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The Environment Shapes how your work turns out

The Space in which we design and work depends a lot on how our work turns out. Which can mean a good or bad thing. If you are working in such a place as above I’m pretty sure your having a fun filled time designing or It could be the total opposite.  In your working space put up inspirational material on your walls if your able to.

For example I design in my bedroom and then I will move to a place in my home where I normally would not. Switching locations allows for a different mindset on how to work. The same thing can be used as an example when you sleep over a friends house its not going to be the same as if you were at home.

This is what I did to make my workspace more creative

1. I put up inspirational material on the walls

2. I let the sun shine through the window

3. Listening to Music helps a lot and makes the process a lot smoother (I’m even listening to Music as I type this)

4. And one major thing that has helped me is to The Book called “Caffeine for the Creative Mind” there is a lot of good exercises to help get you in the creative mindset.

Image rights belong to Uuushh

I Cannot Take you Serious As A Designer If

  1.  You Do not have a portfolio site
  2. Your not googleable
  3. You don’t have business cards
  4. Your designing just for the money
  5. You have a Facebook fan page as your portfolio site
  6. You use helvetica for everything
  7. You have no Idea who Charles And Ray Eames Are
  8. You don’t care about doing Great work
  9. You just put work on your portfolio site to fill the space
  10. You don’t know anyone in your city that is a graphic designer

I’m sure there are more that I could come up with. This is just a list of things that I have seen online or experienced myself and did wrong.

So what are somethings that you’ve seen or experienced?

How to Build Your Reputation As A designer

Image rights Belong to John December

When I first started on my path to the design world I had no idea how to build my reputation. Because in Art school they do not really teach you how to go about doing such a thing. I tend to look at your reputation as a designer which will show people how it is to know you as a person and how it will be to work with you.

The first thing that I immediately did was to start connecting with people in the design community. Connecting with other designers will definitely serve you greatly. The way to go about connecting with other designer is to go where they are, That means go to forums, Blogs and leave good comments, following other designers on twitter (Beware of the people who think having a high follower count and a low I mean really low following count is the thing).

Twitter is one major thing that has helped me tremendously with networking and LinkedIn as well. On LinkedIn there are groups that you can join and network through those as well. Because the more you engage and interact with the discussion the more you’ll be noticed.

Heres the steps I took to build my reputation

1. Started networking with other designers

2. I had a portfolio site ( No A FaceBook Fan Page Does not Count)

3. I had business cards readily available

4. I Created my own Blog that you are reading now.

5. I immersed myself in the design industry

6. I was not afraid to talk to other designers

7. Seek out criticism even though it may scare you do to so

8. Remember that you are as good of a designer as you make up your mind to be

Cane Toad Road

 

This is such a great Australian advertisment I would love to see more commercials like this in the U.S. The frogs remind me of the frogs that were used in the Budweiser commercial.

 

Let me know what type of articles you’d like me to write about for future posts.

Seth Godin: How to get your ideas to spread

Seth Godin always has an interesting way to look at things. When he talked about doing things that people notice such as if you were driving down the street, and seen a cow you would just keep driving. But if the cow was purple you would stop and look.  Doing something remarkable another example from Seth is when he talks about silk about how they did not triple their sales with advertising it was how they placed their product and where.