Here is a very interesting sounding event at the Victoria design festival, State of Design. At Design Quotes we are all about bringing in the work. We understand that designers use us as just one of many tools to get new work. Marketing one's own business is still important which is exactly what this talks is all about.
As designers we are often so caught up in the making of objects that we forget to market them properly. This seminar looks at some of the strategies and tactics that designers can employ to put themselves out there.
To learn more, check out the event page:
http://www.stateofdesign.com.au/Festival/Search/Design-Victoria-Get-Noticed-Its-Called-PR-Darling
The Weekly Round Up is a series dedicated to highlighting the most interesting graphic design, web design and animation resources each week. Feel free to subscribe to the Design Resources Weekly Round Up RSS Feed.
Icon Finder is an impressive database of free icons with an intuitive search and browse interface. Icons are categorised by sets which helps to maintain a consistent theme when designing a website interface. There is a massive set of social media icons as well as many others. A very useful resource.
This is just brilliant. The sales process of winning new work is a delicate process. Many creative agencies are small boutique operations of a a few designers playing a bunch of different roles. This helps to make the sales role a little more turn-key, consistent and measurable.
“Proposable makes generating professional-level proposals a cinch,” says Gube, “and it has reporting features to analyze the performance of your proposals. It was created for salespeople, but as a designer, being a salesperson is a huge part of the gig, whether you’re freelancing or pitching a design idea to your managers.”
We all do it. When we start a fresh website interface design project, we start sketching out our ideas. Which is an important step which ultimately saves time. However there are elements of sketching an interface that are usually the same each time. These free templates help streamline the interface sketching process, saving even more time adding value to your project.
4. A Zoomable jQuery Image Gallery Called jPhotoGrid
View Demo | Download Zip
It's another jquery image gallery, but this one is a little different and kinda neat. It takes a list of images and turns it into a grid where individual images are zoomed to the fore with a click. Good for catalogue type websites or portoflio websites. You can see a demo of the gallery in action.
Marvelous! More and more websites are integrating web apps. One of the most common requirements of a web form is geographical location data. This nifty database provides us with every country, place and city plus additional statistical information about each location such as timezones, populations and capitals.
The data comes in tab-delimited + utf-8 formatted text files and can be downloaded as a whole or per country.
This provides a simple was to quickly check how a website will render in various web browsers and their versions.
Sydney Design 2010
14th International Design Festival
31 July – 15 August
Sydney Design 2010 is seeking expressions of interest from organisations, groups, individuals and businesses engaged in design and the creative industries to be part of the 2010 festival program. Sydney Design invites submissions across a range of programs including exhibitions, workshops, talks, forums or symposiums, industry events, installations, interventions, digital projects, children’s programs, markets and competitions.
To submit an event or project, complete the Expression of interest form and return to Nicole Bearman
by Friday 26 February 2010.
Links
http://www.sydneydesign.com.au/sd09/leading-story/be-part-of-the-sydney-design-festival-program/
The Weekly Round Up is a series dedicated to highlighting the most interesting graphic design, web design and animation resources each week. Feel free to subscribe to the Design Resources Weekly Round Up RSS Feed.
1. Sublime Video - An HTML 5 vide player
Sublime Video is a HTML5 Video Player. The beauty of HTML video players is that users can play videos without the need of plugins like Flash, which are sluggish and often cause a browser to crash. It has Full-window mode with nice zoom-in/out transitions. There are more advanced controls on a draggable pane. Sublime Video will be soon released for free (at least for non-commercial use).
Sublime Video Player Screen Capture
After a few minutes using the player in Safri 4.0.3 (according to the website it requires 4.0.4) the experience was not perfect. The demo video they have took about 30 seconds to start playing before freezing the web browser. Once the video was playing, after switching from full screen back to window mode, I lost the play controls. The video quality is great, but the functionality is still a little rough for older browser versions. Of course it is to be expected since it is one of the first HTML 5 players out there and very few people have the latest version of their browser.
Requirements: Safari 4.0.4+, Google Chrome 4.0+, IE with Chrome Frame
Demo: http://jilion.com/sublime/video
License: License Free
Requirements: Safari 4.0.4+, Google Chrome 4.0+, IE with Chrome Frame
Demo: http://jilion.com/sublime/video
License: License Free
2. SimpleDiagrams
SimpleDiagrams is an Adobe AIR desktop application for diagramming. It's a simple tool for creating basic illustrations that one might typically create on a whiteboard. There's a free version, which lets you use built in stencil libraries and export to PNG. The paid version gets rid of upgrade reminders, allows you to export to Basecamp, import libraries, and install on multiple machines.
SimpleDiagrams
Requirements: Adobe Air plugin
Demo: http://www.simplediagrams.com/home
License: License Free, Paid Upgrade
3. Ecommerce plugin for Wordpress: GetShopped
GetShopped is a free WordPress plugin for adding e-commerce capabilities into WordPress. It is a very easy-to-setup plugin which can work with any standards compliant WordPress theme (and WordPress MU).
GetShopped Wordpress Plugin
The plugin offers a flexible pricing structure for products with features like:
- flexible coupon/discount pricing rules
- product specific sales
- quantity discounts
- free shipping options
- multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts
- and supports multiple payment providers like Google Checkout, Paypal & Payment Express.
GetShopped makes it possible to complete the shopping process quickly with a one-page-checkout & optionally, guest checkouts is supported. It is easy to manage orders with the help of a powerful admin interface, print invoices, packing slips & more.
Requirements: WordPress
Website: http://getshopped.org/
Demo: http://getshopped.org/showcase/
4. 25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time
Smashing Magazine have published a collection of videos covering the wonderful topic of "User Experience" titled 25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time. Notable personalities include:
That's it for this week. If you try out any of the resources discussed here, we would love to hear about it in the comments.
In an effort to help designers better understand how each lead is priced, we have adjusted the layout of some information in the available leads section of the designer's area. Currently there are 5 factors that determine the price of a lead, which is also outlined in the FAQ.
1) Number of copies: The more copies available for each lead, the cheaper it is since there is more competition.
2 Budget: Budgets that are above "Good" increase the price of the lead.
3) Project stage: If the customer is only researching design prices, the lead price is discounted.
4) Work frequency: If the work is recurring, then the lead price is increased.
5) Discounts: Leads that are old and not yet expired will be discounted by 50%
1) Number of copies: The more copies available for each lead, the cheaper it is since there is more competition.
2) Budget: Budgets that are above "Good" increase the price of the lead.
3) Project stage: If the customer is only researching design prices, the lead price is discounted.
4) Work frequency: If the work is recurring, then the lead price is increased.
5) Discounts: Leads that are old and not yet expired will be discounted by 50%
Each factor listed above has now been moved to the top of the page and sectioned off to indicate their importance. Here is one such example:
Lead Price Factors
This should help designers make good decisions about lead purchases. We have also noticed that from time to time there are projects with a low budget, but which are still a high price. This happens when the customer requests only 3 quotes, the minimum budget is already low and they enter a budget that is double the minimum, but is still quite low. This is because we did not include budget levels as a factor for pricing, only the magnitude above the minimum budget. As such, we will be adding an additional factor that will make low budget leads cheaper.
If you have any ideas for additional factors that should affect the lead price, we would love to hear about it in the comments section.
