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.
Stand Out Among Freelancers by Communicating with Your Client
While the internet becomes more and more accessible to everyone, some freelancers rarely use these new technologies to improve their marketing or client relations. These incredible technologies allow us to communicate easier with people from all over the world and to even optimize the communication with someone who is living close to us. Throughout my short career I have learned that communicating with a client is crucial, because his directions might help you too. Moreover, if the product is not heading in the direction the client wants, communicating with him is going to make the product better and, let’s be honest, this is what every freelancer is rated on – the quality of the projects they deliver.
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CSS Tools for Designers and Developers
CSS tools are important for web designers and developers because they help them by simplifying the jobs they have to do. Considering time is money and such generators spare time, it is easy to understand why many web developers are excited about these tools. The only problem is that some of them are not well-known, therefore I made a showcase for you with CSS tools and generators which developers and designers can use to create functional and optimized websites faster. Because the tools will be categorized, you will find at the end of each category a list with other applications that do the same as the ones reviewed, therefore there is no need to review them too.
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6 Things To Consider For A Better Web Design Career
For most of us web design started as a passion or a part-time job. For many of us it started before we turned 18, but most of us ended up working full-time in an agency or as freelance web designers and developers and will probably continue doing so for years and years to come.
But being a designer can take a great deal of time, with multiple clients to please, working in an environment that moves fast and changes even faster, where we have to learn new skills over and over again, market ourselves and even find clients on a monthly basis if we don’t work in an agency.
As with any other career, web design has its own challenges and they arise all the time for us, even if we are experienced or well-known. It can be a difficult client to work with, an impossible deadline or a bad example of outsourcing, it doesn’t really matter. Unfortunately these things can’t be avoided, but to ensure you enjoy a better career anyway I created a list with some tips for all of you.
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8 Things Designers Should Teach Their Clients
When starting as a designer, you might encounter some issues along the way, especially in the relationships you develop with your clients. This happens mainly because the clients quite often have the wrong idea of what we actually do and think that “anybody can design a website”. In their opinion it is as easy as opening Photoshop and drawing something, then writing three lines of code and there you go, you have developed a website.
We all know the reality of is totally different, but until we explain this to our clients, they will not start understanding us and will not value our work any more than they currently do.
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Web Service Review: CSS Lint – Helping You Code Better
Coding is something that takes time to learn and novice developers might not use the best practices when converting web interfaces from a Photoshop file into a fully functional web site. It would be really good to have access to an experience programmer, but not everybody can afford to hire one or knows someone that is with spare time.
So you might ask yourself what to do to improve the code before delivering a web page. Well, lucky you, there is a tool out there which I will review for you today. The tool is called CSS Lint, it is totally free and I definitely recommend trying it and see what you can get out of it. The difference between a good and a great programmer is all in the small details CSS Lint can fix for you – or, at least, can tell you to fix them and why.
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How to Make the Best out of the Fold
The fold, also known as the scroll, is the position on a web site where the browsers will begin to scroll down. Elements that can’t be seen without scrolling down are “below the fold” and some people believe that it is smart to keep the important information above the fold and don’t force the user to scroll down to view it. The whole space below the fold is for less important information and, depending on the resolution of the screen, this can be at around 600 pixels down on a 1024 x 768 screen, 850 pixels down on a 1200 x 1024 screen and around 1030 pixels down on a big 1600 x 1200 screen.
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Questions to Ask Yourself Before Becoming a Freelancer
Going freelance nowadays is a path many designers and developers take, not only because of job vacancies being on the low side, but also because there are some clear advantages to it. While working for a company is more secure and organized, going freelance is something most of us have thought about at least once. Working by yourself means you need some special skills, such as being able to work alone, to respect schedules and deadlines and to be able to market yourself better than the others. None of these is easy to do and not being able to follow some specific rules will ruin your freelance career. Therefore before going freelance, take a look at the following questions and try to ask yourself if this is indeed the right path for you to follow.
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25 Best Infographics Of 2011 That Are Still Relevant Today
The year of 2011 went very fast for us in the development world and I am sure some of you accomplished important things for your career during this year. But besides our personal achievements, the whole industry managed to reach something that was unthinkable around 10 years ago. To show you how the web progressed during the past year, I collected a series of infographics from the internet and hope, by the end of this article, you will realize what huge potential this year of 2012 has. Most of the images are not in full here, so you might want to click on them and read the whole infographic for an overall understanding of the presentations.
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Web Design Mistakes and How to Solve Them
Web design is such a broad field that mistakes can be spotted all over the place – it is almost impossible to deliver a product without a mistake until you undergo full testing, which not everybody has the financial power or time to do. These mistakes can range from a few pixels of padding missing to using a wrong number of fonts. Today we’ll take a look at some of the problems people make so that next time you deliver or design a product you can avoid these pitfalls. This way your products will be better overall and your design skills will be appreciated even more.
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10 Things Beginner Developers Should Know
If you are a novice developer, it might be confusing about where you should start, because the field is broad and provides many options for you. There are so many questions you might ask yourself, such as “What programming language should I learn?” or “Should I also know front-end, or only back-end?” And I am sure there are much more than that. Well, in order for you to be able to start with an advantage against the others, I’ve decided to help you start your career as a developer with the following list of tips.
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