Design an iPad app UI
Apposing’s Dave Brown reveals how to prototype a user interface for an iPad app in Photoshop
- SoftwarePhotoshop CS4 or later
- Time needed3 hours
- Skills
- Work with grid structures
- Wireframe for iPad
- Focus on UI/UX design
- Use Photoshop’s Marquee and masking tools
- DOWNLOAD SUPPORT FILES
In this walkthrough we’ll create two basic user interfaces for an iPad app and develop them to a prototyping level. Using Apposing’s best-selling Pretty Green iPhone app for singer Liam Gallagher’s fashion label, we’ll explore how to layout and structure an iPad version of the app.
We’ll also walk through how to produce multiple pages within one document, and explore some techniques for structuring and constructing your app to create the best possible user experience, including wireframing from sketchbook through to digital. The end result will be a clear and concise design that communicates effectively to the user.
01 Before getting started in Photoshop, take a pen and paper, and sketch out some possible ideas for your user interface layout. Produce some basic wireframe drawings, making sure you also sketch out some human interface elements, such as buttons and drop-down menus that people will interact with.
02 Once you’ve produced your wireframe sketches and have a solid idea in place, you can start exploring your ideas in Photoshop. Set up a new document with the dimensions at 1024×768 pixels – which is the size of the iPad’s touchscreen – and set the resolution to 72dpi (for screen).
03 To start constructing a basic set of guides to work to, you first need to make sure your settings are correct. Check the Ruler and Snap settings are selected by going to View and selecting each item. To show the grid and guides (which will be implemented in later steps) go to View>Show and select Guides and Grid. Finally, go to View>Snap To and select Guides and then Grid, so that your screen items snap to the grid
04 Using the grid, select a guide from the ruler on the left and drag it into the document to create your layout. We’ve gone for a four-column layout with each column at 40mm wide – separated by a 10mm gap – and a 5mm border around the document.
05 Keep it simple by making a wireframe version of the layout in the key shapes of your UI. These can be developed and replaced later on in the process. To start translating your wireframe into Photoshop, create a new layer, select the Rectangular Marquee tool and hit Ctrl/Cmd+Return – this will make your selection turn black. Now reduce the Opacity setting to 13% to help simplify layering the content. Block in the key shapes for the UI menu. Here, the buttons are 15x40mm with a 2mm gap between them.
06 Next, we’ll layout the shopping section of the app. Using the technique in the last step, we produced boxes that are 70x40mm, and then copied them six times on the page in evenly spaced columns of three.
07 Start laying out the first page of the store, which consists of links to each of the collections and specific items of clothing in long, rectangular boxes at 70x140mm. Use the same technique as previously to produce the boxes. Now copy three of them with 5mm gaps in-between.
08 Once the blocked-out wireframe shapes are in place, you can start putting in your text. The font used here is Futura Medium at 18pts.
09 The basic layout is starting to appear at this stage. As you start styling the layout, keep your files organised by having the menu bar and your main content in the three paragraphs separated in different folders. Then, if you want to replace a section or add something, you can access that area very easily.
10 Click the visibility off the layers for now, and fill the background layer (Edit>Fill) – we chose black. Use the Marquee tool to make a 2px line to separate the different links and select a colour (ours is green).
11 We then introduced the Pretty Green logo, placing it evenly between the two menus. Separate the text by selecting the Rectangle Shape tool and drawing a line 40mm across and 2mm high. Copy and paste the line above and below each of the pieces of text in the menu, making sure you distribute the lines evenly. Our lines were green.
12 Next, introduce the layers back into the piece by toggling the layer visibility on again. On both store layouts that we’re producing, you’ll need to add lines between the boxed content to separate it, so copy the line used in the previous step and use it to stylise the content of the two layouts.
13 Begin working on the content, starting with the main store page. With the wireframe in place, it’s a case of adding photography into the layout. You can do this by placing your images (in this case, a banner taken from the Pretty Green website’s Paul Weller collection), and then positioning the layer above the rectangular shape and using a mask. Do this by clicking Alt/Opt in-between the two layers, and repeat for the remainder of the boxes.
14 Now start doing the same for the main shopping page, introducing more images using the same technique.
15 When the layouts are almost complete, add buttons, arrows and information to the UI to improve the user experience and make navigation as simple as possible. We added arrows to the Back and Options sections above the main menu, and also to the content on the right to indicate scrolling.
Think Different
Apple announced the death of Steve Jobs today, less than eight weeks after the company’s iconic co-founder stepped down as chief executive.
“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives,” Apple said. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.”
Steve Jobs’ declining health was well-known as he battled severe health issues for over a decade, including pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant. Yet Jobs’ death still came as a shock, particularly as the very devices Jobs created not only delivered this breaking news but allowed millions around the world to share their passionate remembrances of this tech innovator.
After hearing of Jobs’ death, I immediately recalled his 2005 commencement address to Stanford graduates where Jobs candidly discussed his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. The ethos that defined Apple and its founder, ‘Think Different‘, even characterized how Jobs reflected on his own mortality — managing to push one’s own thinking on such a universal, yet deeply personal experience.
“Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent,” explained Jobs. I hadn’t realized just how often I thought about these remarks until this evening. Great entrepreneurs and business mavericks such as Steve Jobs revolutionize our daily lives, often in the most unexpected ways.
Addicted to Angry Birds ? Here’s Help !
As we continue to work through our Angry Birds addiction, this playful infographic offers some consolation. We’re not alone in our attraction to flinging the flying fowl, but would like some answers, and this infographic is happy to oblige with lots of solid research.
Why can’t we stop playing this game that started on iPhone and now keeps spreading like wildfire on multiple platforms? Why is it so darn fun? The expert market researchers at AYTM (who aren’t affiliated with Angry Birds creator Rovio in any way) consulted psychologists and dug into boatloads of statistics to find the answers:
It’s the end of the web as we know it
When you own a domain you’re a first class citizen of the web. A householder and landowner. What you can do on your own website is only very broadly constrained by law and convention. You can post the content you like. You can run the software you want, including software you’ve written or customised yourself. And you can design it to look the way you want. If you’re paying for a web hosting service and you don’t like it (or they don’t like you) you can pack up your site and move it to another host. Your URLs will stay the same and so your visitors won’t notice. You get a great deal of freedom in return for the cost of running your own site. Your site could still be there in a decade’s time, possibly even in a century.
If you use a paid-for web service at someone else’s domain you’re a tenant. A second class citizen. You don’t have much control. You’ll probably have to live with your landlord’s furniture and decoration and a restrictive set of rules. Your content will only exist at these URLs for as long as you keep paying the same people that monthly fee and for as long as your provider stays in business. Experience tells me that this isn’t very long. As a paying customer you’ll have a few rights under your contract but they probably won’t amount to very much. When you leave you’ll probably be able to get your data back in a useful format but when you put it back on the web somewhere else you’ll lose all your inbound links, search engine rankings and many of your visitors. This kind of service seems like a good deal until the day you need to move.
When you use a free web service you’re the underclass. At best you’re a guest. At worst you’re a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It’s a cliche but it’s worth repeating: if you’re not paying for it you’re the product not the customer. Your individual account is probably worth very little to the service provider, so they’ll have no qualms whatsoever with tinkering with the service or even making radical changes in their interests rather than yours. If you don’t like it you’re welcome to leave. You may well not be able to take your content and data with you and even if you can, all your URLs are broken.
The conclusion here should be obvious: if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. You need to own your URLs. You’ll have total control and no-one can take it away from you. You don’t need anyone else. If you put the effort in up front it’ll pay off in the long run.
But it’s no longer that simple.
Anyone who’s ever run a website knows that building the site is one thing, getting people to use it is quite another. The smaller your real-world presence the harder it is. If you’re a national newspaper or a Hollywood star you probably won’t have much trouble getting people to visit your website. If you’re a self-employed plumber or an unknown blogger writing in your spare time it’s considerably harder.
Traffic used to come from three places: the real world (print advertising, business cards, word of mouth, etc.), search engines and inbound links. Whichever field you were in and at whichever level, you were competing against other similar sites on a fairly level playing field.
Social networks have changed all that. Facebook and Twitter now wield enormous power over the web by giving their members ways to find and share information using tools that work in a social context. There’s no obvious way to replicate this power out on the open web of independent websites tied together loosely by links and search engine results.
Not so long ago you had to be on MySpace if you were an up-and-coming band. Now it’s probably Facebook. Either way, your social network presence is more important than your own website.
If you’re an independent photographer looking to get established you probably need to get your pictures on photo sharing sites like Flickr where they can be easily found by millions.
Many of the most valuable conversations around technology and many other fields happen on Twitter. If you’re not there you don’t really exist, especially if you’re just getting started in your field.
You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve. We need to use social networks to get heard and this forces us into digital serfdom. We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak.
Perhaps none of this would matter very much if the biggest player of them all — Facebook — wasn’t such a grotesque abuser of its position. Even before announcing Open Graph this week it was pretty clear that Facebook wanted to own everything everyone does online. Facebook currently has 750 million members. If it were a country it’d be the third most populous country in the world, bigger than everyone except China and India. The United States has a mere 312 million people — not even half the size of Facebook.
Facebook’s Open Graph technology allows third-party websites to tell Facebook what people are doing. It extends Facebook’s Like button to include any action that the site owners think might be interesting to Facebook. Play a song and your music streaming site tells Facebook what you’ve played. Read a newspaper article and Facebook knows what you’ve read. LOL at a lolcat and your LOL gets logged for all time on your indelible activity record. Facebook calls this “frictionless sharing”, which is their euphemism for silent total surveillance. Once you’ve signed up for this (and it is optional, at least for now) you don’t need to do anything else to “share” your activity with Facebook. It’s completely automatic.
Site owners and developers are lapping it up. Hosting company Herokuposted this incredible tweet the day after Open Graph was announced:
Huge Open Graph momentum with social devs, we’ve seen more than 33,800 new Facebook apps in last 24 hours #f8
Yes, that’s nearly 34,000 new Facebook apps created in one day by customers of just one hosting company. Astonishing numbers.
At least Facebook is up front about Social Graph. Facebook’s abuse of its Like button to invade people’s privacy is much less publicised. We all think we know how it works. We’re on a website reading an interesting page and we click the Like button. A link to the page gets posted to our wall for our friends to see and Facebook keeps this data and data about who clicks on it to help it to sell advertising. So much so predictable.
What most people don’t know is that the Like button tracks your browsing history. Every time you visit a web page that displays the Like button Facebook logs that data in your account. It doesn’t put anything on your wall but it knows where you’ve been. This even happens if you log out of Facebook. Like buttons are pretty much ubiquitous on mainstream websites so every time you visit one you’re doing some frictionless sharing. Did you opt in to this? Only by registering your Facebook account in the first place. Can you turn it off? Only by deleting your account.
This is where I draw the line. I’m well aware that everything we do online and many of the things we do in the real world creates a data shadow — a digital record of our actions. If you carry a mobile phone your location is continually recorded by your phone company. If you’re suspected of a crime or go missing then this data will be handed to the police. Most of us know this and choose to use mobile phones anyway. We know that when we buy things that transaction is recored by our bank and the shop unless we’re using cash. We know that our computers and our broadband providers record what we do online. But all these things are predictable and at least arguably necessary to provide the services we use. We might not like these intrusions into our privacy but we like the law enforcement, fraud protection and service quality that they buy us. It’s a compromise that most of us are willing to make.
What Facebook is doing is very different. When it records our activity away from the Facebook site it’s a third party to the deal. It doesn’t need this data to run its own services. Moreover, Facebook’s aggregation and centralisation of data across all our disparate fields of activity is a very different thing from our phone company having our phone data and our bank having our finances. Worst of all, the way Facebook collects and uses our data is both unpredictable and opaque. Its technology and policies move so quickly you’d need to be a technical and legal specialist and spend an inordinate amount of time researching Facebook’s activities on an ongoing basis to have any hope of understanding what they’re doing with your data.
As individuals we can opt out. It’s still possible to live a full life in the developed world and not use social networks. Some people may find it harder than others — missing out on event invitations that are only sent on Facebook, for example. Not being able to see your friends’ photos because they’re only posted to Facebook. Not being able to join conversations on Twitter. But for now there are sufficient alternatives for most of us. As with smoking, it’s easier to not start using the social web than to stop. Once you’ve signed up the cost of leaving increases with every “friend” you make, every photo you post, every tweet you send. That’s why I’m holding out against Google+ for now.
For organisations and business it’s very different. We’re already past the point where social networks can be ignored. If you don’t have a social networking presence your businesses is at a significant disadvantage compared with those that do. It’s where the attention, the traffic and the conversations are. Even public and government services are finding their social networking activities increasingly important. How long before they’re essential?
The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you’ll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter, not the domain name you own. You don’t pay Big Web a single penny so it can take away your identity and all your data at any time. The things you can say and do that are likely to be seen and used by any significant number of people will be the things that Facebook, Google and Twitter are happy for you to say and do. You can do what you like on your own website but you’ll probably be shouting into the void.
If I find any answers I’ll post them but right now things are looking bleak. It’s the end of the web as we know it and I feel pretty far from fine.
45 Beautiful Free High Quality WordPress Themes
WordPress has always fascinated designers all around the globe because of its flexibility. Features like easy to use and its extensibility, has made WordPress the most popular CMS available. For me, the best thing about wordpress is that we get all these features as open source. Even web hosting is not an issue for WordPress . Be it Linux hosting or Windows hosting, wordpress is being provided for free. There are hundreds of premium wordpress themes which are of very high quality that are being sold to the users. But this does not mean that we do not get good quality free wordpress themes. There are many designers who provide wordpress themes prepared by them for free, out of which some are much better than the premium ones.
There are variety of free themes that are available all over the web for variety of businesses. WordPress is mostly used for blogs. Many companies have been using wordpress for their blogs to promote their products, thus a need for a clean, professional and corporate look to the blog arises.
In this post we are publishing 45 Beautiful Free High Quality WordPress Themes for your Inspiration. If you would like to use any of these wallpapers please check the copyright issue of the creator as they may change from time to time.
Glassical
TheProton – New Free Premium WordPress Theme
simplista
Stitchpress
Tribune
Foliopress
SimpleFolio
Sketch-ace
Monkeypr
Retro Cool
Zexee
Recipy
Newspress
Smashing MultiMedia WordPress Theme
Katana
Dangdoot
Boldy
Brave Zeenat
BlueBubble
Koi
The-Whatsup
Berylliumous
Zeta Theme
Dimenzion
Mgaling Reloaded
Photoblog
Mobileworld
Epsilon Theme
Probama
Infinity
Versatility Lite
Irresistible
Blues vintage
Simply Ornate
DOWNLOADS
- Simply Ornate “Twirl II” (blue)
- Simply Ornate “D.A.R.K.” (military green)
- Simply Ornate “Pinkie” (pink)
- Simply Ornate “Pixel Gray” (grayscale)
- Simply Ornate “Royal Red” (deep red)
Mimbo 2 – Magazine Theme
Smooth
Aparatus
96degree
Bright Sky
iMobile
SimplyBiz
Farmville
Kelonton
Furvious
Obscorp
Obscure
30 Awesome Free Flash Templates
In this post we are publishing 30 Awesome Free Flash Templates for your inspiration. Feel free to edit and use any free flash template for your personal or commercial website projects.
Orange Studio
Arrow Template
Square Boxes
V-Shape
Nature
S-Shape
Grid Slider
Bar Slider
Estate
Spread Gallery
Thumbnail Carousel
3D Curve Gallery
Mini Tour
Pure HD
Roller
Galaxy
Shake
Circular
Color Wave
Swimwear
Fashion Gallery
Rope
Painter
Design Studio
Movie
3D Thumbnail Box
Elastic
Gift Shop
Cateye
Snowboard Design
Snowboard Design
Today we’ve got something for all the adrenaline freaks around us who love cool snowboards. We all know in terms of importance, the quality is the top priority … on the other hand, we want to be unique and a cool snowboard design is what matters too when making the hard choice buying one. Check the showcase below … ain’t they awesome?
Rome Snowboards by MASA
ENDEAVOR SNOWBOARDS by Grzegorz Domaradzki
Snowboards by Paulo Henrique Storch
snowboards… by Konrad Kirpluk
Bonza Snowboards by Mikhail Karagezyan
COMMERCIAL // BURTON SNOWBOARDS by Fiodor SUMKIN
B.O.N.E. Snowboards 2008-09 by Mikhail Karagezyan
EZ Snowboards by Mikhail Karagezyan
Boards (Skate and Snow) by Victor Ortiz – Iconblast
SNOWBOARD GRAPHICS by Sergey Sbss
Naoba2 Snowboards by Mikhail Karagezyan
Burton-Feather “non produced” by Alberto Seveso
Burton-Feather “non produced” by Boards Design
snowboard design by Osm
decks.. by Konrad Kirpluk
DC shoes- snowboards design by Anatoly Shabalin
Snowboard cover design by Visualizers
Design Contest by JCG
Nidecker Snowboards by Adam Hudyma
Blackhole Snowboard Design by niel quisaba
Endeavor Snowboards x GiantHuman High Five series by Nathan Matthews
Northwave – Drake / snowboard by Alan De Cecco
Common Questions About Design Professionalism
The design profession is full of happy folks, and understanding why so many designers enjoy their work is not hard. But not all are so happy. If you’re not careful, the joy of getting paid to pursue your passion can be tainted by the less joyous realities of the professional world.
You see, no matter how skilled you are as a designer, unless you are equally prepared in professional matters, your prospects will be limited and your circumstances compromised. This is true whether you work freelance, for an agency or in-house with a company.
Every week I hear from designers who are struggling to come to terms with these realities. Unhappy with their current circumstances, they write to ask for advice on improving their lot. Usually, they either claim not to understand how things got so bad, or they lay the blame somewhere other than at their own feet. In every case, however, the sole cause is their poor choices and lack of professional acumen. It needn’t be so.
Design is craft, but no matter how skilled you are as a designer, unless you are equally prepared in professional matters, your prospects will be limited and your circumstances compromised. Image source
Professional Diagnosis
Here, I’ll paraphrase a few emails I’ve received from designers seeking advice. For each, I’ll diagnose the situation, explain in no uncertain terms what should have been done to avoid the situation and suggest a strategy the designer can follow to improve their circumstances.
These circumstances are not uncommon. Many of you reading this are likely experiencing similar problems… or may at some point in the future. I hope that the information, advice and strategies presented here will help you avoid these and other problems.
1. From A Freelance Designer
Question: “I recently graduated from design school and have started freelancing, and I’m wondering how you get clients? How do you get your name out there?”
This person may just as well have jumped out of an airplane and then asked, “Now, how do I go about finding parachute? Oh, and should I land somewhere specific? How exactly do I do that?” Even so, this lack of foresight is quite common. The immediate lesson is that you shouldn’t become an independent professional with little to no professional experience, with no prospects and knowing little to nothing about the business.
Fresh out of college or design school, you’re not a professional; you’re a technician (by definition, the opposite of professional). For the next few years you should be acquiring the skills, knowledge and understanding required of a design professional. The place to do this is in the company of peers and under the wings of mentors: at an agency or in house with a company. The successive lessons and built-in support system inherent in these environments are essential to a designer’s professional development.
The way to “get your name out there” is to establish a pattern of excellent work and a reputation for integrity over several years, while you let your agency or company carry the burden of acquiring clients and running the projects. If you are any good, in time you will earn the respect of your peers and superiors, establish a good reputation (spread by word of mouth) and acquire professional acumen. If in that time you make any effort at all to share your work and thoughts with the wider design or business community, your name will become known (through word of mouth and your portfolio or blog), and your reputation will be built on substance rather than on social marketing’s smoke and mirrors. This would be the appropriate time to embark on a freelance career.
As a freelancer, you’ll be running the whole show. So, you’ve got to be an ace at finances and budgeting; at speaking with and converting potential clients; at knowing what to discuss in order to weed out unsuitable potential clients; at preparing all manner of legal and project-specific documents, writing proposals, project management, intra-project client communications (and being the confident, unflinching pro in the face of every client request, question and distasteful situation); at dealing with dozens of types of unforeseen issues without hesitation; at maintaining tax information and constantly preparing various tax and business forms; at marketing, preparing and maintaining your own branding and identity, with its various elements; and at knowing how to begin and conclude all kinds of projects confidently. Oh, and you’ll also need a constant flow of interested potential clients.
If you’re not confident and accomplished in all of these areas, then you’re not ready to be a freelance designer.
Freelancing is only suited to seasoned professionals. Pursuing a freelance career as your first step in the profession is almost always a foolish move. Professionalism is maintained by habit. If your first step is a misstep, you’ve set a poor tone for the work ahead. Unless you immediately correct your mistakes, the habits you’ll develop will be clumsy and unprofessional.
The way to “get your name out there” is to establish a pattern of excellent work and a reputation for integrity over several years. You need to be good at whatever it is you are doing. Image source
2. From An Agency Designer
Question: “I’m not very good at the discovery meeting with clients. I’m never really sure what to ask or how to figure out what sort of design they’re looking for. My project manager or C.D. usually ends up asking most of the design questions. What’s the best way to handle this situation?”
This is a common issue for designers at agencies, especially those with little experience. Luckily, an agency is a good place to gain experience and competence. But the question signals a few issues that require attention.
First of all, design questions are not really appropriate during the discovery process. Granted, specific branding constraints may need to be defined and understood, but the design you will craft will come not from the client’s judgment and understanding of design but from yours alone. The design will be your articulation of what they need, based mostly on their business aims, the website’s purpose, their customers’ needs and expectations, the end users’ specifics, etc. In fact, if you ask no design questions at all, you’re probably on the right track.
Imagine for a moment that you’re a physician trying to determine the best course of treatment for your patient. In that situation, you would not ask the patient what he thinks should be prescribed. Instead you would inquire about his symptoms, history, environment, physical needs (e.g. is he a pro athlete, or does he simply need to be able to get around normally?). The answers to these questions will define the constraints and indicate the appropriate course of action. Your patient’s opinion on what prescription would be appropriate is likely irrelevant; he came to you because he lacks the ability to help himself.
Go into the discovery meeting prepared. Before the meeting, learn as much as you can about the company, its history and its past and current activities. Script a list of questions—some specific to this client and some appropriate for any client—to get the ball rolling. These questions will serve as a springboard to more in-depth discussion, which in turn will flesh out what you need to know.
One more thing: you’re the design professional and it’s your responsibility to conduct the project successfully. You (not the PM or CD) should be driving the discovery. Use your time at the agency to improve your discovery skills, taking on more responsibility with each successive client. Reflect on each project’s discovery process, and look for ways to improve the process and your questions. With time and effort, you should become competent in this essential part of the design process.
3. From A Freelance Designer
Question: “Some of my clients expect three or four (or more) comps from me. But that’s a lot of work, and I would prefer to show just a couple. Should I just charge more if they want more comps? How do some designers get away with just one or two for all of their clients?”
These are interesting questions, and they beg a couple more:
- Why is this designer allowing his clients, who are not designers, to set the number of design comps?
- Why is he letting quantitative preference rather than qualitative necessity frame his understanding of the issue?
Good design is not found by picking from a pack of arbitrary options, but is rather the result of deliberate, contextual choices. Taking a scattershot approach to design is in no way effective. Your clients may not appreciate this, but you certainly should! Your responsibility is to ensure that your clients don’t shoot themselves in the foot.
The only person who knows how many design options are appropriate is you: the designer who is engaged in the process. And in almost every case there is one best design solution. Sometimes another compelling direction is worth considering and presenting to the client, but this cannot be known until you have fully engaged in the process, conscious of the parameters specific to that project.
In most cases, you’ll explore a host of options during the design process. A thorough exploration will cull a majority of the trials, leaving only the most appropriate and compelling candidate(s)—one or two. These and only these design options should be shown to the client. Inferior designs should never be presented, even to fulfill a request for more options (options for what: mediocrity?).
As a freelance design professional, or even as an agency designer, your responsibility is to define how many design options to present in a given situation. If a potential client insists on a less effective and less professional process, do not agree to work with that client. Compromise never brings excellence and has no place in design or professionalism. If you become comfortable making this sort of compromise, other compromises will also become easy for you. Your clients deserve and are paying for more than a compromised design.
4. From An Agency Designer
Question: “I seldom get to meet my clients before I present design comps to them. By that point, the projects almost always become a tiresome series of re-workings of my original ideas. How can I change this?”
One wonders what these original ideas were based on if the designer has never met the clients. If so, either 1) this person is at the wrong agency, and/or 2) this person lacks the professional understanding or the backbone to insist that she decide how the agency should structure design projects and client-designer interaction.
Relationships are built on trust, and trust is born of experience and understanding. Your client cannot trust someone they have never met and whom they know nothing about. So, when designs are presented by someone the client has never met, no wonder the client is a bit reticent and inclined to second-guess the designer’s decisions. These and the ensuing problems are all a result of the designer’s failings. Yes, it’s on you. Always.
As the designer and an aspiring professional, you must insist on driving the design process. This means that you must be the one to meet with the client in the beginning. If a project brief is required, you must be the one to create it, based on your direct conversations with the client and his team.
If your agency has a process in place that prevents you from fulfilling your responsibilities, your options are either to change the process or to find a better agency. Anything less relegates you to an irresponsible practice in an unprofessional environment. Hopefully, this is not acceptable to you, because it would erode the habits you are professionally obliged to cultivate.
5. From A Freelance Designer
Question: “I love to design, and I think I’m pretty good at it. But I’m not comfortable talking to clients. Whenever I’m on the phone or in front of a client, I get very nervous. I think my nervousness makes me seem less capable, and I’m pretty sure I lose some of my client’s confidence. What can I do to correct this? Should someone else do the talking?”
Effective communication is one of a designer’s most important jobs. Every communication, whether by email or phone or in person, is an opportunity to demonstrate value and win confidence. And if you don’t demonstrate value, you’ll seldom win confidence. Like designer #1 above, you may simply not be prepared to be a freelance professional.
If you fail in communicating, no matter how skilled a designer you are, you won’t get the chance to ply your skills very often, and seldom for the best clients. The best clients are those who invest complete trust in their designers. That trust must be earned before any actual designing happens (see designer #4 above).
And no, someone else should not do the talking. The design professional’s job is to show confidence when dealing with clients. No one else can communicate your value or win trust for you. The reason clients distrust those who do not communicate with confidence is because this trait signals other incompetencies. This may sound harsh, but it’s a fact: if you’re not confident, it is because you lack capability (whether professional competence, design skill or perhaps vocabulary)… and you know it. Address this void, and your confidence will shine through.
If you lack confidence in conversation, start to address this deficiency immediately or find another calling. Otherwise, you may have a bright future as a production artist somewhere, but not much of one as a design professional. Design professionals are experts at every aspect of interacting with people.
Confidence aside, it goes without saying that excellent vocabulary is an important component of effective communication. People judge you by your words, as well they should. Knowing this, your professional responsibility is to work on your vocabulary, just as you work on your design ability: daily.
Professionalism
Skill in design is only part of what defines a competent professional. Professionalism is also measured by integrity, preparedness in handling and interacting with clients, and breadth of understanding in the myriad of issues that will confront you in the course of working with others (whether clients, co-workers, employees or others). Professionalism is also measured by how well you uphold ethical standards in making the difficult decisions in every area of your work.
Talent and skill can make you a technician; and a technician is, as we noted, not a professional. For context, think of traditional professions: lawyers, doctors, architects. The enormous responsibility they are entrusted with, and their ability to carry out that responsibility across the scope of their work, makes these people professionals. Thus, an able professional would not be troubled by the questions posed in this article. Rather, they would know precisely how to proceed or how to circumvent these issues. If you have any of these questions, you may not be prepared to be a design professional.
Professionalism is also measured by integrity, preparedness in handling and interacting with clients, and breadth of understanding in the myriad of issues that will confront you in the course of working with others. Image source
All of these situations result from designers believing that being a good designer is good enough. This profession has little room for those who lack a professional’s integrity and broad understanding. Designers who are willing to compromise and simply accept the faulty decisions that are handed to them have had their profession stolen from them. These designers have no business working with clients who pay good money for professional service.
Be better than this. Your first step to success is to assume your rightful responsibility for everything that involves you. Dissatisfied with the flawed structure at your agency? You chose to work there; change your circumstances. Frustrated by your perpetual lack of prospects and stalled reputation? Sounds like you’ve got deficiencies to address. Overwhelmed by the challenges and complexities inherent in freelancing? You probably started freelancing without sufficient preparation.
Fix it. You fix it. It’s all on you.
Designers: you get paid to do what you love. How great is that!? But this fortunate and enviable situation leads to fulfillment only if you take full ownership of your profession. Otherwise, you’re carrying a time bomb. When it goes off, your career will either falter or be blown to smithereens. Don’t let this happen to you. Educate yourself. Have the courage and integrity to habitually make good choices so that you enjoy a long and happy career as a design professional.
Kishan Rama 
