March, 2011 | Graphicdesignmontreal.ca

Best Freelance Graphic Design Portfolio Tips

If you are a freelance graphic designer, graphic artist or illustrator, here are a few simple and easy tips on how you can quickly improve your portfolio.

1) Market Research – Know your target audience

It is important to understand who will be viewing your graphic design portfolio. Whether you are preparing your portfolio for a big show at a gallery, entering a graphic design contest on the web, applying for a position as a graphic artist at a local graphic design studio, or trying to impress your parents so they finance your incredibly overpriced graphic design degree, it is important to know your target audience, and cater to them accordingly.
For instance, you wouldn’t show all your erotic artwork or some sentimental pieces about your childhood troubles to a serious, snooty, posh, academic-looking, top graphic arts program or art history program when applying to their graphic design school would you? It is important to realize that everyone’s creative and artistic juices flow in many different directions and that they are very personal. So, as objective as we would like the world to be and as great and original as we believe our own artwork may be, we have to remind ourselves to prepare our portfolios in such a way that they will be properly received by our audience.
Understanding who your portfolio is for, where it will be presented, how it will be evaluated, and ultimately why you are creating it, should always be the first step in its inception. ( graphic design portfolio tips continued…)

Graphic Design Career Tips

So you have just graduated an illustration, graphic design, or other multimedia program. You studied hard and got fantastic grades but have been taught exclusively aesthetics and know absolutely nothing about marketing or business. Where to start?

1) Get Experience Doing Graphic Design Work & Working with REAL Clients

You aren’t going to like what I am about to share with you, but before taking on any enormous mandates, or even attempting to, you will have to start small. Not because you are a terrible and inexperienced artist, not because you are mentally or physically incapable of managing the condensed and often last minute time constraints, but because you simply lack experience managing REAL projects that aren’t provided to you by a friendly professor who has not invested in your work, and probably also lacks REAL (graphic design career tips continued…)

Hire Graphic Designer – Everyone Needs a Good Graphic Designer

The great divide between those who just surf the web and those who create the web

Do you remember the first time you had a great business idea? Or maybe it wasn’t a business idea, maybe it was just an idea. If you know nothing about graphic design, web design, SEO, ecommerce, or anything of that nature, your thought process probably went something like this…

“I’ve got a really cool idea”

“OK how do I get started? Simple, I just need to create a website to sell my idea to the masses”

At this point you did one of two things, you either tried to find someone who could execute your web strategy or you went through the pain and agony of trying to get a website running by yourself.

Anyone who has tried to create a website on their own understands just how painful and time consuming of an experience it can be! If you took this route, you might have come up with following questions?

Where is the best place to register a domain?

If the .com domain that I wanted is not available, which alternative should I choose and why? Should I go with a .net, .co, or the local web suffix for my country?

Should I invest my time and energy to learn HTML or PHP to create my website?

What if my website doesn’t have the aesthetic appeal that I had initially intended, should I learn tools like Photoshop or flash? ( hire graphic designer continued…)