This 5-minute clip comes from the Q&A portion of the first week of Jason Hoppe’s 10-Week Photoshop Course. This clip includes an assortment of tips inspired by audience questions. Including how to quickly reset dialog boxes, a shortcut for moving type boxes, quickly scrolling through fonts, setting precise guides, and shortcuts for zooming.
Once you spend a little time reading and commenting on various blogs, you’ll notice that on certain blogs some people have branded icons next to their comments, while others have a generic anonymous graphic.
These icons are avatars — tiny online logos that represent you on blogs and other online forums. It’s a small detail that plays an important role in your studio’s online social networking.
They are easy to setup. Design a small square graphic in Photoshop; save it as a JPG, GIF, or PNG; and upload it to a free account at gravatar:
Gravatar — globally recognized avatars
The process takes about two minutes. Use a photo, or design a small square version of your studio’s logo. This free service works with all gravatar-enabled sites (including most Wordpress blogs, like ours). Test out your new avatar by leaving a comment here! Read the Full Tip »
The start of January is a good time to refocus on how to move your career forward over the upcoming year. 2009 presents a challenging landscape for today’s creative professional. Now is the time to focus on important tasks that will position yourself and your business for success over the coming year.
The Printable CEO series includes a marvelous collection of PDF forms that freelance designer David Seah developed several years ago to motivate and track his own business development activities. I highly recommend perusing the forms, and reading David’s excellent essays on the philosophy behind them.
How should nervous, frugal, business owners and creative managers spend money over the next three weeks? This month I’ve found myself in a couple odd year-end planning conversations with clients.
One owner of a large design firm which did very well in 2008 told me her CPA is pressing them to spend some of their pre-tax profits before December ends. A manager of an in-house creative departments has remaining funds in his 2008 budget, and wants to know what purchases will have the greatest impact for their team over the coming year.
Both are justifiably wary about today’s economy, and nervous about what budgets are going to look like next year.
Here is our list of frugal ways you might spend end-of-year dollars, while preparing your company for potentially lean times ahead.
As the economy tightens, we’ve seen a lot of design firms expressing a stronger interest in how to improve their studio’s online marketing efforts. Of particular interest, we hear a lot of designers asking how to help their web site (or their client sites) rank better in Google search results.
If that’s of interest to you, start with the source. Google has published a free 22-page PDF guide that lists some of the best practices you should use to improve your site’s search results:
Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often about making small changes to parts of your website. Individually, those changes might not seem like much, but when combined, they can have a significant impact on your site’s search results. Read the Full Tip »
Our email tip subscribers will notice the look of our email newsletter changed a lot this week. We’re trying out a new 2-column format, as well as testing a switch over to MailChimp for our email delivery service.
This is the 228th straight week of publishing our weekly tips newsletter, and this is the first time we’ve tested significant changes in our template.
Please bear with us while we work out some of the details. I’d love to hear your feedback and questions in the comments on this post.
Over the last six months we’ve been poking at a new version of the CreativeTechs website. This weekend we finally threw the switch. This is a work in progress, and we’ll be cleaning up details and fixing missing links over the coming week. Please give us a visit:
Link: CreativeTechs Website
Link: CreativeTechs Tips Blog
Link: CreativeTechs Workshop/Webinar Calendar
The new tips blog now supports comments. You can now respond to tips that catch your interest, ask questions, or give us an occasional vote of confidence. We invite you to please say hello.
We get frequent questions from designers wanting to use HTML email for client projects or their own marketing. Here is our comparison of the four prominent email delivery services on the market today.
Implemented properly, email newsletters are a powerful marketing tool. Financially, they are one of the most cost-effective ways you can keep in front of clients and prospects. We’re seeing more creative studios using email as a core part of their own marketing effort. And we’re seeing a lot of design projects with studios creating email marketing templates for their clients.
Today we’ve heard from several clients who are adding new designers to their team. They are not ready to upgrade their full office to Creative Suite 4, but they are having a hard time finding where to purchase copies of Creative Suite 3. For readers in the same quandry, here are some links on Amazon for the older CS3 packages:
Creative Suite 3.3 Design Standard:
Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium:
Source: This tip inspired by today’s request from Coolstone Design Works among others.
Tracking individual serial numbers is hard work. It costs you money in time and frustration, and the hassle is easily avoided.
If you manage a creative team with even a few designers, please, please, take advantage of Adobe’s Volume Licensing program when you purchase Adobe software and upgrades. Just call Adobe’s volume licensing service at 800-443-8158, or visit the website to easily break the cycle of serial number management in your studio.
Link: Adobe Volume Licensing
Source: We’ve preached this message for years here, here, and here!
