeting
While you are waiting for your cards to print, you need to research the kind of companies to target for freelance work. Aim high; large corporations with multiple departments make better leads than small or medium-sized businesses. The work you get from a big company is likely to be more lucrative and on-going. You may also get internal recommendations across departments. One company can be a client for life and effectively pay off your mortgage.

Do a Google search for all the big companies who have offices within a reasonable driving distance, and examine each website for contacts. Build yourself a database of contacts in a spreadsheet including the names, titles, email addresses, mail addresses, and telephone numbers of all key sales and marketing contacts within your target companies.
Follow a rigid marketing strategy
Start by sending out your postcards to all the addresses on your database. A week after drop-date, send each of your contacts a personalized email asking if they use freelancers and requesting a meeting to discuss your offer. Include a link to your website so contacts can view your portfolio. If you don’t have a website, ask your contact to reply for samples of your work, then send a maximum of three pdfs or jpegs

Present yourself as client-focused whilst pitching
The key to a successful pitching meeting is to be well-prepared and client-focused. Before you travel to the company office, examine the company’s website so you know what kind of brief your contact is likely to give you. Tailor your portfolio for the company by ordering your most relevant work first (a good reason why you should use retractable sleeves in your portfolio, allocating one project to one sleeve).
At the meeting, make sure your pitch is relevant. Ask to see the company’s existing publicity, then talk about your most similar graphic design assignments.
Give your prospective client enough information to help them see what you can do for them. With each item of work you present, summarize the original brief, say how you creatively interpreted the brief, and give a sense of how effective the project was. Don’t go into a full project analysis unless asked, and don’t assume your prospective client will want to know the intricacies of your portfolio.
At the end of your meeting, ask if you can meet colleagues in the same department, ask for contacts in other departments, and hand out plenty of business cards. When you get home, send a thank-you email to your contact, reminding them of your availability, and update your activities in your database so you know when next to contact them.

Be persistent
It’s important to remain visible. Promotions controllers are more likely to outsource work to people they meet in person. Pretend that you will be in the area one day and ask to ‘pop in’ for a brief chat—you may have more luck arranging informal ad-hoc meetings than formal put-it-in-your-diary meetings. When you visit a company, remember to take your portfolio and plenty of business cards. You never know who you might meet.
You’ll find that prospective clients often say things like “I have no projects at the moment, but I’ll keep you in mind”. Don’t get frustrated, and certainly don’t beg for work on the phone. Just make a note in your database to keep track of responses, then send reminder emails to contacts every month, just so they really do keep you in mind. Give them a phone call every couple of months; sooner or later they will give you work.

Graphic and Web Design Advantages

1. Express Your Creativity
Probably the most important benefit of being a graphic artist is the ability to express your creativity, while still earning a great living. Many artists are moving towards graphic design because it’s easier to make a living as a graphic designer than it is in areas such as fine art.
If fine art is your passion than you should pursue your passion, but being a graphic artist is very rewarding and you can still work in fine art and other areas. I loved both computers and art so graphic art seemed to be a good combination of the two for me, but I still dabble in fine art such as painting in my free time.

2. Web or Print Flexibility
The cool thing about being a graphic artist is that you have different mediums just like in fine art. The two big ones being print and web. Web is obviously more recent and still relatively new. If you get into web design and you can pick up programming skills such as html, css and php you will open up an entire new world of job opportunities for yourself.
Being a graphic artist will allow you to branch off into other skill sets easily that can dramatically increase your freelance or business grow potential.

3. Huge Client Base
Some businesses have a limited client base, but every business needs a graphic artist. If a business is going to do marketing than some one is going to need to design those marketing materials. As long as businesses keep growing and new ones keep appearing, then graphic artists will always have plenty of work. Because of this, the competition is getting rougher every day, so you will need to work much harder to stand out from the crowd.

4. Freelance
My favorite part about the graphic art career is the ability to easily do freelance work online. There are tons of places to find freelance work on the Internet and you can make some incredible money from the comfort of your own home in your free time.

5. Run Your Own Studio
If you have ever dreamed of having your own studio or office than you could turn your freelance business into a larger operation and begin running your own studio. This is a great option if you want to play the role of manager or art director and gain a lot more exposure by doing graphic artwork for very large brands, not to mention making more money!

6. Work In-House
If you are not ready to freelance or run your own studio you can always work full-time for some one else. Working In-House can give you the stability you need for peace of mind. Some designers worry about their creativity being limited in-house and this can happen, but you need to take a look at the benefits and disadvantages to make the right choice.
There are plenty of other ways to lets your creative energy run wild while not working in-house so don’t get too caught up about having more limits on what you can and can’t do. Its just part of doing business!

7. Easy to Get Into
If you have a decent computer and a few Adobe programs you are pretty much ready to rumble! After that it’s all about creativity, hard work, self growth and networking to name a few things. Compared to other careers being a graphic artist could be seen a pretty low cost career to get into as opposed to say starting a landscaping business where you would need a truck and tons of expensive equipment and other materials.

8. You can Learn on Your Own
While I do recommend going to school for graphic design, many amazing graphic artists learned on their own. If you practice enough at home, study other art, practice tutorials, read books and really have a passion for design you can learn on your own. The big benefit of going to school is having teachers to guide you and critique your work, so if you learn yourself you need to be able to gauge what your current skill level is and understand what areas you need improvement in.

9. Few Expenses
Another great thing about being a freelance graphic artist is that there are few business expenses. If you have a computer and software already than there isn’t much else you need to spend money on. If you are going to handle printing for clients you would work this into the total project quote and the same goes for stuff like buying stock images or hiring an illustrator for a project.
You might have some web expenses such as website hosting and maybe a marketing budget, but overall costs should be pretty low if your a freelancing, which means more profits for you!

10. Easy Online Marketing
The design community is incredibly rich online. I have never seen so many different useful and unique sites for an online niche before. The design community is full of great forums, blogs, gallery sites, organizations, tutorials sites and much more. There are so many ways to market your skills online its not even funny. It just takes a little a bit of time and energy to make the most of the web.

Never give up on your Dreams

Never give up on your dreams. That’s good motivational advice whether to a class of youngsters or to more disillusioned adults. It encourages them to believe in their dreams and to follow them. It convinces them that their dreams are worthwhile. If they have doubts and fears they will undoubtedly feel better if you can convince them that that is normal. We all need those dreams and hopes because without them there is no better future. So any teacher or public speaker who can convey that message is re-awakening perhaps forgotten dreams or reinforcing the message that it pays to have passion There are, of course too those other dreams that are part of the cycle of sleep. Fortunes have been made by those who claim to be able to interpret them and certainly some are so re-occurring that those who have them feel there must be some meaning in them. Whether or not these are a way of reliving something that actually happened or something you read about is open for discussion. Certainly a war film that showed torture scenes might give you nightmares afterwards. It’s definitely possible that you will wake up screaming. Generally, though, dreams slip away from us when we awake especially the ones where something nice was just going to happen.  These seem to vanish in the morning mist. So there are two different kinds of dreams, one important to our daily lives and one that is part of the night.

Strive For excellence

Strive for excellence you’ll be glad you did. Most of us would prefer to do things properly but sometimes we give up rather than keep trying. Yet the satisfaction you get from doing something well is tremendous. Ask any athlete who has won a race how it feels and he or she will tell you that all the effort and training was worthwhile. The same applies to anything we do. Take painting a room for instance. We can simply slap on a coat of paint or we can do the job properly by sanding the doors or washing the skirting boards before we start. We should, of course, recognise our own limitations. We have not all been born with the musical abilities of Mozart and we cannot all paint masterpieces like Van Gogh. No matter what we do though we should do it to the best of our ability. Persistence, patience and passion are the secrets of success in every field. That includes public speaking. So if you are writing a speech for instance it means doing your homework and checking your facts. It means finding suitable quotations and writing a speech suited to the particular audience in question. Then you have to practise until you can deliver that speech professionally. You may not be an orator like President Kennedy but if you strive to write an excellent speech and you have the passion for your subject you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you have done as well as you possibly can.

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