Various

Projecting Professionalism: 5 Ways to Make Your Business Seem Bigger Than it Is

5 Comments 10 March 2010

Big is good. Despite the common assumption that small companies are the best when it comes to customer and client service, many businesses look the other way when selecting a service provider or contractor. Rather than selecting based on individual attention and customer care, they look for other signals of approval – the ability to work with large clients, a proven track record, and the structure to support large assignments and long-term contracts.

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For a small boutique provider, it can seem nearly impossible to get a foot in the door. The big guns are looking for companies like them – large, powerful, and very experienced – but in order to become one and gain access to their contracts, you need to become one yourself. For some small businesses, that means acquiring additional overheads and growing in size, even if its just perceived size for some of your clients and customers.

These five tips can help you transform your business’s image from small and micro-focused to large and powerful. With a few small additions, new strategies, and client interaction changes, these tips could land you ultra-valuable clients and customer contacts, long-term contracts, and the experience required to market yourself to the biggest companies in the world. Apply one, two, or all five, and watch your business’s value grow in front of you.

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Various

Top 6 Mistakes that Newbie Designers and Online Entrepreneurs Make

5 Comments 08 March 2010

It’s not uncommon to hear stories of large-scale online business failures. From major companies – anyone remember Webvan? – to small design firms and marketing agencies, failure is a part of doing business. With the low costs of starting and operating a business online, many businesses that would fail under other circumstances end up getting started. Sometimes they grow into leading enterprises, but more often than not, they don’t.

We’ve identified the six most common mistakes that newbie designers, entrepreneurs, and online businesspeople make when they start their own online businesses. If you’re just starting out online yourself, use this article as a template of what not to do in your business. The best business lessons are often learned from other people’s failures, and these six should give you a good foundation for creating a long-term online business.
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CSS

10 Useful and Time-Saving CSS Grid-Layout Generators

9 Comments 02 March 2010

CSS is considered the “back-bone” of a website. It structures, helps embed, and styles elements. Now, if we were to code a CSS layout by hand, it would take us an unneeded amount of time that we could be putting towards other areas of our designs.

With somewhat similar concepts to the all-famous button, background, and favicon generators, today we present you with 10 Useful and Time-Saving CSS Grid-Layout Generators that will save you mass amounts of time and help you eliminate some repetitive coding.

Blueprint Grid CSS Generator

This tool will help you generate more flexible versions of Blueprint’s grid.css and compressed.css and grid.png files. Whether you prefer 8, 10,16 or 24 columns in your design, this generator now enables you that flexibility with Blueprint.
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Tools

15 Free And Useful Typography Tools For Web Designers

8 Comments 28 February 2010

Typography is one of the most important components that make a design complete. This aspect of your design can effectively engage users when used properly. It can also help you enhance the visual appearance of your website, print/graphic designs, and more.

Here we have 15 Free and Useful Typography Tools for Web Designers that’ll help you in a variety of ways. Alright, now lets begin exploring these tools.

FontStructor

FontStuctor is an easy to use free web-based typography tool that allows you to create your own fonts. It has a beautiful interface that is simple to interact with.

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Tutorials

How to create an elegant web layout in Photoshop

33 Comments 26 February 2010

In this tutorial I will show you how to create an elegant web layout in Photoshop using thin lines, subtle gradients and beautiful typography.

Final Result

Have a look at the layout that we’ll be creating in this tutorial.

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