Like a member of the bomb squad or a pilot, designers are capable of stupid things that cost them their job. For freelancers, the following three disasters are a good way to make sure you get your papers stamped ‘DO NOT HIRE’ ever, ever again.

3  Deliver broken or misprinted work

For web designers, this means a broken page. For print designers, this means print work that is crooked, smudged, on the wrong media or printed with the wrong colours. For both web designers and print designers, it means pain.

The fix

For the web designer, this isn’t as easy as it seems. The main culprit will be Internet Explorer 6 and 7. The best trick is to check cross browser compatibility on all the browsers you can. That means installing Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer 8 (with Compatability View). For IE 6, keep an old PC running it, use Multiple IE or install Virtual Windows XP. All this installing is time consuming, but it’s worth it. As often as you save, check your pages across each browser to nail problems early. The best cure is prevention.

For the print designer, the only thing you can do it flip through all the copies. Yep, all six thousand letterheads, if that’s what it takes. You can avoid this issue altogether if you convince your client to shoulder the burden of the printing. Obviously, printing is a service designers can charge for so you’d be mad to seriously consider this. Take charge. You can do it. Just be careful. If you stuff it up, pay for a reprint if you can’t negotiate a free one, and don’t tell the client what happened.

2 The Typo

Print designers need only stuff one word up and it’s lights out, simple as that. It gets worse if your client doesn’t notice until its been seen by a bazillion eyeballs before someone catches on. It makes the client look like a troupe of half-wits. Like a crusted-on barnacle, no perfect storm of proofreading and rechecking will wash a typo away.

It'll be you'res.

The fix

If you’re by yourself, you’re really up the creek here. To nail the typos, you need as many pairs of eyeballs as you can get. Ask anyone who’s a slow reader. I personally ask mum or my grandmother, because they’re not usually in a huge rush. For big projects or big accounts, employ a professional proofreader and past the cost onto the invoice. You and your client will thank you for it.

1 Forget the job or pass the work on

Your client is paying you as a designer because they want your designs. The best way to get one angry is to never deliver it or give it to someone else so they don’t get what you promised.

As a designer, you have to talk a walk in the client’s shoes once in a while. See that any contact they have with you is the only info they’re getting.

You have to understand that once they have made contact with you and agreed on a rate, they are by-and-large locked in. Furthermore, if they’ve already paid a deposit, they have a financial stake in the work. If a client doesn’t like the rate at which the work’s being done or suspects you are working on other projects and pushing them to the wayside, its not a good look. If the client doesn’t cut the rope early, they get dragged along for the ride. You can be certain you won’t work with them again.

Look familiar? Apart from the manilla folders which no one uses.

The fix

The best way to maintain a good rate of work while juggling projects is to keep open a conversation with the client and the project itself.

Email them once a week with your thoughts and how you’re progressing and even if you’ve only managed a small thing, make it appear big with a bright idea or a reflection on the process. To maintain momentum, write a short list of things you’re yet to finish for the client and try to attack them one-by-one. You’ll often find that once you finish one thing, the design juices keep flowing and its a pleasure to finish the job.

Posted on August 7th, 2009 in Design Life | No Comments

G’day and welcome to my blog at Bad Blumau! If you’re reading this, you’re an early adopter and that can only be good, so keep reading and tell your mates!

For those that don’t know me (I reckon there would be a few), my name is Charlie Gearside. I’m nineteen years of age and have lived in Sydney, Australia my entire life. For about as long as that, design has been a part of my life too. It’s been a funny old relationship and something I want to discuss in more depth in future articles. My design persona is Bad Blumau, an agency I started as the next step in my commercial design experience. Read about it here.

It’s time for a brief history lesson, so I’ll start with the now and run backwards. As of today, I’m a student at the College of Fine Arts in Paddington, Sydney. For about four years (maybe more, maybe less) I’ll be studying a Bachelor of Design. In a few short months it’s inspired my to act on my love of design and create Bad Blumau. In short, I love the place and what it stands for.

View from the top of COFA Design building

That hasn’t always been so simple to understand. I was born into creativity, yet shunned it throughout my early teens. My father is a storyboard artist and painter. He was trained a very traditional way at an old art school that used to be near the racecourse in Randwick. He has worked everywhere from Hanna-Barbera as a key-framer to some of Sydney’s bigger advertising agencies. He’s now self-employed doing storyboard art and art direction.

From dad, I gathered drawing skills and an understanding of perspective and colour at a pretty young age. If I could pick the most important influence my parents have had on me, it would probably be a reasonable understanding of what’s tasteful; the subtleties of design and layout that cannot be made by adding elements upon elements. In saying that, I’ve still got a fair bit of learning to do.

Despite it being such a big part of my life, I decided to give Visual Arts a miss when I chose my subjects in Year 9 in 2004. I was really naive and thought that my choices then would impact my future career as a ‘money-maker’ (oh, how wrong can you be?). So there was me snubbing my underdeveloped nose at the subject I was best at and heading off down the path of such interesting subjects as Commerce and Elective History. In the famous words of Aqua, If only I could turrrrrrrn back tie-him.

That was the trend until the age of fifteen when I decided to do a bit of freelance graphic work. I was a car-nut and I managed to find a way to make graphic design and cars go together. Digital tuning. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s a real shame and something I will have to change with a nice long article about it all in the future. Basically I predicted what cars of the not-too-distant-future (think the next model ahead) would look like. I got in touch with the Sydney Morning Herald and got a freelance gig as an artists doing their predictions. I started CGI Automotive in 2005. It operated as both an agency and a popular car-prediction blog. For about two and a half years I got plenty of work through here and some of my work appeared overseas. Probably the highlight here was getting on the cover of America’s biggest-selling car magazine, Motor Trend.

An example of my virtual-tuning. Holden Monaro circa. 2006

What happened next? Well, even I couldn’t have predicted it.

Between 2007 and 2008, I got over cars. Nope. No reason. Just got over them. Where once I found myself scanning every vehicle on the road and subconciously matching their make and model with a special list of ‘good cars’ in my head, now I couldn’t give a stuff. If I could put it down to something, it would definitely be the year after school that changed me. A life-defining year.

That year started with me enrolling in a university course that I, within two months, would hate. It was a business-orientated technology at one of Sydney’s main universities and it sold itself. When I signed up for it I wondered why they were offering a considerable cash scholarship with it. Now I know. Without naming it, it was in my opinion poorly taught and — most importantly — not for me. I was not about numbers, I was about design. It was boring.

Part of the course conditions was that I work at a financial institute for half a year. I got a six-month internship at Macquarie Bank, one of the world’s largest and most successful investment banks. Though I was clearly not enjoying this period, I told myself that the experience of being chucked into the ‘deep end’ of full-time work would be good for me. It was. It was where I found my passion for web design.

Macquarie Bank's Martin Place office. I was on level 6.

I was put in a team of blokes in the Treasury and Commodities department that had a lot to do with the web. From July 2008 to Feburary 2009, I was learning almost everyday about HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more. For the first time in a year I saw a connection between my own creative interests and that of the web. I was fascinated. Sure, I’d run a few websites before but this was serious. I learnt more in my time amidst the cold greys of CBD Sydney that I ever had in a classroom or lecture hall.

So I quit that course, but not web design. If anything, ‘Club Mac’ was the beginning.

I started the Bachelor of Design at the College of Fine Arts in 2009. I started Bad Blumau a few weeks ago and here we are. Have a look at my portfolio and give me a yell if you want some work done. Until then, keep reading the blog. I’ll post a couple of times a week.

Posted on June 26th, 2009 in Design Life | No Comments