Monthly Archives: January 2015

Back in the designer hot seat

27/01/2015 | admin | blog | 0 comments

After a brief interlude of sun, sea and sangria I'm back for the long haul...

Since we last spoke we've had Christmas, and a new year, plus I've met Mickey Mouse and have just returned from seeking some winter sunshine. Not bad for just over a month... With that said, I am fully refreshed and back in the designer hot seat. I returned after a week away to an inbox full of e-mails, so it's good to know I'm loved and in demand, even when I'm a few thousand miles away! Whilst I was away, one of my clients, Cordant Services, launched their new website, complete with rebrand. Check out the knowledge zone for some of the infographics I produced before I headed off for sunnier climes. As ever, should you need any of my graphic design services, please do get in touch, like I say, I'm back in the hot seat!      
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“Promotes us as a professional recruiter”

27/01/2015 | admin | another satisfied customer! | 0 comments
I recently created some corporate literature for the specialist recruiter Sugarman to use to promote their services across Australia. Here's what my client had to say upon receiving the completed document:

This is excellent and will be a huge help to us as we have pretty much zero marketing material at the moment. Gives us an added approach into clients and really promotes us as a professional recruiter.

It's always nice to hear I've done a good job!
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Knowing your rights

27/01/2015 | admin | handy tips | 0 comments

As a freelance designer you own the right to all the work that you produce, unless you have officially signed it over.

Making the move into becoming a freelance graphic designer has been one of the best decisions I have made in recent years, however, although there are many perks to being a freelancer, there is no safety net of an employer or a company legal team to fall back on should legal rights be called into question. Knowing your rights as a freelancer is an important aspect of running your own business. A few months ago I wanted to learn more about copyrights in particular, and came across some useful sites along the way. I thought I'd share them should you be doing a similar search now or in the future: www.gov.uk: I found this site had a lot of useful information in an easy to digest format, including information on copyrights and protecting your intellectual property. As a freelance designer, everything you create, whether commissioned or not, is your intellectual property for which you own the copyright. There are also links on there should you wish to officially register any design work and useful contacts should there be any disputes relating to design rights. www.copyrightservice.co.uk: Although not the most attractive of websites, the UK Copyright Service site provides everything you need to know about the world of copyright and knowing your rights as a UK freelance designer. There are also some useful fact sheets, collating the important facts which can be downloaded for free. www.creativebloq.com: This is a useful online article containing various links to useful resources to do with both UK and US copyright laws. Freelance Handbook available through www.creativebloq.com has some very useful pages with tips regarding how to protect your assets as a designer, as well as how to negotiate any royalties. The handbook as a whole is a handy tool to have by your side. So there you have it, a selection of some of the links that I have found to be useful to have up my sleeve to refer to if and when it has become necessary to talk about copyright with my clients.
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Run out of application memory?

16/01/2015 | admin | handy tips | 0 comments

I recently encountered a running out of application memory issue, and after much googling didn't seem to find the true root of the problem. However, I have found a suitable answer for now...

The other day I was doing what I always do, using Illustrator and InDesign, along with a few other applications all open at the same time, and all of a sudden out of the blue my laptop fans start buzzing hysterically and I'm flagged a message that says I have run out of application memory. Immediately the programs I am running freeze up, with the only solution to shut down and restart. This happened at least 5 times in quick succession before I was ready to tear my laptop in half or throw it through the window. This really shouldn't be happening, I have 16GB RAM, which is far more than I needed for the job in hand and to add insult to injury to frustration, my free apple support had ended just 7 days before this episode....

This all seemed very bizarre, the only thing I had done differently was move my work space to downstairs. My laptop obviously didn't like the Feng Shui down here...

But! I have found a handy work around, plus I think I may've stumbled across the answer myself. After googling and contacting Apple Support through Twitter I was advised to update my system to Yosemite. This I wasn't willing to do, I didn't want to lose anything on the off chance that this might work. What I did find online was a handy tip about checking out my activity monitor to see what was guzzling all my juice. Within the activity monitor I noticed that there were two items on the list using an awful lot of energy, these being the Kernel and the Finder Web Content. The Kernel is the operating system and so without that running you have in essence switched off the computer, it needs to be running - but what about this Finder Web Content? I found that I could force quit that through the activity monitor and that immediately solved the problem on a short term basis. That seemed to solve the problem, however, a few days ago the same thing happened, however, I was able to act quickly with this handy tip and so didn't lose any of my work. As the fans started, I immediately checked out my activity monitor, however, this time I felt I had sussed it out...

In both cases I had been sent a word document that had been saved as a pdf by my client, through running it through mac pages.

This was the root cause of the problem. I asked the client to send the original pdf and worked from that instead. The problem was solved. So, to sum up. If your system looks like crashing, act quickly! Check out your activity monitor to see how the energy is being distributed across your system and quit anything unnecessary - you may just save your work in time. If you receive documents that aren't in their original format, always try to find the original document as you will  be able to work more effectively and meet your clients needs more quickly.
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