Being a web designer is hard work. Sometimes, being the customer is even harder. Your website is the lifeblood of the online iteration of your business. If your business is conducted entirely online, then your web designer is essentially a top executive in your company – even if he’s actually only hired out as a contractor. If you mess this up, you might as well close shop and start submitting resumes to anyone that’s hiring.

Web designers are building your "face" on the Internet. While you might be concerned about the price you pay for the work, you absolutely cannot afford to ignore the designer’s integrity, honesty, communication skills, his technical competence, and his design philosophy. Basically, you should be looking for these 10 things in your designer to the exclusion of everything else:

1) He Should Be Customer-Oriented

Sometimes, IT professionals and web designers aren’t known for their friendliness. They may be short-and to to-the-point, lacking any inkling of what constitutes "customer satisfaction." Make sure your web designer understands your needs and designs his service to meet those needs.

2) She Should Put Form Behind Function

Websites have to look pretty but they also have to function well. Sometimes, web designers focus too heavily on the design and don’t pay enough attention to how well the site loads. This can become a huge problem later on down the road. Bad, or messy, code only makes things harder to fix later on. Make sure your web designer puts function ahead of form.

3) He Should Be A Usability Expert

Usability is a must. If he’s not familiar with Jakob Nielson’s principles of usability, don’t hire him (or introduce him to them). Those usability standards have solid research backing them up. If you want to keep visitors on your site, and keep them coming back, your website has to place usability above everything else.

4) She Should Be Familiar With Your Industry

Your web designer should be somewhat familiar with your industry. Some industries have special requirements that must be included into the design. For example, insurance professionals may need to have special disclosures and a special privacy page for users. Also, some industries are expected to have certain kinds of designs. Where a coffee shop could get away with a more casual design, a law firm needs to look more professional.

5) He Should Include You In The Design Process

Getting involved in the design process ensures that you get everything you want. Some designers exclude clients for some reason. Often, the result is something that the designer likes but the client is either apathetic about or doesn’t like. Choose web designers that actively engage you about your ideas for the site.

6) She Should Have Good Communication Skills

Communication is a must. It’s also pretty rare to find a web designer that is also a good communicator. You should be able to exchange ideas and keep the flow of ideas moving back and forth between the both of you. If you can’t, consider changing designers. Often times, it’s difficult to judge how well of a communicator they are until after the project starts, but referrals from other people (or engaging past clients of the designer) can be very helpful in sorting this one out.

7) He Should Make And Keep Deadlines

A designer that doesn’t give you deadlines and milestones for your project is not worth hiring. Without deadlines, the designer can take as long as he wants to design your site. The arrangement is very open-ended. Fortunately, you can figure out how your designer handles this problem by just asking openly how he works. If he doesn’t mention deadlines or an outline for the process, move on. If you have to prod him to make a deadline or milestones for your project, move on. He’ll be more trouble than he’s worth.

8 ) She Should Design Your Site Using The Latest HTML and CSS Design and techniques

You should hire a designer that can showcase the latest HTML CSS design. If your web designer doesn’t know how to separate design from content, then you need a new designer. Most competent designers understand this, and will not give you any issues here. Choosing a designer that can design with the latest HTML and CSS will keep you out of the "gutter" of the design industry.

9) Your Web Designer Should Have A Good Imagination

You need your designer to have a good imagination. While your ideas are important, you need to rely on your designer to have a good imagination that can translate your ideas into reality. Sometimes, your ideas will need to be modified to work for a website. Only a creative web designer will be able to come up with a way to creatively implement just about any idea you throw at him.

10) Your Web Designer Should Be Efficient

Making deadlines isn’t good enough. Your website designer needs to work efficiently. Ask her how long it takes, on average to build a site. You can safely ask this after you have given her a general idea of what you want from the site. If she meets you with nothing but vague answers, move on.

There is no doubt that if you want to achieve better result in gaining visitors to your website, you must be able to conduct better effort as well in making your website having good layout and becoming attractive for any people. Actually, there are many reasons why people become so interested in opening for their own websites. Yet commonly, most people have certain purpose such as conducting online business. Besides those people who are interested in online business, there are also people who want to share information to others through their blog. It seems that they conduct online activity for the reason to apply their hobby.

Yet, whatever your reason in opening for websites, there will be one thing in common such as certain effort in gaining better visitors. Among many methods that people can apply to make their sites more famous, perhaps the display becomes the basic one. What I mean is that people should be attentive in choosing their website’s background images. Usually, people only choose random image to be such background. Yet, in order to suit the theme of your site and the pictures you want to get, you can obtain it from any stock illustrations sites. One of the most reputable services is Depositphotos stock photo that you can visit at Depositphotos.com.

Some people actually have opinion that by getting quality background images from such service may make them to spend much money. This problem will bother you no more when you recognize that they have a special offer for bloggers, which allows you to get high quality images absolutely for free. It means that you only need to write an article and post it in your blog related to their service and quality images or pictures that they offer. As people who are involved in online activity much, you need to pay attention in your quality of website if you want to be successful. In this case, such service above will become your perfect partner.

One way is rather potential customers and clients also know about your business and promote the image and a different impression of your business by using a good and attractive brochure and of course professional, which you can get from Online Brochure Printing where you can get your brochure printed with high quality. This is one way to open dialogue with your potential customer is. Brochure may by itself not able to convince many people, but with a good and interesting presentation, print quality with colorful design to get attention can be an effective tool for them to know more about your business, at least they were interested to read the contents of your brochure.

In this post I collected some good and beautiful brochure templates to helping you creating modern and professional brochure design.

Corporate Bi Fold Brochure Template

Corporate Tri Fold Brochure Template

Corporate Tri Fold Brochure Template 2

PSD Brochure Template

Corporate Single Side Brochure PSD Template for Photoshop

Free Coreldraw Brochure Templates

Open House Brochure Template

Business brochure template vector

Pharmacy Brochure Template

Creative Brochure Design

Magna Brochure Template

Financial Advisor Brochure: Free PSD Print Template

Typography is one of the buzzwords these days when it comes to cool poster designs. So in this tutorial, we will show you how to make your own typographic poster, but to make things interesting, with a more nostalgic theme to it.

1. First, we shall create a poster document for our design. The first move is to set your poster dimensions and of course determine the right resolution. For poster printing, you will want to go for 300ppi or higher in terms of resolution. As for the dimensions, a 11×17 inch poster is a good target.

2. First we add an old paper background to our text. You can find tons of these for free on the Internet so explore.

3. Next, we paste in a texture. Again, there are lots of different textures around the Internet that are free, just get something with a high resolution.

4. Now, click on your texture layer. Change its blend mode to “overlay” to get that old style texture integrated into our old styled paper. You can also reduce the opacity of this layer just in case your chosen texture is too strong or vivid.

5. Next, we paste in an image for our poster feature. Here we used a clip-art of a Gramophone. We removed the white using the magic wand tool and the eraser tool so that it fits in nicely.

6. Change the blend mode of the gramophone to Multiply so that it gets integrated better with our theme background.

7. Next, duplicate the layer by pressing CTRL+J. Then, change the duplicate’s blending mode to soft light. Reduce its opacity to 30%.

8. Now, type in your title for the poster. Use a white color for the font. It is better to use a Sans Serif type font with nice straight cuts. Adjust the tracking and other character spacing/distortions that you need to fit your text into shape. Change its blend mode to Soft light and reduce its opacity to about 50%.

9. Now, here is the very long part. You will want to write your text into each of the letters for that very creative typography effect. Vary the typeface, color, boldness, angle, tracking, spacing etc. of the text. To do this press CTRL+T when selecting some text to bring up the text transform panel.

10. Just vary the text when you can until you have something like this:

11. Next, use the custom shape tool. View all the custom shaped and find the musical note series of shapes, pick one.

12. Now, start drawing lots of different notes in different sizes and orientations.

13. Once done, you should have something like this:

14. Merge all the notes into one layer. Duplicate it. Then use one duplicate and apply a 5 pixel Gaussian blur.

15. Resize the other duplicate, shift its orientation and size to add more extra detail.

16. Also place in larger notes that look closer to the viewer. Apply a heavier Gaussian blur to these elements.

17. Now, as a finishing touch, create a new layer on top of our texture layer. Fill it with white, BUT turn its fill opacity to 0%.

18. Then double click on the layer and apply an inner glow feature like so:

a. Blend Mode: Normal

b. Opacity: 75%

c. Color: Black

d. Choke 12%

e. Size: 250px (depending on your document size)

f. Quality Range: 47%

g. Jitter: 42%

19. Finally, go to Layers -> New Adjustment Layer -> Photo Filter. Use Sepia as 50% to add an older look to our poster. Place the adjustment layer on top of course.

20. Great! Now you have finished a nostalgic and typographic poster. Keep in mind that you can also apply the same steps to a smaller medium like brochures or flyers perhaps. You only need to alter the dimensions you entered in the first step and work from there.

Home is where the very important private, everyone wants to have a beautiful home. The walls are part of the home that can affect the beauty of the house. Generally, the people gave a plain bright colors on the interior walls of their homes. In addition to using wallpaper it’s good you try to be creative with stickers to decorate your walls, a lot of people think of decal to put on the car or other equipment. With current printing technology and Online Sticker Printing, you can get your own sticker’s designs to embellish your rooms, bedroom, playroom, the main room or even your workspace.

Especially the children’s room, they are very fond of decorating full-color images, even we can invite them directly to decorate their room, stick in there and here, I’m sure they really liked it, and I’ve tried it with the kids, we stick stickers to all over their room with various pictures of animals and their favorite cartoon characters. You can use easy removable sticker, so someday once it was bored we can replace the sticker with other stickers.

Below I have collected various wall sticker pictures to inspire us;

Actually, today I get request from my friend to design his wedding invitation and I’m not have much experience on this. However the wedding invitation design is one of creative area of print design at least it can be to enhance creativity. You need high quality and better unique to impress of your wedding event. Generally these are chosen to match the personal preference of the couple’s, the theme of event, or the event formality level.

Good wedding invitation design can be done with good printing, nowadays you can find easy a good Online Printing Company for your perfect invitation for your perfect wedding to be remembered forever.

For you who want to married or designing for your clients and want to have unique design for the wedding invitation, here are we have collected some inspiration designs, which are have great and beautiful design.

DIY wedding invitation wheel

Endless Love

Handmade Wedding Invitation by Creative Mania

Teabag – Wedding Invitation

DIY wedding invitations

Invitación de Boda / Wedding Invitation

Spring Wedding Invitation – Seed Paper

Did she say yes? // Wedding Invitation

Wedding Invitation by Wondercloud

Mel & Joe

Kerry Moran

I Do’s Wedding Invitation

Aitor & Nagore

Origami Wedding invitation

Letterpress Wedding Invite Booklet

Diner & Dansfeest

Letterpress Wedding Savedate: Pomeroy

Andrew & Aly’s Wedding Invitations

Most people do not think much about typefaces (often referred to as “fonts”) on a daily basis. They do not consider the differences between the different typefaces, let alone the reason for those differences or the history of how they came to be the way they are today. But for designers, these details are both interesting and informative. This article details a brief history of how typography has evolved into what it is today.

First we need to understand what typography is. Typography is the study of typefaces, and the history of printed letters. While most people think of typography as beginning with the invention of movable type, the truth is that it includes handwriting as well, as these letters are the basis of the type we know today. Letters are defined as a written symbol or character representing a speech sound and being a component of an alphabet. By this definition, Egyptian hieroglyphs are not considered letters, as they are pictures that represent ideas, and letters are abstract symbols. So what we consider letters did not appear until the development of Egyptian Hieratic around 3,000 BC. After that came Phoenician around 1,000 BC, and then Greek around 600 BC.

The roman capital alphabet had been perfected by 100 AD. This alphabet is what our modern alphabet is based on. As part of what is known as the Carolingian Renaissance, Charlemagne decreed that a standardized lowercase alphabet be developed. The style was known as Carolingian miniscule, became the official style of the Holy Roman Empire. The style was chosen because it was simple, clear, and easy to read and write. Many ancient manuscripts were rewritten using Carolingian Miniscule.

While most people think that movable type was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1440s, the Chinese had been using moveable type for about 400 years before that. Bi Sheng invented wooden moveable type in 1040 AD which we know through the works of Shen Kuo, who was a Chinese scholar. The Chinese eventually began using clay instead of wood because wood would leave imprints of the wood grain in the ink. Clay was also preferred because it provided a more even surface and was less prone to swelling when dipped in ink.

While Johannes Gutenberg did not invent moveable type, he did perfect mechanical moveable type in the 1440s. His invention made it easier and faster to reset type, which brought the cost of printing down and made it more economical to mass produce books. This mass production of books is often marked as the beginning of the modern era.

Shortly after the printing press was invented, Bookhand and Human style typefaces were developed in Italy. These typefaces are very similar to our modern lowercase alphabet. Claude Garamond was also very influential in the typing world. Garamond developed typefaces based on Greek letters, and made them available to printers at affordable prices around 1541. In 1600, Aldus Manutius developed the Italic typeface. This typeface became very popular both as in print and in writing.

In 1932, Victor Lardent at the English branch of Monotype developed the Times Roman typeface because of criticism of the British newspaper The Times’ antiquated typefaces. Lardent worked in the advertising department of The Times.

All of these developments of typefaces have led to where we are today. Now we have access to hundreds of typefaces on our computers without knowing the history or the context of how they got there.

The postcard is a great add to the excitement in every season and event. Everyone wants to take part in the festive holiday and new year, one of which sends postcards to friends and family. In fact, the company also took part by sending postcards to their customers, associates, employees. A variety of postcard design, they add a humorous, motivational messages, or even a unique and interesting form.

You can easily attract and impress so many customers and also public’s eye through the high quality printing solutions. Postcards are not only used to enliven the feast day, many companies or organizations using this media as well as the promotion and other activities or even just a thank you. You can get the Online Postcard Printing easier and they will help you in obtaining the high quality printing solution.

Below we can see various kinds of shapes and design of postcards are unique and interesting, may be an inspiration to us all.

Spaceship Skyline

Christmas Postcard

3D Popup postcards

Lukoil post card

Yeti Mailing 2011

CUTS Letterpress Postcard

KOKTEBEL Wine Card

Homelessness Australia

Daydream

Type Postcards

Postcards of Barcelona

Travel Postcards

From Russia with luck

Geographically themed postcards

Anfisa and Animals set of postcards

Want to know how people marketing specialists and business clients been lured in for high trading? If you are a business official, then you probably would love to know what a natural, yet powerful website could do for you.

If you really need to improve your business and have great impact on your business, then you ought to possess the greatest web design! Through this article, I hope to convey the need for having a professional web design that could make your website worth appreciative and make your business dream reach that goal.

Some key points for you to really consider while creating a website, which majority of the web developers fall short with.

Home Page

A homepage is rather the meeting place for you and your customer, literally. This must be the guiding line for them whether to consider you for their dealing or not; no matter how experienced or successful you are! Web researchers reach you through your website through the search engine. Your homepage must provide even the minute details that would help your client to stick on with you. Using enlarged or massive logo design is one way to enhance this effect and to keep your website memorable for them.

Fast loading

On an average, hardly a few researchers would take their time to view a website that takes more time to load; only when they are desperate to find an answer from the website! In other cases researchers retire from browsing after just waiting for a couple of minutes! So while design a website, make sure that you have your website loaded within a snap. The faster your website is, the quicker, you get visitors and ultimately, customers!

Trustworthy website

You will get a good customer, only when you give trust in return to them. Create your website in such a way that you convey, trust to them with your organization. The best way to establish this is by introducing testimonials from your clients and by showing off your work samples. Don’t forget to include your contact details and region of expertise clearly in your websites.

Pleasant navigation

This is the golden key to ensure that you have frequent visitors! Customers must get easy access to your website. Also make sure that your website has the simplest navigation. People like that! All relevant information regarding your website, team and yourself must be provided completely. How will the customers contact you with the best deals, if you don’t have contact details?

FAQ’s and Customer Support

For further inquiring about your work, always make sure that you include FAQ or online customer support feature in your website. This is great to make your clients realize that you are reliable and help is at hand, just a few clicks away!

Formal Proposals

Include a feature for making proposals to clients even before they put forth conditions and budget for the work. A clear idea about you, your works, and their benefits and also a complete estimation of the projects must be conveyed over to your client. Make sure you add in the best cover letter, specifications, payment methods and contracts in your proposal. A proposal mustn’t be any proposal but it should reflect your identity, responsibilities, commitment towards work and establishment voyage.

Estimating system

Make your website even more attractive by offering a database that allows your client to accurately estimate the cost needed for their proposal.

Remember: A good website and the contract number, goes hand in hand. For that you should ensure that you hire the proficient web developer for your site.

Marketing and advertising is the most important thing in a company as this can influence their success. There are so many people who are having problem with their marketing as their marketing solution can help them in increasing their business products.  Well, increasing your business products and sales are not easy, as it needs the creativity and good strategy also, one way is to use the sticker as the media of advertise. The quality of your marketing printing can also influence the customers with the incredible color can draw so many public’s attention, creative and interesting sticker is important for your marketing campaign, so the people love to sticking it in their car, wall, or wherever they like to put, and then yeah you get free advertising.

Furthermore, sticker is not just a tool used to advertise, many things that can be obtained from an attractive sticker. Stickers can also be used to decorate the room, bedrooms, even the office. In fact we can have fun with stickers, or just enhance your laptop. Well, for your marketing solution and for your best sticker design, you can rely on the Online Sticker Printing  to get the high quality one, you do not need to waste your time and your money that can help you in providing the printing service.

Okay, let us check these cool and interesting stickers design below that I have collected for inspiring you