Just one year after achieving successfully school with student movies “Gary” & “Yankee Gal“, they are proud to present their new short film made in Paris at Wizz Design.

Film’s Story

Virgile is very shy guy who’s trying to date a charming girl by turning himself into funny and manly characters.

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Hi, my name is Mel Ndiweni, design alias Acuity. I’m a 22 year old freelance designer in London, United Kingdom

How long have you been freelancing & why did you decide to freelance ?

I have freelancing at what I would call a serious level for roughly 18 months but I did my first freelance job about 3 or 4 years ago and dabbled since then, making a gradual progression to where I am now; having set up Acuity Designs with my partner in crime Ashley Bloom.

How did you market yourself (find design work/new clients) in the beginning ?

I began by doing painted murals and scenes at local schools and by doing CD/DVD print artwork for musicians within local urban music scenes. Marketing in the beginning was definitely reliant on a referral scheme. i.e completing work to the highest possible standard and having other musicians call me about my services.

For the murals, I took photos of completed work and created a brochure of work and respective school testimonials. this worked great, as headmasters and principles want what every school around them has. I think a big factor, which I can only see in hindsight for finding the amount of work I did at that stage was due to under-pricing my services. That I think came with a certain naivety  as to what one could charge for design work, due to age and inexperience.

How do you market yourself (find design work) now ?

Finding work now and promotion is a militant routine of weekly and daily tasks. We split the workload. At least once a week, we have a cold calling routine; where we call around 15-20 local small businesses offering service and around 10 design agencies asking if they need to outsource work.  Furthermore engaging in the online community of designers has a good unexpected advantage of work.

Engaging in the online community is also essential to us. Posting on forums and blogs and generally just interacting is a big part of letting people we know we exist. A lot of jobs come from friends in the community who are looking at outsourcing work, or who know our strengths and refer people to us. Last month, we printed approximately  150 letters in custom envelopes and hand delivered them over the course of a fortnight to local businesses; that worked out absolutely brilliantly.

The key for us was phoning before pretending to be customers and finding out the names of their heads of marketing/advertising/IT/promotion and who the owners where. This enabled us to place a named addressee on the envelopes! Personal touches! We’re big believers in the power of google; around 40% of our work comes from google. Thus seeking out ways to get ourselves higher in searches is a big part of our strategy.

How did you decide what to charge ? What was the process ?

Working out what to charge came with a solid week of research after receiving a client from a mid-sized corporate office astounded that we could do the work they required at such a cheap price. Looking at forums and online resources about the subject helped. I compiled a list of online resources that we used to determine my pricing structure. Furthermore, good old fashioned sneakiness was a key. Sending out e-mails for fake projects to various agencies and freelancers helped us to ensure we were competitively priced as well…

What type of work do you do? (design for print, web, multimedia etc)

We offer a variety of services including logo design; design for print; illustration; web design (flash and html); aswell as recently adding photography to the list.

You offer a lot of services, do you have a favourite field?

I’m getting more and more interested in logo design, but my personal passion is photography.

You have received a lot of publication and exposure due to your illustration and photography work, what are your favorite pieces?

Our favorite illustration and photography pieces are Disaster, Mc Escher 2009, Bank Of England, LeadenHall Market respectively.

What would be your perfect dream project ?

A perfect dream for us, would be something that involved every aspect of our cappilities from photography to flash website design but the key to the dream is that it would be something that every single person in the world would see. What the actual project could be, I  have no idea!..

What blogs, magazines, podcasts etc do you subscribe to ?

Of course crazyleaf!, david airey, smashing mag, webdesignerhelp, also active on a lot of forums so pick up a lot of stuff from there. Not to forget to mention twitter; I love the thing, follow us at http://www.twitter.com/AcuityDesigns. I also, pick up copies of Digital Photography and Photoshop Creative every month.

How do you generate ideas/what techniques do you use to stimulate creativity ?

Sometimes I get ideas from just life in general, but quite often it starts with a lil research into what I want to achieve. Maybe a book on cd/dvd packaging and then a light bulb will hit me..

What about the business side of things, accounting, invoicing, bookkeeping, how do you manage it ?

For big decisions we use the free business consultancy at our bank for the nitty gritty we employ an accountant at a discounted rate as hes a family friend. But for day to day things, we have a complicated Excel Spreadsheet and we recently signed up to Freshbooks, just trial running it for the next month or so.

What is the biggest piece of advice you would give to someone starting out freelancing ?

Work is out there. You have to find it. Or you’ll stagnate into the heap of people who seem to think that its impossible to find work. It’s just a hard struggle that demands discipline. That sounds a lot colder and ruthless than I mean it!

Where can we see some of your work (URL)?

On our website at www.acuitydesigns.net

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This module implements a mechanism for email confirmation on all the new registered users. The module doesn’t affect users registered before the plugin was installed. If a user doesn’t provide a valid email address or doesn’t activate his account he can’t submit stories.

The plugin doesn’t affect your template and works with any Pligg template you may use.

We use ourselves this plugin on our design social media website, zaBox. Actually the plugin was designed for zaBox. The results after applying the plugin were spectacular, virtually eliminating those nasty Pligg spam bots.

You can test the module on our website before installing it. Just go to http://www.zabox.net/register and create an account.

If you have any more questions see our FAQ section.

A user hits Register and is directed to the registration page where he fills the details (user name, email, password).

After he hits Create User it gets redirected to a page where he is asked to confirm his registration by clicking the confirmation link he received in the email inbox he provided on registration.

If the user tries to login and submit stories without validating his account he gets an error message.

Once the user clicks the email validation link in his email he gets redirected to the login page and a message is displayed informing the user that his account was activated and he can start submit stories.

The module is available for selling on our website. Just go here for more info and purchase.

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Details : 2 columns, widget ready, XHTML and CSS standards compliant, Gravatar, Flickr and Twitter ready, SEO optimized, tested with IE 6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 2+, Opera 9+.

Requires : Wordpress 1.5+

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Details : multi-level dropdown javascript navigation menu, custom sliding elements with images, site wide customizable 125 x 125 custom banner ads, adsense 728×15 link unit on the index page, 468×60 ad unit sitewide on header, 300×250 ad unit on single posts, tabbed content area, featured video, flash tag cloud, popular posts, Flick ready, Related Posts enabled,

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Details : two-column homepage with featured posts and normal posts, jQuery widgetized slider in the footer, cufon javascript font-replacement for titles, 8 different colour schemes, WooThemes backend.

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Details : 3 columns, fixed width, gallery layout, thumbnail covers style, Flickr, Twitter and delicious integration, not-widget ready, PSD files included.

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Details : widget ready, 3 columns, right sidebar, complatible with IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, W3C XHTML and CSS compliant.

Details : widget ready, 2 columns, right sidebar, complatible with IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, W3C XHTML and CSS compliant, FlickrRSS included, Gravatar enabled.

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Details : WooThemes back-end, Twitter enabled, widget ready, accordion sidebar, 5 color schemes.

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Details : widget ready, 2 columns, right sidebar, complatible with IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, W3C XHTML and CSS compliant.

Details : 3 columns, right sidebars, widget ready, Flickr enabled.

Details : widget ready, 2 columns, right sidebar125×125px ad spots.

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Details : jQuery menu, FlickrRSS included, XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant, 2 widget ready sidebars, ad spots.

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Details : widget ready, magazine layout, Gravatar enabled, auto catch images for thumbnails, auto resize images, social bookmarking Ready, easy logo change via theme option, breadcumb in post ( for SEO ), drop down menu.

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Details : 2 columns, widget ready, right sidebar, Flickr enabled.

Details : 2 columns, widget ready, right sidebar, Flickr enabled.

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Details : magazine layout, custom Admin page, JQuery featured article section, 125×125px ad spots, Twitter enabled.

Details : 3 columns, widget ready, right sidebar, image slider module, multi-level dropdown javascript navigation menu, featured sliding posts, site wide customizable 125 x 125 custom banner ads, Adsense enabled, tabbed content area, threaded comments ready.

Details : magazine layout, 4 columns, PageNavi enabled, Gravatar enabled, SEO friendly,thumbnails on posts, PSD files included.

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Additional Wordpress Themes Resources :

• Top 50 Free Wordpress Themes
• CrazyLeaf Design Blog’s Free Wordpress Themes
• zaBox Free Themes and Templates Section

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1. Self-motivate. Finding freelance work in the best of times can be a challenge, so finding it when things are a bit slimmer requires a sufficient amount of self-motivation to get started. Set your will in steel and just get out there and do it as it’s unlikely that work will just show up on your doorstep unannounced.
2. Ask for referrals. If you haven’t already been doing this, now is the time to start. If a client is happy with your work, why not have them do the work of spreading your name around to other potential clients.
3. Go local. A simple search through the online yellow pages may help you find some local businesses that either don’t have a website or haven’t updated it since the late 90’s. Since the web is where it’s at for business, take advantage of this available market and send them your personal info.
4. Promote your website with social media. For many designers these days, this can mean adding a blog or a Twitter feed to their online presence. These services provide an avenue to get new people looking at your work and if you become successful with them you’ll likely have a steady stream of clients to work with for some time to come.
5. Scour the web. These days, the web can be a great source of potential design work. Try out online associations, job boards, and even craigslist to see if you can’t find a little something to keep you busy. You may not find your ideal project, but you will almost inevitably find something to keep you afloat.

Here are a few job sites you might find useful :

• FreelanceSwitch Job Board
• RentACoder
• GetAFreelancer
• Freshwebjobs
• Krop
• Smashing Magazine Job Board
• Web Designer Wall Jobs
• Authentic Jobs
• Simply Hired
• Coroflot
• AllDevJobs
• ProBlogger Job Board
• iFreelance
• GetACoder

You can find more freelance jobs websites in this Freelance Switch article.

Even though companies are tightening the purse strings, there are still many places out there that need great design for print and web media. Keep your eyes open, your portfolio on hand and your mind open and you may find just what you’re looking for.

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This is the most important step in developing a logo for your company: what does your company want to display to the world? And even more important, in what way are you going to advertise this logo: billboard, magazine, fliers? Once you have established these facts, it becomes integral to figure out what way will best display the company message. Sometimes using animal graphics is the best way, although now it is difficult to find an animal that is not in use. Depending on your company and the general audience it reaches out to will help in acquiring a specific logo, whether it be a graphic or some type of vector design.

Another important criterion in making a company logo is determining what will appeal to the customer. If your customers are typically senior citizens, then you need to make something that will appeal to that demographic. Determining what age group and demographic you are reaching out to will additionally help in establishing what your customers are looking for. It is the logo and the advertisement that is going to draw them in and it is thus important to create a logo that will be memorable to a passerby.

With the increasing amount of advertisements and marketing strategies that have taken over the modern world, it becomes difficult to be original and most of the time companies tend to draw ideas from others. It is hard to make a logo as distinctive as the McDonald’s golden arches or the Starbucks logo, two globally recognized symbols of consumerism. If you want your company to attract this type of attention then you have to ensure that the design is purely original and not a spin-off of anything that is currently in existence.

The message you want to send out to your consumer is one of the most important aspects to consider when creating a logo. You want your company to seem appealing to the customer, but it is again to remember what demographic you are working with; if it is a younger audience, you need to tap into that generational pool and come up with ideas of how to attract them. If you want to seem nurturing, create a logo for that; if you want to seem determined, create a logo that expresses this. It all depends on your company and the message which the whole company wants to present to the public.

Finally, determine what you want the customer to walk away with after seeing your logo. Of course you want them to purchase your product (whatever that may be), but you additionally need to determine what kind of emotional pull you want to place on the message. If you want the customer to feel obligated to take part in your product there is one type of logo for that; however, if you want the customer to be enthusiastic about the message then create a different type for that. It all ties back into your clientele base and what audience you are trying to attract. Once this is determined, you are free to design whatever kind of logo will attract that audience and the best way to attract them.

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For more Photoshop resources check out our previous articles of the series :

• Best Photoshop Tutorials, Brushes and Textures of April 2009
  
• Best Photoshop Tutorials, Brushes and Textures of March 2009
• Best Photoshop Tutorials, Brushes and Textures of February 2009
• Best Photoshop Tutorials, Brushes and Textures of November 2008
  
• Best Photoshop Tutorials, Brushes and Textures of October 2008
  
• Best Photoshop Resources of August 2008

For daily resources check out our design social media website, zaBox

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Fanurio uses many methods to track the time you are spending on a project or more. You can track the time manually or using the incorporated timer. You can also use the built-in reminders (including idle time detection) to help you start, resume or stop the timer.

Whether you bill your work using a flat rate or by the hour, Fanurio has lots of features to help you earn all the money. Fanurio lets you round time if you are billing by the hour, lets you give your clients discounts, supports subcontracting, multiple currencies, allows you to manage your taxes and creates detailed invoices.

Here are some of the other great features available in Fanurio :

• Full backup functions
• Control the timer from the iTunes-like mini view
• Organize projects using services and expenses
• Create partial invoices anytime during the project
• Export invoices to HTML or PDF to print them or to send them by e-mail
• Import contacts from Address Book and CSV files
• Runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
• Cross-platform version that can be used from a USB stick

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Each participating user was asked to say what feature of Fanurio (link opens in new window) they like best,  and leave a comment in the giveaway article. There were a total of 7 participants to the giveaway and each got an ID number, corresponding to their comment number from 1 to 7. To determine this winner we used Random.org List Randomizer.

• Dallas G - comment ID#3
• Michela - comment ID#1
• Maria Joao - comment ID#6

Thank you all for participating and be sure to subscribe to our blog to receive updates and notices regarding future giveaways.

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The “Clark view” is a unique view of the ocean that most will only be able to experience safely on land, while studying one of Clark’s photos. The photos speak for themselves. Enjoy.

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