Talent alone simply isn’t enough anymore. You have to be a well rounded person to be successful creative in today’s market. There are a lot of things you can do to help yourself on the way, and LifeClever: Tips for design and life has some tips to get you started in the article titled Talent isn’t everything: 7 habits of highly effective junior designers.

(Via Creative Guy.)

Wanted: A student interested in earning a little extra money to design a web page for an up and coming artist. Nothing to fancy just a page with some nice pictures and a couple links. I can be emailed at Rubanzo14@yahoo.com

Uncouth blogs and social-networking bloopers can hurt your employability, a survey of more than 600 employers finds.

(Via CNET News.com.)

Ike sent me this tip. It’s true for the most part that if you make sections of your GIF’s transparent they’ll have a smaller file size though not always.

Want a killer tip for squeezing even more size out of your GIF Web images? Make something transparent. That’s right, if you can pick an area of your image to make transparent, your file size will drop like a rock. For example, if you’re putting a logo over a white background and you can make the white area around the logo transparent, your file size will be significantly smaller, because the transparent areas are virtually ignored when determining file size, because, after all, there’s nothing there.

Just got this from the Head Office so I thought I’d pass it along you:

Registration for Summer 2007: Begins April 23rd
Registration for Fall 2007: Begins April 30th

I sure am glad none of my students do this. Well, at least I haven’t caugt anyone trying it. Actually the picture on the left looks just like a student I had a couple of years ago. Are you reading this James?

As promised, here’s the updated ARTS237 outline. It’s also in the ARTS237 area.

When one of world’s best-known usability experts, Jakob Nielsen, conducts eyetracking research to test what his usability work has shown, the results generate some beneficial tips for online editors. This is what happened in late 2005, when Nielsen and Tara Pernice Coyne, the Nielsen/Norman Group’s director of research, conducted an eyetracking test with 255 people in New York City.

Jump to read the rest.

I stumbled onto a post by Joshua Porter, of Bokardo.com. In it Josh list the five guiding principles he goes by:

1. Technology Serves Humans.
2. Design is not Art.
3. The Experience Belongs to the User.
4. Great Design is Invisible.
5. Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.

Read more here.

This free tool will help you calculate what you should be charging for your services. I wish I hadn’t run it. Now I’m depressed.

My Hourly Rate Calculator