HuntingTown

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Basic Colour Illustration with Simple Background£45 / $68


Fully Shaded Illustration with Simple Background £65 / $99


Fully Shaded Illustration with Complex Background£80 / $122


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When it comes to the most important tools a graphic designer has at their disposal, a good portfolio is pretty high on the list. It's an absolute must have for anyone wanting to get ahead in this industry and quite frankly there really isn't any excuse for not having one. As I've said before, you portfolio really needs to be available online and ideally be on your own website at your own domian name. Directing potential clients you www.companyname.com/portfolio is the very best setup to have and should be what all designers ultimately want to achieve.

The Free Portfolio

From time to time, I get emails sent to Hunting Town from other designers and illustrators looking for work, with a link to thier portfolios. I make a point of always look through the portfolio of every designer that contacts me and I'm astounded with how many of them direct me to free portfolio sites! I've heard designers give countless excuses for not having a domain name portfolio, like "I don't know how to build a website" or "I can't afford the hosting", and they're all rubbish. There are loads of tutorials out there on how to set up a quick portfolio website (you could even redirect the URL to one of your free portfolios!). As far as cost goes, I know for a fact you can get hosting for just £4.37 ($6.95) a month, because that's what I get charged for this website through Bluehost, and that's with a free domain name! If you're not covering £4.37 a month through your graphic design business, then I'm sorry to say that you don't really have a graphic design business.

So with that all said and done, am I totally against the idea of a free online portfolio? Hell no, they're a great idea.

Eyeballs

I have set up countless free online portfolios for Hunting Town throughout the internet, simply because every single one makes my chance of being found a little bit better. Think about your online presence as a shop window. If you have a huge, awesome display in your shop window, then that's great, but only the people who wander by will ever see it. Now if you have lots of posters out there... Read the rest of the article here ...

The Go Media Zine holds a special place in my heart. When I was first getting started as a graphic designer Go Media was definitely my guiding light. I spent a lot of time searching around other design firms, trying to get an idea of how I should present myself, and generally how I should try and go about running my business. After stumbling upon (and lapping up) the Go Media website I quickly found myself on their sister blog site; the Go Media Zine. This website offered up not only design tutorials but real world business advice for designers. Needless to say, the Zine was an amazing find for my novice designer self, and the words of Bill Beachy and Jeff Finley quickly became (and to this day remain) gospel.

To put it bluntly, I have become very fond of it

So for the past four years the Go Media Zine has become one of my on-line designer haunts. I check it daily, subscribe to the newsletter and have even had one of my own articles published on it. To put it bluntly, I have become very fond of it- and I have no shame in stating that it acted as a blueprint when designing the Design Range.

Go Rebrand

Recently Go Media announced that they were having a total on-line rebranding to try and tie their extensive on-line portfolio together under one uniformed appearance. This initially kicked off a few months ago with the new look Go Media.us website and has now extended to my beloved Zine.

The new look is a huge departure from it's dark, textured and illustration heavy predecessor

The new look is a huge departure from it's dark, textured and illustration heavy predecessor, and features a very clean, professional white and grey look. From someone who follows the running of the company (as) closely (as I can), it's clear that Go Media are trying to push into the next tier of design firm. Originally they began as specialists in illustration and bleeding edge graphic design, however in more recent years their portfolio has leaned toward identity creation and web development. Now this isn't to say that they have abandoned their roots- in fact anyone who has read Jeff Finleys Threads Not Dead, or attended their Weapons of Mass Creation Fest will tell you that's far from the truth. However it is true to say the Go Media are growing up a bit. I don't mean to say that in a negative way, or make it seem as if their prior work was some how 'lesser', but it's evident that Go Media  are concentrating less on smaller up and coming businesses and instead are putting a lot of effort into tendering for much larger corporate contracts.

If you've listened to the new Go Media Podcast then you'll have heard Bill remark about how sometimes work just doesn't come in, and how stressful that can be for a large design firm that has  employees expecting their wages at the end of the month. In some ways I think that this new look and new approach is an answer to those concerns, and from my perspective at least, I find it incredibly exciting to watch a design firm step out of their comfort zone to try and achieve greatness.

So What About the Zine Then!?

Sorry- I'm getting totally side-tracked here. This is suppose to be a review of a new website design, not a company analysis!



To get back to the Go Media Zine (aptly now renamed to simply 'Zine') it's clear to see that the Go Media team don't do rebrands by half. Far from a simple re-skin, the whole of the website functionality and layout has been redone to meet modern standards in web and blogging design.

...Read the rest of this article at the Design Range

As a designer your portfolio is absolutely you're most important asset. It doesn't matter if you're this generations Da Vinci in terms of you're design skills if you can't prove it. Likewise having a world renowned reputation as a Photoshop wizard will only get clients to your door, unless they can see the work you've done before they're not going to take a risk on you. So with that said, it's vitally important that as designers, our portfolios are the absolute best they can be.

Now, I'm not sure if you've noticed yet, but you've had the good fortune in being born into a largely digital age. Whilst this doesn't mean that you can throw out that chunky A3 leather-bound portfolio you've been carrying around since university, it does mean that your online portfolio is probably now just as (if not increasingly more) important as your physical one.

How a Client Sees Your Portfolio
When a potential client is looking through your portfolio they're trying to establish what you're really good at, what your skills are and most importantly; how you might handle their project. But that's not all they're looking for, what they really want to see, what they're really looking for is confirmation. Confirmation that they're putting their project in the hands of someone they can trust. Confirmation that other people have been where they are right now and walked away happy with a product clutched in their hands.

Think about it. If you're anything like me, when you're buying something on Amazon or eBay you always check the reviews section. Even if you've done all the research on this item in the world and are utterly utterly convinced that it's perfect, you still read the reviews. Why? Because you want the security of  knowing that people have already made the decision that you're about to make and that they have been happy they made it. You want confirmation that you're making a good call.

What So Many Designers Do
Now when I'm looking through other graphic designers portfolios a mistake I see again and again is that they're not providing this confirmation. Their portfolio is just a flat image or two for each project and maybe a bit of a blurb, in some cases they may have a quote or reference from the client about how happy they are, (and that's really good) but they could be doing so so much better.

Say for instance you put together a sweet t-shirt design for a band and you made up this crazy awesome illustration to go on it. Obviously you show your illustration off, but that's it? I mean, yeah, it's very good and all, but are we to just take it as read that this ever made it onto a t-shirt? Oh, it says in the blurb that they used the illustration on their CD cover too, great! But... wait, you don't have an image of that printed up either? No no... It's ok... we totally trust you. We don't need to actually see it do we?

What You Need to Do
They're called product mock-ups and they are VITAL! If you design a cover for a book, then how it on a book www.huntingtown.co.uk/portfoli… ! If you design a logo for a business card, then show it on the business card www.huntingtown.co.uk/portfoli… ! Our online portfolios suffer from a major lack of tactile response so you absolutely have to do everything you can to show your work in situ, to show that it actually exists.

Read More... www.thedesignrange.com/2012/09…

So here's the scenario; you're sat at your desk at your dull, dead-end job, answering pointless phone calls from automaton customers day in day out. Occasionally you may have enough free time to scribble a cute little doodle onto your work pad and half hear colleges complimenting your sketches as they pass by your desk. "That's really cool" you might catch through the haze, or perhaps a "wow, I'd love to be able to draw like that". But every now and again you hear that remark, that call to action that is as taunting as it is complimentary; "what are you doing working here with a talent like that?".

"That's really cool" you might catch through the haze, or perhaps a "wow, I'd love to be able to draw like that"
It's a throwaway comment sure, but they stack up, building and building until one day they break through that mist of billing reports and conversion rates and you genuinely ask yourself,

"what am I doing working here with a talent like this?"

A light shines down on you from the heavens above as you march over to your boss and hand in your notice declaring that "from this day forth, I shall be a Graphic Designer!" (click to Tweet this!).

Sound familiar? Well it does to me, because that's exactly what I did. I was fresh out of university and had leapt straight into the job with the highest salary I could find. After almost two long years and a mountain of (vastly improving) sketches I threw in the towel for a brighter future in graphic design.

Big mistake.

What little savings I had soon got swallowed up by rent, tax and food as I quickly scrambled to find enough clients to keep the lights on. I could do the work sure, but I had no idea how to find the work, how to deliver the work and how to get paid for doing it, let alone what I should actually be charging!

With the Benefit of Hindsight

Looking back now it seems painfully clear what I should have done and what I'll recommend that you do if you find yourself in that same position.

Read More...www.thedesignrange.com/2012/08…