Trends, practices, and ways of doing things in the web and graphic design business.
There’s a whole lot that is involved in providing good web or graphic design services. Obviously, being a good artist or coder is at the top of the list. But somewhere near second on that list, is being able to communicate to your clients or your potential clients, the value of your work and time. Sadly, there is a misconception in our industry that all we do is make nice pictures and make them appear on the internet, and that this is all somehow, an easy task. Hell, anyone with a Facebook page can do it, right?
Our job is now also to serve as an educator as well as an artist, programmer and developer/designer. In order to do that, we must properly educate ourselves!
Many a time, young or new artists get sucked into the potential trap of “spec work” in order to get that client, or get their name recognized. I know I have, and have felt the frustration of spending hours on a design or layout, only to be told, “No… I think I’ll go with another designer.” The worst possible end result of that, is to find out design ideas taken by the potential client and passed off to another, less ethical designer, who simply copies the design idea for the client at a cheaper rate.
That brings me to my first, of many, points on protecting ourselves, our intellectual property and our industry: When things are able to be easily copied at a lower rate, that drives down our overal rate of service. We can’t easily do away with designers with poor ethics without spending the rest of our lives in copyright litigation, but we can make things more difficult for them and state right away to the potential client or existing client that our work is our property. Whether you are doing “spec” work (we’ll get into that in a minute) or contract work, watermark ALL of your samples! Even if it is a simple large text overlay on the image at 50% opacity, put your name on it somewhere, with notice of ownership or copyright!
NEVER send samples as a PSD or other layered source file! The best approach I have found is to flatten it to a mid to high (7-9) resolution .JPG - Open this JPG in Photoshop, then go to File->File Info and enter your information. Then export to PDF. You can create a metadata template to be applied to all of your images created in Photoshop! Here’s a “How To” link for more info: Photoshop MetaData Templates
The same can be done when combining pages in Adobe Acrobat! Info on this can be found here: Acrobat MetaData Templates
This is the First Step in protecting our creative works, property and the integrity of our industry as a whole. For more posts on this topic, please visit my “The Biz” category!
