Have you ever wondered how hard it would be get a job in the world today? Even techie freaks like programmers and graphic designers are feeling the pinch of the credit crunch and economic meltdown but as far as graphic designers are concerned, their best bet to land a job would be online.

Work from home is no longer about writing. Telecommuting using professional skills like graphics designing is still something you can find out in the world today. In fact, the demand for graphic designers online is growing and most of them are housed at forums like SitePoint where freelance graphic designing gigs are plenty.

So if you are a master in graphics designing, check out the openings online. They are becoming larger in demands and for sure offer a lucrative pay if you get hired.

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One thing you are sure to be planning is on what souvenirs or giveaways to hand out this Christmas season. Large companies have planned this as early as August, simply choosing a type of merchandise and affixing their corporate logo or information on a certain portion of the item.

But for some people, you can improvise. Printing your logo, url, company name or identifying tag can be simply designed on a computer using software programs like Adobe Photoshop and then printed legibly on a transparent sticker. If you look at the common giveaways that hold them, it is practically the same thing.

Glowing LED Color Change Digital Alarm Clock

So all you have to do is just find a good item to give, and you can even control the volume of items you need. This is important so that you don’t end up being stuck with most of them when you have no one else to give.

On my end, I had a company print my website name and the URL below it. Simple right? Just tweak the colors a bit and have it printed on a transparent sheet.

Then I came across this glowing LED Digital alarm clock which had bare white sides that could accommodate the transparent sticker. The clock costs about $3 while the printing of the sticker labels cost around $10 for 150 pieces.

If you do the math, you have a good giveaway per piece at $4.50 and free advertising at that. I plan to make 50 of these and give them to corporate people known to me. It is not only a give away, it is also advertising and distributing your business brand name in style!

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Just don’t look back. You may be dismayed at the reason why everyone was planting all their attention on you.

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Too bad, the girl really looked like a great fish to hook. But it is against doctor’s orders!

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As previously mentioned in other posts, web design is a format subsection of graphic design. However, web design as it pertains to graphic design and web design in general are two different things, although they can be interchanged at times depending on the specific situation.

When a person wants a web designer, they want someone to create their website. This means that the person needs to have coding experience as well as experience with something other than graphic design software. Freelance web designers are the ones that actually carry out website creation.

However, a web design graphic designer is something else. This is a person that is in charge of actually designing the website. This means that they figure out the page layout, typography and create all of the original graphic design work for the website. A web design graphic designer might also have the knowledge necessary to go ahead and create the actual website after that, but even so that does not change the fact that the two occupations are defined differently.

If you need help thinking about it, think of it as being analogous to the relationship between concept artists in advertising firms and the tape crews that actually create the ad in the end.

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Another format of graphic design is typography. Simply defined, typography is the art of arranging letters and text on a page. This can refer to calligraphy and other forms of written text or it can refer to the idea of the printing press and the typewriters that made earlier publications possible. It is considered an official subsection of graphic design by most definitions and in the modern world it also applies to the idea of font selection and placement on the page.

Now in the modern typographical subsection of graphic design, there is a lot of work to be done. Typographers will often work with other graphic design professionals as consultants behind consultants and in this way they can work with page layout people as well as original freelance graphic design artists. However, they can also work alone with newspapers, magazines and any other major publication online or offline that needs help with aesthetically pleasing arrangements of letters.

In practical terms, this means that a typographer’s clientele is unlimited and can never run out. However, other graphic designers know this as well and for that reason the field of typography is one that is very competitive. If it sounds like something you’re interested in however, success can be very lucrative indeed.

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Another interesting subsection of graphic design in terms of the final format is printmaking. Printmaking has been discussed tangentially in other posts on this blog, but it should be given at least a single post just to the topic because it is a very important part of the graphic design field. The art of printmaking simply has to do with the idea of printing on paper in a way that creates a very beautiful graphic design. In old times the printmaking would have been done through a press and impressions and there are many different techniques still in effect today that use this very old and very tried method of graphic design.

Modern printmaking however makes use of everyone’s favourite piece of technology, the computer. You can now create all of the graphic design work through the use of graphic design software on a computer and then hook that computer up to a printer to achieve the exact same results as you were able to have before. The process is a lot faster and far more efficient, saving companies millions of dollars annually.

Since each printed piece is still an original creation, the term “print” as opposed to “copy” is still valid and by extension the term printmaking is also still valid. This is just one way in which an ancient graphic design format has been made easier to accomplish with modern technology.

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Of all the different formats of graphic design, page layout is perhaps the one where you can really get a job opportunity in the regular sense right away. The reason for this is quite simple and it is that there are pages all over the world today. When you take a look at the different pages in the world that are in newspapers, magazines, textbooks and almost anything else you can imagine, what you need to understand is that behind most of them is a graphic designer that used graphic design principles to create the best page layout format manageable.

Page layout is in fact such an important subsection of graphic design that there are people that study it when they get formal training in graphic design in the form of page element management. There are even pieces of graphic design software online that deal with the idea of optimizing page layout and while they are good as a starting point, they are really no substitute for a person that knows what they are doing. This is why page layout graphic design experts are always in high demand. If you ever think about getting a job in the industry as opposed to doing freelance graphic design work, becoming a page layout expert might be the way to do it.

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If you are truly interested in becoming an overall complete graphic designer, you are going to have to work in multiple graphic design formats when you create your different graphic designs. There are different formats for different types of design and for most of these formats there are specialized skill sets and experiences that you need to have down before you can hope to compete in the industry at large.

For example, one subsection of graphic design that you see a lot in your day-to-day life has to do with the newspaper. The layout of the newspaper is in and of itself a challenge of graphic design, especially when you consider the overall page and the positions of the different elements on the page. Likewise, the creation of very beautiful text (i.e. typography) is another format of graphic design that you are going to have to get used to. Many of these formats are interchangeable between the online and offline worlds however, so getting used to a new graphic design format might be easier than you think.

To give you an introduction into the wide world of different graphic design formats, the next posts will cover four of the major ones, some of which may have already been mentioned in passing on this blog before.

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There are many different areas of graphic design in which modern technology has helped the process along significantly. For example, computers have allowed people the opportunity to fill and render objects instantaneously, allowing them to save hours per drawing when compared with a graphic design they might have created off the internet. Yes, there can be absolutely no disagreement whatsoever on the fact that graphic design software in a computer environment allows a higher efficiency of design versus time for most graphic designers.

However, the people that are critical of modern graphic design through the use of computers actually point to this very fact as being the reason that computers have made graphic design worse rather than better. While they agree that efficiency is up, the argument you are likely to hear from these people is that the creativity of the graphic designer is not better served by being able to create more things in less time. They would argue that the relative creativity is actually down since the graphic design professional now has the opportunity to pursue quantity in the hopes of finding something good as opposed to quality creative development.

It’s an interesting argument, albeit one I don’t particularly buy. Anyone that’s sat at their computer staring at a monitor for an hour straight knows that the creative process of graphic design online can be just as frustrating and long-winded if you use the same method of creative generation.

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