The designs that have been uploaded so far (or “shots” in Dribbble parlance — there’s lots of basketball analogies here!) include an astonishing variety of high-quality work from some well-known designers, such as Jason Santa Maria, Shaun Inman and Veerle Pieters. There are plenty of web and logo designs in the uploaded work, as you might expect, but also sketches, interface designs, typographical experiments and animations. Shots are organized by tags to make it easier to zero in on the kind of thing you’re looking for.

Unlike other gallery sites, members (known as “players” on Dribbble) can only upload small screenshots (400×300 pixels maximum) — presumably an attempt to reduce the risk of work being ripped off wholesale. Players can also upload “rebounds” and link two shots together, perhaps to show a progression of work.

Dribbble membership is free, but available by invitation only. In an attempt to maintain the quality of the community, you must be “drafted” by an existing player. As invitations are released, existing members sometimes advertise that they have them available on Twitter — Dribbble’s FAQ recommends that you have a URL handy to show off some of your work before approaching an existing member for an invitation.

Where do you go for design inspiration?

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Along with its desktop uploader, Scrnshots has become a regular part of my own workflow, keeping a public articulation of the digital designs and elements that inspire my work elsewhere. Scnrshots has been ticking over nicely, though few features have been added recently, and the Mac edition of the desktop app isn’t compatible with Snow Leopard.

So when I recently came across Ember, a service similar to Scrnshots but with more contemporary features, a smarter interface and cleaner design, I was keen to try it out.

Like Scrnshots, the basics of Ember are really all about uploading images, and adding some descriptive metadata for future reference. However, Ember offers a few extra capabilities:

• The ability to flag an uploaded image as private.
• Every metadata element of an uploaded image’s page is directly editable with a simple click.
• Images can be added to collections, to help theme and organize related imagery.
• Every page has an integrated URL shortner that generates URLs such as http://embr.it/gW — handy for the integrated Twitter support.
• Integration with desktop and iPhone tools such as LittleSnapper for offline use and mobile capture respectively. Though these don’t appear to be as sophisticated as Scrnshot’s desktop app.

However, unlike Scrnshots’ free offering, Ember is a tiered service, with both free and paid service plans. The free plan allows thirty uploads a month and up to three collections, but to get the most out of the service, you’ll need to upgrade to the $25/year option.

As a long-term Scrnshots user, I find it unfortunate that there’s no way for me to export data as a single batch from one service to the other. Indeed, both Scrshots and Ember illustrate a pressing need to include data portability by default in all web applications.

Ember’s a great service that’s actually pretty good value for money, though I find it hard to invest time into another app that doesn’t let me at my data without resorting to using an API.

Where do you keep images for digital inspiration?

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The tool allows everyone to provide feedback and stay in the loop with a design’s progress, as well as archiving the design’s history. You can control who can see and leave feedback on each captured design. For example, a project manager could share one page with the copywriter, another with the whole team and yet another with the developers. The feedback occurs multiple ways, instead of one-way.

For example, let’s say I open a Notable account for the meryl.net web site. I work with a designer and a blog app expert; we’re all web workers living in different states. I capture different pages on my web site to highlight the current problems and identify ways to improve them, as the screenshot below shows.

While I could use my screenshot application to get a snaphot of the page to make comments on, Notable works faster. With a screenshot app, I’d capture the web page. Then, I would use the application’s drawing tools to add call outs. Notable takes care of everything for you. All I have to do is click and enter notes.  This video shows the process of capturing and annotating a site.

Notable offers a Firefox plugin for capturing any web page, which is especially helpful for those pages stuck behind logins. I grabbed Facebook pages and other password-protected pages with the plugin. You can also capture pages from a URL from within Notable, use a special URL formula to capture a web page (for example, www.notableapp.com/www.webworkerdaily.com would capture the home page of this site), download the iPhone app, or upload an image.

I can send my notes for one page to the designer and notes from another page to the blog expert. Or I can send it to both. Notable gives you control on what feedback and notes you share with others, and you can remove someone from the discussion after the fact. The designer and blog expert can capture their own pages to add notes or leave comments on my notes.

In this case, I have a workspace called “meryl.net” for the meryl.net redesign project. I can organize the pages into three sets: one for the business section of the site, one for games and one for the pages about deafness, as the next image shows.

Notable sends email notifications whenever someone adds notes and shares them. You can control who receives the notification to be able view the specific page and leave feedback. Permissions are also available on a per-set basis.

You can also see different views of each page. You not only view the design, but also you can see and post annotations on the code (the underlying HTML code of the page), the copy (just the page’s copy, without any distracting visual elements) and search engine optimization (which lets you see the page’s structure for SEO purposes).

Currently, Notable works with Firefox and Safari. However, I could leave comments and view notes in Google Chrome — just not capture pages. One of the biggest benefits is that it cuts down on emails and confusion. The only emails you receive are notifications of new notes or updates, rather than a bunch of emails from different people on a project and trying to keep track of it all. Best of all, Notable is fun to use. While it works great for teams not working under one roof, but it’s suitable for those that do because the work is centralized and visible in one place.

Check out the use of Notable on the CNN and MSN home pages. A free plan is available that handles up to three users, 3 GB storage, one private workspace and the iPhone app. However, the free plan doesn’t come with enhanced security or private URLs. Other plans range from $24 per month up to $119 per month, based on number of users, storage size and other features. You can try any paid plan for 30 days with no obligation.

Have you tried Notable? What do you think of it?

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Graphic Design Career

It’s important to highlight the distinction between web design and graphic design. Those who do graphic design concentrate mostly on print work. They create designs for annual reports, advertisements, brochures, billboards, logos and design identity packages complete with letterhead, envelopes and business cards.

How to Qualify

Unlike many web designers, graphic designers tend to have some formal design education. Lea Ann Stundins worked as a creative director for several agencies before switching to self-employment with her business, Wish List Creative. “The best advice I would offer young people trying to break into design is: go to an art school that has a good reputation according to your ideal design firm/agency. (Ask them, they’ll tell you.) Get an internship at a ‘big name’ agency or design firm. Do anything you have to in order to get that name on your resume. Then, with that school name and that agency name — and a good portfolio, of course — you should be golden,” says Stundins.

Cynthia Courtney, designer and creator of cool stuff, took jobs working with designers she respected so she could learn from them. Although Courtney has a degree in communications design with a minor in illustration, she continues her education by taking courses in Photoshop, business and marketing. “Anyone can use a computer and do a layout with fancy type. Doing it well by creating a piece that solves a client’s problem and can be printed is a whole different ballgame,” says Courtney.

Designer Tools

Stundins lists the important things in her designer toolbox. “My brain mostly. My fingers. A pencil. Paper. Finally, a computer,” she says. Photoshop leads the pack as the “go to” graphic design tool for photo retouching, InDesign is used for page layout, with Illustrator being the choice for logo creation and line art.

Like Stundins, many rely on old-fashioned pencil-and-paper to work through ideas before heading to their Macs turn ideas into pixels. Designers use many ancillary tools such as Acrobat, Stuffit, file transfer protocol (FTP) tools, and file-sharing sites like YouSendIt to send work to clients.

Find Clients

Like many web working careers, marketing remains important. However, most graphic designers find their gigs through word-of-mouth and networking.

Are you considering a career in graphic design?

Photo credit: Tsunei Miyuki

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Fluxiom is a web-based digital asset management system for creative teams that offers a nice, visually rich interface and the ability to scale depending on your needs. It has a number of useful features, and there’s a free version available, so I wanted to see if it could function as a tool for helping people collaborate on a wide variety of media including text, photo, audio and video.

Assets

Right away, you notice that Fluxiom is clearly content-oriented. By default, you launch into your assets page, and you can upload files there either using the web interface, or using fluxUp!, an app that makes uploading multiple files easier. If you’d rather not install any software, you can always zip a number of files together and upload the whole archive via the web interface. You can also upload entire folders via the fluxUp! app, which I think gives it a huge advantage over other similar web apps for file sharing.

Once you’ve uploaded some media, it quickly becomes apparent how well-designed Fluxiom is. Interacting with your uploads feels a lot like using a native OS X desktop app like iPhoto, and because of this, there is almost no learning curve to the software. There’s a search field prominently displayed in the top left-hand corner; you can choose either thumbnail or list view; and you can filter your assets using a number of pre-set fields using convenient buttons running along the top of the asset pane.

As in iPhoto, you can also preview each asset you upload. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Fluxiom even supports PSD previewing, which is a huge benefit for graphic and web design teams hoping to use the app. To test the limits of file type support, I uploaded a RAR archive and a Flash file (.fla). Both uploaded fine, but neither could be previewed, though Fluxiom did know what the Flash file was, at least.

Tags & Stages

You can add tags to any uploaded media for easy searching and organization. That will really come in handy when you start dealing with large volumes of media. While Fluxiom does not have folders for organizing media, the “Stages” feature presents another good way to drill down and focus only on the media relevant to your specific purposes. Stages is designed to help you share a limited set of material with a particular client. So if you’re designing an ad for someone, you can create a tag for that project, assign it to all relevant media, and then create a stage using the tag. You can then email a link to that stage which, once the correct password is entered, will allow them to view and download the media you’ve designated.

Stages is also a great way to parse out media for individual assignments to different team members. This is especially useful if you’re working with a consultant or external contractor, since you can then ensure any IP not pertinent to the task at hand remains safely out of reach.

Dropbox

Fluxiom is not only a great way for you and your team to share files amongst each other and with clients, it’s also a great way for others to share files with you. Using the “Dropbox” feature, anyone can upload a file or files to your account, so long as they have the proper address and can confirm that they have a valid email address. Media uploaded via this method is then stored in a queue where you can choose to accept it, thus moving it into your main asset library, or reject it, whereupon it is deleted.

I can think of a thousand different uses for that feature, with the most appealing to me being a submission form for photographic or illustration work for contribution to a publication or web site. Fluxiom even makes it easy for you to post your Dropbox link on your web site so that, if you want to, you can open up content submissions to the general public.

Pricing & Conclusions

Because of how easy it is to share and receive files via Fluxiom, and because of custom branding and API access, this is one of the most impressive and scalable asset management systems I’ve seen in a web app, and especially one that offers a free account. Paid accounts range from €9 (about $12.50) all the way up to €169 ($235) per month, and offer a variety of storage/user limitations. Definitely give the free account a shot first, since it may be enough if you just want to use it for yourself, but I think creative teams will quickly see the value of an upgrade.

Share your opinions on Fluxiom in the comments.

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Could becoming a web designer be a good career move for you?

Web Design Career

Web design is not the same as web development. Web designers focus on visuals, typography, colors, layouts and other important design considerations. Their technical expertise usually consists of mainly HTML, XHTML and CSS along with one or two programming languages like JavaScript and PHP for adding interactive features. Web developers concentrate on web site function and programming, rather than design and the interface.

Once upon a time, web designers could do it all. All they needed to build an entire site was to know was some HTML and possibly a little JavaScript. In the last few years, though, the web site-building process has become more complicated and has evolved to include more technologies and techniques, including  CSS, AJAX, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, information architecture, search engine optimization (SEO), usability and user experience. This long list makes it impossible for anyone to know it all and do it well. Designers like Jon Phillips from Spyre Studios know this and hire freelancers with specific skills to help out with their projects.

Matt Brown of thingsthatarebrown does design consulting and full-scale site development and deployment. However, as a small design shop he finds that the best use of his time and resources is focusing on design projects. “In a given day I tend to manage 2-5 projects (of various sizes) concurrently, and I’ll usually do a little work for each one during the course of the day,” he says. ”This keeps me fresh and not too ‘over-focused’ on any one client project.”

How to Qualify

Do you know how to do HTML and CSS, but have no portfolio to speak of beyond your own web site? Do what Reese Spykerman of Design by Reese did. She asked, “Hey, who wants a free design for their personal blog?” Offer to design a web site for friends and family. Few designers majored in anything related to design in college. Most learn through reading and studying various online resources, and also by examining the code for web sites they like. A few take design classes at a local school or online. Jon Phillips makes time to learn new tricks and experiment with web design techniques.

This field is still very young, which is why those doing web design today typically don’t have degrees or certification in the field. However, new and wannabe designers have more opportunities than ever to get a formal design education as colleges and universities are increasingly adding design programs, such as the School of Visual Arts, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in graphic design, illustration, photography and more. Matt Brown recommends interning with design agencies to learn how to work with clients and gain experience in working with the latest tools and technology.

Web Design Tools

Photoshop, of course, is in most web designers’ toolbox, along with Fireworks and Illustrator. They love Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar Extension for editing and testing the site and its CSS. Designers often use a text editor like Textpad, TextMate or TextWrangler for hand-coding because WYSIWYG editors, like Dreamweaver, add a mess of unneeded code that weighs down the page. Besides design tools, many designers rely on business apps like FreshBooks for invoicing, Harvest for time tracking and Basecamp for project management.

Geography doesn’t tie down web designers. Reese Spykerman, who’s located in Malaysia but has most of her clients in the U.S., communicates with clients through email, telephone and conference calls.

Find Clients

Word-of-mouth marketing takes the lead in helping designers find gigs. Jon Phillips reported that over 40 percent of his clients found him through Twitter, but they also find him through his blog and referrals.

Are you considering a career in design?

Image from T. Al Nakib.

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File Sharing

Once upon a time, I used Image Shack for most of my design-related file hosting needs. That was before I had my own server space with which to play. But despite still having private server space, sometimes it’s just easier and faster to use an online file-hosting service, especially if that service is incredibly easy to use.

Sharenload is really simple, and it has an impressive file size allowance. How does 2048 MB sound? You can upload up to five files at a time that together add up to a full 2 GB. Have more you need to share? No problem. Just reload the site and do the same thing over again. Sharenload provides you with a nice progress screen, and then gives you automatically generated download and file deletion links for each file.

You can also sign up to keep track of your files if you like, or even pay for a premium account ($5-$50, for 7-180 days) to get more storage space, remove ads and get other perks. It’s a great, easy solution that your clients will also really appreciate.

Font Resource

My old typeface haunts are mostly still in operation. 1001fonts, Blambot, and FontFreak all continue to be great resources, but there’s nothing like sheer volume to put a smile on my font-loving face. A new resource put together by a group of web designers offers enough selection for even the most jaded of font geeks. Best of all, PimpYourFont.com is all hand-selected, so you don’t have to worry about duplicates and other oddities that can crop up in web crawler-generated lists.

The site is simple, but does have a variety of methods for navigating fonts in the database. By default, they’re listed in the order in which they were uploaded, with the most recent additions listed first. You can also view them alphabetically, by style, or take a look at the top 100 list. And of course, you can always search the site if you know what you’re looking for.

What new design resources have you discovered recently?

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Wix — founded in New York by ex-venture capitalist, Allon Bloch — offers users the ability to create a free, SEO-friendly, Flash-based web site using only drag-and-drop tools. I’m surprised I hadn’t come across Wix before, as according to the company’s PR, more than 500,000 users are actively using the service, a fifth of whom joined from the UK just last month.

Wix appears to be targeting professionals in various industries who want to set up a glossy site very quickly. The directory of published sites ranges from photographers, stylists, designers and actors to real estate companies, bands and arts sites.

What’s particularly notable about Wix isn’t the Flash-based authoring tools, but the ability to publish “widgetized” versions of your site to MySpace and Facebook, as well as publishing to online marketplaces such as Etsy, Craigslist and eBay. Handily, Paypal and Google Analytics integration is also included.

As much as I’m impressed by Wix’s ease of use, integration with third-party services and widget-publishing tools, I don’t accept that a Flash-based site is superior to HTML. To quote usability guru Jakob Nielson:

Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web’s fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site’s core value.

As pretty as many Wix-powered sites are, they don’t contain anything that couldn’t be produced using HTML and CSS. Flash has its place as a video and animation tool, and to some extent as an interactivity mechanism.

Wixs assert that the thousands usually spent on producing a Flash-based site can be reduced to a hundred dollars or so using a premium Wix account. It’s not difficult to see the appeal of Wix to anyone lacking the skills to produce Flash-based sites, or indeed to professional designers using the service to produce low-end sites for clients.

What do you think? Is Flash a good substitute for general site design?

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This is where new web app redmark can help. Currently in limited private beta, the service aims for, and largely achieves, the difficult feat of making and tracking design notes a snap. Check out the nifty demo here.

The first thing to notice is the strikingly slick and clean interface: There are blessedly few tools and features, and the tools and features that are at the user’s disposal are easy to understand and use.

Playing around with the demo is fun, and it’s easy to see how redmark has created a valuable way to share notes about online documents, making for a powerful collaborative tool. The process of adding notes and attaching those notes to specific elements of the design document is made simple by way of a drag-and-drop interface. This mimics how people make notes on hard copies in “real life,” using circles and arrows to give designers direction quickly and efficiently.

Meanwhile, a zoom in/zoom out bar on the left side of the interface lets you zoom into the document to concentrate on a particular area. For example, you might have seven things to say about a tiny corner of a button within a screenshot, so the zoom feature would be very helpful there.

Perhaps the best feature of redmark is the easy ability to scroll through the various revisions of a design, with version-specific notes tied to each. This again mimics the common “real world” ritual of laying out multiple versions of a design on a table and having everyone hover over them to decide which one works best.

I have one quibble about redmark, and it came when I logged into a private beta account (request your own here). Everything worked as the demo suggested, except that I wasn’t able to add comments and use the drag-and-drop functionality to create lines and arrows to point to various parts of the images I had uploaded.

I’m not sure if this is a bug – which is totally acceptable in an early beta product – or if the expectation is that the “original uploader” of the document will not want to add notes to the document. That is, I’m guessing that it’s possible they expect that use of redmark will entail one person uploading a document, leaving it unmarked by notes and comments, and then sending it to clients and colleagues, who themselves will have the ability to be the first to comment and “mark up” the document.

If this is the case, I would strongly recommend that all users of a document have both read and write privileges. For example, I can imagine plenty of situations where it would be useful to create a design, upload it to redmark, and then use the service’s great features to make initial notes to the people with which I’m sharing. For example, something like: “I added an extra module for user feedback in the upper right corner; what do you think?”

What do you think of redmark – do you think you would find it useful for collaborating on online design and documents?

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Inkd is one such service provider, aimed at print designers. Like Threadless and Cafepress before it, it offers users the chance to use their own original designs to earn revenue. Indk’s model is slightly different, but will be familiar to people who’ve used either of those older services. People who contribute to stock image libraries like iStockPhoto will also recognize how this system works.

Basically, you sign up, choose a specific product to design (for example, letterhead), download one of Inkd’s pre-made templates, upload your own design once you’re ready, and, pending a quality control review by Inkd staff, you’ll start earning sales-based commission for your creation.

Obviously, the model isn’t perfect, and depending on your stance on spec work, you may strongly disagree with what Inkd is offering. But for people just getting started, who have no connections and no idea how to break into the print design industry, it might be the right solution for getting started.

Inkd also offers a lot of free resources that could be useful for novice and experienced designers alike, even if you aren’t looking to actually sell your material through them. For instance, you can download free starter kits — basically Adobe Illustrator files with pre-set layouts that you can play with, adjusting fonts, colours, images, etc. These could be useful in jump-starting your own creative process if you’re feeling stuck or you’ve never designed the type of product in question before.

The pay structure is decent, if not ideal. You take home 20 percent commission on any sale, and if a customer wants to enlist your help directly to polish or customize a design, you get all of the revenue, with Inkd making no claim on any of that business. I think this is better than the competition-based system Threadless is running.

On the other side, if you’re looking for some original design work for your business or company, you can request a design from Inkd. Of course, your results may be hit or miss, but you have the advantage of being able to look without commitment, and of ultimately buying only what you like or need. This opens the can of worms that is the spec work debate, but if you’re a real estate professional working on your own, for example, you might not have the budget to hire a design firm, or even know where to start looking for one.

Personally, I think Inkd is a nice resource for the beginner, but I do worry about yet another site that could encourage spec work, speaking as a freelance professional. There will also be concerns over Inkd’s marketplace devaluing print design as there have been over stock photography sites, like iStockPhoto, devaluing professional photography. As with most online marketplaces like this, I’d say “use, but don’t abuse,” is the best rule of thumb when it comes to Inkd. Basically, that means that if you can actually afford to hire a professional directly, you should do so, as you’ll likely get a better result and it will be better for the industry as a whole.

Will you consider selling print design work through Inkd?

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