by Shaun Crowley

The Internet is one of the most effective promotional mediums available to you. Internet promotion can be cheap, it can be highly personal, and it enables you to reach thousands of people with minimal effort.

It’s also a good vehicle for exhibiting your talents. In fact, I regularly hire new freelance designers on the strength of their online portfolio - if they present their services persuasively on their websites, I don’t always insist on face-to-face meetings.

If you’ve got good material in your repertoire, you should have a good website to present it. And if you’ve got a good website, it makes sense that you make people aware of it.

There are two ways to exploit your website to its full potential. Either you make yourself accessible to website browsers by optimizing your website’s exposure on search engines and major sites, or you buy a data list of potential clients and present your website directly to people in an email campaign.
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by Shaun Crowley

There are two common misperceptions surrounding self-marketing that often trip up small business owners and freelancers.

The first is the perception that ‘word-of-mouth’ is part of the self-marketing mix, and the second is that self-promotion is best organized only during periods of down-time.
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by Linnea Dayton & Cristen Gillespie, authors of the Photoshop CS/CS2 Wow! Book (Peachpit Press). This tutorial is supported by worldlabel.com.

The following tutorial shows how you can use Photoshop and labels (like those at Worldlabel.com) to design an easy packaging project like the one shown below:

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By Pariah S. Burke

Why have bland, generic looking labels when you can just as easily create labels that really pop?

Take a look at Figure 1, two versions of a label to be affixed to VHS tapes chronicling an annual stockholder meeting and to be distributed to investors. The one on the left was created the way 99% of short-run self-adhesive labels are created on a desktop computer—in Microsoft Word. It’s bland, boring, “generic�, just 99% of short-run self-adhesive labels created on a desktop computer. How about the one on the right? On its best day and under the deft manipulations of an extremely skilled Microsoft Word user, Word could probably make the same label, but it would take a lot more time and require Photoshop to create the imagery and faded text anyway.

Figure 1. The Microsoft Word version (left) and Photoshop version (right).

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Getting exposure on the search engines – tips for freelance designers
Adapted from The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook
by Shaun Crowley

Wouldn’t it be great if new clients contacted you? In the following article I’ll show you how to conquer the search engines so prospective clients can find you online. We’ll look at four core areas: Choosing your keywords, Making the content of your website “Googlable,” Fulfilling the needs of browsers, and Getting other sites to link to you.

1. How to choose your keywords

By far the best tool for researching keywords is Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com). You can pay for access per day ($8), per week ($26), per month ($52), or per year ($260). It’s worth taking as much time as you can afford.
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Adapted from The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook.

If you have an interesting story to tell, a press release will help you to make newspaper editors aware of it.

Maybe you recently won an award. Maybe you stumbled upon some interesting information in the field you work in. Or maybe your design contributed towards some kind of achievement on behalf of your client.
Depending on the scale and content of your story, you can send your press release to marketing websites, marketing magazines, the relevant trade press, the regional press, and even the business section of the national press.
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I created this blog for one reason - to stay abreast of the design contest scene across a variety of disciplines and to learn more about how to use my software to the max. Since I’ve used Photoshop since 1990 (version 1.0!), I’m always interested in tutorials from other Adobe Photoshop CS2 users. Here’s a recent list of a few tutorials that I access once in a while to learn more. Mind you, some of these tutorials may date back as far as Photoshop 5.5 (I don’t think any of them are any earlier), but they are as relevant today as they were five years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

by Shaun Crowley

Freelance designers who produce marketing materials will know that design and copy should be developed together to work well. But sometimes there isn’t enough budget for teaming with a copywriter. Or the client needs a project in a hurry. That’s when being able to produce concept and copy in addition to design can be a powerful business advantage.

It goes without saying that an ability to write is fundamental. But you don’t have to be a copywriter to produce strong concepts and write copy for many smaller projects. Read the rest of this entry »

You’d probably never believe it (or maybe you would), but the U.S. Government provides some nifty photos that are basically free from copyright except, possibly, for commercial use - but only in some instances. Some sites also have print-quality resolutions available. As a bonus, I included another non-governmental link at the bottom that will blow your mind if you don’t know about it already.

Public Health Image Library (PHIL) from the Centre for Disease Control – Warning! Some images are unsuitable for children because they’re fairly graphic (seriously graphic). But you can find natural disaster, bioterrorism, and influenza photos, illustrations, and videos here for the asking.

CIA Publications Homepage – This undercover operation hands out free maps and flags from all over the world.

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by Jennifer Schrock

“Doesn’t that cost a mint?� a visitor asks as he eyes a ground source heat pump unit and the plumbing that brings recycled rainwater to the toilets in Rieth Village, a three-building academic complex at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College which was completed in the spring of 2006.

“Do you mean up-front or over the long haul?” Luke Gascho, executive director of Merry Lea queries. Gascho is an advocate of full-cost accounting and challenges his guests to consider not only the cost to construct a building but also the expected lifetime of its materials and the expense required to maintain heating, lighting and cooling. Often these factors alone can justify a “green” expenditure, without even considering the benefits to the environment that are more difficult to quantify. Read the rest of this entry »