Just a note for all you hopefuls who haven’t applied with T&S yet, but were still planning to. If you are applying to be a T&S intern, call 241-1051 and leave a message before 10am on Wednesday, September 9. We are cutting off the applicants at that point.
Good luck!
Amber Hanks, current intern
I’m excited to announce that we’re ready to hire new interns for the fall. We’ll be hiring both design and programming interns. There will be either 2 or 3 of each, for a combined 40 hours designers and 40 hours programmers.
And these are paid internships, though we’re fine if you get school credit for them as well.
If you’re interested in joining our team here at T&S, just call our intern job hotline at 241-1051. Listen to the entire message, then leave the information that you’ll hear me ask for.
And if you know of anyone who would be a good candidate, be sure to pass this information along to them as well.
A couple years back, Stanford performed a large study to determine how people evaluate a website’s credibility. Take a look below and see different factors influence your website visitors.
| Percent (of 2,440 comments) |
Comment Topics (addressing specific credibility issue) |
|
|---|---|---|
| 1. | 46.1% | Design Look |
| 2. | 28.5% | Information Design/Structure |
| 3. | 25.1% | Information Focus |
| 4. | 15.5% | Company Motive |
| 5. | 14.8% | Information Usefulness |
| 6. | 14.3% | Information Accuracy |
| 7. | 14.1% | Name Recognition and Reputation |
| 8. | 13.8% | Advertising |
| 9. | 11.6% | Information Bias |
| 10. | 9.0% | Writing Tone |
| 11. | 8.8% | Identity of Site Operator |
| 12. | 8.6% | Site Functionality |
| 13. | 6.4% | Customer Service |
| 14. | 4.6% | Past Experience with Site |
| 15. | 3.7% | Information Clarity |
| 16. | 3.6% | Performance on Test by User |
| 17. | 3.6% | Readability |
| 18. | 3.4% | Affiliations |
Just the look of the site made up 46.1% of the comments! The next closest was over 10% away. This is a dead giveaway that sites like craigslist are the exception to the rule, not the rule.
Your website really does need to show your best side. Not just because a web designer tells you so, but because the research shows that it really does make a difference.
Well, in the very, very early hours of this morning, we launched our new website’s design. It had been a traditional “shoemaker’s children” type problem, where our quality of websites and design in generally has continuously improved over the past year, but our site stayed the same because we were busy work on other people’s websites and print design.
After putting it off for much too long, we all pitched in and worked really hard these last couple of weeks to get our site done. And it’s really paid off.
Take a look above at our old site on the right compared to our new site on the left, and you’ll see what I mean about our drastic increase in skill over the last several months. Although the website we designed for ourselves at the beginning of last year was solid, it was no longer reflective of our collective capabilities.
Major kudos goes to Dave, who spent hours and hours working on the site, getting it done phenomonally fast while still doing an outstanding job. And to Eric, who still plans to redo much of the coding his boss threw together to get the site online quicker. Eric, please don’t cry when you start looking at my code.
Please, take a look around. We would love any feedback on the new design.
This is February 23, 2009, at the T&S office. We thought it would be fun to record the entire day, but condense it down to a little over a minute, so you can see everything in time-lapsed format.
Fireworks is often overlooked. Many (most) web designers today use Photoshop to design their websites, and a lot of them have never considered or (*gasp) even heard of Fireworks. Adobe Fireworks is made for creating websites. That is what it was built for, and it does it well. Fireworks enables you to rapidly prototype and design for the web. With it you can create a clickable PDF that will act as a prototype. Also, you can quickly create export and optimize slices (Fireworks is better at optimizing images than Photoshop).
Now don’t get me wrong, Photoshop is an extremely powerful tool and is amazing; it has way more features than Fireworks, but if all you are doing is designing websites, then you should use software that was specifically made for doing just that. Another excellent feature to note about Fireworks is that it is compatible with Photoshop. For the most part, you can open a psd in Fireworks, and it will recognize all of your layers and styles, and with CS4, compatability between Adobe’s programs have been further improved.
If you are a web designer and have not looked into using Fireworks, you should at least try it out and see for yourself how efficient it really is. There are hundreds of other excellent features Fireworks has to offer, read more about them at Adobe’s site.
Stock photography is an excellent resource to designers because we don’t always have the time or outlets to take our own pictures or hire a photographer. When I was just beginning as a designer and visiting these stock photography websites, I could not understand why royalty-free photos were not actually free of charge. I finally had to research the meaning and discovered that you still have to pay the price of the picture, but it’s only a one time fee. After you pay, you are able to use the photo multiple times, hence free of royalties (although there are still restrictions for non-commercial use, etc.), as opposed to the “Rights-Managed Licensed” photos where you are basically paying the person who took it and you pay every time you use the picture. The Rights Managed photos do allow for a much larger print though.
At the moment, I have a membership with iStockphoto which gives a relatively good selection of royalty-free photos, vector illustrations, and royalty-free videos for a reasonable price. A low-resolution image for websites costs $1-$3, as opposed to a royalty-free image on Jupiterimages.com, close to the same size, can cost about $100. It just depends on the quality and selection of photos you need.
www.jupiterimages.com is a good source for more professional-looking photos with an enormous selection
www.istockphoto.com is a better source for cheaper photos with a decent selection.
It may seem trivial to precisely name and organize each and every file, but in the end it can save a designer (or anyone else) time and money. Many designers learn this the hard way while interning or beginning their first job, but eventually they realize the significance and impact it makes on their work flow.
First and foremost, I would recommend using an external hard drive to backup all of your files: it is worth the extra cost! Next in the process is naming and organizing folders. A basic setup could include the following folders:
Within the “Clients” folder, you can include subfolders for their identity package, including: logo, letterhead, business card, etc. Also make sure you designate which file is the original file and which one is sent to the client by creating a file-naming system. For example, ORIGINAL_logo_clientbusiness.ai for your own use and SAMPLE_logo_clientbusiness.jpg to send to the client. Use the same type of system within your other main folders.
This is definitely a rough start and it takes a lot of trial and error to discover a system of your own, but the initial setup is well worth your time so you can prevent any future headaches!