There are no Standards on Pay for Graphic Designers

What happened to Aiga.org, they used to serve this industry fairly well 10 years or so ago fighting for designers, but they’ve become a useless organization for creative pros.

I think it’s time we build an organization or create a Union to help designers get the pay they deserve. This is hard to do, but this industry is suffering more and more every year.

So many designers have bachelors degrees, or years of experience, but the market does not back them up, businesses just want cheap labor.

Designer pay has been about the same as it was since about 2003. Almost 20 years later and the majority of salaries or freelance wages have staid the same.

Just remember this, you would not have your business without graphic design. Your brand would fail, your marketing collateral would not exist, your product packaging would never be on display nor would you have a company website or online presence.

Graphic designers are a crucial part of a business. Treat them with respect.

5 Books Every Designer Must Read in 2020

The graphic design industry is rapidly evolving, with people now using graphic designs for a lot of purposes such as advertising, branding, and art. As a good graphic designer, you should seek to evolve with the current trends in the graphic design industry. To improve your craft, there are certain measures you can take, one of which is to properly study the standard and new graphic design concepts. One way to do this is to read quality books about graphic design.

These books will help you to brush up your old skills and even learn new ones. They could also be the answer to questions and difficulties you have as a graphic designer. Reading these books will go a long way in helping you to maintain brilliant, unmatched standards as a graphic designer. In this guide, you’ll find brief summaries about 5 essential books you must read as a graphic designer in 2020.

1. Branding: In Five and a Half Steps

Common brands and their basic components

Michael Johnson authored Branding: In Five and a Half Steps in 2016, and the book has remained one of the most popular graphic design books ever since then. He is one of the foremost graphic designers and also owns a graphic design studio named Johnson Banks. The studio has worked with clients such as Think London, Virgin Atlantic, and BFI, and has gained lots of awards ever since it was launched.

In this book, Michael Johnson completely uncovers the process of branding in graphic design and divides the process into five important steps. The steps include Investigation, Strategy & Narrative, Design, Implementation, and Engagement. The book is a complete step-by-step guide to branding and rebranding in graphic design. Michael Johnson in this book takes common brands and examines their basic components, explaining the connection between strategy and design. 

In the first half of the book, there is a six-question model which serves as the first part of the book. The first part identifies questions such as ‘what does the brand mean?” and other key questions. The second half examines and explains the process of branding and design. Michael Johnson uses a lot of brand identities from all over the world to explain how to create a successful brand as a graphic designer. This book also shows the importance of research and strategic thinking in creating a successful brand.  It also gives you a better understanding of how branding choices can influence how successful a brand can be with the different kinds of case studies that were discussed.  Johnson further reveals the most important elements involved in creating a successful brand, from the use of language to typography. All these make this book an essential resource for a graphic designer.

2. Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning

Signs and symbols are an important aspect of graphics design 

Adrian Frutiger examines the relationship between symbols and psychology in this book, while also discussing the sign elements such as alphabets, pictograms, calligraphy, trademarks, and numerical signs. Signs and symbols are an important part of design and as a graphic designer, it is important to understand how to use them the right way. 

The book has chapters explaining basic signs such as the square, triangle, circle, arrow, and the cross sign. The next chapter explains how to join signs together, showing the relations between signs of the same form and signs of different forms.  The second half of the book is based on speech-fixing signs. The first chapter explains how to convert thoughts to pictures while readers also learn about prototypes, speech, and gesture. The subsequent chapters discuss topics such as Speech Fixing, The Graphic Wealth of Pictograms, The World’s Alphabets, The ABC of the Western World, and other relevant topics. This book is a great resource for graphic designers as it makes an in-depth explanation of signs and symbols. 

In the third and final part of the book, Adrian Frutiger explains symbols in detail, with topics such as How Pictures Become Symbol Signs, The Stages of Schematization, and The Different Types of Symbols.  The final part concludes with signal signs, their orientation, and pictograms. The whole book takes the reader through a journey of signs throughout history. For a designer seeking to understand the origins and usage of signs and symbols, then this book is a must-read. 

3.The Non-Designer’s Design book

There are fundamental principles to graphic design every designer must learn

This book about design written by Robin Williams explores the fundamental principles of graphic design. The author has written a lot of books on graphics design such as The Non-Designer’s Presentation Book, The Mac is Not a Typewriter, and The Non-designer’s InDesign Book. Robin Williams identifies four principles of design: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. The author explains her principle of contrast as “If two items are not exactly the same, then make them different. Really different.” 

The author further explains the principles of design in simple terms. In subsequent chapters, the author explains the concept of design with step-by-step examples. The book features topics such as Tips for Brand Designing, Underlying Principles of Design, Designing with Type, Designing with Color, and a Professional Approach to Design. Although many other graphic design books explore similar topics, this book is great for beginners and intermediate level designers as it is easy to understand.

She uses relatable and often hilarious examples together with quizzes to explain graphic design. In the second half of the book, the author explains Type. Readers can learn the basics of fonts, the different kinds, how to use and combine them. The book contains practical advice on how to make designs look professional, which is very useful for upcoming designers and non-designers.

There is a chapter that focuses on the fundamentals of typography, with quizzes and examples to help readers develop their design skills. Robin also explains the typeface choices such as thickness, colors, shapes, sizes, and space. This book makes learning graphic design easier as the author explains the concepts in a concise manner while accompanying the material with visuals and examples. 

4. A Smile in The Mind: Witty Thinking in Graphic Design

Witty thinking improves the quality of your design

This design guide is a joint project created by four authors – Beryl McAlhone, David Stuart, Greg Quinton, and Nick Asbury. This book is a great sourcebook for designers. This edition is a revision of the first edition which was written by Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart. The new edition explains wit in graphic design with this new edition showcasing over 1,000 instances of humor and wit in graphic design and branding. It is a compilation of over 1,000 projects by more than 500 graphic designers. 

The authors feature a mixture of vintage and contemporary designs to show how witty thinking can be employed in graphic design. The authors also demonstrate different ways to create humor using means such as double-takes, substitution, and ambiguity. The chapter titled Types of Wit addresses this. In another chapter titled Wit in Practice, and Wit in the World, the authors explain how wit is used in graphics such as logos, memes, and in the media.

In the final chapter, readers can read about interviews with international designers and creative icons such as Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, and Alan Fletcher. These interviews help to get an idea of the thought behind classic designs and popular present-day graphics. Through this book, you can get the different routes you can take to incorporate wit into graphic design. The authors have included photographs, logos, and adverts which use these routes to serve as examples for readers. 

5.Why Fonts Matter

Fonts can be useful in mirroring experiences or emotions 

Why Fonts Matter is a book which majors on fonts and how they influence decision making. The author, Sarah Hyndman is a graphic designer and a public speaker known for her works on the psychology of type.  In this book, Sarah Hyndman examines how font design and choice influence different reactions. For a graphic designer seeking to understand how to use type design to achieve their goal, this book serves as the perfect guide. 

According to the author, typeface can be used to mirror experiences or emotions displayed in the real world. The book also shows how fonts are more important than what many people think. Sarah Hyndman details the emotional reaction to fonts through experiments, multi-sensory interpretations, and a collection of reviews from a variety of designers and non-designers. Rather than focus only on how graphic designers interpret and use fonts, the book shows how the public views typefaces. Why Fonts Matter is easy to read and engaging, it will do a lot of good to graphic designers looking to improve their craft.

Conclusion

No matter how much the concepts of graphic design look complicated to you, it is possible to understand and apply these concepts by reading the right design books. There’s a large number of useful resources at your fingertips, part of which are the books we have recommended in this guide. The books above will help you view known and unknown design principles and concepts in a new light. With detailed process, analysis, and illustrations, they will help fine-tune your design skills, whether you’re an established designer or just learning the basics.

How Companies Benefited by Improving Their Web Design

Great web design is sometimes unfairly brushed off as a luxury only huge brands can afford to carry out successfully. Companies with generous design and marketing budgets usually do take full advantage of their options and provide users with great online experiences.

However, although it may seem like this is a major league game, even simple web design tweaks and investments can result in huge payoffs. In this article, we’ll explore how several companies managed to increase their revenue and conversions by implementing some of the current web design trends. The following case studies and tips based on research compiled by DesignAdvisor help illustrate the power of good web design, and how any business can wield it.  

Make your site easy to navigate

The percentage of sales lost because customers can’t find what they require on a website goes as high as 50%. Nowadays, users online are accustomed to finding what they need quickly and easily so navigability is key. By improving their site’s architecture and ease of navigation, Botanica managed to increase sessions by 78%, page views by 102% and organic search traffic by 55%.

Provide easy access to information

A site’s search functionalities can help users find what they need in case they are unable to do so merely by browsing. If a search function in not implemented correctly or worse, missing entirely, the user’s overall perception of a website and the quality of their experience is likely to be negatively impacted. 60% of the time, when users can’t find information it’s due to poor search functionalities.

In the case of Volleyball BC, the sports site managed to increase user engagement by improving their search options. They implemented an advanced filtering system for searching results by game and team as well as searching events by location. As a result, the site saw a jump of 28% in visits and an increase in social referrals of over 500%.

Don’t forget about mobile devices

As more users migrate from laptops and desktops to mobile phones, companies failing to update their design to enable responsiveness to mobile devices are bound to see some adverse effects. Almost half of all users will take the fact that a website does not perform well on their phone as a sign that the business associated with it just doesn’t care enough.

HMT updated their site to fit mobile specifications and increased their monthly revenue by 159%; merely by introducing responsive web design, time spent on the site increased by 60%.

Speed up

Almost 50% of users think that a site should take no more than two seconds to load, and investing in meeting these expectations can have some very positive outcomes for a business. Allowing users to get to where they want to go faster helps you sell products and services. Shopzilla increased its conversion rate by 7-12% by simply getting their site to load 5 seconds faster. These small tweaks can clearly have significant impact on your business.

Check out plenty more trends, case studies and resources in the infographic below.

How doing a drawing a day changed my life: David Litchfield at TEDxBedford

Freelance My Way

Check out this new freelance site. They provide handpicked freelancers, ready to work on projects. Contact them to post a job or to become a freelancer.

At FreelanceMyWay they screen all freelancers before they can bid on jobs and get hired by the clients. All freelancers must go through a 3 step process before becoming a member. They want to focus on quality jobs, freelancers and excellent customer support. They have logo designers, php programmers, writers, data entry, seo and marketing jobs available.

Learn More

Seven Digital Design Resources

Great list of design resources.

1: Canva – Canva is a one-and-done web app that removes the complicated parts from digital design. The drag and drop interface makes it easy to improve images or photos and the extensive range of templates makes it easy for anyone to create anything from magazine covers to hero images in a matter of minutes. Canva may not make you a design expert overnight, but you’ll certainly be able to fool (almost) everyone.

2: Screenpatterns – Good luck trying to find inspiration for apps or responsive designs without maxing out your cell phone’s data plan! Screenpatterns is the mobile designer’s dream site, aggregating mobile interfaces from almost every app and organizing them by type and style. Want to know how Pokémon Go details maps without having to actually search for Pokémon? Look no further.

3: Sketch Tricks – Sketch is an essential wireframing tool for UX designers, great for building interfaces, websites, icons, and plenty more. Naturally, Sketch Tricks’ newsletter serves up a weekly batch of essential plugins, advance techniques, and shortcuts that will make you a Sketch power user in no time.

4: Font Awesome – Need scalable vector icons that are easy to tweak? Font Awesome includes over 600 icons in its font base, all scalable, all customizable in CSS. Even more amazing: Installing the whole package takes only a single line of code.

View All Resources

The surprising pattern behind color names around the world

Why we gave up web design after 10 successful years

A decade ago I started a web design company. We grew and grew, and after ten years of hard work, I’ve finally been able to get rid of it.

Don’t get me wrong – we were successful, had fun and did good work. At our peak we had over 200 clients and 15 fulltime staff, making us the largest such company in our city. We’ve worked on great projects for some big name clients and we even made some money too.

Little by little however, the years ate away at my soul. This year we finally left it all behind and moved onto our own products, and I’ve never been happier.

So this is why.

Web design isn’t all bad

Web design is not without its benefits. Client work is endlessly varied, and you’re always learning new things.

It’s a ludicrously easy industry to enter too – all you need is a computer, Internet access and time. There’s plenty of demand for cheap work to get you started, and fair rates for good work if you can do it.

I started Silktide fresh out of University with no computer and £14,000 (about $22,000) of debt. And though it was hard from the start, we were able to double in size every year, and all our work led to better work. Our efforts were continually rewarded as we grew.

Unfortunately, not forever.

Read More

CreativePublic’s YouTube Channel

Hey Folks,

I wanted to send out an update about CreativePublic’s YouTube Channel. I am planning on adding new content over the next month with new videos. From this point forward, all video related content will be published on my YouTube channel. 

The purpose of reviving this channel is to help bring education on design business to a wider audience and being able to start a conversation with my site members. This will be a great platform for all of us to engage about design business, including how to price your projects to selling your design services and more.

Subscribe to the CreativePublic YouTube Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/creativepublic

Thanks for your support. I look forward to starting a conversation and providing great training content.

Jason Vaughn

CreativePublic.com

Engineering the Perfect Pop Book