DIV Positioning, Font Size Styling, and Other Stuff
HTML DIV POSITIONS, LINKS WITHOUT UNDERLINES AND ALL THAT.
January 29, 2011 by Gary Simon
So I’ve been writing more quick tutorials, guides, articles and all that juicy stuff. Why? I’ll be honest, because I love doing it and it makes me hard.
How to Style HTML Font Size with CSS
Learn how to style a font size with CSS. It’s simple, just use the CSS font-size property and you’ll be all great and good to go!
Make an HTML Link without an underline
Yeah so most of the time for the purposes of usability, you’ll want to leave that little underline in the link; but other times you might want to remove and just use some other indicator such as font-color and font-weight to signify the anchor text being a link. This is how you do it.
HTML DIV Positioning
Yeah so you have a DIV, and then you want to move the damn thing around. The question is, how the fuck do you do it? Well I’ll tell you how, just click the link above.
What goes into Creating a logo?
Lots of stuff, of course!
January 25, 2011 by Gary Simon
The difference between a great logo design and one that looks like it belongs in a toilet, are usually a few key factors. If we slump the toilet logos (the bad, the ugly, the unreadable, the terrible) into one category, we could sum them up under the following characteristics:
Bad Logos
- Typical. Yeah, your company name is “Jane’s Flower” and you have a picture of a flower. Unique brah!
- Type. Comic sans, great choice of a font. Die.
- Spacing. Your logo looks like it was organized by an 80 year old with parkinson’s.
- Suckage. Your logo just sucks, it was destined to suck from the very beginning because you lack skill and talent.
Check out creating a logo - if you suffer from designer retardation, it will help you design a better logo.
The Aspiring Designer’s Guide to Finding Clients (Pt. 2)
Choosing your Design Niche
June 8, 2009 by Gary Simon
Chances are if you’re starting out, you probably won’t have a specific niche. The issue of specializing in specific niche(s) with the design industry can be somewhat tricky when you think about it. On one hand, specializing in logo design allows you to focus specifically on improving in that area, and allowing you to ultimately attract more logo design clients. On the other hand, you also limit yourself to other potential projects such as full web design.
Personally, the majority of my income comes from logo design at http://www.garysimon.net, but I also keep my doors open to other projects by accepting web design orders through a separate web site http://www.propsd.com
One question you may be asking yourself is “Why limit myself by only accepting orders through one or a couple niches?”, and it’s a good question. But the decision is made more difficult when you realize that specializing in one niche makes it easier to attract those clients. It’s a known fact in web marketing that the more specialized, personalized and “niche’d” out a page is, the better it performs in terms of converting website visitor to customer.
Ultimately my advice is this, if you have gained a preference to logo design, print design, or web design, stick with it. Believe it or not, you can even get as specific as solely designing banners. As you improve your skills in those niches, you can open more doors for yourself by tackling other niches.
If design is something that is completely new to you, I suggest starting as I did. I took on full website design and everything that came with it, including logo design. After some hard work and persistence, you will establish your own style and your own preferences.
Once you know your design niche(s), then it’s a matter of establashing yourself, which will be covered in the next post.
The Aspiring Designer’s Guide to Finding Clients
Part 1, Introduction
June 5, 2009 by Gary Simon
This is the first in a 6 part series that will show you, the aspiring designer, how to find clients in a consistent and successful manner. The biggest question I get asked as a designer is “How can I find clients?”, which has prompted this series of articles.
It has been quite a long time since I first became a designer (over 10 years ago) and I can hardly remember what it was like starting out, and only god knows how much the web has changed since then. Because of this, I have a blog reader who has agreed to become a case study for this series. He currently has no steady flow of clients, and he spends most of his time entering design contests with not much success. He will follow along with this series, and at the very end, we’ll see exactly where he’s at compared to where he was before this series. This way, you get to see all of my advice put to use and the results they provide.
We will take a look at choosing a specific design niche, establishing your precense, building your portfolio, pricing strategies and then the many ways of finding clients.
Look for Part 2 within the coming days.
Buzzwords and Itemized Lists, Fuck.
76 Absolutely Beautiful Amazingy Stunning Fantastic JERK OFFS.
April 13, 2009 by Gary Simon
So apparently every design tutorial / resource site is into using these annoying-as-all-hell buzzwords routinely in their blog titles. And they’re almost always used to describe their shitty little no-effort lists they compile. For example…
- 48 Beautiful Examples of Wallpapers
- 8 Fantastic Photoshop Brushes
- 45 Excellent Examples of using Character Illustrations
- 21 Fantastic Examples of Brilliant Photography With Humor
- 19 Amazing Free Graphic and Image Editors for Designers
If there’s anything to learn from this, it’s that people are stupid sheep that salivate over the power of buzzword marketing and itemized lists. Just take a look at the design section of digg.com, this shit is all over the place. I for one can assure that you won’t ever see a blog post written here that has to do compiling lists that employ over-used douchebag words to describe them. But because I’m in a giving mood, I’ll offer my fellow designer webmasters some ideas for their next blog topics…
- 81 Fantastic Ways to Jerk Off
- 101 Essential Gay Porn Flicks
- 19 Incredible Ways to Stay Single
- 21 Gorgeous Examples of You telling Me to STFU
/end rant.
On a side note, sorry for having updated in awhile. Got slammed with some client work but I’m back at it now.
Raw Logo Design in Illustrator CS4
Check it out as I design a logo from scratch for a real client.
March 15, 2009 by Gary Simon
This is a quick tutorial that shows me designing a logo for one of my clients. The good thing about this tutorial was I didn’t pre-design the logo before hand, and I didn’t even read the details of the clients request before I started recording the tutorial.
I’m a little monotone in the tutorial because I had just finished drinking a Wine-O-Rita (good shit), but other than that everything goes well. ;)
Premium Wordpress Design (Part 8)
Part 1 of the Wordpress Integration
March 7, 2009 by Gary Simon
This is part 1 of the wordpress integration. In this tutorial we integrate the background, header and a portion of the main left content area. As always, there’s a severe lack of quality control here since I have a “No editing” policy (because I’m lazy) featured in the later portion of the video — But, I get through it and all ends well. :)
Design Contests are 93% FAIL.
Enter 100 design contests and you might win 7 of them. Good job.
March 1, 2009 by Gary Simon
So what do I mean when I say they’re 93% fail? Because when you take a look at the numbers, the average designer has a 93% chance of failing every contest they enter. To put it differently, if you enter 100 contests; you’ll win a whopping 7. I kid you not, just take a look at the “recent winner” profiles on the lower right corner of 99designs.com and average them all out (But don’t bother, I already did that for you). This ratio is probably even worse when you take into account all of the designers who entered contests and never won a damn thing.
Let’s look at some other numbers, such as $ earned vs. time spent
If you look around, the average design contest earnings are $200 per project. Let’s assume on average designers spend 2 hours per project (this includes revisions as well, and we also have to consider they allow full site design contests here too). If a designer were to submit designs to design contests on a full time basis at 40 hours a week. That’s 20 contests a week, or 60 contests per month. Since the average designer wins only 7% of the contests they enter, that’s 4.2 contests they can win. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say they won 5. 5 * $200 = $1,000. A full time job grossing $1,000 a month comes out to $6.25 an hour (below minimum wage). Flipping burgers is more profitable than this shit. Let’s go over this again:
1. Joe spends 40 hours a week entering contests
2. Joe, as an average designer, invests 2 hours per contest.
3. This means Joe enters 20 contests a week, or 60 per month.
4. Joe, as an average designer, wins 7% of his contests (or 5 per month).
5. Joe, as other average designers, wins $200 per project.
6. This means Joe grosses $1,000 a month on a full time job.
7. This means a 16 year old nerd who’s never been laid makes more money flipping burgers than Joe.
Contest Starters are often times blind.
Design contests are also fail because there’s a decent chance the contest starter will choose a logo obviously inferior to others submitted. A lot of these contest starters don’t know shit about what makes a good logo, just take a look at these astounding examples of real winners chosen in real contests at 99designs:
“But design contests are fun!”
Fine. I’ve entered a few contests myself for the hell of it. But if you browse around on some contest sites like 99designs, you’ll see profiles of those who’ve literally entered hundreds, even saw a couple that entered well over a thousand contests. This means there are “designers” spending a good majority of their time entering contests, making shit.
“It’s a good way to learn and build a portfolio”
No. A better way to learn is by making money doing it. There’s a market for every budget, it’s simply a matter of finding those clients.
You can spend your time more wisely…
Instead of entering design contests and using the excuse that you don’t know how to find clients, how about you give it a shot? It’s not all that difficult to find clients, and stop wasting your time on a gamble. In fact, coming up in a blog post, I will show you how to find clients.
Premium Wordpress Design (Part 7)
Part 3 of the CSS Process (ending the css portion)
February 21, 2009 by Gary Simon
Well this one could have ended up being a disaster as I had just finished drinking and took 2 sleeping pills, but fortunately I knocked it out. This is the final stage in the CSS process. In the next parts, we’ll integrate it into wordpress which is the final section. Enjoy!
Premium Wordpress Design (Part 6)
Part 2 of the CSS Process, Oh no!
February 16, 2009 by Gary Simon
As we continue on with the CSS, in part 6 we’ll write the CSS for the left half of the body. In part 7 we’ll finish the CSS off. I wish I could think of more content to type here, but I won’t bore you. Enjoy.