Filipino Freelance Web Designer

Are you a self-taught Web designer?

2009-05-31T05:12:00.000-07:00

Are you a self-taught Web designer or formally educated?

This is the question comes out in my mind when I saw some of the web designer profile on the net. As I was browsing to his website, I have notice that he studied in a big university in the Philippines, He has a web design degree and has been on the web design industry for 5 years. Technicality wise, his website is okay and have posted clients website that he made. But the thing is, I am not convince the look and feel of his website. The header has no call to action or at least putting it somewhere else on the homepage. I am not mocking about his website because It's not ugly anyway but my point is, this guy studied website design formally but turns out to be a not so nice web designer at all. I don't consider myself as professional on this matter but I can see the difference between white and red on this.

Web design is my passion and I learned it by myself at home. I was a bigginer way back 2007 where I published my first website as a Philippines Web Design. Being a self-taught web designer is right choice and at the same time its tough. You will do a lot of research, browsing the tutorials on the internet study the other website on how they do it. On the other hand I was thingking of studying web design formaly in some university in Manila Philippines. But I change my mind due to what i have observed. That most self-taught web designers have a good skills in web design and their works are awesome! (well that's my own opinion) All you need to have is the passion to do it, practice and patience. Those who don't have this will have nowhere to go.

In the contrary, client will look on web designers that has a diploma because by reality they want their website to be design by the person who has a degree on it. Needless to say that professional self-taught designers has more experienced and know the right thing to do it.

So the bottom line is we have to build our portfolio as nice as it can be and most of all its a browser friendly and yet attractive to look for more. After all, formaly educated and self-taught web designer are measured on how passionate and motivated they are to excel on what they do.

How Website Design Influence People

2009-05-15T20:41:00.000-07:00

A website is a representation of a company online. The public can have a positive or negative perception about your products and services based on your website design. It is the first reason by which the nice website design is very important for businesses. Website design does not import simply because it helps you to establish a strong and positive image for your mark but also because the website design can really encourage people to take the desired action.

All the professionals who work in the field of website design understand that the visual ones can produce certain feelings in the people and can encourage them to take a certain policy. It is because cognitive processes are affected by the sensory stimuli. By the course of our lives, our brains will be conditioned to answer the logos, the signs, the colors, and the symbols in certain manners. A good website designer knows this and will benefit from this fact.

Take the red color for example. The red is largely accepted to mean the stop or the error. This is why when there is something false product during the opinions of a process on line usually come in red from color, often accompanied with a mark by exclamation. The red can also mean the importance. The red is employed to mark the important messages because the color is held easily outside.

The symbols also give the specific significance thus it is important to employ them correctly. The symbols are the visual signs that the assistance communicate messages with people. The false use of the symbols can cause confusion among people and can decrease the effectiveness of your website. The nice website design employ all the suitable police forces, symbols and colors to communicate the good messages with the public. website design implies to create a web site which supplements your efforts of hot marking. Do you want to be known as a company of recreation? Your website should exude a vibe recreation. Is your company implied in the businesses and the bank transactions? Then you do not want that your website designer put kiddy font to discuss your services. The good website design exceeds esthetics but also implies semiotics. Semiotics is a very important aspect of communication on line because you want that the people identify positive values and take positive measures in your site.

Cool and Effective Headers in Web Design

2009-05-13T22:44:00.000-07:00

If you're going to design a website, make sure that the header will communicate with the surfers. This is very important because the header is the first thing you want to tell your user when they visit your site, and will catch their attention to read further.

Here are the different types of header design:

www.styledivision.net/

www.jameslaicreative.com/

Design Philosophy

2009-05-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the designers' philosophy that I encountered on the net. I thought of sharing it here though it has been published a hundred times even before this blog was created.

If you have something to share, please feel free to make some comments and post your philosophy as a designer.

Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy. Erik Adigard

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose. Charles Eames

Design’s fundamental role is problem solver. Fast Company, 2005

Good design, at least part of the time, includes the criterion of being direct in relation to the problem at hand - not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood. Ivan Chermayeff

Good design is the most important way to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. Samsung CEO Yun Jong Yong, 2004

Graphics is the visual means of resolving logical problems. Bertin

A design isn’t finished until somebody is using it. Brenda Laurel

Intelligent design itself does not have any content. George Gilder

Dreamweaver Tutorial for Beginners

2009-04-28T02:10:00.000-07:00

Hi! My name is Clenn and I am a website designer.

Last 2 years ago, I looked at my website which was created using embedded website builder on some site that offered free website hosting. And I felt down as it never got finished because it looked so funny knowing that I am a graphic designer as well.

I tried to edit it with the use of Dreamweaver, but then shut it down in less than 3 minutes. It was very confusing, and I didn't know where to start. My friends and clients asked me if I know how to build websites, but my answer is a big "no" for I didn't even finish my own website.

Fortunatey, I came across with the "Dreamweaver Tutorial for Beginners". After I discovered the tutorial, I found it so easy to make websites. I didn't just only finish my website, I modified the whole site beautifully and it was working remarkably!

This took me about 32 hours of work.

I had different pages, galleries, and even put a portfolio page that showcased my graphic works. And the rest was history.

I have created more than 50 websites and successfully lauched all of them. I earned thousands of dollars because of this and that's not all, my friends have enjoyed this benifit since they also got the chance to learn building websites even if they are not artists themselves.

I thank "Dreamweaver Tutorial for Beginners" very much for making this tutorial possible for me to do.

If you would like to view my site, the address is www.clennsunico.com. My portfolio and my happy clients were posted on this site as well.

3 Flash Banner Concepts Just $10

2009-03-02T08:42:00.000-08:00

Clenn Sunico is the most innovating Website with flash slide show banners in the industry of design since 2007. Its world-class design provided many satisfactory customers with flash banners made by ordering of quality slides for only $10. My booklet and examples of success prove my quality. Purely made to order.

Thank you

DVD Cover and disk

2009-01-28T02:15:00.000-08:00

DVD Cover and Disk

Designed for Abundant Life Family Christian Center

For more DVD samples, click to enlarge thumbnails

Pending Projects for 2009

2009-01-04T06:31:00.000-08:00

Happy New year to everybody! Wow! 2009 is here! Another year has gone and the next thing you know it’s year 3000. Well, we can’t do anything about it. Everyday is just like a second on the clock that could jump to another without noticing it.

On January 10th, it’s gonna be my birthday. Yeheey!!! Food, drinks, and rock n’ roll are my preparations. LOL! Gee! I almost forget that I have so much design works to do. I just have to put something on my blog before getting started.

My task is designing, hmmm… speaking of which, I have two website projects pending, 2 graphic mailer revisions, 3 design studies for logo and business cards and 1 blog template design. Whew! That’s not bad for the year to start. I’d be a lot happier if the 2 mailer revisions were approved last year, so I can concentrate on my new design task.

And oh by the way, the design mailer is from my client from the USA that has still balance for the website design. Before Christmas, he paid half of his balance and until now he still hasn’t paid me the rest. Grrr! I wish I could charge him an additional 10% for not paying me on time. Anyway, I love this client despite of the delay of his payment because he pays even though it’s not on time. And besides, he was my first client and we have this bumpy relationship for almost a year now. I’m responsible for the designing of his website with e-shop, mailer, 3 logos for his company and flash animation… such a very loyal client. Because of him, I have more recommendations to design form his friends in the USA.

To view the recent updates of my design works, you can log on to my website. Thank you for reading and have a Prosperous New Year to everybody. God bless!

Official Gmail Blog: Get your Gmail stickers

2008-12-05T01:17:00.000-08:00

Official Gmail Blog: Get your Gmail stickers

If you like this blog, give me your money bag.

Web design and development: My client didn’t pay me yet.

2008-12-04T21:39:00.000-08:00

Although my website (www.clennsunico.com) has more clients each week and is making money, I still can’t help but to decline some because I work alone and no one will help me; a one-man show that designs and develops website. What I do is sit down and relax and do the math, whoa! I have to decide which client I have to attend first and which one is going to be the next in the line. I am not saying one client is less important than the other. I still have to weigh them in terms of the length of the task, design complexity, theme, value and the cost of the project; so to speak, the whole package.

When the decision comes out, sad to say I have to pick the clients who are close to my heart. Though I haven’t met them in person, but I can feel it to myself who are close to me and who are not. I felt sorry to those people that I left behind. I will find ways to boost my speed of work so I can earn more. In addition, to support my rock ‘n roll lifestyle and pay my 2 credit cards without any deficit. I must do this to support my family and me because no one will wipe my ass except me.

My clients are loyal, easy to work with and pay on time. I was happy and very grateful to have them. There are times that we don’t escrow anymore because we trust each other. I didn’t even ask my closest clients to pay the projects in advance of 30% because I trust them. There is this one incident in my freelancer career wherein my client didn’t pay me yet until now. It’s ironic because he was my first client in my whole online freelancing job. After he paid half of the web design and development project that we worked for the past 3 months, the website is live now and I think his e-shop is getting much money. The thing is he forgot to pay me the rest. His balance is only $450.00 though, but for me it is huge. It can pay my rent, electric bill, ISP, upgrade my computer and to think we need to eat to keep going on this kind of job. Grrrr! Today is December 5, 2008 and I will send another note to bill him and hope that he will pay me. Christmas is fast approaching and I hope it will be ‘Merry’.

If you like this blog, give me your money bag.

My telecommuting job

2008-11-21T05:21:00.000-08:00

I've been looking for telecommuting jobs for about 6 months. Unfortunately, only a few of them
were real that would give me real money in which I can sustain my sophisticated lifestyle as a recording artist and at the same time as a website designer. What I have encountered mostly were 'pay to do data entry jobs' that ended up to a pay initial money to join the site! Grrr! I almost given up. Even though I haven't found any other online jobs, I accepted my fate and waited for my royalties to come as well as my monthly salary as an online website designer of Messageforce-Australia. I knew there were opportunities out there but I gave up looking for them. I really wanted an extra job aside from the regular one which I already have. To be a blogger was also on my list that would let me work from home, but I was too hesitant to be scammed.

It was May 29, 2008 when I found the site of Serebra Connect , whereby they offer telecommuting jobs like:

Accounting Finance
Admin Support
Business Consulting
Engineering/Architecture
Graphic Design/Multimedia
Legal
Marketing/Advertising/Sales
Photography/Videography
Programming / Database Development
Traditional Art (Illustration/Painting)
Training/EducationWriting/Editing/Translation

This is where I earn my extra money. View my profile to browse some of the projects I have done from clients all over the world through Serebra Connect.

If you like this blog, give me your money bag.

My first design project as a graphic designer

2008-11-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

I design Coca-Cola.

It was Monday afternoon during working hours at Cebu Kolorsep Inc. when my two collegues and I decided to have a ten-minute Marathon Durandal game on our PC network. It was working hours but we were so bored since we had to do the same task everyday which was retouching photos of the models that needed to be put on posters.

The posters were already been designed by some advertising agencies. All we have to do was to copy the mock-up and put the final images to their design so it would be ready for mass production. Our company was responsible for the pre-press and printing. And my responsibility was to make sure that the files would be pre-press ready and ready to print. I saw to it that the design was in high resolution, CMYK color mode and had all the elements before printing it to film. So much for the introduction of my previous company and job, our account manager rushed unto us one day and said, "This is your chance guys". As she stood in front of us showing the photo of a girl, we secretly quit the game afraid that she might caught us playing during working time. She asked, "Who's not busy today?" Then the two of my co-workers turned to me without saying a word, just looking at me with their eyes wide open. The account manager presumed that I was not busy so she moved toward my place and sit beside me. She handed me the photo of the girl and said... "Show me what you get Clenn. Coca-Cola Bottling Company wants us to design their notepad cover for this summer 1998 event." To my surprise I said "Okay no problem".

The account manager wanted me to spent 3 days designing the notepad cover for Coke but surprisingly I finished the task in one day. Wow! Our company didn't offer designing, but the Coke company didn't have any option anymore for their design agency was loaded with the design project for the promotion of the said event. They thought that the notepad cover design didn't require much marketing stategy, so they just let the printing company conceptualize a design for them rather than to spend additional cost to the advertising agency to do it. Tsadan!!! Here's the design!

I am very proud of this project because this is the design that I made from concept to completion. It may be lack of art direction and out of style but then this was my first concept that has been printed 10 years ago and aside from that it's created for Coca-Cola. It's a mess but I love it.

If you like this blog, give me your money bag.

What I can do for the sake of art

2008-11-17T09:50:00.000-08:00

List on what I have done for the past 10 years

* Banner Ad Design

* Billboard Design

* Brochure Design

* Business Card Design

* Corporate Identity Kit

* Flash Design

* Logo Design

* Poster Design

* Print Ad Design

* Song Writing /Arrangement

* Story Board

* T-Shirt Design and Printing

* Website Ad Design

* Website Design and Development

* Film Stripping

* Pre-Press

* And Many More!!!

Can do all stages of the creative process from concept to final production. Activities also include research, brainstorming, sketching, photography, image correction and pre-press file management.

If you like this blog, give me your money bag.

CSS, tableless, web design and development

2008-11-16T04:39:00.000-08:00

As a designer, I am more into software base coding when doing the structure of the website rather than hard coding using note pad or plain text editor to build the structure of the website. In my case, I use Dreamweaver to manage the whole thing. Even with css, I use Dreamweaver. After making the basic css coding like the body, p, ul, ol, li, header, footer etc... I link it to Dreamweaver and add more functions from there. I find it easy and manageable because I can preview what I do in no time at all.

CSS play is the website I usually go for referrals when I need to do something for my new design. Basically, I learned CSS on my own hardwork and nobody taught me but myself. Two years ago, I have spent 46 hours on constructing CSS. And to think that I was just going to align the background from header, left menu, right menu and the footer. Oh my! It felt like I evaluated the code forever. When I learned to link CSS on Dreamweaver, it was a lot easier. And the 46 hours that I spent to do the CSS is only 1 to 4 hours now, depending on how complex it is that I am doing. Nevertheless, I still have to code manually if there's something that needs to be done that way.

In my 2 years of experience on designing and developing websites, I have never made a tableless website. I have created more than fifty websites and successfully launched all of them, but never been in my whole career did I try to make a tableless website. So my goal now is to make one, and maybe by the end of this year I will publish my first tableless website. It will be either my own website or from one of my clients.

Wed Design Templates

2008-11-15T07:43:00.000-08:00

Using Templates to Manage a Site

Dreamweaver templates and library items are enormously important productivity tools. Templates make designing a large site fast and easy,and library items provide the extra control you need.

Templates are comprised of editable and locked regions. Editable regions, which can be modified outside the template, should be labeled for the type of content they are designed to hold. This will help content editors determine where specific content should be placed. Typically, all that is required is an editable region for the main content and editable regions for other content unique to different pages or departments of a company. You can create library tems for a departmental sub-menu, for instance, and place them in a designated editable region of the template to speed production, maintain appearance throughout the site, and decrease the chances of broken links. We ’re going to create a simple company Web page that contains a main menu and submenus that change based on the main menu item selected.

The base page and its main menu are managed in a template. The sub-menus are managed with library items. The main menu is locked so that changes made in the template update all pages to which the template is applied. The submenu library items are contained in an editable region so that the appropriate submenus can be placed on the actual pages. template has 10,000 plus web templates ready to use for your website.

DHTML Tabbed Interface

2008-11-15T07:17:00.000-08:00

Real world metaphors are an excellent means of conducting viewers through your web site. A study done by Microsoft showed that tabbed interfaces are one of the best real world metaphors. Literally every testee recognized what the tabs were and how to use them. Other advantages to tabbed interfaces are that they allow you to present a lot of information without requiring the viewer to scroll, they allow the viewer to keep track of the information they have already accessed, and they are visually pleasing. So why aren't they used on more Web sites? One reason may be that the tabs commonly used on Web sites do not behave the way the viewer expects them to. They are static. Nothing happens to the tabs when the viewer clicks on them.

Manomano band website is my sample for DHTML Tabbed Interface website.

First time as a graphic designer

2008-11-15T01:26:00.000-08:00

I was in Cebu when my first job as a graphic designer all started. My friends told me to apply at Golden ABC which happened to be the owner of my favorite casual wear "Penshoppe" and "Oxygen" clothing. On the day of my interview, I was so excited that almost my whole personality was inverted into a different me. I came there overdressed like I was going to attend a wedding ceremony. And on top of that I was wearing a pair of flat shiny shoes that never in my entire high-school life have I worn that. As an artist, I am comfortable wearing clothes that suite my mood. I wear anything which are complementary in colors-- maybe gray and black, black and white, orange and blue or maybe black all the way.

Anyway, my interview was quite impressive though my interviewee found me funny about how I dressed that day. The bottom line is that I was accepted as a graphic artist whose responsible was to design their posters, hang tags, packaging and bags. It was once in a lifetime experience because I got to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for the first time. Unlike at school, we just used Corel draw and paint for our graphic projects.

Big thanks to my mentor, Joe Talisic, for taking time to teach me how to use designer softwares such as Photoshop and Illustrator since it all started there to where I am right now.

Designer Introduction

2008-11-14T00:16:00.000-08:00

After I graduated in Bachelor of Fine Arts in Advertising Arts at the University of San Carlos, I have spent the past several years working in an industry developing and executing effective communication and design solutions. Areas of my specialization include web design, website structure, web development, banner ads, flash, corporate identities, collateral material, annual reports, brochures, print advertisements, packaging, etc.

I am a highly creative and motivated individual with more than 10 years of work experience. My ability to generate new ideas, analyze problems and develop effective solutions in a timely and professional manner allow my clients to achieve their vision with ease. Selected from over a thousand applicants to be one of the10 web designers and developers to be accepted to the Messageforce, Australia's number one web designer/developer and SEO company. I am fortunate enough from the start to be a part of such a highly recognized company that offers web design and development as well as search engine optimazation.

As a result, I have gained a strong understanding of the design principles and have become proficient with the current business and publishing software such as Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop(advance) and Acrobat.

I believe that my diverse experience and professionalism make me an excellent designer. I look forward to be working with you to meet your design needs.

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