Almost every creative studio uses written contracts of some form with their clients. Many studios invest time and legal fees in developing their own custom contracts, while other designers will borrow contract language from the back of a design business book (or from a studio where they used to work). However your studio developed your […]

The October issue of the Creative Business newsletter has a valuable two-page white paper titled “How To Answer: I’d Like The Computer Files”, which discusses the legal and business issues involved when a client requests a copy of the original files used to build a recent project.

This increasingly common client request can pose a dilemma for many creative studios. Should you give them up? Do you have to? How do you respond to your client’s request?

Here is a tip that came up during the hour of Q&A after last week’s “Blog Your Portfolio” talk at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts: “What are some of the best tools out there for keeping track of my studios’s online buzz?” Here’s an easy tool we like: SocialMeter.com Type in the URL of your […]

Thanks to everybody who came out to SVC last Tuesday for our free “Blog your Portfolio” talk. Every seat in the house was taken, and we ended up staying almost a hour after the presentation answering questions and talk with people. As promised, here is a PDF of the slides from our talk: Blog Your […]

Every graphic designer who earns part of their living designing websites should be required to read at least chapter 14 of Dave Taylor’s book Growing Your Business with Google.

Tip: Copywriters who want to learn to craft search engine-friendly copy should read this book too.

Craig’s note: That’s my own copy shown at right. I read it on vacation in early 2006 while we were planning our own CreativeIQ blog. I thought I knew a fair bit about web design. The dozens of post-it notes and highlighted sections are a testimony to how much I was missing about designing sites that work well with search engines.

This week we reviewed (and highly recommended) the book Growing Your Business with Google by author Dave Taylor. If you like to watch video instead of read, we’ve added a link below to Dave’s presentation on business blogging at a recent summit in Florida

Who is viewing your website? How do they find it? And what do they look at while they are there? Those are three important questions every creative team should know. Not only for their own website, but for their clients as well. Google Analytics is a great tool for uncovering the answers to those questions. […]

About a year ago Seth Godin published Who’s There? — a free ebook about the evolving art of marketing with blogs. (This was a follow-up to his previous ebook Knock Knock which discussed how to make websites do their job better.)

This 45-page PDF is a quick read:

Seth Godin’s Who’s There (PDF)

Seth’s book provides a good introduction into the world of using blogging as an effective marketing tool.

Should you ever lose your laptop while traveling, StuffBak property identification tags increase the chance that your lost item will be returned to you. StuffBak offers a wide range of label shapes and sizes that affix to any electronic device, such as a laptop, camera, iPod, cell phone, or external hard drive.

Ever wondered how you might use a blog for your studio? You can see how hundreds of other designers answered that same question at Designers Who Blog.

This site (a blog itself) provides a constantly growing list of over 400 blogging designers. Also included are illustrators, photographers, and professionals in advertising and marketing, etc.