Christian Vasile
Christian Vasile is an enthuziastic Romanian web designer currently living in Denmark. He is passionate for the industry and writes about design, usability, coding and freelancing and is a regular publisher here at 1WD. You can follow him on Twitter at @christianvasile or visit his web portfolio by clicking on the link above.
How To Grow as a Designer by Building Your Own Network
Being part of a web design and development community offers you many possibilities and chances for self-development. Each one of us knows about these communities and, at some point in time or another, wished or even was part of one of them. Knowing other individuals in your industry is something I recommend to everybody, as you can get a lot of help from such experts. Communities are not only created around people, but also around offline web design agencies, which give you even a better set of possibilities and a different network that you can use during your career.
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Answering a Designer’s Question: Should I Choose Web or Print?
Print and web are both huge areas of design and mean a lot in today’s world. Print has been with us for more than 100 years and we know pretty much everything about it, while web is a new area of design that became mainstream about 10 years ago. Before this, web design was totally unknown and only experts and developers knew its potential and helped it grow to how we know it today. Both areas of design have advanced so much in the past 10-15 years that they started to cross each others paths and while this can be beneficial, it can also create problems. We will talk about the advantages and disadvantages in this article and also about how the two areas of design differ from a designer’s perspective.
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6 Must Read Tips Before Registering a Domain Name
There are many things a web designer has to think of when designing a website. Moreover, if he has full responsibility, he has to come up with a good domain name as well. Although many think it is not so important, the domain name is as important as your company name, the website or the Facebook page. Having a good domain name will many times not only bring you more traffic, but also make your webpage easier to remember – and this brings traffic too.
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6 Tips to Stay Focused on Project Deadlines
Staying focused on your goals may be difficult at times as a freelancer. Not having a nine-to-five job, selecting your own clients, setting your own rates and deadlines and also doing PR work for yourself is quite different than being a full-time employee in a web design agency, where many of the things above are done by different individuals or departments. One of the most difficult things I encountered when I started as a freelancer was staying focused on the deadlines. And not only keeping my focus, but also meeting the deadline and delivering the project on time – at the end of the day, this is one of the most important things alongside the quality of your work.
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What is Pro Bono Work and Why Should You Embrace It
Few weeks ago I wrote an article where I torn Spec work apart. There is no reason in going back and I think I should do as promised and explain why I think pro bono work is something you should do to help you build up a portfolio if you are new to the design business and to give a helping hand to different communities.
Pro bono work comes from a Latin phrase and is mostly used to describe professional work delivered voluntarily and without payment or at a highly reduced fee. Pro bono work is increasing in popularity lately in domains such as marketing, technology and yes, web design. Such a concept offers the specific skills of a professional for free to someone who is not able to afford them otherwise. The main difference between Spec work and pro bono work is that pro bono work is usually for a good cause and even if you don’t get paid, it will definitely bring you awareness and allow you to build up a portfolio and earn experience. The reason behind me preferring pro bono work instead of spec work is that it is usually for a good cause. We designers love the nature, optimistic and energetic volunteers and good causes like charity. Why not work for them and earn their respect rather than do Spec work and (most of the time) earn nothing?
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Introduction to Mood Boarding and How to Use it Properly
Mood boarding is a technique often used in web and graphic design, but its use is even broader than this. Painting, photography, game design, interior design, movies, marketing, fashion, music, advertising and even architecture are domains where mood boarding is used to develop concepts and to intercommunicate with other members of the design team. A mood board is a type of poster design containing text, images and samples of objects used in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator. It enables a person to illustrate the direction and general style which the final product is pursuing.
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Why Creating Minimalist Design Makes You a Better Designer
Our target as designers most of the time is improving ourselves and our techniques. There are many ways of doing this. You can read books, find an internship or simply learn a lot by example from the internet. But there are some other ways as well. You might not believe it, but by only designing minimalist layouts you will become a better designer. You might ask yourself why, therefore I thought of putting together some ideas to try to convince you that this is also a good way of improving your skills.
Minimalist designs have been with us for quite some time now, emerging from nowhere a couple of years ago. It is easy to spot all over the place as everybody longs for such a design and everybody looks to have it. People pay lots of money for revamping their websites and minimalism seems to be everybody’s direction right now.
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What is Spec Work and Why You Should Say No
Spec work means producing a piece of work for a client without any guarantee that your work will be published in any way – or will be paid for. If you think you’ve never done this before, look back when you submitted designs on 99designs.com. Websites like this one make lots of people work for free, with only a handful of them actually getting paid. We will look today into this type of work and I will bring in arguments against it; in the end, we will wrap up with a discussion through the comments and I hope you will leave better informed.
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New CSS3 Properties For Better Text And Word Wrapping
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets is, alongside HTML, the very basics of web design. It was first designed to enable separation of document content and allow web pages to be displayed differently depending on the screen size of the device, or depending on the device itself.
CSS is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)… and it is exactly maintaining we will talk about today.
The first CSS specification was used 16 years ago, with the first addition coming two years later. From 1998 to 2011 there wasn’t a new CSS specification. In 2011 CSS 2.1 was released, after a long period of development, while W3C also worked on the new CSS, version 3.0.
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A Beginner’s Guide to Combining Multiple Fonts
Using multiple fonts in the same design can get tricky if you don’t have knowledge of basic theories and good practices. In my opinion pairing fonts is one of the most difficult parts of the design process. If you have no idea where to begin, then this article will guide you through the knowledge you need for now. Browsing the internet for tips about pairing fonts can get confusing, because there are many practices designers use. Therefore I researched a lot in the past couple of weeks and I will present you what is, in my opinion, the right way of doing this.
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