Twitter is a popular social media tool that helps individuals to connect with friends and family, and businesses to connect with existing and prospective clients. Most businesses today understand the power of social media and come up with different ways to market their products and services and at the same time, touch base with their clients for some valuable feedback.

This powerful tool can also be used by freelance designers and designing companies to reach out to customers around the world because it cuts across geographical boundaries. It helps designers to effectively market their talents and help to get new business opportunities.

Related posts:

• Using Twitter to Promote Your Designing Skills
• How to Promote Your Business With a Facebook Page

Below are some tips that we think will help you to better market yourself on Twitter.

Tip # 1: Add a personal touch

The virtual world has made it difficult for people to get a personal connection with each other and this is the problem with Twitter too. Get around it by using a photo of yourself and not the logo of your company. When you use a picture of your company or design, people will feel like they are talking to an automated system rather than a human being. Put up your profile picture and your customers will get the feeling that they are talking to a real person and this can land you more projects. Moreover, this adds a personal touch to the relationship you have with your followers and this lays the foundation for a lasting relationship.You may like to check these tips for how for using twitter to promote your designing skills.

Tip #2: Do small talk through your tweets

One of the biggest mistakes that many people do on Twitter is to keep it professional. While being professional is good, you also need to do some amount of small talk with your followers to connect with them at a personal level. Casual conversations can go a long way in making your followers feel more comfortable with you and so, include these small talk tweets also into your marketing style. However, do not make it casual all the time. Understand what amount of professional and casual conversations work best for you and stick to this ratio.

Tip # 3: Consistency is the key

In Twitter, consistency is the key. You need to provide a constant stream of tweets every day, typically one to three per day, to interest your followers.  However, this may not always be practical as the workload and family time may vary. One good way to maintain consistency is to use applications like HootSuite that help you to schedule tweets ahead of time. This will keep your Twitter followers interested in your progress and can make it easier for you to find new clients.

Tip # 4: Combine personal and business accounts

For ease of use, combine your personal and business account into one account. Though this is against all established rules of personal-professional life separation, it is nevertheless important for Twitter. This is because when you have two accounts, the line between personal and professional accounts gets blurred beyond a point and you are unsure of what to post where. Also, your work is double when you have to maintain two separate accounts and for these reasons, you are better off marketing yourself with one account instead of two.

Tip # 5: Understand @mention

Mention is fairly confusing to many novice Twitter users. It is a public message that can be sent to anyone irrespective of whether they are following you or you are following them. You can have as many @mentions as you want in your tweets. However, they are not private messages and it is available for everyone to see. So, do not include anything private in these mentions. If you want to send a private message, then use the direct message feature. This can help you to maintain a more professional profile that is likely to impress your current and future clients.

Tip # 6: Feedback is important too

Twitter does not only help you to promote yourself, but also helps you to get valuable feedback from your followers. In fact, engaging your followers is an important way to keep them interested. Throw up questions about your design or anything related to your work from time to time and see what the response is. You can even effectively use this as a forum to clear your doubts or nagging questions. This kind of interaction is likely to boost your list of followers as they have something interesting to contribute to your tweets. You may like to check these 22 must-have iPhone apps for designers for useful Twitter tools for your mobile.

Tip # 7: Promote other content related to your line of work

Twitter is a great way to share information, content, blogs and webinars related to your line of work. This will make your tweets more useful to your followers and at the same time, it will tell your current and prospective clients that you are staying abreast of the changes happening in the designing world. This creates a positive impression about you in the eyes of your followers and clients.

Tip # 8: Use tinyurl.com for long URLs

A tweet is typically only about 140 characters long and if you want to use a long URL, it can get tricky. Either the entire URL will take up the tweet leaving you no room for explaining what it is or a really long URL may be more than 140 characters long and this makes you tweet useless for your followers. To avoid this problem, use tinyurl.com when you have to post a long URL in your tweet. This will save a good amount of space for you.

Tip # 9: Follow other design professionals

One way to increase your follower base and your clientele is to follow other people who are involved in design. When you follow someone’s profile, they are more than likely to follow you as well. This is one way to connect with different people on Twitter. You can follow other design professionals or even potential clients as a part of your Twitter marketing strategy.

Tip # 10: Have a dedicated Twitter landing page

Other than your bio, a landing page is important to market yourself better. Many people simply paste the link of their blog or website in Twitter for followers and visitors to know more about their work. Though this may be effective to some extent, a dedicated landing page is a sure way to generate the valuable leads you need for your business. Your landing page can talk about a lot of things ranging from your company to what you do to just about anything that is relevant to design. This is one way to tell your prospective clients that you are serious about what you do and that they can expect a professional work from you!

In short, Twitter is a unique social media tool that helps you to promote your talents and to increase your prospect of finding new clients. With the right kind of tweets and information, you have a good chance of increasing your follower base that is sure to lead to more design projects in the future. Also, you can check How to Promote Your Business With a Facebook Page for more tips to get exposure for your business.

Design tutorials, vector packs, and photography ideas - Graphic Mania

If you are a freelance designer you probably know that having a good repository of WP themes and templates at hand may be really helpful, especially when you work with different clients on various project topics. One day you are building an eCommerce project for a pet products company, and a week later you’re developing a WordPress photo gallery for a wedding photographer. To work more efficiently it’s preferable to customize ready-made templates and themes rather than build a whole project from scratch. Thus, hundreds of well-designed and coded themes could make your life as a freelance designer much easier and worry free

In this article we want to shed some light on a product that was specially crafted for, both for professional freelance designers and those who are just beginning their career. This product is a Freelancer Starter Kit by DXthemes.

The package includes responsive HTML templates built with Twitter Bootstrap, eCommerce WordPress themes based on Woocommerce cart, awesome WP themes for photography, businesses, restaurants, hotels, and much more. In a few words, everything you may need for an average product in just one package.

Rainbow – responsive ecommerce theme for kids website

RealPros – responsive HTML5 template for real estate agents

Kids website WordPress theme

and much more…

Besides its extremely affordable price, the product has one more great feature – it’s distributed under a commercial license, which means you can use it for multiple projects and clients.

A few words about dxthemes.com. The company was founded back in 2011 by 3 professional WordPress developers aiming to deliver high quality WP themes and HTML5 templates at a competitive price. Their business philosophy is to keep the cost of the products half of what major template providers offer while keeping top industry quality. Since dxthemes.com is not a marketplace, customers do not pay middleman commission fee which results in the most affordable price on the net.  In summer 2013 dxthemes.com plans to add responsive Joomla templates to their collection.

And finally, here is a special promo code from dxthemes and graphicmania graphicmania25 apply to your order to save $25% on any product.

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Unlike brochures and flyers, poster designs present a very common method of delivering your advertising idea by grasping the attention of prospective consumers who can see these posters in the streets, bus stops, and halls.  Poster design tips will help you build successful ad designs that get the consumers’ attention and deliver the message high and loud.

Unlike flyer or brochure designs that you can hold in your hand, poster design requires you to work on a design that the viewers will see from a long distance. Therefore, you will need to create your design in a large size, for example A3 paper size or larger such as billboard ads. While practicing and viewing different poster design ideas and learning from them can fuel your mind and stimulate you to come up with new ideas, poster design tips can help you avoid common mistakes that many designers make when they design posters, especially for larger poster sizes.

Out of the box ideas

How many posters do you come across, but never look at when walking in the streets? There are posters on every wall of every street and other places. All these posters have made the viewer’s eye to get used to them and never notice their content or the advertising message that poster designs should deliver.

AIGA Poster by Kittaya Treseangrat

Thus, your poster design idea should be unique and attractive enough to stand out from the crowd of other ideas. You can use different materials to visualize your idea or extend your design outside the poster’s borders similar to the examples below.

Keep it simple

Try to make your idea simple and direct. Poster viewers usually see the posters for only a few seconds before they continue on their way to work or home. Therefore, you need to make your poster simple to allow them to learn about the marketing target or poster idea.

Simple poster design idea

You can apply simplicity to the design by many methods including implementing space areas in the design and using fewer elements to deliver you message. Minimal poster design is an example of how to use empty space and a few design elements to express a specific idea or marketing campaign.

Focus on the message

As we have mentioned earlier, viewers take only few seconds to get attracted to the poster design and read its message. Therefore, you need to keep you idea focused to deliver this message in a short time, or you will never be able to deliver at all.

Simple and direct creative message.

The secret behind a focused message is to narrow your ideas down to one sentence or slogan that reflects the marketing campaign, and then you can build your design around this idea. You can use visual elements such as photos, illustrations, 3D objects, or typography. The more reflective the visual elements are, the simpler you idea becomes, because you will not need to complicate your design with other elements in order to deliver you idea.

Fonts, fonts, and fonts!

One of the poster design tips that you should consider is related to typography. Text plays an essential role in poster design because it includes the message or the important information that you want the viewer to see and read, such as the company name, slogan, social information, etc.

Print, Design and Industry

When you choose your font you need to consider the target audience. For example, when designing a poster for old audiences you need to choose a font that is large and easy to read. In other cases you may think of using casual and funny fonts in kids’ posters to attract this type of little people.

Generally, you need to choose easy to read fonts that suite a large number of people, such as the Helvetica font that many designers like to use because it is user friendly and has clear letter glyphs.

Use colors carefully

The last one in poster design tips is the colors. You can do a lot with colors such as attract the viewer’s eye or turn an empty space into a useful element in the design. Colors can also act as a container for the design elements, such as in the Swiss design style. When you think of colors, you have to choose the ones that really reflect your idea and are in harmony with each other in the poster design. For example, you can use bright colors to attract the viewer’s eye or soft colors to reflect a message of peace.

The poster design tips above overview some ideas that can help you improve your poster design and make it more effective so you can deliver a real and clear message to the viewers. You can also learn more tips by viewing different poster ads and ideas to explore new sources of inspiration and concepts to help you when you are designing your own poster and you can check How to Create Effective Poster Design.

Design tutorials, vector packs, and photography ideas - Graphic Mania

Skull logos mainly use the shape of the skull to serve as the base for the logo idea. Actually, the skull shape has been used as a visual element in many different fields such as street art, t-shirt designs and even product design.

When you build your logo idea, there are many characteristics you can base your logo on. For example, you can use an element related to the corporate identity or the business similar to the skull logos below, or you can use the company name as the base for the logo, which is known as a typography logo.

Skull logos can use the skull shape alone or can be merged with the company or the name of the business. Also, it can be visualized in a wide variety of styles and shapes. Some designers prefer to keep the outline of the skull sharp with dark colors to reflect the notions of fear and honor. Some other designers reshape the skull to create more smooth lines to reflect funny concepts.

If you observe skull logos and their colors, you will find there are some preferred colors that many designers associate with the skull shape, such as black, red, and brown. I do not know the real reason for choosing these colors, but the concept may have originated from the colors of real skulls.

The challenge behind skull logos is to create simple logos in the shape of a skull, which is actually a complicated shape that includes many lines. So, each design can modify the skull outline based on the creative idea and how the designer would like to implement the shape in the design.

After this introduction to skull logos, I would like to provide a couple of different ideas for skull logos and examples of how creative designers implement the shape in their ideas.

Twice Skull

Creative idea for two skulls intersected together.

Mayhem Style

Outline skull logo design based one sharp lines.

Black Magic

Funny skull logo design created using one color.

Gag Eyewear

Skull logo based on simple lines.

Cozinha Infame

A funny idea for skull character.

Danger Zone

Creative logo design for Danger Zone based on funny skull character.

Halo Pixel

Negative logo design idea for skull character.

Skull Nut

Cartoon style logo design uses a character of a skull.

Soft Served

multiple colors logo design for a skull shaped as an ice cream.

Borststtoo

Minimal style logo design uses a skull shape.

Skull Audio Car

Creative skull logo design for a skull character holding a headphone.

Zum Skull Logo

Skull logo design with a top perspective.

Crazy Mind

Funny logo for skull logo design.

Pirate Fast Food

Black and red logo design idea.

West Skulls

Simple logo design with skull wearing hat.

Pirate Girl

Mono color for pirate skull logo design.

Skupple

One of the skulls logo designs that uses two elements such as the skull and the apple.

 Pirate Skateboards

Simple logo design for draft skull.

 Game Over Skull Logo

Skull logo inspired from game designs.

Sckular Logo

School logo design based on skull shape.

Share with us your ideas about the above logos and which one provides the most creative idea?

Design tutorials, vector packs, and photography ideas - Graphic Mania

Photography of all forms has given people the ability to capture not only the most cherished events of their lives, but also to document life-changing phenomena. This is how we are able to record personal events like a wedding ceremony, as well as milestones like the wonders of outer space. And with the various kinds of cameras available on the market these days, we are no longer limited to immortalizing human life—we are also capable of exploring the existence of other living beings.

One of the trending formats of photography is the one done underwater. Blame it on documentaries that keep taking footages of the spectacular life miles beneath the water’s surface, many photographers have begun their own quest to find the beauty that can’t be found on land. The concept of being photographed underwater has become a budding theme for many occasions, prompting camera manufacturers to whip their own models that can be taken into the deep.

Digital Photography in a Nutshell

Before digital cameras came into the photography scene, pictures were taken using film—a thin sheet of plastic made with chemicals sensitive to light. But as technology progressed, so did the way we immortalize precious moments.

Cameras then became equipped with an image sensor, a mechanism that converts the light received by the lens into electric signals. From instamatic and SLR cameras, we now have a wide range of digital cameras including the point and shoot, DSLR, and even the mobile phones we carry in our pockets.

Underwater What?

Despite the proliferation of cameras and accompanying devices, one of their common limitations is that they can’t get wet, much less be immersed underwater.

While there are innumerable subjects you can shoot on land, the waters that surround you are also thriving with equally stunning things to photograph. Fortunately, the camera’s evolution did not stop on the digital models. Developers around the world eventually came up with those that can be safely taken underwater, depth notwithstanding.

How to Capture Amazing Underwater Photos

Whether you have just purchased a high-tech underwater photography gizmo or just dying to shoot ala National Geographic or Discovery Channel, here are some tips you should keep in mind before snapping that shutter button. 

1. Lighting is everything. Taking photos underwater, as on land, requires a good amount of light to ensure a picture’s clarity. Thus, make sure that you have a healthy amount of light for the shoot.
2. Practice shooting. Spend enough time to practice taking pictures, both on land and in the water. Try to achieve your desired angles. Experiment with the settings of the camera and the lighting, and then memorize them by heart so you won’t have problems during the actual shoot.
3. Adjust your camera’s settings. Practicing will give you a fair idea of which camera settings will allow you to capture the photos that you wish. Some of the settings that you should go through are the aperture, exposure, ISO, flash, shutter speed, and focus.
4. Get as close as possible. Things can be pretty unstable underwater since movements are inevitable. To avoid blurred shots, get as close as possible to your subject and click away once you have a steady frame.
5. Throw in some texture. While sea creatures and corals are already good-looking by themselves, taking photos of people underwater can be a little bland. Inject some texture in your concept by bringing safe props or simply blowing bubbles in the water.

30 Breathtaking Underwater Photos

Now that you’re equipped with a number of tips, here are some breathtaking photos taken underwater that will serve as inspiration for your next project:

Design tutorials, vector packs, and photography ideas - Graphic Mania