As a Maine College of Art graduate with a degree in New Media Design, Josh was in the position of many young freelancers ; fresh out of school and full of creativity. Since that time Josh has set up a successful art and design label under which he can produce work that he loves and people will flock to it. With his successes and very bright future I thought he would be a valuable resource for young freelancers trying to make it big. He generously answered my questions below.

How did you make the move from being a graduate of Maine College of Art to starting your art and design label? What drove you to start Lumadessa?

Lumadessa evolved from a creative necessity to make something for myself other than client design work. I would dedicate a little time each day to working on a piece. Over time, friends began expressing interest in owning the artwork in some form. I guess it was seeing that passion for my work that opened up my mind to developing an art label.

What have you learned about the business side of design since setting up shop?

Shipping is a big one. I had a general knowledge of it, though not on a mass scale. I quickly learned to build systems and find ways to automate things. I remember when I first began shipping it was many long waits in the post office line with my handwritten packages. Now it’s online shipping, carrier pick-ups, digital receipts, printed labels, fragile stickers and bulk packaging shifts. It’s an ongoing evolution in make things simpler.

The other area I keep learning about is my customers — from what pieces they are most interested, where they are from, how they navigate the website and their personalities. I find this helpful for improving my business and improving on the overall customer experience.

What sources have influenced your very unique aesthetic and conceptual collections?’

In making a collection, I have an intuitive process in how it’s made. There is no set system. Sometimes concepts come out while making the artwork. Other times, a general concept comes first which influences the visual look of the collection. The only thing that is the same is that both, the form and concept are a back and forth process that help improve on each other.

In the case of the Flora Fauna collection, the concept is about simplifying the visual form of the subject. This brings out the unique character identity from which people learn and appreciate its existence. The visual look of the collection is graphic design meets character design. It has roots in typography, iconography, character design and field guides.

To what degree and by what means do you actively market and promote your work?

I primarily promote Lumadessa through blogs, Twitter and Facebook. I’ve been very lucky to have an audience that is vocal about my work. If they see something they like, they will blog about it or repost it. I try to find easier ways for people to share their interest in the work with others.

Was there any particular point that Lumadessa took off? If so what contributed to your success?

I would have to say being on multiple major design blogs at the same time with out my involvement in it.

The success is combination of quality work, preparation, putting that work in front of the right audience and being consistent about updating new work to that audience.

Do you have any advice for business minded creatives looking to start their own business?

I think the best advice is to understand that you’ll have failures at some point in running your business. Great success can come out of this because it forces you to focus your business to be stronger and adapt. Once you come to terms with this, you’re free to learn, to experiment and evolve as a business. This gives you a better opportunity to make a better product.

Thanks and Reactions

I wanted to thank Josh again for answering my questions. I really appreciate his responses and hopefully they can help you readers in thinking about directions for your business. Now it’s your turn to react. How important is knowing the business side of freelance to you? Is your aesthetic all your own or influenced by current trends? Are you a good self promoter?

This is part 2 of their responses. Previously we had answers from Ray Larabie, Eric Olson and Bas Jacobs, three well respected type designers. Today we have the exciting conclusion featuring Peter Bilak, Ross Mills, and Ken Barber.

Read last weeks responses from Ray Larabie, Eric Olson, and Bas Jacobs.

Your Turn

I’ll ask you the same questions I asked them. Are free fonts free for a reason? Does the price of a font directly correlate to its quality? Are there well designed and well considered typefaces offered online for free? What are they? Which type designer’s response are you in agreement with? Leave you responses in the comments below!

I asked 6 type designers and type foundries these same questions and here are their responses. In this post we have Ray Larabie, Eric Olson and Bas Jacobs, three well respected type designers answering. Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion featuring Peter Bilak, Ross Mills, and Ken Barber.

Come back next time for responses from Peter Bilak, Ross Mills, and Ken Barber.

Your Turn

I’ll ask you the same questions I asked them. Are free fonts free for a reason? Does the price of a font directly correlate to its quality? Are there well designed and well considered typefaces offered online for free? What are they? Leave you responses in the comments below!

A single user test can change all that very quickly as it has for me time and time again. The misconception of user testing is that it’s expensive and ultimately not worth it. There are many services that will gather “qualified participants” to user test your site or app for a reasonable sum. These services get the job done but you can bootstrap your own round of user testing for free.

Small scale user testing is an idea triumphed by Steve Krug in his wonderful usability book Don’t Make Me Think. His concepts are really solid and he preaches that even doing a single user test looking over the shoulder of a friend can do wonders for your site.

There are a few tools out there to make the user testing experience a little more rich and the good news is they’re all free!

Clikcheat

Clickheat is a free services that lets you see where users are clicking on a particular page. This kind of information can determine if certain page elements are being used or if users expect a feature to function differently than it does. Use the findings to de-clutter your site of unused items and move towards functionality that users want and use most.

Screenr

This web application is a free and easy screencasting service (for twitter mostly) that can be used for any number of things including web testing. Set up a tester to begin a screencast by clicking a link and then navigating to your site. When they are done instruct them to stop the screencast and send it to you via twitter or by emailing a link. This service can be used face to face or remotely to observe how the user moves his or her mouse around your site and any audio feedback they might have or questions about the site.

Your Own Two Eyes

No this isn’t the name of a web app the help you with user testing. Just as Steve Krug suggests, sit down a group of 5 friends in front of your latest web or application creation and let them run free. Make notes to yourself and observe where they click and how quickly they get confused. Even this simple interaction can be very valuable to your design process. Take your findings, make changes to your site, and test it again.

Other Applications

Chalkmark – A quick user test that asks users to complete tasks on your site and measures the results.

SMT (Simple Mouse Tracking) – A free way to record the mouse movements of visitors and play them back to examine.

Google Website Optimizer – Allows you to run multiple variations of your website and to track and compare the results.

Do You User Test?

Do you sing the praises of user testing application and websites? Is your design too bulletproof to require anyone to test it before you launch it? What applications do you use to test your site besides those mentioned? Has testing every opened your eyes to a major usability problem? Answer in the comments!

Description

Rebecca was looking to take her tutoring business to the next level using innovative online tools and effective online teaching methods and she needed a website to match. This site now serves as home base for all of her students with FAQS, demo videos, and resources for online learning. Rebecca works one on one with each of her students using online whiteboards and skype and is very different from all of the other big tutoring services out there. The new website reflects a certain balance of personality and professionalism to connect with both students and parents.

Goals

If parents were going to connect with Rebecca and have her tutor their children, the website needed to be professional while differentiating its self significantly from the competing big tutoring companies. The one on one interaction was a main point to highlight because prospective students want to know they will be working with Rebecca each time. The line between professionalism and kid friendliness in all visuals and copy was carefully controlled so Zook Tutoring can be viewed as a simple, safe, and effective alternative to big tutoring companies. The blog gives visitors another opportunity to connect with Rebecca and read her writing about education and teaching.

Concept

When Rebecca works with students, she uses a digital tablet and an online whiteboard so she can write and respond in real time with students. This aesthetic of handwritten elements, unruly lines and imperfection was the main inspiration behind the playful look and feel. The colors are those typically used on the whiteboard and relate to some degree to ideas teaching and learning while keeping a simple color pallet. Simple illustrations around the site make things more playful and kid friendly and add lots of personality. The site remains clean and readable with hand drawn elements interspersed to soften the site a bit. The logo is also hand lettered by me.

Solution

The result is a content rich site that introduces kids and parents to Rebecca and presents Zook Tutoring as a trusted establishment for online learning. Hand drawn elements make the site visually interesting and the wealth of content about Rebecca’s services is easy to find and pleasant to read.

The large and open photographic background carries a few clicks into the site where it changes to a more traditional layout that is nice on it’s own.

I’m quite a fan of MICA’s redesign complete by Happy Cog recently. The homepage looks great:

And the interior pages feature some great web type.

Loyola and MICA join a growing list of colleges and universities who are beginnig to realize the importance of the design of their site to incoming students, alumni, and the competition. The entire student body uses the web along with every prospective student and so colleges and universities are finding it more and more important to put their best foot forward.

Sites like Edustyle seek to promote those sites with the best designs and serves to further the trend of beautiful .edu site designs.

What’s the best designed .edu?

Do you have a favorite .edu site for it’s design? What are some other schools with great sites? Do you wish your school had a better site? Would something like web design sway your opinion of a school? Answer in the comments.

Why Handpicked?

I’ve done a little of the work for you with these hand picked freelance jobs of the week. I comb through lots of job boards and pull out the ones that are best for young freelancers and those at entry level and post them here.

This is the same way I would look for jobs when the barrel ran dry but condensed into the jobs I would actually take time to respond to.

Jobs – Development

Junior Web Developer
at Wall Street On Demand in Boulder, CO — Oct 07, 2009

Web Application Developer
at Cramer Dev — Oct 06, 2009

iPhone developer – Early, but funded start-up
at Yaptor in San Francisco, CA — Oct 06, 2009

Web Developer
at Yelp, Inc. in San Francisco, CA

Junior Flash Developer
at Fish in a Bottle (Anywhere)

Jobs – Design

Website Graphic Design Intern
at FanBox in San Diego, CA — Oct 06, 2009

Flash, AIR, and Flex Designer
at Vidli in Denver, CO — Oct 08, 2009

Freelance Interactive Designer
at Microsoft Branded Entertainment in Seattle, WA — Oct 07, 2009

Graphic Designer at Dapper
in San Fransisco, CA — Oct 09, 2009

Suggested Reading

How To Get the Summer Internship or Job of your Dreams

How To Find Freelance Work and Save in Today’s Economy

Finding Jobs on the Web: A Practical Guide

Successes?

Have you gotten a gig off of these postings? Let me know in the comments if you happen to strike gold.  Are hand picked jobs valuable to you or would you rather dig through on your own?Enjoy the handpicked goodness.

There is a trend that when a designer wants to display a poster, instead of hanging it on a boring old wall, they setup their tripod and a time and take the photo holding their poster. The more interesting way you can hold the poster, the better.

The internet is a-wash with these photos each with a duplicated presentation idea that at one point was original. Each photo is a little different and presumably features the piece of design along with the designer. They are setup, perhaps considered, an add a little interest to you poster photos.

This trend has reached a level of popularity which has caused it to transform into something entirely different. It has actually turned in to a product, a commodity for some.

Arsenal, “Professional Design Weaponry” is now selling “Photorealistic Poster Presentation Templates.” These $35 files are PSDs presumably that allow you to paste your designs right onto them and have your cliche poster photo in moments, without the use of a camera or actually printing your poster.

Some young professional is dressed up behind your poster holding it in a variety of ways for “easily adjustable width” and “optional folding effects.”

Beyond the absurdity of having some random hand model holding up your poster, this file will probably be bought hundreds of times and used on thousands of “posters” sad to say. Photoshop can do some pretty amazing things but faking a display of a nice printed piece for convenience is not one of it’s best tricks.

The site goes on to try and sell you a bunch of photorealistic t-shirt (wrinkled and unwrinkled) for $35 for you to plop your design on to. This trend in packaging design elements is not new of course. Vectors have been bought and sold and dropped in place since MSword but faking a final presentation photograph is a step further in my eyes.

The presentation of your work is almost as important as the creation of it. That’s the point of the people on Arsenal as well: “buy our presentation packages for your projects that you probably won’t get completed because your presentation wouldn’t be very good if you tried to do it.”

Designers should take pride in every aspect of their design, from it’s inception to it’s final presentation and every aspect in between. This strange pre-packaged solution is something i would caution designers against using out of respect for their fellow designers and for their own design’s sake.

Poster Cliche Turned Product?

Have you ever used some form of pre-packaged design like this? Do you think it’s wrong for this type of thing to be bought and then used by designers? Is it no big deal or does it spell trouble for design’s future?

Revealing the differences is important to appreciating each font a little better and perhaps paying closer attention to typography as it applies to everyday life.

Many signs and informative displays you read over the course of the day are set in one of these faces. Take note of the nuances of them and see if you can spot them throughout your day.

Helvetica

Helvetica was developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas type foundry. Originally called Die Neue Haas Grotesk, it was created based on Schelter-Grotesk. The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, had no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage. – wikipedia

Since then the typeface has been marketed to the nines and used worldwide. The documentary about the typeface helps the viewer to appreciate it quite a bit more and I highly recommend it.

Arial

Arial is a sans-serif typeface and computer font packaged with Microsoft Windows, other Microsoft software applications, Apple Mac OS X, and many PostScript computer printers. The typeface was designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype Typography.

Arial has identical character widths to those of Helvetica but differs greatly in most letters. The differences are especially noticeable in the capital letters but in many lower case letters it can be distinguished by terminals that don’t go quite horizontal. The letter e has a terminal at the bottom where the letter comes to and end. In Helvetica this is horizontal to the baseline and in Arial this is angled.

These characters highlight some of the major differences between the fonts. Angled lines are drawn on the Helvetica letters (set in red) to show the terminal differences.

The capital ‘R’ highlights a major difference in the consideration and beautification put into each typeface.

Can you see the difference?

These two typefaces are used everywhere. Can you spot the differences when they aren’t right next to each other? Do you think distinguishing type like this really matters? Are there instances where Arial should be used over Helvetica and why?

Here are some sexy pictures of the thing.

The thing is real wood, glass and aluminum all over. It ticks at a most enjoyable volume and weighs quite a bit which I can appreciate. There’s nothing digital about it and the clockwork in the back is great.

The face is a great big piece of aluminum with the names of different time zone related cities printed on int Helvetica. The Date Line and the “GMT”are highlighted in red and everthing else is monochrome besides the second hand.

The brilliant little second hand rotates on a clear disk and is the shape of a plane. Behind the disk, at the center of the clock is a representation of the globe, imprinted in white, centered on the North Pole.

To me this thing seems like it’s straight out of Mad Men, the one TV show the internet tells me every designer should watch and the one I haven’t gotten around to watching yet. The clock was probably made in the 80s but I think it has that international ad man feel.

It is now planted firmly on my desk (read: windowsill) to make things a little more official and professional. It also makes it seem like I need it for my full roster of international clients. It’s cool beans.