With Adobe CS4 about 6 months old now, have you made the upgrade yet? Are you willing to spend that much on an upgrade? Will you be pulling your hair out or enjoying the ride? If you find yourself going bald over the decision, here are few tips that might help you out.

Have you ever cranked out a t-shirt design for a client or yourself, only to find out the printer does not do 4-color process printing? If this has happened to you, you were probably left with a lot of lost hours without much to show for it. We want to clear that up for you and provide you with the information to avoid the same problem next time.

As a freelance graphic designer, you will have to wear many different hats from time to time. It can become extremely difficult to juggle all the different tasks thrown at you in a given day. In this post I want to concentrate on five things that will not only increase your productivity, but also your number of clients.

My RSS feed reader is stocked with 100′s of feeds from the design community. The articles that fill my reader, inspire me, teach me, and keep me up to date with the latest in the design community. It has become instrumental to helping me grow and keep up to date with this quickly changing field.

I know from personal experience that when I begin a web project it’s so easy to choose a Content Management System (CMS) that I’m already familiar with. Even more so, it’s easy for me to reach for the popular choice that’s already well established. Recently, I’ve had a chance to give SilverStripe a test drive.

The issue of how to handle a web maintenance contract has always puzzled me. I’m constantly rethinking how I should do things. Throughout my many efforts, I’ve tried to set up hourly and per project contracts. So which is better?

Working in a creative field, such as design, can be taxing on the imagination. But there are some ways that have proven effective to folks who have faced these times, and come through them with success. And they all involve taking a mental five.

It’s in our nature, as we move through time to note the trends that shape said times. And furthermore, one might say, it’s in our nature to cycle through these timely trends from time to time. We see it in so many aspects of our culture. Fashion, entertainment, design. Each one sharing this retro-revisiting that brings back popular past elements to recapture something from our formers.

Designing a logo can be a very difficult challenge whether it be for yourself or for a client. There are quite a few guidelines that you have to stay within to ensure that your design captures the brand’s identity. Some of the more obvious parameters include theme, tone, message, colors, size, etc.

With the web every day becoming more and more robust and websites becoming more advanced users and designers can benefit from these changes, I can feel that it wont be long until every one will initially start to ignore IE6 and start enjoying what more advanced browsers can handle.

So I was thinking today (which admittedly tends to not go over well), and I struck upon an idea that seemed ludicrous at first, but as I digested it, it seemed to make more sense. In every field there is a set of standards that folks follow which grant a certain uniformity to the group as a whole.

Choosing what career path you wish to take is one of the biggest decisions you will ever make in your life. And people take a lot of things into consideration when choosing their job, but did you ever stop and think about what the community around your job choice might be like, and how that could effect your choice.