I’ve recently found myself in the position of a hiring manager, which means I screen, interview, and recommend candidates for hire who will work with my directly. It’s a great position to be in, as I get to meet and speak with the people I will be working with on a daily basis, but it is also a very taxing one: Some of the things people will do just to get an interview are depressing.

I’ve compiled this short list of what to do and not to do based on my experience over the past few weeks:

1. DO NOT Lie on Your Resume
   You will be found out…eventually. Maybe you’re just looking for a job – any job – for any period of time and you don’t care about getting let go down the road. That’s fine. Maybe you don’t feel your time is all that valuable. But when you start wasting my time, my HR Department’s time, and the time of my co-workers, that’s when we have a problem. Normally, I can tell within the first 5 minutes of an interview if you’re full of it, and I’m relatively new to this. If you apply to a job that isn’t a good fit for you, it’s just as much a detriment to your employer as it is to you. Just don’t do it.
2. DO Include Portfolio Samples with Your Resume
   You can have the most impressive resume in the world, but at the end of the day it is completely worthless if I can’t see your work. HR gets 10-20 resumes per day where I work (some places get hundreds). They want to see your resume. By the time it lands on my desk, it’s filtered down to 3 or 4. The first thing I do is look for a portfolio link. If you don’t have one, your resume is in the trash bin. It’s not because I don’t think you have quality work, it’s that I DON’T KNOW if you have quality work. My interviews typically last one hour. I simply can’t spend that kind of time (besides interviewing, I do have a daily job to do) on an unknown. If you give me your portfolio off the bat, I might turn it down right away, but at least you have a chance.
3. DO NOT Be Nervous
   This is more of a soft rule: of course you’re going to be nervous. Hell, I’m nervous interviewing most people. Will they be the right person for the job? Will they want the job once they know the requirements? Will they be an easy person to work with? These are just some of the things running through my head before walking into the interview room. Interviews are just a much a chance for you to get to know your potential employer as it is for us to get to know you. Have a conversation, not a presentation. As soon as you walk through the door, forget that you’re looking for a job, or that you’re looking to impress. You’re simply going in to talk. You will find yourself more confident, natural, and able to answer questions without those awkward moments where you forget what you were going to say.
4. DO Bring a Creative Resume
   Another soft rule. You’re applying for a creative position, let it show. Your resume is a perfect opportunity to show your knowledge in information design, page layout, typography, white space, and just about anything design-related. While a normal resume won’t get you thrown out, a creative resume will get you shot to the top of the list.

While following these tips will not guarantee you a job, they will make the interview process easier, and might increase your chances of landing the jobs you apply for. Most importantly, they will make sure that you are applying for the RIGHT job for you.

If the goal was to have everything above the fold, then newspapers wouldn’t be folded. To ask to put everything above the fold on your website is like the newspapers switching to a half-height format.

The next thing I say is, “Yes, we can put everything above the fold, by cutting back on content.” Most clients get that I’m being sarcastic: what’s the point of having a website if you just remove all the content from it?

Should you worry about content being above the fold? Absolutely. Put the most important content there. Put the hook there. That’s what the space is reserved for- both in print and web. But the space above the fold is NOT the only space on your site. Web browsers have scrollbars for a reason, and really: people don’t mind using them. If the client demands to put the content above the fold (or any other equally bad request), challenge them. Ask them how many sites they actually visit on a regular basis with all of the content fitting within 400-600 pixels of height. You can be pretty sure that number is close to zero: with that little content WHY would they need to go back? You can memorize that much information. If it’s a quality client, you won’t offend them by challenging them: They hired you because they know they don’t know what they’re doing.

It seems so many people (web people included) get so caught up in the details of launching a website that they lose sight of the end goal. Whether that goal is to sell online, publish articles, direct visitors to another medium or anything else, one thing is constant: a site needs content. Without content, your visitors have no reason to come back, no motivation to delve deeper. A new visitor to your site is a blank slate. Before they pick up the phone to call, fire up their email client to write, or convert in any way whatsoever, they are going to read your content. And if it ain’t there, they ain’t biting.

/rant.

Update (6-27-2009): A first-time reader has contacted me via email to point out a great example of a site that balances above/below the fold design very well: bounceenergy.com The call to action is placed directly above the fold, while rich content is placed below the fold. Thanks, Dan!

Update (12-17-2009): Emily Balog over at Brooks Bell just wrote an article with lots of facts and fancy graphs on the same topic. I recommend you check it out for the actual facts behind the “fold”: http://blog.brooks-bell.com/2009/12/forget-what-you-think-you-know-about-the-fold#more-351

Twitter is built with the cards stacked against mass-marketing, at least the spammy kind. You have to confirm who you get updates from- that doesn’t help the marketers at all. Secondly, it sets the tone of the conversation: “What are you doing?” Not “What would you like to buy?” But third, and most important, is the level of intrusion.

There are various levels of intrusion when it comes to marketing, and these determine how receptive people may be to your voice. Send me a mailpiece, and I can ignore it (which is actually part of direct mail’s success- it depends on you placing the ad on your coffee table, where it will haunt you until one day you look at it and realize, “hey- I do need an oil change!”). Call my house phone, and I may get a bit angry- but in truth I’m used to it, and may respond. Call my cell phone, and forget it- that’s just too personal.

Twitter falls in cell phone territory. I use Twitter to chat with friends, colleagues, and my readers. I use it to share useful information with others, and find information from those who are doing the same. The few cases where I did sign up to Twitter marketing alerts, I did so not because they blind followed me, but because it was part of an existing web campaign. I get NewEgg daily deals because they clued me into it, and I shop there a lot.

But not everyone uses Twitter effectively. You need to bring your A-game to have an effect in the Twitterverse. You need to make sure you’re bringing something to the table that people WANT. And remember, it’s an opt-in system so let your audience CHOOSE to follow you by integrating Twitter with your existing campaigns, not by randomly following them and hoping they follow back.

And one last note: please, please, PLEASE don’t tweet about how to get more followers. That totally misses the point. Twitter- like anything else social- isn’t about number of followers, it’s about quality.

While I will agree that flash-based websites suffer from an SEO standpoint (workarounds aside), I don’t always think that matters. And this is where the deluge of “WTF” started- largely from people that weren’t even following me.

I know, I should have expected it. Saying SEO doesn’t matter on the web today (let alone on Twitter, where the SEO folks tend to congregate) is social media suicide. But it’s true. Sometimes.

SEO can be a very time-consuming, exhausting practice, and that time may be better spent elsewhere depending on the intended use for your site. The thing to remember is that the search engines are but one channel through which people will find your content or website. If organic search isn’t an important channel for your uses, don’t pour the energy into increasing your search engine visibility.

“But increased visibility is always a good thing!” I hear you shouting. And it’s true. But is it necessarily worth the effort?

Example: My portfolio site, georgegumpert.com gets some search engine traffic (mostly people searching for me by name), but not much at all. Maybe 1-2 hits per day come from search engines. But I don’t care. My conversion rate from search engine traffic is a whopping 0%. I have yet to get a lead from search engine traffic, and know that even if I do, it will be at a rate of 0.5-1.0%- not really worth the trouble of optimizing to me. However, my conversion rate from other channels – face-to-face primarily, but the same can be applied to word-of-mouth, direct mail and video/print advertising – is much higher, around 70%. So why would I dump the effort into optimizing my site for search engines, when it’s already optimized for my uses?

So what is the take away? Yes, you should do what you can to make your site search engine friendly. But like everything else, do it in moderation. If it comes down to a choice between launching your campaign’s site effectively or making it as appetizing as possible to the spiders, ask yourself if search engine traffic is really a channel that you’re targeting. Don’t just listen to what the SEO guys tell you – search engines aren’t the only way to use the web, no matter how much they try to convince you otherwise. And always remember: focus on quality content first, and the social nature of the web will take care of your publicity for you.

Sure, I had my iGoogle start page with a few sites I followed: Lifehacker, Slashdot, and a friend’s blog or two, and that worked fine. That is, until I saw Bradley Robb speak at WordCamp in Richmond. In his presentation, he advised bloggers of the importance of RSS, and setting up Google alerts to get the latest news from the topics they’re most interested in. And my whole outlook on RSS changed.

So like a good little blogger, I rushed home, setup my Google Reader account, and made a few generic alerts: “photoshop tutorials,” “illustrator tutorials,” “graphic design” and “web development.” Within an hour I had over 100 new items to sort through. Yeah, there was a lot of noise, and Bradley warned us of the signal-to-noise ratio…and assured me that the process of refining keywords would help. And it did.

But still, I had subscribed to a number of RSS feeds since the event; I was begining to suffer from Information overload. Something needed to be done. And Google Reader’s ugly interface wasn’t helping.

I downloaded the Flock browser, which helped to manage all of my social media accounts, but didn’t really deliver feeds in any sort of useful way. And then I found Feedly.

Feedly is like a magazine for your RSS feeds. You are given multiple views for your data: Cover, latest articles, and Digest (my personal favorite). It delivers news to you in a way that doesn’t make you feel overwhelmed by it. It brings the joy back to reading the news.

After installing the add-on (Firefox, Flock), you will be asked to provide your google reader information. This may (reasonably) turn some of you off to the service, but there IS a reason they ask for it: Feedly will tie in with your Google Reader account, and stay synchronized with it. In addition, it makes use of some of Google Reader’s features.

Once you tie your accounts together, you will begin to see your pages fill up. To the left is an example of what my digest page looks like (click for full view). As you can see, it pulls in my feeds, and lays them out in a mash-up format that’s a little more visually appealing than your typical RSS Reader (you can also view each feed source individually if that’s more your style). Tie it to your Twitter account, and you will find your Twitter stream and the top trends in addition to your featured (favorited) news sources. Further down the page, you will also find a break down of your feeds by topic and source, who is following you (in Google Reader), and an interesting little “Explore” section, where you are given site feeds that seem to do a good job of relating to your topics of interest. For media streams (photo/video feeds), it does a good job at laying them out in album format.

What else does Feedly do? Besides basic Google Reader functionality (sharing, favoriting), how about integrating with your FriendFeed account to share with that network? Facebook? It does the same there. Twitter: same. Delicious also plays nicely (as you would expect). It even does a good job of hooking into Digg so you can tune into whatever inane chatter is going on over there about what you’re reading. And all sharing services also allow for you to add your own annotations, which is nice.

So give Feedly a test drive at http://www.feedly.com. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and already find myself getting more out of my RSS feeds.

1. Save All Receipts – Trust me, you’ll be thankful come tax season. Most items you buy, from pens to computers, and even a new HDTV (depending on your field) can be written off as a business expense on your taxes. When year-end rolls around, you’ll need all the write offs you can get. Just don’t fall into the trap of using the write off as a justification for buying that shiny new iPhone. Remember, you can only write off a portion of the total purchase price.
2. ALWAYS Choose Mobile over Stationary – A very wise man (who just so happens to be a client of mine) is always telling me “Good things happen when you leave the house.” As good as it might feel to take the 3-second commute and work in your PJs all day, eventually cabin fever will always kick in. I made the mistake this year of buying an iMac over a Macbook pro, and was kicking myself during the warm summer months, when I was really craving the socialization I used to have in the office.
3. Free Wifi isn’t REALLY Free – I know. One of the great draws of the local coffee house is that you can take that mobile laptop you so wisely purchased and connect to their wifi and still work. But remember, they are providing a service to you with the expectation that you will be a paying customer. Standard fare is a cup of coffee every 2 hours- it’s still the cheapest rent you’ll find- and in line with tip number one, save your receipts! That coffee is considered a business expense!
4. Always be Open to Learning New Things – When I first started freelancing, I turned down many jobs, thinking I couldn’t handle them. It wasn’t until I found clients that were willing to work with me while I learned that I realized there’s nothing I can’t do with the proper motivation. If you asked me a year ago to create a site that integrates PHP, mySQL, Javascript, and Flash in one massive application, I never would have thought I could do it. But with a supportive client, the right motivation, and the entire Internet at my disposal, it somehow happened, and everyone involved is better for it.
5. Don’t be Afraid to Let Others Know You’re an Expert – We’ve all been there. You disagree with everything your client asks you to do. They absolutely MUST have Comic Sans as their primary font. They think they absolutely MUST show their (artificially inflated) visitor count. Or they just can’t live without a lengthy Flash intro. As much as you disagree, you don’t want to disagree with your client- after all, they’re paying your rent next month! Don’t be afraid to voice your concern. Remember: they hired you because you know more about what they want than they do, and sometimes it doesn’t hurt to remind them of this. Make sure the client knows you share the same interests- you want them to have a killer website (or brochure, poster, business card, etc.), and they want to get their message across in the most effective way possible. Just politely let them know why you think it’s a bad idea, and if they still insist, go along with it. You can always modify a copy of it for your portfolio.
6. Recognize When You Are NOT the Expert – While you WERE hired as the expert in your field, chances are your client is somewhat of an expert in theirs. Whether they know more about effective copy writing, conversion rates or development, listen to their side, and don’t immediately look at their opposing view as an attack on your skills or expertise. None of us are experts at everything, and the best team will work together on a project.
7. Be a Tough Boss – You’re living the Dream. You wake up when you want, work when you want, and never have the boss breathing down your neck, right? Wrong. By switching to freelance, you traded in the 9-5 for a schedule that is constantly changing. Your one boss has been replaced by a handful of them, and none of them are ever in contact with one another. Every client you have is your new boss. While you are ultimately in control of your own schedule, a successful freelancer will realize that their clients decide their schedule. You have 4 clients breathing down your neck for progress by tomorrow, it’s 11:30 at night, and your significant other is begging you to come to bed. Doesn’t matter. If you want any of those clients next week, you get the job done. Don’t worry. As hectic as it is now, it WILL be slow eventually. And when that time comes, you’ll be glad you worked your ass off today.
8. Never Stop Learning – This is usually the first piece of advice I give budding Freelancers. When you work by and for yourself, you lose the benefit of learning from your co-workers. Learn to visit the book stores often. If you are a designer, learn the web- it’s becoming more and more necessary. And not just HTML. The web is more and more about dynamic content. PHP, mySQL, Flash, AJAX, JavaScript. Learn the DOM. If you are a developer, learn design. And not just UI design. Learn color theory and typography. Study print layouts. Saturate yourself with retro design- the oldest styles and techniques are the ones that have proven themselves to be powerful and effective- the trends will disappear, but the classics will have impact forever. Long gone are the days where it’s acceptable to do one or the other- to be effective in the modern design world, you MUST know development. Print just isn’t enough any more.

These are just some of the lessons I learned in 2008 and plan to pay more attention to in 2009. If you have any tips you’d like to share for other freelancers out there, let us hear them in the comments below!

Themaninblue

The results are quite varied.  Many make me not feel so bad.  Others make me swoon.

What are your opinions?  Do you think it is important for a designer to have good handwriting in this digital age?

So CSS can be a bit frustrating from time to time. While working on the reskin of this site, one problem I kept running into was the css attribute “min-height” wasn’t always working. How did I get around it? With a little help from Grey Wyvern (who just so happens to be the #1 Google result for “div min-height”).

But, of course, it didn’t. So, how else can this be done?

The Prop Div

Without a height attribute, the .entry div will fit the height of whatever it contains. (Duh, that’s the default behavior of a div container!). So, if we want it to have a minimum of 110px height, we can just insert another div inside with a defined height of 110px:

And insert this inside the .entry div:

But wait! We can’t just stop there! For one, your formatting is probably all messed up. So what can we do? First of all, we can define the width, telling it to only take up 1px:

Finally, we can move it to the right, minimizing any damage caused even further:

Much better! …In Firefox that is.

That’s right, in classic CSS fashion, this hack doesn’t quite work in IE…yet. But we’re about to fix that using…

The Clear Div

You see, in IE, the height attribute doesn’t do anything if it has nothing to “push down” on. By adding another div for it to push on, IE will implement this hack correctly:

And add it to your page, like so:

Now your div should never shrink below 110px (or whatever value you provided for “prop”)! Best of all, this code doesn’t use any selector hacks, so it will validate! Double score!

As always, any questions, comments, criticisms, let me know below!

Please, let me know what ya’ll think below! Comments, criticisms, browser-incompatibilities, etc. Thanks!

Never show a client a logo that you don’t absolutely love
This is by far the single most important rule if you want the client to go with a logo you like.  It’s also the first rule I had to re-learn.  I got the idea to show  the client the two logos I was liked, and accompany them with a few logos I thought were just silly.  I mainly included them as filler (I was fresh out of school, and thought I needed to show the client a lot of stuff), but I also thought they would make the logos I liked look even better.  Sounds like a good plan, eh?  Well, the client picked one of the silly logos.  And this has happened to every single person I’ve talked to in this position.  Remember, you were contracted for a reason: you have a skill your client lacks.  If you were contracted to design a logo, it’s because they don’t know how to.  They trust your expertise, and part of that is to provide quality work.  If you’re showing them crappy logos, they assume your seal of approval is on them already.  And once they have their heart set on it, there’s no convincing them otherwise.

Show the logos in black and white ONLY
This is actually for three reasons.  One- why would you put all the effort into designing multiple logos in color, if they’re just going to be discarded?  The first client I ever had ended up going through 42 logo revisions before finally settling on one.  The first two sets of 5 were in color, after that I switched to black and white only.  Two- colors will just confuse your client.  I know it sounds silly, but it’s true.  The client will spend more time focusing on color schemes than on how well the logo conveys their brand or image- which is what they should be focusing on.  And finally (and most importantly), about 75% of the time their logo will only be used in black and white, so you need to make sure it looks good that way first.  Remember, settle on a design first, then add color.

ALWAYS design your logos in a vector program
I personally use Adobe Illustrator (honestly, any serious designer should).  Your logo needs to be scalable.  If you’re thinking “it’s just a logo for a website, so I can make it in Photoshop,” stop now.  You never know where that logo will end up.  If two years from now, your client wants to put up a billboard (or even a print catalog), you have to make the logo again from scratch.  If you’re thinking “Illustrator doesn’t have all the filters I need to design the logo I want to,” stop again.  If you’re designing a logo that you want to be effective, you shouldn’t be using those filters anyway.  There are a few rare cases where it’s okay to use them (for example, if you are designing a logo for a film studio, and they want a specific effect to happen when it appears on screen)- you can export it and add whatever effects you want/need to then.  But you will ALWAYS need a vector file of it.

Have only one master
Preferably the one who makes the final decision   If you have to sell your logo to the Seven Dwarves,  the great you sold them on in step one will get chopped, hacked, and mangled as you attempt to please them all.  I once had a client who passed me between 3 different people (each with different backgrounds and tastes) while designing the logo, and I’ve never worked so hard in my life.  Find out who will make the final decision, and work directly with that person.  If they don’t accept those terms, or there is no single decision maker, don’t accept the job.  It might sound extreme, but trust me- your life will be much less stressful that way.

Make the logo work on the nano-scale
They may have no desire to do it now, but what happens to your fancy logo when the client wants to put it on something small, like a pen?  It turns into a blob.  Trust me, nobody wants to be remembered as The Blob.

Don’t be gimmicky
This includes using filters, drop shadows, etc.  That cool new effect you learned how to do in Photoshop (why are you still using Photoshop to make your logo?) will be old and tired next year.  Remember how cool Bullet Time was in The Matrix?  Remember all the movies that did it afterwards?  Now it’s pretty lame, isn’t it?  Leave the gimmicks to the fly-by-nights.  You want your logo to stand the test of time.

KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)
Look at it this way: Every extra feature you add to the logo makes it harder to remember.  The most effective logos are usually no more than a few simple shapes.  This also goes hand-in-hand with the previous rule about making the logo work at small sizes.  Remember, you’re not creating a work of art, you’re creating a logo: and that means it needs to be easily recognizable, scalable (both up AND down), and make an IMPACT.

Variations, VaRiAtIoNs, VARIATIONS!
Your logo will be used in different formats, and it’s okay to modify the logo to fit those formats.  Remember, the only goal is to make sure that when people see the logo (or part of it), they think of the brand it’s tied to.  It works even better when you design the logo with this in mind from the start.  Of course, the less complex your logo is, the less you’ll need to modify it.

Look to the future
I don’t mean come up with the “next big thing.”  Remember, you’re not creating a gimmick.  I mean think of where the logo will appear.  It won’t always be on a blank piece of paper.  The client will want to put their logo on everything from print ads to television commercials to billboards to trucks.  Will the logo you designed stand out when put next to stunning photography?  Will people recognize it when it passes them at 60 mph on the highway?

Of course if you follow all these rules all the time, you would have a pretty bland logo.  That’s why you’re a designer.  Any effective logo will have a number of these properties; it’s up to you to balance out which ones to keep in mind.  Some are steadfast rules (such as designing the logo in a vector program, or keeping scale in mind), while others you can sometimes let slide (Is your client even in an industry that has shipping trucks to put their logo on?).  In the end the choice is up to you, and remember: Your client is counting on you to make the right one.