Addison Duvall's Articles (37)

Freelance

Handling Ethical Disagreements With Clients

Sometimes, you may get a client who wants you to do something that you’re just not comfortable with. We all want to please our clients, but how do you please a client who, say, really wants you to directly copy another company’s logo design or sales copy? Or who wants you to do something malicious to a competitor’s online reputation, Google ranking, et cetera? Image Source: Shoulder Devil and Angel…

Dealing With Overly Opinionated Clients

Do you know what a shoemaker is? Well… it’s a person who makes shoes. But it also has another meaning. In the culinary world, a shoemaker is a hack – someone who is typically ill-informed and incompetent, and who uses shortcuts to get around their lack of skill. The term comes from the oddity of having a person who makes shoes running around in a kitchen. To be fair to…

Occam's Razor

Shave Your Designs With Occam’s Razor

Did you know that designers can use a tool that mathematicians, philosophers, and other academics have known about for hundreds of years? It’s called Occam’s Razor, and it’s a law that states, essentially, that the simplest solution is usually the best or most correct. For example, if your client is late to a meeting, you would probably assume he or she got stuck in traffic. It’s a simpler and likelier…

Freelance

Waking Up Your Clients’ Taste Buds

One of the hallmarks of a top chef is his or her ability to do interesting takes on food combinations that, at first glance, seem like they wouldn’t go together at all. The first person, for example, to pair peas and wasabi together was a culinary genius. Think about it. Someone had to test flavors repeatedly – combining and recombining in just the right increments – to arrive at that…

Freelance

Everything In Its Place – How a Professional Culinary Technique Can Help You Become a Better Freelancer

Today I’m going to tell you the story of two cooks: David and Jenny. Both are equally talented in the kitchen, and both are about to prepare a 6-course meal for a table full of rowdy dinner guests. They’re hungry and they’re hungry now. David gets his pots and pans out, pulls what he needs from the fridge as it’s needed, and dives hands first into the cooking. He likes…

Portfolio

Put More Personal Work In Your Portfolio

Anyone here have a bunch of strange, unusual, or, shall we say, “quirky” hobbies? Perhaps you like to collect bottle caps from around the world and photograph them as found typography. Or maybe you recycle old computer parts to fashion into handmade art pieces? Come on, you’re designers – I know there’s something juicy you work on when you’re not putting your nose to the old grindstone! If you do,…

Freelance

This is Only a Test… Or Is It? How To Test Your Marketing Efforts as a Freelancer

In today’s freelancing climate, one of the best things you can do in terms of marketing yourself is to think in what I like to call “Test Terms.” What does this mean? When a food company is developing a new product to release into the market, they don’t simply travel in a straight line from recipe to manufacturing to stocking the shelves at the grocery store. What happens is they…

Sketchbooks - The Designer's Cookbook

Sketchbooks – The Designer’s Cookbook

As a food lover, I absolutely adore cookbooks. I have a ton of them – all filled with pages and pages of delicious recipes for me to try and experiment with. Perhaps some of you do as well. My favorite part of a cookbook is the visuals – mouth-watering pictures of food heaven on perfectly arranged plates. It’s enough to send even the casual eater into foodie nirvana. Most cookbooks…

Freelance

Don’t Assume Anything – Improve The Way You Communicate With Your Clients

When you walk into a bakery, what’s the first thing you want to know? Do you care that the bakery was started back in the ’60s by the current owner’s immigrant Grandma? Or that the head pastry chef’s favorite dessert is a strawberry cheese Danish with the perfect blend of cheesiness, flakiness, and strawberry-ness? Or how about that the tiles on the floor are hand painted ceramic from a little…

Design

Using Your Own Design Voice

I have a confession to make today: when I started writing this article, I was stumped at how to best phrase my main idea. I had something important I needed to tell you wonderful readers, but I just wasn’t sure how to do it. Then it hit me that I wasn’t approaching it in a writing voice I recognized as being “mine.” I was attempting to get too lofty with…

Storytelling

Storytelling For Freelancers

Several years ago, I worked as an in-house copywriter and designer for a prominent marketing firm. When I first applied for the job I didn’t have any of the credentials my employers were looking for, and yet I got the job anyway, out of a pool of more qualified competitors. Why did I get chosen? The boss liked my story. I had no experience with working at a firm, nor…

Design

New Flavors: Design and the Unique

Quick, how many flavors are there in food? We’ve all probably heard that there are four: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. But what would you say if I told you that someone had discovered a fifth basic flavor not too long ago? In 1908, Japanese scientist Dr. Kikunae Ikeda did just that, when he managed to isolate the exact component that makes up the flavor of umami, or, as it’s…

Talking Cash

Talking Cash: Preventing Future Client Burn

It seems like every designer has a horror story or two (or seventeen) about getting ripped off by a client who refuses to pay. Once it happens, there’s not too much you can do. It sucks, but it’s the simple truth. If you didn’t get a contract or a clear payment process established in the beginning, a lot of the time you’re just going to have to eat the loss….

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