I found this usefull tips if you want to start your own business.

1. Assess your entrepreneurial abilities. Learn the business side of design.
2. Assess your design skills. Acquire at least basic design skills and knowledge.
3. Develop a business plan. Plan your business and work your plan.
4. Choose a business structure. Assess the best business structure for your business.
5. Get the right software and hardware. Use the right tools for the job.
6. Set a price for your services. Calculate hourly and flat fee rates.
7. Choose a business name. Play creative name games.
8. Create a basic identity system. Make a good first impression.
9. Craft a contract. Never work without a contract.
10. Market yourself and your business. Get your name in front of potential clients.

working as a designer within a quite small advertising company has pros an cons.

and although we manage some great accounts, like emporiki bank and nike, we also have smaller customers with smaller marketing departments (if any ).

in my experience these smaller companies always have “special requests” and provide us with fewer materials.

today i’ve had to do a print layout for a company that has provided me with only some paper sheets stuffed with a loooot of information. and couldn’t give any electronic support for this information.

now i had 2 options:
- i should either rewrite all the information
- use some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to scan and import all the data.

within this post, i’ll show you what’s my favorite OCR software and how to use it.
i’m talking about abbyy finereader 7.0, and what i liko the most about it is that you can import really complicated schemes, chartes and tables.

1. after you open your scanned file, you should set the language the information is.

2. now, you have to push the read button and wait…

3. this is the final step: save and send doc

if you want to use it in indesign, here’s how you can import excel tables to indesign, import excel charts in indesign, and how to import word elements in indesign.

if you need more help with this, please post a comment

_________________
comment “working with ocr sotfware to save time”

so… the other day i’ve desided use a “portrait picture” for a layout.

the thing is that the subject in the picture looked… well… let’s just say… unprepared!
so i needed to do a facelift for the picture.

here is what i’ve started from:

and here’s what i’ve done:
- remove face impurities
- increase face luminosity
- change eye colour
- remove wrilnkles

and here’s the result:

and here’s a 2 min quite amusing video on how i’ve done it:
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cRClJEHXMc[/video]

_________________
comment “facelift in photoshop”

you get a faster trace in illustrator as you downsample, because this action results in a less complex image to analyze.

and yes, you should be concerned about the resolution, as it is the most important factor with this. but have no fear!
here’s what you get if you bring an image into Illustrator at the highest resolution possible:

so here’s how you can use live trace in illustrator:

1. select the placed image, and click the live trace button in the control palette to trace it; choose black and white logo. (make sure that preview is checked in the live trace options dialog box)

after you select the black and white logo option, you will see your logo in black and white, so everything’s ok! don’t delete anything!

2. if u see there just not enough details, we have to put more threshold or select the live trace options icon from the control palette. the standard threshold value is 160. you might want to increase (or decrease) this value…

3. in the adjustments box, select resample. and use the slider to quickly adjust the image resolution, or type in the image resolution desired. then view the results in your layout:

4. now… just click on the expand button and the vector is ready:

5. now you just have to give back the colours to your logo. do this simply by using the colour codes (cmyk, rgb or pantone depending on what you need the logo for) or by using the eyedropper tool (i’m not going to offend you and explain how to do this. but if you need help, please post a comment!

and your done with live trace. isn’t that great? you have a logo for you to use in any layout you want! HA!

_________________
comment “live trace in illustrator”

so… i’ve promised to give you the final result of the teahouse design for print project.

it seems that it is a quite known local in bucharest so the ad’s comes only like a reminder for customers. that’s why the text is only related to the name, the adress and tehouse’s tagline.

the teahouse is mainly targeted to bucharest’s expats so the text is english.

following this post, i will give you details regarding the “making of” (where to find pictures, how to process pictures, how to prepare your ad for print).

so… i’ve just received a new task: to create a visual ad for a teahouse downtown.
it will be published in print publications. the “free program guide” kind.

i don’t know now how it will develop, but stay close… i’m going to share it with you ;)!

see u soon!