All of my fellow self employed friends will get a kick out of this little cartoon.  After you’re finished watching it, make sure you get your stuff done!

Are you this guy?  We all need breaks in the day, but it’s funny how quickly one thing and lead to another, and before you know it your entire workday is shot.  Where did it go?  I dunno.  I’m still trying to figure out what happened to the month of August.

Here’s some really awesome commercials, clips, and inspiring examples of creativity I’ve seen recently that I really enjoyed.

Empty LA  by Matt Logue.  Los Angeles without any cars or people…  Crazy.

PDF article by AfterCapture magazine:
http://www.rangefindermag.com/storage/articles/AC0610_Logue_Smith.pdf

And for all of you that are videographers, or love to produce stock footage and video for microstock…  enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SItFvB0Upb8

Don’t judge the B ROLL!

Do you ever feel like your work is never good enough?  Do you get praise from others about your creations, but deep down inside you don’t feel the same way?  Maybe you feel like you just served up a pile of trash.  To be honest, I feel this way about my own work a lot.  I recently did a few photoshoots and nothing I shot really wow-ed me.  This type of thing happens other creatives I have spoken to, as well.

I Am My Own Worst Critic
I’m definitely my own worst enemy when it comes to criticism. I see the flaws in my work.  Even if they are minor, almost untraceable to others, I still manage to find them.  Am I just being over critical?  Am I bored with what I’m doing?  Is it just because I’m being overly anal?  What’s wrong with me?  I want to be happy with what I’m doing.  I am definitely enjoying it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be 100% proud of where I’m at creatively.  I think we all want to have our own “style” but this is easier said than done.  I’m still trying to figure out what it is, and probably will continue to do so for a very long time. 

Transform
Last year Atlanta Georgia based editorial photographer Zack Arias made a video like no other.  It described a personal struggle that a creative has and lives through.  I don’t care if you’re a graphic designer, a hairdresser, a chef, a contractor, a sculptor, or even a basket weaver… if you create on a daily basis, watch this video.  It’s a must see, and I am pretty sure you will be able to highly relate to it.  Any creative professional should see this.

Getting In and Out of Creative Rutts
We all get in the same creative patterns sometimes, and many times we might not even notice it.  As a designer I would find myself using a lot of the same typefaces, or laying thing out with the same compositions all the time.  In photography, I might find myself framing a lot of headshots in the same way.  Or, I might continue shooting the same themes and subjects with different models.  What do you do when you realize you’re in a rutt?  You do whatever you can to get the heck out of it.  Don’t wait around for someone else to tell you what to do.  Mess around and get crazy the next time you get to work.  Change things up surprisingly.  Look elsewhere for inspiration, if you need some.  Try something new (maybe a different subject, theme, or style) that you might have passed up before.  I personally find that when I get out of my comfort zone and try something new, I get a lot more satisfaction out of my successes.  You will also realize whether or not your new experiments are for you or not, and just might step back into your comfort zone.  Even still, you’re going to be a lot more well rounded of a creative than before.

It’s Okay…
Being your own worst creative enemy is not necessarily a bad thing… be worried when the opposite is true.  Then, you might have a problem.  Heck, maybe it’s healthy.  It’s nice to have a constant semi-dissatisfaction with your work, in a way, so that you can use that to drive you onward to the next level.  I talked to my mom about this topic recently (she’s a hairdresser that’s been in the business for over 30 years).  We agreed that sometimes you just have to keep doing what you know you have to to please your clients and pay the bills.  Feeling completely satisfied with where you are as an artist or craftsman might be a lifelong quest… just try not to beat yourself up so much along the way.

When it comes to searching for the right stock photos, I know from personal experience as a past image buyer that it can be a huge hassle.  You can many times get lost or even sidetracked very easily when browsing through the ocean of stock photos and graphics.  The sooner you find what you need, the sooner you will get your work done, nailing those time sensitive deadlines.  Searching for stock photos can be pretty annoying if you’re not going about it the right way.  Here are some tips and advice I can offer that might just make your next “hunt” a little more successful, or at least maybe a little less time consuming.

Be Specific
Let’s face it, there is a sea of images out there for royalty free licensing.  You can sometimes search for “cat” and get “dog”.  Unfortunately, image keywords are prone to mistakes, spamming, and more.  You don’t want to have to dig through a sea of crap before finding the types of images you’re looking for.  How can you avoid this?  By being specific.  If you’re looking for a photo of a cat, go as far as describing what breed, color, and even what pose.  You just might be pleasantly surprised in your results.  Don’t be so specific that your search string is more than 5 words long, as you might miss a lot of pretty good results.  But, at the same time you don’t want to use simple one word searches and have to sift through hundreds of pages of images.  An exception to this, of course, would be if you were searching something very rare or a rarely covered subject.

Narrow Results With Additional Secret Words
These words aren’t anything super top-secret, but many image buyers might not be aware of them.  They are widely used by stock photographers.  Try them in your upcoming searches and be blown away by how this trims down your results to a more reasonable size.

isolated: A cut-out image or person object with a solid color background.  These types of images make it easy to pop into solid colored backgrounds or layouts, even easily add or remove negative space.  Be sure to include whichever color you would want it isolated over; ie: black, white, red, etc. Other variation: cutout, cut out

clipping path: sick of making selections to isolate images?  Search for this phrase and find images that have a preset clipping path already embedded in the jpeg.

copy space: Use this when you want images with negative space, or a little bit of room to breath.  Every good deigner knows what negative space is, but not many remember to search with the term copy space. Other variations: copyspace or copy-space

seamless: If you’re looking for a texture that tiles seamlessly as a pattern in any direction, include this one.  Also don’t forget about: seamlessly, tiling, tiles

studio: If you’re looking specifically for photos captured in a studio environment, try this word.

vector: If you want just vectors, use the word.  The word illustration also works, but unless you want a lot of jpeg graphic results included, use vector.

Employ the Special Modifiers
There usually are different modifiers you can check off on each website.  These usually are site specific, but are incredibly helpful.  For instance, let’s say you don’t want to see anything but vector illustrations.  Usually you will have the option to choose only vectors, and this will allow you to avoid having to use the word vector in your keyword search string.  Maybe they opposite is true, and all you want to see are photos – not illustrations.  Then you would do the opposite and tick off the “photos only” box.  Some agencies go even further.  If you searched for the word girl on istockphoto.com, for instance, you could then check off whether you meant: Women (Female), Teenage Girls (Female), Little Girls (Female), or Baby Girls (Female). Many of my personal friends say they don’t even bother with doing that, and they simple keep on scrolling through pages upon pages of stuff before they find what they need.  Why would you want to make it harder on yourself?  Make sure you employ these additional features created to help you out.

Restrict Certain Words
Certain stock agencies (the better search engines) will also allow you to restrict certain words from coming up in the image results.  That has helped me tremendously in the past.  For example, you might want a photo of two brothers playing outdoors.  For this search you could start with the keywords boys and brothers.  If that yields too many results, you could also try adding the word two.  You probably might find a bunch of images that have boys or brothers in them, but also have other children or girls in them.  You will probably also get a bunch of family portraits.  This is when you would restrict words like mother, father, girl, etc to narrow down what you need.

Search For Specific Artists
On most stock photography websites you will also see the artist’s name beside every image with a hyperlink.  Yeah, that’s right – you can click it and see all of that artists specific images.  If you like what you see, or are maybe looking for more images from a similar shoot, many times you can search within that person’s portfolio.  Maybe you like one specific shoot theme that artist has done, but only found a few results from the main site’s search engine.  A lot of times you can find similar shots with different angles or with other different variations by searching through that photographer or artist’s personal portfolio.  You can also search from scratch for a certain artist.  For example, if you search username “arenacreative” you might just find my stuff (shameless self promotion, sorry…)

Change the Search Type
By default, most websites employ results by the newest or most downloaded.  Don’t forget, however, that you are able to easily change that search method.  You can usually sort the results by most views, download, popularity (usually that is a mix of views and download), newest, oldest, or random (if you feel like living dangerously).

Spend Less by Shopping Around
Shop around – don’t just stick to one agency just because it’s the same one you’ve been using for 5 years.  It takes only a minute to register an account on a different agency.  Some websites require a minimum credit package purchase, while others are a better deal by getting a monthly subscription (especially if you need a bulk number of images).  If you’re spending company dollars, you boss will probably appreciate how much you’ve saved for the company by purchase (many times the same) images somewhere else for up to 25-50% less.  Prices and selection vary from agency to agency.  Guess what – most microstock contributors sell their work under the same user name.  If you find an image at Pricier Site A try looking that photographer up at Cheaper Site B and you might just be pleasantly surprised to find it there at a much lower cost.  You might even be able to score an XXL high resolution version for the same price as the medium size price at Pricier Site A.

If at First You Don’t Succeed…
…keep on trying different keyword combinations.  You will find what you’re looking for!  Be persistent and enjoy your “hunt”   There’s nothing like the feeling of finding an incredible image that fulfills the exact idea you had in your head.

Ever heard the term “viral marketing” but wasn’t 100% sure on the entire process, or what it means? Well, if you are still curious, this video will clear it up nicely for you.

If you’re a graphic designer, have you ever thought about competing in a design contest somewhere? For those of you who don’t know what crowd-sourcing is; here is a quick explanation. There usually is an original poster (a company or small business owner) on a design forum or contest site that sets the prize amount and the specifications. Then, a bunch of contestants post up concept proofs and samples for critique. Many times today design firms even have to contribute hours of man hours in order to “compete” for a job. Many times they end up getting the shaft, because they are up against many other firms in the process. So, I guess there is crowd sourcing going on to an extent, even at the professional level.

Are There Any Benefits to Crowdsourcing for a Designer?
These contests are great for students or those trying to develop their portfolios, but in actuality participating in these low budget contests is undermining the industry. Don’t give away your work for free, no matter if you’re new at something, or highly experienced. Design time is money, so unless you’re doing charity work you just might be barking up the wrong tree. I’ll admit – I was a sucker once.  I’ve participated in crowd sourcing when I was young and stupid; but hey, you live and you learn.  Back when I was just out of college I had a little bit of free time in between graduation and landing my first day job, so I competed in a handful of logo contest. I found one flier design job that I nailed and then it led to some additional freelance work from that business owner. Don’t expect this to happen every time, though. In the end, after I tallied up all of the hours wasted on these design contests, that little bit of assignment work I got was not even worth all of my time and efforts spent in crowdsourcing. In the end, the only parties that, I think, benefit from crowdsourcing are the contest holders and the crowdsourcing websites. The businesses are getting a huge variety of entries, but the majority of times they’re receiving crap-tacular designs from inexperienced ones that just got their first copy of Photoshop or Illustrator. You’ve seen the contests… if you want to see the caliber of design aesthetics just go to any of the major design contest websites.

So in the end, are the original contest posters really benefiting from having so many different proofs to choose from? Evidently not. You get what you pay for.  Some of the entries might be very good, actually deserving of traditional commissions of upwards of $1000-2000 for such a design.  This is, in fact, that company’s corporate identity.  I know you can’t really put a price on that, but do you think that $100-250 is really enough?  And remember, that’s ONLY if you win. If you’ve up against 50 other designers, that’s only a two percent chance that you’re actually going to win.

Other Concerns
I really don’t care where you live or how little you need to earn in order to pay your bills.  Don’t undersell yourself!  Sometimes the original poster will even choose an uglier design over a more professional one… because, well; beauty is is the eye of the beholder.  If you’re a designer and haven’t had to dumb down one of your best designs just to please the client, then you must be new at this. Also – there is a lot of theft going on nowadays – lots of “right click -> save as” or screenshotting and auto-tracing fun, as well.  I’ve even had some of my stock images retraced and resold on the same website I was selling mine on.  For what it’s worth, if you’re going to be posting up hours of your design time, even in low web-resolution screenshots, make sure you watermark them at the very least.

Just please – take what I’ve said here with a grain of salt.  Be wise. Think before you crowd source.

Here is a recent photo edit I did on a photo of my dog, using the clone stamp and patch tools in Adobe Photoshop. This video illustrates a pretty simple yet effective way of removing some unwanted elements from the image – all in under 4 minutes.  These are the types of edits I do on a daily basis to each and every one of my photos, when it comes to removing logos, flaws, zits, etc.  Once you master these tools there’s very little you can’t fix. Be sure to click full screen and watch the video in HD.

Wow, John Stossel actually covered the topic of graphic design very briefly on the abc tv show 20/20.  I must have missed this one – maybe you did too? He talks about the uber-hated comic sans font and even Paul Rand.

Sometimes this is what being a graphic designer really feels like…proofing changes with clients can be funny, but not when you’re the designer jumping through all the ridiculous hoops   This is a funny parody on how ridiculous it can sometimes get when dealing with moron clients and making a million and one revisions.  Charging an hourly rate for revisions past a certain point will definitely help to avoid this type of dragged out ridiculousness.  Sometimes clients make changes just to feel important, or just because “they can”; even after being super specific about what they wanted in the first place

Here Bob show how to create a unique layout with simple square shapes in Photoshop.  Clipping group is something I had never even heard of until I watched this tutorial.  I really like how non-destructive the editing is with these methods.  Everything Bob does, he does it in ways where he can easily modify it without having to go backwards in the history tab. Overall this is a really cool effect that you can easily tweak the template to your own style or personal preference.

Adobe Photoshop video tutorial by Robert Mizerek