BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Andrea Joseph is an artist from UK who specializes in hand sketching and has a wonderful ability to create beautiful sketches. Today we are presenting some of the finsest sketches by this gifted artist. You can explore more about her work from her website or Flickr account.

Andrea Joseph’s Work

BOSTON JIM

even after all this time

and it just don’t matter now

NEW print The Great British Chip

Print

i’m the weaver

remember when you were young?

new eyes to see the dawn

chuck

stumbling over what to say

rollin’ over

bright in my northern sky

all the pictures on the wall

what’s new pussycat?

back to the garden

blue and red (of course)

rapping on the windows, whistling down the chimney pot

lead me to your door

on a quiet street corner

big fish

?

words

grey to green

the nerve centre

life is what happens

for a minute i lost myself

i’ll be back again and again and again and again and again…

i know that’s who you are

cry for a shadow

it’s funny how these old feelings hang around

Zine No.1: Refuge of the Roads

Zine No.2: I’ve Seen That Road Before

By Cameron Chapman

Keynote (part of Apple’s iWork office suite) and PowerPoint (part of Microsoft’s Office suite) are likely the two most commonly used presentation software programs out there. PowerPoint is more likely to be found in the corporate world, whereas Keynote may be more popular in creative fields (due to the proliferation of Macs in the design field). Creating presentations in either program is a similar process, though.

Finding good resources for creating presentations isn’t always easy. There’s a definite lack of quality free presentation templates for both PowerPoint and Keynote, though it’s definitely more pronounced with PowerPoint. The good news is that there’s plenty of premium templates available, many for very low cost. And creating your own templates is as easy as creating a slide (just save it as a template file instead of a regular presentation file).

Free Keynote Templates

Free templates for Keynote abound, though not all are of particularly high quality. Here are some that are:

Green
This Green template would be perfect for an eco-friendly business. It has a simple green and white color scheme with leaf graphics.

Tones of Gray
This is a relatively minimalist template set, with a dark gray, stone-textured background. There are 20 master slides included in the set.

Weathered
This iWork ’08 template has a green, brown, and cream motif that’s very elegant and slightly distressed.

{Silver}
{Silver} has a silver gradient background and angled content areas.

Folded Paper
This template has a folded paper background and brightly-colored typography and accents.

NewWay
This template set has a dark gray background with a compass image, and 36 different master slides.

Sport III
The Sport III template has a striking mountain photo background. There’s one master slide included.

Premium Keynote Templates

There are hundreds of fantastic Keynote templates for sale out there. Here are some of the better ones:

Enterprise ($19)

Enterprise is a corporate-looking blue template, which includes 32 different slide designs.

Glossy Black ($19)

Glossy Black is a black template with a dim spotlight motif in the center. It’s a very professional theme with 32 different slide designs.

Glossy Metal ($19)

Glossy Metal is a gray template set, reminiscent of stainless steel. There are 32 slide designs included in the set.

Sky Blue ($19)

Sky Blue is a template pack with a partially-rounded rectangle on a textured background perfect for fast-paced industries. There are 32 slide designs in the set.

Gabardine ($19)

Gabardine is reminiscent of men’s suiting, with a sophisticated gray and dark red color scheme. There are 32 slide designs included.

Living Space ($19)

Living Space is a real estate theme with a green and white color scheme. 32 slide designs are included.

Elemental ($29.95)

The Elemental template set includes five template designs, based on the four elements (one each for water, wind, and fire, and two for earth).

Galleria ($19.95)

Galleria is a template set specifically for showcasing photo slides. It has a dark, textured background that perfectly complements most images.

Clouds ($5)

This set of slide templates has a cloud motif, with accents that resemble antique paper. The PSD files are also included.

Bubbles
The Bubbles Keynote templates are a warm orange, with a bokeh background image. PSD files are included.

Copenhagen ($24.95 – $49.90)

Copenhagen is a modern, light blue template set, with fractal-inspired jagged edges on slide images.

Elevation ’09 ($24.95 – $49.90)

This template set has a modern, aggressive style, with tonal stripes in the background and striking graphics.

Free PowerPoint Templates

While there are tons of high quality premium PowerPoint templates out there, there’s a real lack of high-quality, professional free templates.

Grunge
This black and white grunge template comes with four different master slide templates.

Atoms
The stylized molecules on this PowerPoint template make it perfect for companies in the scientific industry.

Premium PowerPoint Templates

Like Keynote, there’s a great market for premium PowerPoint templates. Many are available for very reasonable prices (as low as $5), though prices definitely climb quite a bit higher. Here are some of the best ones out there:

iBusiness ($5)

This dark gray and yellow template set has a subtle grid pattern in the background, and some blue and red accents. PSD files are included.

Media Interactive ($5)

Media Interactive is a colorful, glossy PowerPoint template. It has a very Web 2.0-feeling to it. PSD files are included.

Professional Animated Power Point Template ($5)

This template set is very minimalist, with a white, gray and red color scheme. It’s a very clean and modern template, with subtle shadow and 3D effects. PSD files are included.

Diagram III ($6)

The Diagram III template set has a very interesting motif, with a staircase descending from a platform in the clouds. It’s a clean and modern, very professional-looking theme, even if it is a bit whimsical. PSD files are included.

BIGIdea ($6)

The BIGIdea template set comes in three different color schemes: off-white and gray with either yellow, blue, or green. The set has bold typography and a very modern feeling. PSD files are included.

Graph and Chart ($6)

Graph and Chart has a clean, glassy look to it, with tonal stripes and lighting effects. PSD files are included.

Clean, Elegant Presentation ($5)

This template set has a taupe background with spotlighting effects. It’s a very elegant, understated template pack. PSD files are included.

Dots ($5)

The Dots template set consists of a handful of master slide designs in six different colors, all with a half-tone-style dot pattern. PSD files are not included.

About The Pixels ($5)

This template set has a beautiful orange, pixelated background, giving it a very modern look perfect for the tech industry. PSD files are included.

Next Light ($5)

Next Light has a beautiful blue-green background with a subtle lighting effect that looks like a cross between stardust and bokeh. PSD files are included.

Venera Night Sky ($5)

This template set has a purple and black background, with a stardust-like lighting effect reminiscent of the aurora. PSD files are included.

Waves In Colors ($6)

Waves In Colors has a colorful 3D wave motif on a light blue background. It’s a very modern, fun template set. PSD files are included.

Resort Travel ($89)

This template set has a muted color palette with hills and hot air balloon in the background, suitable for travel and other industries. Included are files for both PowerPoint and Keynote.

Business ($89)

The crown motif on this template set is suitable for a variety of industries, and the gray and yellow color scheme gives it a young, modern look. Files for both PowerPoint and Keynote are included.

Craft Fair ($89)

This Craft Fair template set has a soft green and blue color scheme with a vintage-looking design. PowerPoint and Keynote templates are included.

Real Estate ($89)

This urban real estate template has cloud and building motifs, along with a muted color scheme, perfect for real estate or any urban business. Included are PowerPoint and Keynote files.

Alternative Energy
This template would be suitable for any eco-friendly company, not just alternative energy brands. It’s modern and simple, and has a beautiful, subtle color scheme. PowerPoint and Keynote template files are included.

Real Estate
This is a more modern real estate template, with a graphic, pixelated background and upbeat color scheme. Included are both Keynote and PowerPoint template files.

More Keynote and PowerPoint Resources

Here are some additional resources for working with Keynote and PowerPoint.

Knock ‘em Dead with Your Next Keynote Presentation
This how-to article from Mac|Life offers up some great tips for creating Keynote presentations from scratch.

How to Make a Keynote Presentation on a Mac
This tutorial from eHow.com shows the basics of creating Keynote presentations.

Tips for Creating an iPad-Compatible Keynote Presentation
Unfortunately, creating a Keynote presentation you can load or edit on your iPad isn’t as straightforward as one might think. This article covers the things you need to know to make the process go smoothly.

Keynote for iPad: Best Practices for Creating a Presentation on a Mac for Use on an iPad
This is Apple’s official documentation for creating Keynote presentations that will work on your iPad.

Note & Point
Note & Point is a gallery of awesome slide decks. Included are PDF, Keynote and PowerPoint slides, all incredibly creative and inspiring.

How to Create Your Own PowerPoint Templates
This article from O’Reilly Answers covers the basics of creating your own PowerPoint templates.

Adobe Illustrator is a powerful tool to help designers produce high quality digital drawings. Once you created a sketch on paper or your tablet, you can use Illustrator’s tools to turn sketches in a vivid, beautiful illustrations. In this post we present some fresh tutorials for mastering your drawing skills in illustrator.

Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

Create a Painterly Apple with Illustrator CS5’s new Bristle Brush
The new Bristle Brush in Illustrator CS5 gives you the best of both worlds: The painterly effects of real media and the control and flexibility of a vector drawing.

Create a Print Ready Business Card Design in Illustrator
Illustrator has fantastic tools available for creating small print designs such as business cards. Follow this walkthrough on how to create a fun business card design complete with illustrated character.

Japanese Sushi
This tutorial will teach you how to create a plate of yummy Japanese sushi in illustrator.

How to Make Hitman in Adobe Illustrator
This tutorial is on illustration of hitman in Adobe Illustrator. For this tutorial you don’t have need any extra skills if you know basics of Adobe Illustrator you will make it easily.

Design a Little Lion Man in Illustrator
In this tutorial we’ll learn how to design a Little Lion Man inspired by the song from Mumford and Sons.

How to Draw a Vintage Typewriter Icon Inside Adobe Illustrator
In this tutorial, author will tell you how to draw a vintage typewriter icon inside Adobae Illustrator

Abstract Vector Artwork Illustrator Tutorial
In this tutorial author will teach you how to create this Vector Artwork in Adobe Illustrator.

How To Draw a Cute Vector Dog Character in Illustrator
Follow this step by step design process of the making of a vector character. We’ll start with a hand drawn sketch of my dog, Jake the labrador retriever, then add various lines, colour fills gradients and highlights to produce a cute cartoon representation.

Cute Vector Baby Cartoon Illustrator Tutorial
In this tutorial author will teach you how to create a Cute Cartoon Baby in Adobe Illutrator.

Illustrator Tutorial on Making a Jack in the Box
We will learn how to make a jack in the box.

How to Draw a Funny Bee Illustration
From this tutorial you will learn how to create a funny illustration of a bee inside Adobe Illustrator

Create the face of a grumpy bear
In this tutorial you can learn to create a grumpy bear face in Adobe Illustrator

Design an Underwater Clown Fish Tutorial in Illustrator
In this tutorial author will show you how to create a beautiful clown fish illustration inside Adobe Illustrator CS4.

Create the face of a greedy monkey
This tutorial will help you create a simple illustration of a monkey face.

How To Draw A Funny Cop Illustration From A Sketch
In this tutorial author will show you how to draw a funny cop illustration from a sketch. This tutorial requires intermediate knowledge of Adobe Illustrator and advanced pen drawing skills.

Discover tattoo illustration techniques
This tutorial will teach you how to master your tattoo illustration skills.

How To Draw Ferb Step By Step
This tutorial is about only Ferb where we will guide you how to draw Ferb step by step in Illustrator. It’s a very basic tutorial where beginners can also practice this easily.

How to Apply Toon Style Coloring Techniques to a Pencil Drawing
In this tutorial we will learn how to easily take a pen and pencil sketch and turn it into a vector illustration without losing the aesthetic of a hand rendered image.

Creating convincing characters
Illustrator maestro Alexis West demonstrates how to magic up appealing characters using a pencil, a computer and bags of imagination.

How to Create a Lustrous Electric Guitar
In this tutorial you will learn how to create a realistic looking electric guitar

Design symmetrical character art
In this tutorial you will learn how to Design symmetrical character art.

Wooden Smoking Pipe
This tutorial is on how to draw a stylish smoking tobacco pipe in Illustrator. You will learn how to create wood texture on the pipe in this tutorial.

Create a Tiger Striped Cat with Illustrator
This tutorial is on how to draw a cunning yet cute tiger striped cat.

How to Illustrate Dynamic Hair Using Adobe Illustrator’s Paintbrush Tool
This tutorial will show you how to create a dynamic hairstyle from a reference image. You will use the Paintbrush Tool, basic skin shading and transparent gradients.

Create a Tasty Burger Icon in Illustrator
In this delicious tutorial I’ll show you how to create a three-dimensional, scrumptious burger using Adobe Illustrator.

Waving Flag of the USA
Drawing a waving flag in illustrator can be a tricky and challenging process for a new beginner. In this tutorial, we will learn how to draw a vector waving flag of the United States of America.

How To Create a Trendy Seamless Pattern in Illustrator
The great thing about seamless repeating patterns is that once created, they can be used as a base for all kinds of awesome designs

Give personality to character art
If you’re looking to create a series of characters based on a theme, what better one to sample than one of Aaron Miller’s delightful confections?

How To Create A Very Scary But Cute Monster In Illustrator
This is a tutorial on how to draw a complex monster illustration.

Create a Cool Vector Panda Character in Illustrator
Here’s a step by step walkthrough of the process used to create a cool Panda character, from the basic outlines through to the detailed final design.

How to Create a Delicious Chocolate Chip Cookie In Illustrator
In this simple tutorial, I will show you how to create a super detailed cookie illustration inside Adobe Illustrator.

Create a cute monster girl in Illustrator
Author will explain how to create a cute little monster girl and in the same time, you will learn to handle multiple layers and maximize their efficiency.

Modeling the Human Body in Adobe Illustrator
In this tutorial we will use Adobe Illustrator to create the ideal proportions of a female figure.

By Thursday Bram

If you want to make a living as a web designer, there’s no option but to market your services. As much as you might hope clients will drop out of the sky, you have to take the steps necessary to make sure that those prospective clients know that you can help them and can easily find you.

But the options for marketing web design skills seem endless: you can network, blog, advertise, cold call and promote yourself until you’re blue in the face. You can spend hours trying to line up clients and be unable to tell if your efforts are having any effect at all. Are the majority of your clients finding you through a specific ad? Or maybe through an article you contributed to a magazine?


If you know what marketing methods are actually helping you to land design clients, you can often focus your efforts on those marketing projects that are the most effective. If something time-intensive, like a blog, isn’t actually bringing in new clients, wouldn’t it be nice to stop investing time in it?

All of that boils down to the fact that, if you’re marketing yourself as a web designer, you need to be calculating the ROI of the time you’re spending on your promotional efforts. ROI — or the return on investment — is a matter of determining if the work you’re bringing in is enough to cover the cost of the time you’re spending on marketing, at least for web designers. For certain organizations, it can get a lot more complicated, but for a small web design shop or a freelancer, that’s really the question that determines if your marketing is worth your while.

Your Business Website

For many web designers, your own website is central to your marketing plan. It may be a beautiful design that walks clients through every step of the process and showcases your portfolio, but you have to get traffic to your website in the first place. You can’t just take a ‘build it and they will come’ approach.

Considering that many web designers rely heavily on online marketing techniques, such as newsletters or social media, it is significantly easier to measure the effect your efforts are having online than off. It can be a matter of installing Google Analytics or another analytics package on your website and actually diving into the reports.

SEO and Traffic

The odds of optimizing your site for terms like ‘web designer’ and ending up on the first page of the search results are not good. But it’s certainly possible to rank well for more specific terms like ‘web designer’ and your town. Measuring the results of your SEO projects is just a matter of looking at those analytics reports and seeing which search terms are actually sending traffic to your site.

More complicated to track are in-bound links. In-bound links can provide targeted traffic that can include prospective clients actually interested in hiring you to design a website. Of course, it helps if you have links in the right place. When you’re looking through your analytics reports, take a look at what other websites are sending you traffic. If you’re using an analytics package that lets you do so, see if you can track conversions on your site (most likely contacting you to discuss a new project) and see if particular sites are sending you traffic that converts better than others.

There are a couple of categories the links sending traffic to your site can fall into, including the following:

• Past clients. You may be surprised how well a link in the footer of a client site can promote you as a web designer. But the fact of the matter is that someone who clicks that link is probably already impressed by your skills as a web designer.
• Giveaways and articles. Whether you offer up a free icon set or submit a guest post to a blog, you can establish your expertise as a web designer by promoting your work on other sites. However, it’s important to consider what kind of traffic these links send you. Depending on where you’re establishing your expertise, it may come more from other designers than from prospective clients.
• Professional links. It’s entirely possible that someone will mention you in a blog post that refers to you as a person, while linking to you as a designer. While that link might get some clicks, it’s generally not nearly as valuable as a link that refers to you as a professional.

Social Media

While you can track much of the usefulness of your efforts on social networking sites simply by looking at how much traffic Twitter, Facebook and all the rest are sending to your own website, but it’s also worthwhile to look at the conversations you hold on each site. Do particular sites help you connect with prospective clients in such a way that they send projects your way? It may not be easy to answer that question, but if you can, you can often focus your social media efforts on the one or two sites that are actually helping you land clients.

Similarly, with blogs and email newsletters, you’ll have access to plenty of numbers: how many of your emails have been opened, how many sites have linked to a blog post and so on. Translating those numbers can again require looking at conversations, however. If someone is engaging with you after you’ve posted to your blog, you can get a clearer idea of whether that post is winning over clients or whether prospective clients are even finding your blog.

Games and Apps

Offering a game or a web application or some other sort of project that showcases your design and development skills can bring your web design skills to the attention of a prospective client. The Langton Cherubino Group created Masterpiece Yourself as a way to showcase the firms interactive design skills and the extent of their capabilities. The app allows users to add their own photos to famous portraits, like the Mona Lisa, and then share the results through social media.

Since the launch of Masterpiece Yourself, the Langton Cherubino Group has seen traffic to its website increase by 61 percent. It hasn’t been easy to translate all of that traffic into new clients, though, says Langton. The firm is still working to decide how to best direct that traffic. But the app has proven to be an ideal way to showcase their skills, leading existing clients to ask for games of their own. The case study of how the app was created has also been useful in landing new clients.

Word of Mouth and Other Hard-to-Measure Marketing

John Wooton, of InspireMedia, found his first big client through a very close bit of networking: it was the website for his wife’s photography business. The ROI for the marketing that it took to land that particular client is impossible to measure.

Networking and other types of marketing can be tough to measure, at least in part because you often have to get your name in front of a prospective client several times before that client will actually hand you work. It may be a combination of seeing an ad, a recommendation from a friend and actually meeting you in person at a networking meeting that wins over a client. But that doesn’t mean that figuring out the effectiveness of your efforts is out of the question.

Ask Your Clients

It’s easy to over-complicate the measurement process, but there’s one simple step you can take: ask your clients how they found you. Many of your clients will happily tell you, especially if you ask as you’re getting ready to start the project.

Wooton’s mix of marketing methods have made asking his clients about where they heard of him crucial: in addition to networking, he uses social media and some local online advertising. Wooton has also added signage with his business information to the back and the side of his car. He asks each new he works with where they learned about him and track the responses so that he can tweak his marketing efforts.

Even an informal survey of your clients asking where they found you and, if possible, why they chose you over the competition can help you focus your marketing plans. Wooton puts an emphasis on networking to promote his design services, but he doesn’t go to every networking event out there. He focuses his efforts: “I’ve found it helpful to participate with business networks that engage with new businesses or with people who are looking to start their own business.”

That’s a fact that might not be readily apparent if Wooton wasn’t paying attention to what was driving clients to him. New business owners will almost certainly need a new web design, while attracting a prospective client with an existing web site on a re-design is a much tougher proposition.

Encourage Referrals

Off the different ways to market a web design business, word-of-mouth can seem like the toughest to track. But if you push for very targeted mentions of your web design skills, you can land new clients and track where they came from easily. The secret is promoting referrals. Offering a discount for existing clients who send a new client your way, you can get the best sort of word-of-mouth traffic.

Start Measuring Now

With marketing, it often seems hard enough to actually plan and complete marketing projects — especially when you have work you could be doing for your clients. Adding measurement on top of the work it takes to get your marketing efforts in motion can be tough. Just the same, it’s necessary. Having information about the effectiveness of your particular marketing strategies can help you decide what’s really working for you and what isn’t.

Once you’ve got some numbers in hand, you can focus on those marketing methods that you know are bringing you the most clients, letting you get the best return on the time you invest. You will likely even be able to save time and money on the process in the long-run, making calculating the ROI on your marketing efforts crucial to your web design business in the long run.

About the author

Thursday Bram is a full-time freelancer who has been working on her own for more than seven years. She writes about the business side of freelancing and maintains her own website at ThursdayBram.com.