1.) Creating a Brand That everyone will remember
Creating a brand is the most important part of your company. A logo tells you a lot about the designer or company. The quality shows how well they can design.The best ways to come up with names for your next design agency is by writing down whatever comes to mind, things you see every day, and asking close friends for ideas and feedback (make sure the name is not being used before you start designing). Try to do a search for the name on Google and also, take a look on yellowpages.com. After that, buy the domain name ASAP and find a copyright solution to protect your design and logo. A great place is myows.com.
Key Points About Branding:
1.) Write down 20 to 50 names and slowly start eliminating some from the feedback you get and also, by the searches you do.
2.) Double check your name. This is very important because you don’t want to work on the design and find out you can’t use it.
3.) When picking a name, think short because it’s a lot easier for someone to remember it.
4.) Use a grid to keep your website design in line and easy to slice.
copyright solutions
It’s an easy-to-use app dedicated to providing a full suite of copyright solutions, from registration to management. Myows has been created for designers, photographers, bloggers, writers, musicians and anyone who creates copyrightable work.
Logo Samples
Harbour Apartments
CRA Logo
Harness Racing Victoria
lexpro Logo
2.) Planning and Building a website
Planning your website design is important. Try looking around to get some Inspiration, don’t start designing right away. Start with wire frames whether you draw it out on paper or on illustrator. This way you can get ‘feedback without doing tons of work. Once you have this done, it’s easy to start building your website in Photoshop. If you don’t know how to build a website, it’s okay. There are millions of tutorials out there to get you started.
Key Points About Planning and Building a website:
1.) Drawing or laying your website before designing saves time.
2.) Layout 3 wire frames and ask for feedback on your designs.
3.) Use a grid. It keeps the layout clean and easy to slice.
Creating Wireframes
Stephen Thomas – does a great job showing the steps to designing a website.
Stephen thomas - After our initial planning we created graybox wireframes for formative usability testing. We recruited a representative sample of actual users and had the option to modify the wireframes between each test. While it was a lot of work, by the end we weren’t making many changes anymore and the result was a very solid, usable set of wireframes.
Wireframe Sample – N.1
Wireframe Sample – N.2
Wireframe Sample – N.3
grid the photoshop layout for slicing
Stephen thomas -It’s good to grid based design coming into favor online. We created a 8 column grid that would provide structure, but still some flexibility as the framework for the site. We then created 1, 2 and 3 column layouts with variations of each as well as standard design elements that could be reused throughout the site for consistency.
Grid Sample
Details and slicing
Stephen thomas - With the clean aesthetic of the new site, the design details become even more important. In a design like this, it is attention to detail that separates a good design from a great design. While none of the details in themselves should draw too much attention, it is how the work together as a whole that creates the visual experience. And it is the result, the resulting reaction and feeling that the visuals inspire in the user that matters. This feeling helps shape the user experience.
Final clean up
Fully working website
Stephen thomas - We had a lot to do on this site. New or rethought: strategy, information architecture, page layout, content management system, visual design, process flows, multimedia, sign-up process, form design, increased usability, use of standards based design principles, increased accessibility, enhanced organic search results, new statistic and tracking capabilities, new automated content update tools, distributed site management, integration of all international sites and multiple languages, and much more.
Website Tutorials
Here is a list of some cool website tutorials that I like and I’m should there is a lot more, but wanted to give you an idea.
Making your own portfolio web page
How to Create a Grunge Web Design in Photoshop
Create a Textured Paper Photoblog Layout in Photoshop
Simple & Cloudy Portfolio Layout in Photoshop
3.) Marketing yourself and website.
Social Media and Freelance websites, and showcasing your work is always great, but it can also fail big if you don’t know how to market yourself right. One website that really helps my traffic is Twitter. Everyday, I tweet about useful things that designers can use like tutorials, fonts, layouts and, new wordpress plugins (don’t always tweet things about yourself; people don’t really like it). It’s always a good idea to make a lot of friends that can help promote your post. Websites like delicious.com, stumbleupon.com, designfloat.com, and thewebblend.com are good for this. The more people that see your blog or website, the better. Your business can’t succeed without making some money. Try signing up with freelance websites to get freelance jobs to help pay for your domain, hosting, and the time you’re putting into it. Also, use the showcasing websites that are out there. Promoting your work is key here; the more places, the better.
Key Points About Marketing yourself and website:
1.) Get a Social Media account. Start one when you finish designing your website.
2.) Help promote others. This will help you in the long run (you can start here by helping me promote this post)
3.) Look for good paying freelance jobs to help pay to get your business off the ground.
4.) Showcase your work like crazy; the more the better.
Social Media
Social Media is a great way to make new friends and also, promote your work.
twitter.com/UnderworldMagz – Create a twitter acount
delicious.com/UnderWorldMagazines – Create a delicious.com account.
stumbleupon.com/stumbler/UnderworldMagz/ – Create a stumbleupon.com account.
Create a designfloat.com account.
designbump.com/user/13281 – Create a designbump.com account.
thewebblend.com/users/julioariverajr – Create a thewebblend.com account.
Join Freelance Websites
Very important when starting a business. You need some money.
Showcase your work
Showcase your little heart out.
I want to really thank you for reading this post and hope you found it helpful. I’m not an expert, but I like sharing my ideas to help you. I hope you see your feedback on this post.
Valuable points for anybody starting there own design agency.
thanks!
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Creative Director Reply:
May 7th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Thanks for the comment.
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This is an amazingly comprehensive post covering a wide range of areas. Thank you for putting it together and featuring Myows. I’ve now subscribed to your blog
it’s great stuff.
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Creative Director Reply:
May 7th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
thank you glad to help.
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You just made my day !
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Thanks, good point. I found some helpful design resources which I didn’t know before.
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helping tips for designers and also for design houses.
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I got a lot of helpful info from this post. thanks
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This is a great article, thanks for all the info and links!!
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Nice step by step tutorial for people to follow. I think this kind of guide can also help any sort of new website.
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Congratulations on a valuable contribution – I found several sites that I wasn’t aware of. This is a very helpful resource for freelancers, start up design studios and small business. This page is worth a tweet
.
I do not have an RSS feed but I do have a sitemap.xml feed!
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Great points here. A lot of people skip over the wire frame step, which is very important.
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a valuable contribution was searching for it at-last got it hurray!
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Another list of cool tutorials to recreate, lets if my skills can manage to implement this tutorials. I don’t know where to start fist. LOL
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Thanks for the post! I’m currently in the process of starting my own business and this was very informative.
Michelyah´s last [type] ..love this
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I found several sites that I wasn’t aware of. This is a very helpful resource for freelancers, start up design studios and small business., Thanks for the share.
custom printing
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