So recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how my decision making or sometimes lack of actually making a decision can hinder our company’s progress. I hold off because I’m not absolutely sure. But could it be that the decision’s end result is actually hurt by not making the decision sooner? Self-fulfilling prophecy or something. I’m not going to know I’m right prior to a decision.

Now big company decisions like whether or not to hire a new employee or taking on a new client do need the right amount of time to consider. What I’m interested in are the small decisions. Some decisions don’t need as much time to consider. Should we order new ping pong paddels? Sure! Just say yes. Should we spend a little bit of green and order shirts with our logo. Definitely! Do it. Should we get some new desks to improve our workstations? Of course we should.

Now imagine if we took weeks or months to weigh out the pros and cons of those decisions. Ping pong paddels wouldn’t come in and team morale might be shot by the time they do come in. T-shirt order takes forever because we wanted to get the right shirts, the right printer and the right quantities. But how much marketing time was lost by not just printing and getting them out there? A decision is never made about new desks and we stick with our smaller older ones.

You can just feel the drawbacks. So lately I’ve been doing my best to just say yes, when I can. If what you gain from just saying yes outweighs what could be improved by waiting and thinking about it, then I say just go for it.. We want to move quickly but intelligently. We have to become better guessers, smarter risk takers & more confident failures. If a decision goes bad I enjoy it because I know I’ll learn from it and not make the same mistake twice. By failing you learn & improve. So bring on the decisions. Bring on the risks. The more important decisions you encounter the better you get at being right.

Have you struggled with making decisions when it comes to your line of work? What helps you commit to a decision despite not knowing for sure that it’s the right one?

One third of our team (me) working remotely adds to the challenge of staying in sync, on top of our priorities and producing work we are proud of. Here are a few great services and apps we use and recommend to stay on top of things.

Basecamp – www.basecamp.com

Oh 37signals how we love you. If our business was a journey to the top of Mt. Everest, Basecamp would be, well, base camp. Everything is here. We keep track of projects, discuss design direction, create and assign to-dos, host important files, collaborate with clients and so much more.

It has completely replaced internal email communication for us. Gone are the days of reply-all, flagging, forwarding and searching through hundreds of emails. Basecamp keeps everything we need for our projects neatly organized and in one place.

 Hipchat – www.hipchat.com

It’s not very often we all find ourselves physically in the same room. I live in San Antonio, and my partners are in McAllen. And even they aren’t in the office everyday together. Basecamp is great for archiving and organizing our projects and ideas, but we still need something to stay in constant communication. Hipchat is our own internal private team chat room. This is where all of our daily conversations happen. It has some really great features like pinging someone directly for important messages, separate rooms for different discussions, drag and drop file sharing, solid desktop and mobile apps, emoticons for showing how we truly feel, and it even hooks into Github for extra nerd-out points.

Google Hangouts

Even with all of the above communication and collaboration outlets, it’s still important to talk face to face sometimes. That human interaction is good for the soul, even if Jaime is still in his underwear. Google Hangouts is what we use for our Monday chats, client meetings and the occasional screen sharing. It can be clunky at times and complete crap if you don’t have a solid connection, but it keeps me happy knowing my business partners haven’t been replaced by automated website building robots on the other end.

Invision – www.invisionapp.com

This one is fairly new for us. Our workflow involves PSD mockups and static proofs before anything hits the coding table. I’ve always thought sending JPG website screenshots to clients for review was a horrible way of presenting your work. Enter Invision. Invision allows us to take those website screenshots, link them together, and create clickable, semi-functional prototypes for our clients. This gives them a great idea of the flow of the site, what button goes where when clicked, and a good idea of what their website looks like in the browser. To top that, clients can leave comments and feedback on specific areas with a single click. It’s fun to use, our clients like it and it creates a much better feedback system

Freshbooks – www.freshbooks.com

Ugh. Invoicing. It sucks. Gross. Honestly, FreshBooks makes getting us paid pretty damn easy, and maybe just a little bit fun (who doesn’t like getting paid?). We look professional with well designed invoices, accept credit card payments and setup auto recurring invoices for our retainer clients that get sent out automagically and it’s all in the cloud, so we can all keep a pulse on our finances.

My goal of this post was not to review these products, or tell you what’s wrong with them. None of them are perfect for every situation, but they all get the job done and are the best solutions we know of for our small design shop.

But of course, we are always looking at new ways to improve our workflow, communication and satisfy our customers. So, if you know of some great services for a growing business, we’d love to hear them in the comments.

1. First open up a new document 800px wide by 400px high (72dpi works). Fill the background with a gradient of blue, darker on the bottom (#17709b) and lighter on the top (#149fb3). You can eventually use any color but try this one out to get the color differences down.

2. Next, using the Text tool type a word. Make the font size decently large and use a thicker font like League Gothic. It will help achieve the effect. Center your text in your text box by highlighting the text and hitting Cmd+Shift+c. Then center the text on the canvas. (With your text layer selected and using the Move tool (v) hit cmd+a to select all, then center-align tool)

3. Change your text to a color that is just darker than the darkest color in your gradient (#0a6876). What I like to do is highlight my text and bring up the color palette to change the color. Using the eye dropper the palette provides, select the darkest area of your gradient then move the color selector down a bit to get a darker color. Click Ok.

4. Now the magic. Double click your text layer to bring up the layer styles. Select Inner Shadow. Change your Distance to 1px and your Size to 2px. This will help give it an imprinted look as if the type goes into the background.

5. Now the final touch to make it look classier. Grab a light colored but rough texture from www.subtlepatterns.com. Open up the small PNG in photoshop and select all (cmd+A). Go to Edit, Define Pattern and click Ok. Back in your original document, create a new layer and  hit “G” to enable your Gradient tool. Hit Shift+G to cycle through Gradient tool and Paint Bucket. Select Paint Bucket and from the upper left tool palette change the option from Foreground to Pattern. The drop-down menu just to the right will show what patterns you have available. The last entry will be your most recent pattern addition. Select it. Fill the canvas with the pattern.

6. Holding Option, hover just between your pattern layer and your type layer. Click in between the two layers to mask your pattern layer. Next, change your pattern layer’s Blending Mode from Normal to Color Burn. You may want to try different modes depending on your pattern.

7. Donesies! Hope this can help you with your web designs and type treatment.

Do you have another way to achieve the same effect? Let us know below in the comments section.

I find that if I don’t make the time to sit down, stop whatever else I’m doing and review my notes, it won’t get done. I’m going to try to plan certain times of my day or maybe my week to take an hour or two and go through what I’ve written down. This will serve two purposes.

1. Brain Assistance
There’s only so much information your brain can consciously capture. When you’re in that meeting there may be one feature that the client specifically asked for on the website you’re designing, but you wouldn’t have remembered unless you went back over your notes. Your notes fill in the gaps for what your brain misses.

2. Reflection Time
Being able to take that time to sit down and reflect on your week’s meetings or ideas helps drive them home. Those ideas will make more sense to you by simply rereading them and thinking about them for a second time. You may come up with an even better idea because of it or you might realize that the idea wasn’t the best solution after all. Either way you’re utilizing your notes and ideas in the best possible way.

Do you take a lot of notes as a designer, photographer or developer? What are your methods of reviewing them? Leave a comment.

For example, when I get a new website design in I gather all of my content for the page I’m working on, let’s say a home page, and determine the order of visual hierarchy of each element. So I sketch out my first home page design. The logo, navigation, main headline or copy, where a main image will go, secondary images, and maybe the first call to action such as a “Read More” button.

This can be completed through a sketch in seconds. Once the first sketch is on paper I can look at it and let the sketch communicate back to me. If it feels off I can move down the paper and try another version. Let’s try the navigation here, center align the copy and the call to action, add 2 more secondary images and include a newsletter signup bar with the extra room we’ve made. Now I’ll have two different takes on the same content to work with. All sketched out in under 5 min. I do move quickly. Sketches are for experimentation and don’t need to be perfect. Some designers spend extra time on their sketches and I think that can be fine. Whatever process you find to help you determine the right solution for your design will work.

Sketching can help in other situations as well. The sketch process is a massive part of how I design logos and identities.  I don’t jump into Illustrator until I’ve solved the design problem in multiple ways. If you have your logo design brief, you’ve met with the client and you’re ready to start exploring, try sketching 50 logo marks. Try 100. The more versions of a logo design the better the end result. Having a sketch pad to conduct these idea generations is invaluable. You can move quickly, you can capture ideas on the fly if you keep your sketch book close, and you’ll have a record of your process to be able to reflect on later. A sketch book and a few solid drawing pencils has greatly increased the quality of my work.

No matter how fast I think I am in Photoshop or Illustrator, I’ll never be as fast with a mouse as I am with a pencil. Sketching is something I’ve done ever since I was a kid and I’m happy to pay respect to such a classic form of creation. I’d encourage you to always be sketching and stick with pencil and paper as long as you can before moving to the computer. It can mean the difference between a good design and a fantastic design.

Public transportation in McAllen has struggled to acquire the popularity bigger cities like Austin have come to have. So with a brand new logo on deck and new bus vehicle designs, McAllen looked ready to launch a new campaign to help promote affordable and quality public transportation.

We were asked to help develop a new website design to communicate their brand online. This was our first public transportation website that we’d designed so doing research was made a priority. We wanted to see how metro websites had been designed before, what has worked, what can be improved, and how we should properly approach the look for MetroMcAllen.com. From our first meeting, Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART.org) was referenced as a successful website design they wanted to take inspiration from. At first glance, DART.org has a lot of information going at once. We knew they wanted similar features, but realized there would be a cleaner way to present it.

A few key elements needed for MetroMcAllen.com included:

• ability to Plan Your Trip, available on every page

• icons for users to easily recognize services they needed

• keeping things visually clean and making the experience easy

• strong visuals and photography in keeping with the McAllen Metro brand

• visually linking the website to the new green McAllen buses now circulating the city

• target audience included just about everybody, but they especially wanted to try to add the college demographic.

As with every design, we started with sketches.

We knew we wanted to have their new bus design be front and center to really breathe life in to the website. We wanted to have a very usable navigation menu, bold messaging on the home page, and an organized hierarchy for the typography to help users easily find any information or services they were looking for. With the large amount of content that was provided in their site map, maintaining a strong template for the internal pages would be needed as well.

After we had a direction, we dug in to Photoshop.

We really wanted to let the bus come right off the page. We cropped it in such a way that helped make that happen. We maintained the green and orange color scheme as on the bus themselves and added small elements that might be found on a subway map or street sign. The navigation menu is an example. Each link is “connected” by a “destination dot”. The header banners for “Plan Your Trip” and “Fares” have a look that wraps around the page. The team liked this element because it mirrors what the motion of a street or route would look like.

The internal pages gave us the opportunity to switch out photography on top headers. This allowed us to hit that college demographic they were asking for. Each main section would allow for new photography that could help target a new audience.

We met with the McAllen team to review and ask for some feedback. We were lucky enough to be working with a great team that were very helpful and made the design process go very smoothly. Thankfully they were very pleased with our direction and only had minor additions and tweaks. We completed the revisions and handed over the final design to programming and development.

We were definitely happy with the final result. Our favorite part about this project was being able to work with a team that were passionate about improving the city of McAllen in such a positive way. A public service like transportation is a vital component for unifying a city. During the design process, we got wind that the new buses were attracting much more deserved attention from the public, employee morale was up due to a new branding strategy to provide uniforms, and ridership was on the rise.

We hope their new website design will only contribute to McAllen Metro’s growing popularity.

Check out the live site at  www.metromcallen.com.

If you’re like us you dig seeing other designers PSD’s. Here’s the Photoshop file we used for this project: http://www.brlrl.com/downloads/McAllenMetro.psd

Font used, Bonveno. Download it here: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/BonvenoCF

It’s important for both your personal morale as well as your team morale (if you work with one) to take the time to really put your attention on that success. Take them out for a drink and toast it. Send them a congratulations email with a link to the end of Mighty Ducks 2 on Youtube. Treat yourself to you a nice dinner at your favorite restaurant.

These celebrations and positive feedback is hopefully why you’re doing what you’re doing.
The first time I got a check made out to my first company years ago, it was the best thing ever. I literally got in my car after the meeting, took out the check and let out a “WOOO!” as loud as I could. It got me pumped and I wanted to show it. I know I had worked hard to get to that point and I was happy to celebrate, even with myself. These days I have a team to celebrate with. We don’t throw huge parties or put on parades, but I enjoy sharing a drink with them and really experiencing the positive moment together.

Stay aware of what you’re doing right.
Remember there’s more to it than just the process. Keep the end result in mind and realize you’ve achieved it when it comes. It will help you continue the trend of success and can only contribute to your motivation in a positive way.

What counts as a win for you and how do you celebrate it?

1. Be Awesome At What You Do

The most important thing you can do for yourself and your career is be awesome at what you do. Get really good at designing. Learn the process, practice your craft, design design design. Experiment. Try crazy techniques. Try classic techniques. It’s literally  a numbers game. The more you design the better you’ll get. When I first started out I made up my own projects and worked on those. Usually at the beginning client projects aren’t easily accessible. Think up a redesign for a local coffee shop logo and work on that. Find a website online and redesign it. Granted you won’t have the client feedback you need but it will offer you the chance to develop your skills and you might even end up with a project or two for your portfolio.

The best part of this is that it’s entirely up to you. It took me a while to grasp that idea. You don’t need a professor, boss or manager putting work in front of you. Take ahold of your productivity and the sky’s the limit. When clients do start rolling in, you’ll be ready.

2. Establish your Vision

Take a second, close your eyes, and imagine your perfect working situation. What time did you get up in the morning? What does your desk look like? What kind of client are you working on today? How much money are you making per project? Are you happy?

These types of questions will help you establish a vision for yourself and your career. It will be something to shoot for and a great gauge as to whether your going down the right path or not. If in a few years you find yourself stressed, unhappy with your work and working with clients who are more stressful than enjoyable, then you can look back at your original vision, realize something isn’t right and make a change.

When I first started out, this vision always helped me stay focused and gave me the motivation to pivot and change direction multiple times. In a way, having a strong vision is a natural deterrent for that “designer job” where you fix the printer every other day and help John in accounting with his email.

Your vision will naturally change as time passes and that’s a great thing. Keep it in mind, focus on what you want, and you will get there.

3. Have no Fear

It can be daunting when you first start putting yourself out there looking for clients to work with. Will they like my work? How much should I charge?

The best thing you can do is be confident with yourself and your skills. If a client doesn’t like your previous work, they have that right. Don’t let it get you down. For every client that doesn’t work out, there’s 2 more out there that would love to work with you. Establish your pricing based on how much you think you’re worth and stick to it. If your pricing is too high for them, there’s another client out there that will think your pricing is spot on. Keep at it.

If you’ve become awesome what you do and you’ve established a strong vision for your career, there’s hardly any room left for fear. But don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Some of the best lessons I’ve learned were taken from my mistakes. Embrace the idea of getting it wrong sometimes. Make it ok to mess up. If you conduct yourself honorably and do your best to correct it, no one can fault you for it. Don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone. If you find yourself working with a lot of attorney’s for example, try landing a cupcake shop. Working with different clients will not only build your craft but will also develop a stronger network for future clients.

Being afraid will only inhibit your growth. Be confident.

4. Be Nice

This may sound like a given, but being nice can mean the difference between 2 clients and 10 clients. Be yourself. Be humble. Be nice. People first and foremost want to work with a nice person. Ask yourself, would you rather work a nice person with a decent portfolio or a terrible person with a great portfolio. Most people would want the former. And if you can be a nice person with a fantastic portfolio then you’re golden.

Being nice can especially help you when things don’t go according to plan. I’ve had a project for a client in the past that went over the projected timeframe. The client understandably was upset and voiced that to me. I calmly explained the situation, told them what went wrong to cause the delay and let them know the steps I was taking to complete it. They understood and though as the client I’d still be upset, I did my best to calm the situation by being honest and up front about it.

Don’t lie to your clients. If they ask you for something you don’t know how to do, be honest and tell them you can’t do that. Maybe you know someone you can refer them to but don’t commit to something you can’t deliver on. They’ll appreciate the honesty more than the apology later for not delivering.

5. Reflect and Grow

Every once in a while, I do my best to step back from my work and take a good long look at my progress. I ask myself a few questions that help me reflect.

What’s been working really well? What hasn’t been working well? How can I make things easier for myself? Do I like the work I’m producing? Are the clients I’m working with satisfying and enjoyable? Am I overwhelmed?

I’ve found that focusing on these questions now and again helps me to improve my career. You never want to stay stagnant and unprogressive. Figure out what the steps to take to address these questions and I think your overall happiness will improve because of it. And maybe even your income.

6. Step Away from the Computer

I’m sure you’ve heard this one before but for me this is a hard lesson to implement. Sometimes you get so dug in with your projects that it’s hard to find time to relax. You may have to literally schedule it. Don’t wait for a pocket of time to open up. Make the time.

Pick up a new book. Try new foods. Go visit a new city if you can. Visit a museum. Take a walk outside. Play some ping pong.

Find an activity that can completely take your mind off your work. I’ve found that it actually improves the quality of my work plus it gets your eyes and mind away from the screen. Resting your creative muscles will help them get stronger.

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There you have it. Those are 6 things that I’ve done that have helped me since my days as a design student. I still practice these today as often as I can and I know I would not be in the position I am without these.

What have you learned in your experience transitioning from a student to professional? Any ideas you think I left out? I’d love to hear your thoughts below in the comments section.

Personally I wish it was that simple. Eventually you might work for a bigger company that has that designated person who handles selling the clients, keeping them happy and collecting payment when the time comes. But if you’re self-employed this responsibility is all yours.

Here’s 3 things that helped me alleviate the stress of dealing with clients early on in my career.

1. Take control of your process

Many clients I’ve worked with had never worked with a graphic designer before. They didn’t know how this thing worked. Early on I would let the client decide when to meet, how to move forward, and when payment could be collected. As I worked with more clients I realized that it should be me letting my clients know how the process will go. I’m providing the services and I know the process that works for the best results. From the first meeting, try to let your client know what to expect from working with you. Tell them what you’d like to get out of this first meeting, when to expect proofs or the next correspondence, approximately how long this project will take and when you expect their down payment and final payment. Educating your client in a polite way about how you like to work will help ease any stress down the road and will help ease the client’s mind about what’s happening with their project.

2. The client isn’t always right.

If you’re a photographer, designer, programmer or writer, clients are hiring you because you know more than they do about your field. They need something they can’t do themselves. Feedback is essential when working with clients but listen carefully. Not every suggestion or change has to be done because the client said. Have a intellectual debate. Tell them nicely why you think otherwise and listen to what they say. This takes practice but staying confident in your skills and expertise will help you find your groove.

3.  Proposals, Contracts & Money

The most stressful part of my early client dealings was collecting payment. I always felt weird about it, as if taking their money was wrong. Of course that’s not true. Some great advice that I had always heard but never applied to my daily life was “it’s just business.” You have to remember that you are running a company. Like Nike, Starbucks or Ebay, you are a business providing a service and you deserve to be compensated for your time. A good way to show your clients you know what you’re doing is prepare proposals and contracts for your projects. This may sound intimidating at first but an agreement on paper contributes to clearing up the expectations about a project and motivates the client to pay on time. You can check out traditional proposals but definitely read up on the contract killer by Andy Clarke. He’s got some simple yet genius ideas that we at Barrel Roll Creative use ourselves.

What has your experience been when dealing with clients? Do you have any tips that have worked for you? Share in the comments section below.

If you want get really good at piano, you sit in front of one and practice as much as you can. If you want to learn how to speak French, you learn the alphabet and speak as much French as you can. It’s through understanding and practice that we learn things. Making money is exactly the same. You don’t just wake up one day and it all hits you how to make money. It’s a skill that requires time and practice.

During my early days as a graphic designer I really had no idea how much to charge for a brochure design or a logo design. So I researched as much as I could. I found other designers online and read up on their techniques of pricing. One of the best rules of thumb I’ve kept with me is, ask yourself what you think you’re worth per hour and multiply that by how many hours you think you’ll spend on a project. There’s your project pricing. I know at first your gauge of hours may be uncertain since you haven’t worked on too many projects. Don’t worry. The more projects you do the more accurate your approximation will get. Pretty soon you might just set a single project price for that brochure or that logo and leave the hourly rate behind, which makes things a bit easier.

There will always be a lot of factors that go into pricing out your work. What is the client’s budget? Are you extremely busy right now and don’t have the time? Does the client need it in a week or a month?  Asking yourself these questions will naturally drive the price up or down. The client is only giving you 3 days to complete it when you’d really like 2 weeks, that would be an extra cost. Rush delivery.

Another lesson that has always steered me true is to be confident with your pricing and don’t be afraid to take people’s money. It sounds a bit harsh but at the end of the day you are providing a valued service and you deserve to be paid fairly for it. You will run into clients that may think your pricing is outrageous and you’ll also have those clients that won’t think twice about paying you. If you do your best to navigate through it honorably, you are up front about why you price things a certain way, and you don’t let anyone bully you into dropping your pricing beyond what you’re comfortable with I think you’ll do great.

It will take practice. And you will get better.

How do you price your projects? Has there been a time when it didn’t work so well? Or a time when it was successful? Leave a comment and I’d love to talk about it.