1) Variety

I see a lot of great graphic designers who are really good at one style have a portfolio full of that one style and nothing else. There is nothing wrong with playing to your strengths, in fact it should almost be a point in its own, but you should always consider that a potential client may not be looking for that particular style or format.

I recommend, if you don’t have a massive range of styles and products, you actually give yourself the job of creating them. Make a magazine cover, some album art, a flyer and posters, even something as seemingly trivial as a few desktop wallpapers can really spice up your portfolio and make you look a lot more versitile.

Make sure you vary your style and colour schemes too, sometimes it’s easy to think “I hate blue” and never include it as the main colour in work but your clients may not see the same view and by excluding it from the portfolio you could be going against them before you even start.

2) Work Online & Offline

This si the digital age and your online portfolio needs to be a big deal but this doesn’t mean you should have nothing to show people in the flesh. Networking is extremely important but networking without showing people your work is pointless.

You need to make an impact on people whether your online or offline so be sure to provide something of interest in both. Not taking a portfolio folder with you? Here’s a few idea’s;

* Range of different styles business cards
* Business cards with logo designs on
* iPhone ready portfolio sub-site
* Customised clothing

3) Understand Marketing

As a designer you main set of clients will be approaching you from some sort of marketing perspective. Spend time learning to understand what they want/mean/are saying about a project and more importantly why.

If you can more accurately understand the goals of your clients then its much more likely you will produce initial and finalised work that they are not only happy with but will achieve their goals and have them coming back for more.

This is not an easy task but read related websites and talk to any contacts you have as often as possible about marketing and stay on top of the latest trends.

4) Professionalism

There are a number of things, especially on an online portfolio, that can make you look more professional than you actually are. These little tweaks can make a big difference to how you recruit clients and what types of clients you attract.

Here’s a short checklist to run through;

* Spelling and grammar
* Privacy Policy page
* Terms and Conditions page
* Have a basic contract ready
* Full contact details and where applicable, company registration numbers
* Display awards, accreditation and qualifications somewhere on the site

Professionalism carries through to you as a personal as well, treat clients with respect and be sure to be understanding in the face of problems.

An additional note, while professionalism is important don’t let it stifle creativity, you can still be yourself, have fun, use bright colours and have teddy bears in the office just don’t throw the teddy bear in the clients face and call him names when he is late paying a bill.

5) You are a Brand

A lot of people don’t get this but you, as a designer, are a brand in yourself, even if you work for a company.

The purpose of any brand is to become well known and recognisable and to do this you have to be in the public eye. On the net this is very easy to do but time consuming. Here are a few ideas for building yourself as a brand, they can each be explored in depth but feel free to ask any questions about specific strategies.

* Run a personal blog, talk about your work, the industry, whatever you want, just be you.
* Take part in social networks, join Twitter and post regular updates, join Facebook and Myspace and publisise these things from your blog.
* Make yourself a presence on industry related forums and blogs and speak to “the big” players in your particular speciality, can you make friends and contacts out of these people?
* Use online portfolio sites to increase the number of places your work is displayed

JPEG
The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG or JPG) format compresses photo files with different level of compression. The higher the compression levels the lower the image quality and the file size. You choose the compression level when you save the file. Even the lowest compression value reduces the file size more than three times. For example, if you save a 10Mb TIFF file as a highest quality (lowest compression) JPEG, the resulting file will be between 1 and 3Mb. The file size depends on what especially you have on your photos. The ones with more monochromatic color content will give you smaller resultant file.
JPEG is useful when your photo has smooth color transitions and gradients. Otherwise you will probably use GIF or PNG.

GIF
Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) files are indexed color images with maximum 256 colors. GIF is not good for compressing full color photos, since the number of colors in the image will be reduced to 256 and the file size will be larger than a JPEG. GIF is the best choice for compressing solid color illustrations without smooth color transitions such as logos and type. Photoshop will allow you to chose from several color tables options and to choose the exact number of colors in your GIF illustration. GIF files support transparent background, background matting and can be used for saving multi-frame animations.

PNG
Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a rarely used format. It delivers very high quality on both photos and illustrations, but it’s bigger sized than GIF and JPEG files. There are two standards for PNG files – PNG-8 (with 8-bit color) and PNG-24 (with 24-bit color). As you can suppose, the first one is smaller size and lower quality.
I do not recommend you to use PNG’s except you need very high quality with fine details and smooth gradients or color transitions.

That’s right, after five seconds most customers are moving on. That does not give a logo much time to communicate. So a logo needs to be easily recognizable to be most effective.

Keep this in mind as you, or your graphic designer, are considering different logos. Usually, the most difficult part is to create a simple logo. Designing a logo that can quickly communicate everything a business needs to say in such a short time, can take hours. I like to say,

“in the simplicity, lies the complexity”.

Keep those creative juices flowing and you will design a custom logo that is unique to your business. It should not be complex or intricate, just say it fast and professionally.

Well, here is some solid advice that will get you that little bit closer, based on a recent email conversation.

Hi Jacob,

I was reading your “Twitter / job success story” and the one thing that I’m curious about, is what kind of things were you tweeting / blogging about that drew Carrot Creative in to hire you? As you know, there are a bazillion designers out there on Twitter looking for a job (including me), tweeting about all kinds of things design and career-related. I’m just curious if there was anything in particular, or any specific tweet or blog post, that initially drew them in? Was landing a NYC design job part of your strategy, or was just pure “happenstance” that brought you two together?

Congratulations. It is indeed a fascinating story, mostly because of the miles involved between Australia & NYC.

Regards,
Mitch

Rather than answering the email myself, I forwarded the email to one of the Carrot Creative founders, Chris Petescia, to get his honest reply. Here is what he replied:

Really, it was your initiative with your brand & authority in the online design space, your initiative on the freelance space and communication / presence across the whole social web. Being pro-active is a big thing for us and you demonstrated that enough with your own brand so we thought you’d fit in with us. There is a lot of talent out there but our agency values motivation, eagerness, enthusiasm and online interaction as much as we do talent in some instances. Make the effort – showing up or being passive doesn’t demonstrate drive.

So, in a nutshell, it’s not what you’re tweeting or blogging about, it’s about being pro-active in all areas of your business and online presence.

While the study itself is quite dated (1997) I don’t suppose people has changed a lot since then so most if not all of results must still be valid. Here are some interesting ones:

- Green on yellow is the best color scheme in the most conditions except for italicized Arial, for which it’s the worst
- Times New Roman on average is much better than Arial
- The combination, which gives the fastest response time is (surprise) italicized green Times New Roman on yellow background