The Freelance Masterclass: The Ultimate Guide to Freelancing

1. Course Preview: Are you ready to go freelance? Are you wanting to learn everything about how to become a successful freelancer? Are you interested in going from part time to full time are wanting to explore? This is a viable career option. This course is a special focus on creative freelancers are anyone who uses their creative skill sets in their craft? This includes graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, Web designers, UX designers and MAWR, although everyone could get a ton of this class even if you do not use creative talents in your line of work, this extensive course reviews all aspects of the freelancing process, including setting your business goals, creating your list of services and finding your target market. We will craft are freelancing story together to write effective bios, marketing copy and write a compelling mission statement. Way will learn what goes into powerful personal freelance branding will work through the brain storming of a local design, the creation of a letterhead and business card and learn how to create and use branded assets. To make yourself look incredibly professional and consistent. Way will learn the power of stellar port flues and had the best present your work and several different formats, including a PdF portfolio and Web based portfolio will even review had opposed to work to third party websites. Finding clients is the hardest part of freelancing and will spend plenty of time reviewing the many different ways to secure clients online, offline and on. Social media will learn to write fantastic bios and profile descriptions to present ourselves in the best way possible to potential clients. We even spend time creating an upward profile and learn how to use freelancer websites to find work efficiently. Pricing your work is essential to maximizing your earnings as a freelancer, and we'll learn several different ways to price. Your work will go over the benefits and downsides to both hourly and fixed rate pricing will find ways to help us create accurate and profitable quotes and even work through several practice quotes to get comfortable pricing Our work after finding clients sometimes working with clients could be Justus challenging on. We'll learn how to create contracts that properly protect us and talk about up front deposits, project scope and more. We even work through a contract together, and I provide a basic contract as a downloadable resource. We work through several negative client situations and talk about best ways to navigate those common client issues and finally will work through copyright issues As we review best practices for using fonts, photos and graphic Resource is for client work in projects. Managing your income in cash flow is vital to your success. Will discuss wind might be the right time for you to move from part time to full time freelance and maybe even win to quit your job. We also review cash flow basics and how to properly manage your income from month to month . This course is dynamic, and they'll be additional content added to the course. And speaking of downloadable resource is this course has more than Paul. My prior classes, combined with over 100 pages of written content downloadable on the nice bite size resource , is that go along with each section so you can work through the class with videos and resource is adding another level of engagement to this course. Are you ready to start adding value to the world who never thought was possible before? Are you ready to be your own boss or make your current freelancing side gig a bigger deal. I am more than excited and proud to present this freelance masterclass to you today. The best thing we could do is freelancers and stay in community with each other. And that's why all students of this course will have access to an exclusive student Facebook group where they could support each other, ask questions and will thrive together. So you ready to open up your world to freelancing Al, see you in the first lesson. 2. The Course Guide: welcome to the freelance masterclass, and I'm excited you decided to join me for this detailed and engaging dive into the world of freelance. I wanted to spend this horse guide reviewing the basic core structure and giving you tips on how best and move throughout the course. First of all, if you have access to Facebook, join the exclusive student Facebook group by typing in going freelance. Masterclass in the Facebook search bar are going to facebook dot com slash groups slash going freelance masterclass. I hope this group provides you with a lot of helpful community engagement and gives you an open, friendly place to connect with others who were trying or have gone freelance with their creative talents. This course is divided up into several different main sections. Make sure you download the resource is that are attached to this lesson, which will include the course outline here. This course outline is a basic checklist to help you see your progress as you move throughout the course. The second is a downloadable word, and PdF document that contains links to some of the resource is I mentioned throughout the class, and I refer to this document as the resource guide later on. In the course there are a ton of downloadable resource is referenced throughout this course toe. Access those on skill share. You can download them in the project section of the class. You will see them divided into different sections so you can download them as you move through each section. This course can be taken at your own pace and feel free to skip. Particular sections are lectures. If you already feel comfortable with that particular topic and feel free to take another look at the course outline and checklist to see if there's any lessons or topics that interest you the most. If you have a chance as you move throughout the course, I would love a review. Are you ready to get started now? I'll see you in the first lesson as we talk about creating our freelancing goals. 3. Setting Your Goals And Expectations: Are you ready to go freelance? What do your expectations and goals for going finance? This lesson will help you explore to create those goals and understand the positives and negatives of freelancing. The pros easily matched the cons in a freelance situation. And knowing the negatives, along with the positives can help you prepare for a successful freelance career. Walking down the street in my neighborhood, I see large, empty front porches and empty Sunday yards, and I wonder how much more time people spend away from home than actually enjoying it. What if I didn't have to put on that suit and make that long commute to work in the morning ? What if you could take his money, coffee or tea breaks as you'd like, and still be productive? How would you like to pick up your kids from school and not send them to after care? There many reasons why we want to pursue a freelance career. And those are just some of the main reasons. There are drawbacks, though. One of the most unexpected drawbacks in my 15 year freelance career is the isolation, working at home and not having other colleagues to bounce ideas back and forth to each other. There's also the issue of cash flow, which will study a little bit later in the course. Cash flow can be a bit unpredictable in the beginning two years, and having to budget more diligently to make it work for your family can be stressful. Even with its drawbacks, The biggest benefit to freelancing is being able to take charge of how you craft your work , the type of clients you work with and having total control over your own business. Freelancing if the same as being a small business. You take on the responsibilities of small business owners, like paying monthly or quarterly taxes, keeping track of all your accounting and landing new clients. It's all on around. But this could be freeing to those wanting and needing creative space to feel like they're adding something of value to the world on their terms. Freelancing does get easier with time, and that means your first year is the hardest, with many people dropping out finding clients. One of the more frustrating freelancing task can be arduous, but I can tell you it doesn't last forever. There are moments when you have enough steady work and client referrals were constantly finding new work is no longer your main task, and you could start to focus on being creative instead. The key here is that have reasonable expectations for your freelance career. Will you replace your current salary job? I sure hope so. And I hope to craft this course in a way to give you the best step forward. But nothing is a guarantee. Will you be able to work less? Perhaps, And the key to a great freelancer is maximizing productivity. This comes easier for us once we work at home with less distractions and then set up systems that work best for us and not those four systems we have to use in a larger company . For example, there's also new management of her jobs. There's nobody checking in to see for okay, and this could be harder for usedto having your performance reviewed and getting a good, steady raise each year. This could be a huge plus, though if you're a self starter who always prefer taking charge on their own with less boss supervision, insurance and benefits, or something you have to work hard for is a freelancer. Health insurance is something you need to purchase on your own with your own freelancing income. If your spouse or partner does not have a plan, at least that's the case for me in the United States. Even if you have provided health coverage in your country, you have to think about having your own retirement account and contributing money into that account. Monthly. There's no for a one K here. You have to set it up all on your own. As a freelancer, you need to be ready for days full of task. That might not include your paid client work, their tasks like creating and voices, proposals, giraffes, emails and other forms of communications like bookkeeping that may remain unpaid hours at a salary job. You're paid for all the work you do as a freelancer. There's things that can't be built to the client when we talk about pricing or service is a little later on in the course, we'll see why the average freelancers hourly rate is generally much higher than a salaried workers hourly rate after you break it down. You have noticed this when looking at freelancer websites and wonder how they're able to charge such higher rates the workers who worked for a company full time in the same industry. First things first. Let's set up some goals for your freelance business that are both realistic and grounded. I wanted to work through the goals worksheet to write down some of the goals you have for going freelance. Also, we want explore questions like, Do you want to pursue freelancing? Full time are keep it part time. How much money do I want to make? How many hours do I want to work each day? Do I work on the weekends? Download the worksheet and please. As you work through these worksheets and exercises, feel free to share with the student Facebook group or post in the community section. If you're willing or wanting to share others, your bowls as isolating us freelancing to be the best way to prevent the negative side of that is constantly staying in community with each other and with others in your industry, not only to share your work finding clients, but to share our dreams and frustrations 4. Creating Your Services List: Have you ever been to a restaurant? And they handed you a menu that felt more like a book full of hundreds of different options , and you're instantly overwhelmed by the choices. And it might have been given you a slight, panicked feeling. Clients get the same way when you have a long, extensive service list. It's good to be concise and focus on the type of services you think will bring the most value to your clients, but also be services you have a particular experience in or have a passion for take. For example, graphic design graphic design is a large field that can easily spread into other disciplines and services like Web design and illustration. When a client sees a huge long services list, they think two things. First off, they think they're jack of all trades but a master of none. There's no way they have stellar experience in all those different services or number two. They're desperate for work, and they're willing to do about any type of project. It's the 2nd 1 I most worried about in terms of presenting yourself as a top notch freelance contender, remember, they will always be considering other options and freelancers. Anything you could do to present yourself in the most professional way possible is vital. Instead of offering so many surfaces, perhaps narrowing it down to 4 to 8 main services might help you in focusing in on the types of services you'll provide. These will also be what you slowly want to specialize in as you continue to fine tune your freelance business. For example, if I list local design, branding, product package design and finally, print design all of those services air connected somehow and there's a good chance of client will need more than one, but they're not randomize services. The all require similar software and skill sets. I want you to work through the services list, guide a downloadable resource to find out and work through the top services you'll want to provide. This will also set the tone for how you craft your portfolio and website later on in the course, and what projects will come first in your portfolio presentation. The following tips Air for me Having a chance to look at hundreds, if not thousands of portfolios of freelancer websites, It's my time is art director in charge of hiring freelancers for various creative needs. These air the tips I wish they followed, and the ones who followed them quickly went to my short list of possible next contacts. First tip. Focus on services that can cross sell. This means one service will naturally lead to another. After the completion of one service. For example, Web design offering S E O services are working with another partner that also offers, so services might be mutually beneficial for you, your partner and the client. They know that they can take the next natural step in the process and know that you can continue to work with them outside. That initial need tip to keep her list assured us possible without hurting your total offerings right out. The reasons why that service deserves to make it to your services. List. Tip. Three. Be thinking about how you can best market thes services. Do you have a prior project or portfolio piece that can help you sell the service to a future client? Tip war. Be open to removing or adding new services as your client work progresses. Client demand shift with industry ships being open toe, adding new services and specializing in a new skill that you seem to notice an increase in client demand or something that you can add value to. I want you to work through the services less worksheet and create your own main services list. Those will be important to have on hand. As we continue to work through the course, build our website builder for you. It will definitely need some future. 5. Finding Your Target Market: like with any small business setting your target market is imperative and helping you find and locate the right clients for your services that you offer. Now that we developed our goals and we really worked on detail in the services will offer us a freelancer. Let's figure out what types of clients and what industries will need to market to. If I'm a Web developer and I create mostly custom coded solutions and coding for custom maps, I may want to think about focusing in on larger companies are medium sized regional businesses. As the demand for custom coded solutions are higher in those with larger budgets, small businesses and clients may not be able to afford a custom coded solution or app. Another example. If you're in illustrator who specializes in specific watercolor illustrations, and they want a target clients without a business and maybe target individuals who desire to have an illustration created or made. Same thing goes for photographers. For example, think about what type of photography like doing best. Find your target market based on the demand for that type of photography. Wedding photography will most likely be an end consumer or individuals and families product photography will most likely be hired by ad agencies or larger corporations. Knowing your target market early on will help us when crafting our portfolios and websites , and will help guide or design and layout decisions even how we write our sales language on our landing page and how we write our social media accounts that you can also affect how we do our paid marketing. If you decide to go that route as well. First of all, let's figure out what your target market will be. Mom and pop businesses. Ah, large company or anything in between. Let's say you're a graphic designer who has logo design and branding in their services list . I can have the potential of both smaller or larger sized clients. Businesses are even individuals winning logo work done when first starting your target market. It could be larger, and as you find your client base, you'll slowly be able to hone in mawr on your target market. There's a few questions you can ask yourself that will help you narrow this down further. What type of client would need my particular creative style if I have ah, high end clean, flat design style or illustration style or photography style. Perhaps targeting clients in a luxury retail high end real estate space might be helpful. Ask yourself, where is their demand for my services? Are there particular industries needing my service more than others? Retail shops are always needing logo and branding work also freelancers as well. Perhaps there's a way to fine tune my target market by exploring demand, and this is where a little detective work pays off. You could check out trending photography stock photo sites to see if you can pick up more popular styles and demands from people interested in needing photography or stock photos. Depends on your industry and what services you offer. What types of websites you think you can go to do that detective work. What type of budget do you need to hire me for a project or service? If I'm a Web developer, perhaps only in a minimum of $2000 to even start a project with me, that could help you narrow down your target audience simply because some types of clients may not be able to afford a website of that pricing to small mom and pop local businesses, for example, may not be your target market. There are several ways to break down the target market or demographic. I'm gonna go over some of them right now. Demographics can be broken down by age. Perhaps I want to target 20 to 40. Something's if I offer wedding photography services. If I offer custom T shirt illustrations, I may want to target the younger ages. There is a breakdown by income. Once again, budget plays a factor in this demographic. Some individuals, clients or companies may have smaller budgets, are income levels and others. And we'll touch on this a bit more. When we get to the pricing section of this course, there's a breakdown by location. Some of the guys wanna have a worldwide client base, while others, like those in the painting world, find it hard to ship. Larger finished products declined to our overseas. Also, working with clients and other countries can be more challenging in some industries than others. Web design is one of the services that seem to be more immune to this challenge. You also want to figure out if you want to target local clients at first or national, sometimes starting with a local target market can make marketing and networking a lot easier. Some local markets may not support your services, though, because of income or budgets in your nearby town, demographics can talk about client size, and figuring out the size of your client's companies or businesses could be a big help in crafting your target market. Your client may be individuals, families, small local businesses, regional businesses or even larger national corporations. Finding out the size of your desire client will also help you personally. Individuals and smaller companies are more compassionate with deadlines, and larger corporations can pay a lot more but be a little less forgiving of schedule changes. Things can also be helpful to know if you decide to do paid targeted marketing campaigns, and we'll talk about that a lot of it later in the course when we get to marketing, you can also break up your target market by interest, likes and dislikes. Through this goes back to matching with an industry that may demand your style. We all offer certain styles and our creative services and try to find ways to find target demographics that may desire or have a demand for you need your unique style or have a demand for the style. You wanna have a particular skill set in. There's a breakdown by gender, which your potential clients most likely be male female. Certain industries and styles may be overwhelmingly targeting one over the other, so you can check out your competition. Another way to fine tune your target market is to study that competition, and you may notice their client list on their portfolio seems to be targeting a particular industry. Also, add them to your social media feeds so you can constantly see what they're up to and how they're crafting their marketing paint campaigns to their clients to get some great ideas. Four profits are nonprofits. Finding out whether your target market will focus on non profits or for profit companies is helpful. Certain services favor one over the other for example, illustrations or year old work. Maybe more in demand for non profits in the area. Feel free to download the target market worksheet and see if you can come up with your basic target market for your freelance business. This, of course, can shift and change as you find new clients and slowly build up our business 6. Personal Branding - Branding Theory: this section will set the tone for the rest. Of course, as the personal branding aspect will be where we find our inspiration for the look, feel and message we send to our potential clients. The copper writing we create during this process can be used later on when we craft our portfolios and website. The logo created can be used on all materials we produce, including the invoices will be creating together as well. Branding is at the heart of any freelancers journey, and that's why, after we set our target markets and our goals, this is the next natural, essential step. First of all, what exactly is a brand and had a brands differ for freelancers and individuals and for larger corporations, a personal brand consists not only of the logo and symbol, but the freelancers, personal story experience, history, personality, unique selling point color palettes, stationary look, apparel, digital assets, portfolio styling and website presentation. Who? That's a lot, but your brand touches every part of your business. Think of the branding as an extension of yourself and your skill set. This means it may be more than just visuals. It can also be how you write your bio, the words and personality you bring and also how you present your work and the colors you choose. Strong personal brands exude consistency and everything they produce, even without a logo. You know, just by looking at the copyrighting styling personality who it might be, your personal brand should be unforgettable. Remember, people looking at your portfolio website will be looking at many more your brand. It can play a porton part of making you look polished and professional and helping you land the right clients with matching goals. I want to review the characteristics I see of strong personal branding. First of all, they have personality. They echo the freelancers, main talents and skill sets by presenting the freelancers unique style on full display. You want to attract clients, but you also want to find clients that will match with your style, not only to benefit the client's needs but defined projects that are fulfilling and rewarding for you as a freelancer. They are adaptable. Their logos and local marks can be used on all things and maintain the same quality. This includes small social media images, fabric, Khan's business cards and even email signatures. They make memorable experiences. They leave impressions on the viewer or potential client, not only in how they show their work, but how they craft their stories and explain their projects. They show a high level of professionalism. This means great grammar, spelling and sentence construction and all text shown their photos and photo worlds Resolutions are cropped properly. They present themselves in a professional manner and even in casual communications like email and texting, they nailed their target market. They appeal and define their target markets the way they build their logo down to their color selections. They know and understand how to appeal their target clients and their viewers. Now there were reviewed some fantastic examples of personal branding for freelancers. I now want to review the process of the personal branding timeline. It could be broken down into four main stages, crafting this story, creating the logo, creating brand assets and finally putting together your digital presence. We're going to work through a lot of these steps together. In this course, you can download this documents who can take a detailed look at some of the natural stages in the personal branding process. You do not have to complete them all, Not all freelancers. We're going to need a T shirt or certain social media graphics, But think of this as a general guide and it thinks about all aspects of the brand. I'll see you in the next lesson as we work on the first section, which will be crafting our story. 7. Personal Branding - Crafting Our Story: Each freelancer will have their own unique story to tell, showing off her style but also what has made you who you are as a creative and it could be helpful and selling yourself to potential clients finding clients is like dating and showing your true authentic self goes a long way in finding clients with a foundation rooted in trust. We want a craft, her story with their skill set in mind. What inspired us to become creative artist, designers, photographers, Web designers? Was there someone who inspired you to make you who you are today? Is there someone who motivates you to go out on your own and make it as your own boss? Be thinking about those questions. We begin to craft our stories together in this downloadable worksheets. First of all, let's get the tough part out of the way. Let's develop a mission statement. A mission statement is a small 123 Senate's description of what you do and you're freelancing goals as an online instructor, an example for minus to teach the world design and interesting and passionate ways by use of video, student challenges and engagement with my students as you could see, it's one longer compound sentence. Some of the best mission statements are quick one line phrases, because being able to reduce your business model until one sentence is a true test of having a simple, viable service or product. Here are some examples of mission statements of larger corporations that are simple unifying, and they explain their entire business model and such a short time effectively. Life is good to spread the power of optimism. They sell motivational T shirts and apparel of varying kinds, but yet they don't mention apparel. They mostly mentioned their main goals to spread the power of optimism. This leaves their company mission statement over open for change as they add new products and services. Their mission statement never has to adopt or change. It's evergreen, as they say. Another example for the company. Uber, we ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion. You'll notice a theme here about not focusing so much on the services, but the feelings, emotions and goals of the company they use. The word opportunity and not once is the word Khar mentioned. It's a car ride sharing company. You think this would be critical in their mission statement. But as they add new modes of transportation, their mission statement never needs to shift or change with it. For Adobe Onley, Adobe gives everyone from emerging artists to global brands everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. And, oh, Bees Mission Statement takes another direction and talks about the unique advantage over its competitors. They mentioned how they're the only ones who give artists everything they need to deliver digital experiences. They do not go on to list how they do it, but just that they do offer such a wide variety of products, and they do it very well. So maybe after all this mission statement research, I should revisit my own mission statement and Aiken simplify it even more. Perhaps I can revise this to focus more on my main goal and motivation unless on exactly how I do that. How about to teach the world design and interesting and passionate ways by providing unique , engaging student experiences? This leaves my business open to change without ever having to change the core values or mission statement. I can use video expanding toe workshops and not once. Well, I have to change my statement Let's head on over to the downloadable worksheets and see if he can craft your own mission statement. Then we can move on to creating and writing our bio and story where we can go deeper into the type and style and methods we use. Try writing your mission statement using little words as possible. Keep it no longer than three total sentences and constantly find ways to reduce the length to say more with less. So now that you read in a small, concise mission statement, we'll get more detailed information about your services. Are yourself and a story and bio bios can be boring or an incredible read your the key qualities. I see a great entertaining and rich bios. They are honest and authentic. This is taken from one of my favorite online design instructors, Aaron Drop Lynn. He's raw and authentic, and its approach feels like a real person that matches his brash spunk and realistic approach to design. They're never too long and difficult to read. I have seen some long freelancer bios in my day, and if it's longer than two paragraphs genuine, do not read the last half. It's the realism of trying to grab people. Some people are more gravitated toward motion pictures, photos and less of text. And that's why crafting and writing a bio that is short, manageable is critical. I try to keep my less than a three minute read that leads into the next one. They get to the point quickly by the end of the third sentence. A great bio already. Communicate several things your name, your main goals and your motivations and what you do. Not everyone list their services on their portfolio. Sometimes the bio is the first time of you, or we'll see exactly what you do and have it listed. Make sure you communicate that quickly if your photographer communicate that in the second or third sentence at the very minimum. Also, if you're a jack of all trades and participate in multiple disciplines, try focusing first on the one that you're looking for clients in. So if your photographer designer Web designer extraordinaire, try focusing on Web design of those of the type of clients you're seeking first and foremost, once your BIOS written, we've already written the bulk of what you will have on your portfolio and Web page. It seems kind of tough at first working through these first the lessons of the course. But once we get to creating riel tangible items and marketing products for a freelance business, the core hard work will already be done. Lastly, we need to write our copy and headlines for marketing. These can be one or two liners that can make great Facebook ad post headlines, Great poster headlines basically copy that could be written to grab people's attentions toward our services that exist on a rod wide variety of platforms. All the above mission statements, bios and attention grabbing headlines and even your services list can also be used in your portfolio or on freelancers. Websites like up work dot com to grab clients of tension. We will be crafting an upward portfolio together, and we'll go into even more detail on how to piece all of this together on the site as well as many other sites. So establishing your values and your culture, this last section will establish our values and culture. Is there something special or unique you stand for? Do you use sustainable paints as an illustrator? Do you donate any proceeds to a charity as a photographer, Do you value hard work and honesty? All of these things play important parts and crafting that brand story because it's not a just about who you are, but what we stand for and also the type of work culture we want to represent. Work culture is for more than just larger companies. It could be for a single employee business like you as a freelancer. Also, freelancers rarely work alone in the long term. There's usually collaborations that happen when you start to take on larger clients, how you work with those and other individuals and client's consent, the tone for your company for years to come. Once again, working through this worksheet can get a lot of the hard work out of the way now. So when it comes to creating those many promo items will create together in this class. It will go much, much quicker now that we have processed through all of this. Now that we run down our story bio, another necessary text. Now it's time to focus on my favorite things about branding the visual side of things and the inspirations behind it. 8. Personal Branding - Creating Our Inspiration Boards: where one step closer creating our visual brand and logo inspiration boards or mood boards is another name. Our ways of gathering photos, colors, textures to put together a tapestry of what we think best represents us as a creative freelancer. These photos come make up ones you can download for free online, like from pixels dot com. These images can also be your own artwork. If you're an artist or an illustrator or even a graphic designer, that could be your favorite typefaces or fonts. They could even be. Textures are metallic colors you think best represents your style for the demonstration. I'm gonna happen to a program called Camp. They currently offer a free basic account, but I find camp a great way to put together quick inspiration boards. But you can use about any photo editing program you choose. This course will focus less on teaching the actual software and more on crafting the ideas behind creating our personal brands. So I'm here on pixels dot com, and there's tons of free photo up sites you can check out. I'm gonna list that and the resource guide so you could find out all sorts of places you can source your photos for your brand board inspiration. So I'm here right now on pixels, and I'm just kind of flipping through the generic photos. Of course, I can always search and find Tune the kind of photos I'm looking for. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to find what I think would resonate with my own personal style, my own personal brand and my target audience. So I'm thinking about a few things as I'm going through here, and I'm looking at colors as well because we're really gonna drive our color palette and brand color inspirations from some of these photos. So I got to think about that as well. So I'm just gonna scroll through here already. Have a couple downloaded that I wanted to check out. You can also do textures as well. Textures, colors, people, anything that you think would resonate with your brand. It doesn't just have to be a photo. Could be all sorts of different things. So I'm gonna scroll down here. I've got one. Had downloaded that the white brick. I thought that kind of resonated with the style I wanted to kind of an urban style I wanted to go with and just kind of going round. If you like gold, if you like. You know, this is really a personal journey for you, figuring out what you think would resonate. Also downloaded several, um, Leaf are dark nature photos because I really love the greens and I want to see if I can pull out some of those greens in my brand and also purples just anything that I personally like. This is different than branding for a company, because when you brand for a company, you're thinking about the consumer. And in this case we are thinking about our target market. We are thinking about our client, but we're also thinking about our own personal style that we get Teoh portray in our brand . So I'm gonna be over here in Canada dot com. I'll see there in a minute. So the great thing about Camba is their ability to have all these pre made photo templates . We could make a pretty good brand board quickly by kind of dragging those photos over, and they have a free canda. It's not. The Campbell for work is the paid monthly subscription to Campbell, which you get a lot of extra things, but there's also a free version off camera that you can sign up for and do this step. You don't have to use Campbell. I just recommending this as a great tool for freelancers because it's free and easy to use . And it could also create social media, graphics, posters, fliers. There's a lot of great reasons to kind of have a camera account, so I recommend you checking it out. But you could also use photo shop illustrator, any old program to kind of put there, put together your brand board. So I'm gonna go ahead and find what I think would be enough photos to properly represent a brand and pull some colors out. I'm thinking anywhere from 6 to 10 photos. Of course, this is really personal to you if you have 50 photos you really want to pull from. But I'd like to simplify and make this choice a lot easier. So I'm just gonna flip through this and try to find what I think would be a really good layout for my brand board. So I found when I thought that would work really well and I went and uploaded several. The photos that I found that I thought really resonated with Lily and Hernandez is kind of personal brand that were starting to build for her. So she's trying to appeal to She's just getting started. So she's trying to appeal to a broad audience. So not really a specific target yet because she's still trying to develop that. I know she really loves those teals and blue color, So that's something she really wanted to have in her brand. Gonna go and drag a few of these, I think would really work well on this is kind of she likes to brainstorm and sketch out her logos and as a graphic designer. So I thought this would really be helpful. I'm gonna go ahead and find a few others here. I really loved this kind of texture here. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in on this. You can really see that texture. And she really, uh, really prefers this orange color. So we're gonna go ahead and focus that cause that could be a chance for us to pull out some secondary brand colors in that particular texture. So you notice how he zoomed in on that because we have it zoomed out, it gets too detailed, and you start to lose the essence of what you're really trying to focus on, and that's gonna be the texture. So let's go ahead and focus on what's the most important, because that's how we're deriving our inspiration from her brand board. Another thing was these dark green nature leaves. That was something that really resonated well, so we can kind of keep that as as is this Robin Blue? There's a lot of blues and Thiel's that we want to maybe derive some colors off of someone's gotta zoom in on this eggs. We can maybe get kind of some of that color out there. Also, this blue door was a huge inspiration, especially because of the teal in that really nice cream color. So that's something we can have in there as a part of the brand theme and also featuring previous artwork or design work or illustrative work or Web design work. Whatever freelance activity you do kind of putting some previous client work in their personal work and also help your brain board because you have a particular style or you have a style you wanna have going forward with your clients, so it's always nice to incorporate some of your prior work, so that could be a part of your brand board. If you already have some personal work or even some paid work, um, you can go ahead. Incorporate that and remember, it could be textures. It could be colors. It could be anything that you find or derived a brand inspiration from. So in this case, that little bit of silver could be something that were inspired by feel free to incorporate . Certain typography are font usage that you really appreciate. If there's a certain way that typography is done, are certain font choice. You can also incorporate that into your brain board as well. Are you catering to individuals or companies? All these factors play a part in the colors we choose. I'm including a color psychology chart to give you a rough idea of some of the emotions and reactions we can evoke with color. Certain colors air stronger like reds and warm colors, while other colors are naturally more calming and relaxing. And I go over a lot of this in detail in my local design, a mastery course, So we have our little brand board that we're gonna get started with. I'm gonna go ahead and bring this into a color dot adobe dot com, which is another great resource. I'm also could include that into the resource list, so feel free to check that out for all sorts of great resource is, this is great, because I'm able to really pick the colors that I need and source that from the photos. I've done this in other classes. If you take in some of my other design classes, I do this a lot when it comes to trying to find and derive colors. Ah, from inspirational photos, as opposed to trying to derive and pick colors out of nowhere. It really is kind of a helpful starting guide, so I'm on color dot adobe dot com. I got to go to extract from Image. I believe this is free to use a so long as you don't need to download anything, but I don't think we need to do that. So once you load your photo and it'll automatically populate with a color palette that they think are the strongest colors. But you can mainly manipulate thes any way you want to go and drag these around and try to find and source the color that way. So if I this a really helpful tool to kind of customizing your color palettes. And let's say they focus heavily on this image and you wanna drag one over and focus on this door, which was really important image for Lillian, so I'm gonna drag that over to the door. You also find off white, subtle color. So if you want to have some whites and creams, you can also maybe drag this over, and he could source a color that way, so kind of get it can like light grey that can help. You kind of choose those colors as well, just a really helpful tool. There's kind of the color palette we have so far, and of course, you can extract using a color mood so you could do colorful, so that would be your colorful colors. I'm your brights, muted deep darks. And of course, none of you could do your own custom so you can go over to color will appear on that were left there just recently redesigned. This whole thing's It's a little bit different, a little bit more efficient. Um, this is the standard color wheel. So this is the color palette that we brought in. And if you scroll down, it will give you all the hex codes and different items that you'll need. So these air hex codes, HEX codes will be important. When you build your online portfolio thes air the codes we need to do to do a digital representation on your website of that particular color. So any time you see a hex code input, this is where you can find those hex codes. You can also do RGB modes and also go ahead and click on some of these and go ahead and give you all of the C M y que and RGB color. So it should be helpful if you're gonna be really doing print and digital items and doing more of the design work with a lot of your stuff. So it's very helpful way to find colors. So when I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and start with hex codes and bringing all my head's has hex codes in the program of my choice, which would be Adobe illustrator and I'm just gonna really put together and finish up my brand board. It looks a lot like this. So that's kind of when I finally came up with in terms of color selection, and it's kind of have some circles there with Put it in, put it in the hex code from color dot Adobe and I was able to find the perfect shade and perfect match for these. So now we have our brand board mood board source, some color ideas. Course none of these colors or final until we get a final brand together, cause as we test out some of these colors when they need to go back and find, too in them and tweak them. Maybe we were a bit aggressive with the orange. All these little things need to be figured out when we actually start to put together our logo and practical branded items. 9. Personal Branding - Creating Our Logo: way have our inspiration board or brand board. We could start to sketch out this concepts for a local design. You'll be our main focal point for our personal branding project, since you already defined your target market and created your inspiration board. Sketching out ideas for a logo and picking out our colors and fonts will go a lot quicker. Now that we have a basis of who we're designing for, there are many directions we can go in with their logo design. This class will focus more on the branding aspect and less on the technical steps we need to go through using software. I have many classes that focuses solely on local design and software, like Adobe Illustrator and even free Cloud Brace programs like Camba if he wanted to get into the technical side of do it yourself local design and branding. First, we want to sketch out our concepts and ideas on paper or digital, sketching app before we make it a reality. There's many of you out there that may not have any graphic design, background or experience, and you may prefer hiring a designer to turn your concept into a real vector usable local design. Perhaps you're an illustrator or a photographer or a Web developer, and design is not your strong suit. Hiring another freelancer or designer could be an overwhelming task. So I created this downloadable guide that gives you a lot of tips and tricks on places to start searching for a designer or freelancer and also what to look out for when doing so For those who are graphic designers, this could be helpful to look at, too, as it gives you some great inside and to what other small business owners are looking for. And great designers. If you decide to hire another designer to create your logo, are branded assets, make sure you send them some work we have done prior, including your mission statement, your target audience sketches, inspiration boards or brand boards. Those will be very helpful to the designer that will be helping you craft your personal brand. So let's sketch out some rough ideas on paper. I'm gonna be using a digital sketching app called Procreate, which you can use with your apple iPad, an apple pencil for this demonstration. Why you're sketching out ideas? Think about your target audience along the way are you targeting and high end clientele? If so, that might change the look and feel of your logo. Would your target audience appreciate a detailed, illustrative style? Also, be thinking about the different type of logo styles. When you're sketching, some of you may want to leave this up to a professional designer are try a hand at this yourself if I have a few downloadable resource is one is called the Logo Types and Styles Cheat Sheet, which goes over some of the basic logo design types. Personal branding for freelancers is a bit different than branding for a company that I talked about before. First of all, personal branding his well, it's very personal. It's about you and your unique style and what you're gonna bring to the market. I find the best freelancer Lobo's put the freelancers style on full display, and you can echo similar colors you use in your work like we just arrived from our brand board. In the lesson. Prior branding and logo designed for companies tend to focus on the product or service and a personal freelance branding, we want to focus on yourself in your personality. Remember that being authentic and true to your own unique style, cells yourself better to the right clients. Remember how finding the right clients is kind of like dating. We want to make sure we represent ourselves to the client and the most accurate way possible. And the style you choose for your local design and the layout is a great way to show that style. So what about names? Freelancers can either stick to their personal name, so, in my case, Lindsay Marsh or they can create a freelancer company name. I recommend using your personal name. If you plan on remaining independent with your client worker projects, that means you work mostly with yourself and working in collaboration with others, but not really function as a growing company or agency. For example, I would recommend using a company name are not your personal name. For those who want to eventually grow into a multi employee company down the road, look back at your freelancing goals that you establish earlier. Maybe these could help you decide what might be best for you. The great thing about sticking to your name at first is building up name recognition for our case with Lillian. We could be sticking with our personal name for now. You can also include your official title is part of your logo that could make sure you clearly communicate with surfaces you provide. For example, is a Web designer making sure that is clearly communicated with text below. It could be Assemble an icon, a tagline some way to tell the viewer what you do in your logo. You may even provide multiple services like Web design and photography, and being able to communicate through that in your logo through a type or a tagline is critical and showing a client right away who you are and the kind of services you can provide for them. It's not required, but it's a nice inclusion and a strong logo design for freelancers. When sketching out your ideas, find icon symbols illustrations that can represent what you do and help brainstorm concepts . For example, it could be the pin to Elin Adobe illustrator. For a graphic designer, for example, this is a tool that she used every day in her profession, so it makes a lot of sense of including in her logo, just for an example. Do not overdo it on brainstorming for those of you were wanting to go as far as possible, creating your own logo and branding. Try coming up with three viable concepts you want to develop further using vector software , every logo needs to eventually be created and vector format. There are many great vector programs like Affinity Desire, which is a cheaper version. Or, if you have the Adobe creative suite. Adobe Illustrator. You may also want a higher aircraft designer to take on your rough sketches and create that vector format for you. Affinity designer is that cheaper solution and only costs around $50 just a one time fee for those wanting to give this a try on their own and not hire a graphic designer. You can even put together a logo using camba, which is a cloud based free design tool that allows you to put together simple logos, although it is a little bit limited. So now that we were able to sketch out three different ideas and concepts, I'm gonna go to a step further and make these air reality and vector for back and Adobe illustrator 10. Personal Branding - Logo Construction: adobe illustrator right now, and I'm going to vector rises Asset. This is for those who are designers who are already comfortable with Adobe Illustrator and you want to be able to affect arise your idea or your rough sketch. I'm gonna go ahead and start to begin and I'm not gonna get into too many details because then I'll start to be teaching a design class and not a freelance glass. I want to show you a little time lapse of all the steps it took to kind of make this a reality and make it our finished logo. Of course we haven't applied Are color palette yet. We're gonna be doing that next. A little trick when you vector rise your sketch or you make it kind of a real vector logo object would like to bring in my rough sketch. It could be a J peg, a PNG. You can export it from anything. You could take a picture with your phone if you sketch it on a traditional paper or pen and paper and you can bring it in. And I like to put it on its own layer and also like to reduce the transparency a little bit so that when I do start to sketch with it, our sketch on top of it, it doesn't try to get in the way when I sketch on top. So I'm gonna reduce the transparency, gonna go and lock that layer so I don't accidentally move it. I'm creating a new layer to go ahead and Becht arise everything. So I'm gonna recreate everything you circle shapes the pin tool to draw and put the type on here is well, we owe fonts. Typefaces can make or break your logo, for example, noticed these two logo's using different typefaces. One is a bolder sand surf. Whether other one has lighter strokes and thinner lines and has serifis. There's little details at the ends of the letters. It's amazing how just a small font change and a logo changes its mood and style. The serif typeface looks more high end and elegant, while the boulder type choices more approachable. In modern, I have included a downloadable resource called the Font Styles Guide. It will go over some great font type or font choices for certain styles you want to set. For example, if you're looking for an approachable typeface that Cater caters to a younger clientele. Perhaps a few of these font choices my work just some small suggestions out there as there are thousands upon thousands of fonts to choose from Google fonts is a great place to find free open source fonts. We'll talk about photo and fought licensing a little bit later in the course, but just make sure you have the proper license for font usage, which will be for commercial use as you're using it for a personal small business has another quick reminder. All of the links software and external resource is I mentioned. The class will be listed in the resource guide that is accessible in the beginning of the course as a downloadable word doc and PDF. So some suggestions for you with the font styles guide, but you'll know when you come across the right phone for your personal brand. Some personal brands with taglines will want or need to use two different types of fonts. How do you know which to fonts? Pair well together. I've included another resource called the Font Pairing guide, which gives you some didn't general direction on pairing two different typefaces or fonts together in one logo. A few tips while you create your personal brand and make sure that your font choice is very readable and it's very easy for small text to get lost. And remember, your logo may have to be seen at small sizes on invoices, so make sure everything is readable at those small sizes. Try not to use too many font types. Try to keep it to 2 to 3 fund choices at a maximum. Too many will overwhelm, and it could look a little unprofessional in some cases back when you're sketching out your logo, make sure you plan out your logo layout. Do you want to include an established date? Do you want have a tagline? If so, what's it going to be? Do you want your title listed your full name, including your middle name or just your first and last name? The more you include them or other local types might work best for you. For example, a seal logo might work best for a freelancer, for example, whose including three different phrases in your main logo like our example of Lillian Hernandez. You need to think about the logos. Flexibility can be seen very small, but cannot look good in just one color. How does it look printed out now that you have a good basis off your basic local design. Now we're gonna do some brand extension and take that local design and put it on all sorts of items and really create an amazing brand presentation. 11. Personal Branding - Brand Assets: good branding takes a more complex logo and can simplify it further to be able to exist on its own. For example, Lillian's logo can be simplified to exist as a smaller icon. For example, we can then take this icon and creative background watermark to use as background for letterheads. This takes our finish logo and takes to the next level branding. Not only do we have a full logo, but we can also develop this. Icons illustrations What they say is brand assets that can be used on our website, letterheads and voices and little creative details and flair to help further communicate our style and personal preferences. Maybe there's a consistent texture that is used throughout all of your materials. There could even be a series of shapes or geometric shapes that are used as common supporting graphics to help to continue to elevate your brand theme across all channels. Are you a designer who focuses on icon designed, For example, you could create an entire series of personal icons and create a pattern background for use on all materials, giving your brand a consistent matching feel. Once again, if you're hiring someone else to create this for you. Make sure you share your thoughts and ideas with them on this Justin example. If you're a photographer, maybe you can share your personal favorite photos, and maybe they can create a background graphic to use the branded asset. Your task is to create several branded assets you can use alongside your logo. This could be a background texture separator bars, for example, or icons you can use. These assets will come in handy as we create your business cards and other branded materials and future lessons. You could start to incorporate some of those headline phrases we developed in the gold section of the class. Those headline phrases will be great for Instagram ands. The business cards will be creating together in the next lesson before we start creating a few example assets for our brand. Holien Hernandez. I wanted to go over a few tips When creating your brand assets. Make sure there's a consistent theme throughout your logo and branded assets. This will make your brand cohesive and interesting noticed similar color usage throughout thes branded elements. Did you notice a similar treatment to the style of typography as well? Make sure these asset elements are in separate files, so you can use them independently for a multitude of situations. This maybe more. For those who hire someone to create their personal brands, you have all the icons of separate files. Some case need to use one when creating another branded marketing material. You'll have all those assets and a nice, neat folder and ready to access. Don't be afraid to be creative. Remember, we're developing personal brands for creative freelancers. Be bold. Find your style and maximize it. This is the chance to be creative with branding. Not everyone gets his chance as the only limits you set are the ones you set for yourself. So now we're gonna create a braiding standards manual for our freelancing company. Branding standards are a little bit different than inspiration boards, branding standards, or sometimes they're called branding manuals or guides, outlines and overviews your entire brand. This helps to explain to others who may be creating assets for you how to use your brand assets and logo. It also explains in details your color palette and went to use certain colors. It will show the many different formats in which your logo can exist, including single color, full color and other variations that might be used for different situations. It also show what bond choices are suitable for use when creating your branded materials, including a headline are a larger sized font as well as what fought to use for your smaller body copy. These also show any other branded assets like textures, patterns, icons and more. I find great branding standards. Manuals include a few finished designs, including a business card or social media post. Just to show how these branded assets are being used and how to properly use them. I wanted to show you how messy it is to create all your brand assets in your local design. So this was just the logo concept. Process was really trying to find the right fonts and try to find the right fought peering . It took some time to figure out what colors I wanted to use is Well, I tried out quite an array of different colors. I tried bright colors. I tried to bring out the colors for my inspiration board to try to pull things there, and so I kind of settled on that green teal color that I pulled from the Inspiration Board . But I started to develop icons and patterns, just having an area to play around with and really produced some ideas and concepts for my brand assets. Do you kind of see this kind of mess I created trying to think of some, maybe some icons that I thought really connected with what she does, which is a graphic designer. I just have some basic tools, like lay out the pin tool little typography element there, like she works with type A lot and also kind of the color wheel type area. So just kind of coming up with some generic icons at all. I did this all on Adobe Illustrator. Of course, you can use offended a designer. You can hire a designer a lot of different ways. You can approach this, but I thought I wanted to kind of show you a little bit of the mess that it took. I also made a pattern using the pattern tool in Adobe Illustrator. To be able to create that pattern, I thought would be great to have a really neat branded asset that I can put on backgrounds and in this area. I was still trying to figure out how to best overlay that texture on top. This was kind of what I came up with. I don't think in the end, I ended up going with something a little bit more clean, but just some ideas that were running through my head. I want to kind of show you my raw process because a lot of people, I don't know a lot. Instructors just showed the finish polish stuff, But I wanted to show you the messy stuff because this is what it's like when you're creating brands, it gets messy. There's a lot of different versions and generations you have to go through to find that final design. So this is kind of my rough play area where I'm figuring all this out. I'm gonna take a lot of this and put it together and a really nice brand presentation, and we're gonna be doing that with our brand manual, which is going to be right over here. So this is the brand manual that I settled with. You can kind of see how I have the color palette have the choices. I've found the inspiration there. I'm also including that as a part of my brand presentation, and we have a couple different versions of the logo like we talked about a little earlier. There's a single color version, and it can exist and a lot of different primary colors of the brand so it can exist in the teal. It can exist as a watermark, which is kind of a lighter gray color. It can exist on the back of a letterhead. You could put this very easy to read. Still text on top. So just kind of laying out the different arrangements of logos. And you know what happens is when you start to develop your website, your portfolio, your business cards. You'll start to use this logo, and you might run into some limitations. And that's great because you can always revisit your brand manual and add different versions of your logo. And so, for example, when we create our profile are online portfolio. We're gonna have some limitations with a round seal logo because they don't always fit nicely on a top of a website in the header area. So we're gonna need to create a really simplified non seal version of the logo so we can be able to have multiple applications of our logo, and that's gonna be very common with almost any logo. Not every logo's gonna fit perfectly in that one format, so we're gonna be developing that a little bit later to make sure that we have a horizontal version of the logo so we can work in digital formats so you can see kind of the iconography. Icons are not required. I just like to have them because, you know, it's kind of nice to have a Siris of icons just for this particular person. I found it to be nice and also secondary colors not required. What I did is I wantedto pull for my inspiration board. Some of those colors that I found that were didn't did not end up his primary colors, but I thought, What if, for some reason, those colors are not working out for that particular for matter? Add, you know I don't want to be stuck with these cool colors when I really want to have a high impact color. And so that's why I chose some secondary colors that I thought were alternatives. If I felt like a particular ad needed to be much more brighter and vibrant and eye catching , and so just kind of developing a secondary color palette. And I have the hex codes underneath just so I can copy and paste those hex codes. Whenever I start to develop online assets, I can copy and paste, and I have a document I can go to an easily access. That stuff can further expand on the brand assets, including the background texture I created when you create something settled enough where I can put text on top and it doesn't fight with it too much. And also you wanna lay out your typography plan or your font plan. So what type of fonts can you uses their multiple fonts that you can use in your brand? Is there one you use for headlines? And is there one that use for secondary lines? Is there one you use for body copy if you have long blocks of copy? This is great for your digital website, but it's also great when we create your pdf portfolio and other kind of assets. We can kind of have this set up so you have kind of a font or typography plan so you can literally copy and paste from this area can drag this over you. You know what type face is gonna be? This one's bitten Sands and the soon's commuter Sands light, so I can already have that establish. It's easy for me to go ahead and pick those as I start to develop the branded assets and also application on darker backgrounds. It's always great to think about that. I go through that in a lot of my design courses when we're developing brands and logo designs, how important it is to have your logo be as flexible as possible. That means it needs to work on darker backgrounds or so many situations where you're on a social media site and they have a dark background and you're forced to use it. This is great to have that option. You're not limited. You're not stuck in a box with your logo design. Also, we have invoices. I'm just kind of this is a great way to show kind of how our brand and brand manual can be applied to an actual product. So I decided to come up with a mock and voice. Of course, we're gonna talk about invoicing software later in the class, and there's some limitations with what you can design on some of them. Some of them, like QuickBooks, is very flexible. You can design a really custom invoice and some of them, like ZIP books, which is a free invoicing tool. They'll allow you to change your header. They might allow you to put a logo, but they're not gonna allow this kind of custom look, So But I went ahead and kind of put one together, just in case. And just to kind of help to practice, brand extension and help to kind of show. How do I handle type and text and layout? How do I use the texture? Are there any kind of things that can apply to other branded assets? So in this case, I have this kind of line system here was able to keep contact information was great about developing. This is once we develop a few items. So we're gonna do a social media post and a business card. Next. Once you develop a few items, you can copy and paste a lot of those to keep the same look and consistency. So when you already developed a first wife, I can copy and paste this little chunk of text, and I can easily apply it to a business card. So here's the business card. I applied kind of the same information and kind of the same style with the lines. So we're starting to develop that you can't develop your entire branded campaign without having to do riel projects. So sometimes you have to go back and revisit your brand, and that's okay. That's a very normal part of the branding process is going back, maybe adding a new logo and your style, maybe tweaking something because when you start to apply it to other assets that maybe didn't work. And so it's a back and forth creation process. And don't be afraid. If you kind of messed up and said, Oh, my logo doesn't is not working well there you could find a way to adapt it or have a different version that works on. It's all part of the process 12. Personal Branding - Creating A Business Card: So now we need to apply the personal brand to a multitude of items. And this class I'll walk through the creation of two very important items. A business card and a letterhead will talk about the paid and organic social media, post design and other types of digital design A little bit later. In the marketing section of this course, business cards may seem outdated to some. But when it comes to working and finding local clients, having a physical card to hand out really helps with remembering who you are and even jotting down quick notes about your conversation. When we start talking about finding clients, I will emphasize heavily how important local networking is. The business card is your golden tickets is starting conversations but also providing something they can walk away with and remind them to follow up with you. Your task is to create either a single side or double side business card for your personal brand. There's no requirement to what to include on a business card. MMA. Commonly, you'll find basic contact information like phone, email or website. I like to include something interesting about my business. Maybe my main headline or phrase that defines who I am, what I do and how I do it better than the next guy or gal. Business cards are small, so this does not lend itself to big paragraphs of text. So use this real estate wisely to say more with less. There are all sorts of lovely effects you can apply to your business cards, every using an online printing company like mood dot com. You could apply a wonderful gold or silver foil stamping to give your logo or another brand asset a nice high end shine. During the process of creating your first few marketing items, you'll start to work out certain layouts, font sizes for particular things like I mentioned earlier. For example, working with this contact information, I created a unique way of dividing the lines to display the information. This pairs well with the elements in my logo to there's a little bit of a theme there. I could take this arrangement and use that on the letterhead layout or the business card layout displaying the same information. This is gold brand consistency. Using those similar layouts and different situations, remember, use your textures. Icons patterns are other brand assets and find ways to incorporate those to continue that brand consistency. This example I'm using the repeat pattern I created from a few custom icons I created to create that subtle background to complement the logo. Those who are illustrators or photographers may wanna feature your own work paintings, photos, illustrations to show that style, whatever might capture the attention of your target client or make them happy we could start to notice our theme. Throughout the items were creating. We can easily apply this style of many different items. T shirts are a great way to start conversations with people while you're out and about networking or just living your life. I had a brand T shirt with my logo and tagline on it, and the landed several clients just by living my normal life. People are interested in what you are and what you do and what is on your T shirt. They're intrigued by it, and so they ask you naturally, some follow up questions. So now that we developed our logo and some brand assets, what file? Four months do I need to have these in? We're gonna be doing this yourself for hiring another person to do this part for you. This is the four months I like to have my logos or brand assets in, if possible, logos. I'd like to have these in smaller J pegs. Larger P and G's P and G's can have transparent backgrounds. I would like to have these in vector format, so it's simple dot ai or illustrator file or a dot E P s. If using another program is great if you're getting your logo printed at a custom promo items, a vector file is usually requested. Buy a printing company, so it's nice to have one of those on hand. We'll be uploading all of these exported PNG and JPEG files that we have of our brand assets so we could start to put together a sample business card front back. We're gonna be doing that and Adobe Illustrator, but you could put this together in any programme of your choice. Once again, these lessons focused less on using the software as many of you guys will be using different software or some of you will be hiring someone to do these designs for you. I'll focus more on how to extend your personal brand other areas and less on graphic design , as this course is focused on, freelancing and getting that personal brand are ready to go. If you're interested in knowing how to use Canberra and detail on how to create your entire Brandon Camba, I off offer a branding course for non designers. Do it yourself non designers. I also offer courses in all the adobe software. If you're interested in doing all this and adobe software. Okay, we're ready. We have all these brand assets we can pull from, and you're gonna be doing that as you create all the different assets you'll need. You may not need a business card, but you're going to need some kind of contact information, whether it's in the email signature or some kind of way to display all your vital contact information. So let's begin. We have a two sided business card front and back. I went ahead and pulled our headline thing. Wasn't kind a little bit more generic that I'd like it to be this headline, but they're sell well, more that I developed in that brainstorming process in the gold section of the class, where is coming up with some kind of ways Teoh talk about what I did in a one very simple statement. I like to put this in my business card because a lot of business cards will just have kind of your generic contact information. But they don't really tell you how you bring value. Like with my business cards. I do elevate your business through design or something very similar to that. That kind of tells them a little bit what you do more than just your title. So I like to incorporate a little bit more of ideas on a little bit of text. That way, you never want overwhelm it too much. If you can't say in one sentence, it's probably to be too long for a business card. They're very, very tiny. You don't want to overwhelm with text. Another great thing about having all of your branding standards manual developed so I could start pulling all these assets than I need so I can go ahead and pull, you know, logo over. I can also have my type set up, so I know what type of ah ah fonts I should use here for the headline and other information . So it's really just a matter of figuring out what I think would capture the imagination of a client. What do I think would be a proper lay out on the front? The back? I like to have business cards that are front and back because they're really not that much more expensive to get it back these days. And I like to put high quality upgrades and finishes to my business cars, maybe a metallic ink foil stamping and bossing. Um, go to move dot com if you want to get all those fancy effects. But I like to do that just because I don't mind spending a little bit more of my business card because I hand them out very deliberately when I go meet people and I hand out a business card that somebody have had a conversation with, someone I seriously want to pursue as a client, I want to give them my best. Ah, foot forward. I'm gonna give him a very high quality, maybe even a little bit more expensive business card. Maybe even you spend 50 cents even a dollar on the business card that's worth it. A dollar. If you're handing that out to ah ah high quality potential client or lead. So let's continue to kind of fiddle around with the layout. And we're just thinking about ideas. We're not thinking about graphic design. I'm gonna focus more on why, What I'm including and why? So we definitely wanna have that headline over here. We're gonna bring that headline. We don't want to overwhelm people, so I'm just gonna make it a little bit smaller. I'm a big fan of putting the logo on both sides because you never know what side when they take it out of their wallet or they take it out of their purse. You don't know what side they're gonna land on and also like to do different contrast on the side. So instead of have to Whiteside's, I maybe have a darker background and then a lighter background or the other way around. I think it really helps to kind of add to the experience. So you're just adding to the experience. The back of your card could even feature one of your works assed Long was maybe have your logo or water mark mark somewhere on there so they can kind of see that work and see your name. They want to connect your work in your name together. So that's another great thing of your illustrator, especially photographer or even a Web designer. Putting a little piece of your work. A little snapshot on the back, along with your logo really, really, really helps, so you need to make business cards fairly unique. You know, you kind of have the standard layout where you have the information over here, and you kind of have a typical layout. But try to be creative, even though you have to do contact information in a clear manner, and you want to be consistent with your brand, so continue to use the same type faces throughout. Find ways to get it to work. Or if you feel like you're typeface or colors are not working, please revisit your branding, inspiration and brand boards and all that stuff and branding standards and tweak it. This is when you go back and forth in that creative process, so some other things I'd like to include is I'd like to include obviously website that's working. They're gonna drive them to the website. That's the main focal point is not really the email. I'd like them to contact me. But I like them to contact me after they visited my Web site and portfolio because I want to get them sold before the email me so that it would be a very soft sell for two to land that client. They've already seen my work. I don't have to. Then send them to the website and keep going through that. The website. Big, bold, beautiful. That's what we want to have. The website is gonna be very prominent. We could even bring in some of our colors. I'm gonna go ahead and copy and paste my color palette, so I have easy access to it. So if we wanted to go ahead and switch things up, we can. So that will be the main focal points of sometimes putting your website away from the other . Contact information helps especially for doing its own side, because it really helps that user focus more on the website and not get lost among the other contact information and also like to put a very obvious statement. If my header making your small business ideas come to life, it's a little generic. It doesn't actually say that I'm a graphic designer. Although we have graphic designer in her logo, which is nice, I wanted to have a very obvious statement almost like a title. So if you want to say senior graphic designer or senior photographer or art director or illustrator, those were great to have titles. Sometimes I'll put it in a phrase, so offering full service graphic design or I could probably even rephrase that a little bit to make it sound better, but just kind of having something that's it's very, very, very obvious. What you do right when you look at it, you're not playing any games. You're getting right to the point so they can remember. Oh, yeah, she's the graphic designer I met in the elevator. Um, so that's exactly what you want to kind of do. So I'm gonna spend about 10 minutes rearranging everything and trying to find what I think is a suitable layout already kind of did, ah, couple of ideas here with an invoice, and there's already some kind of brand consistency of developing with kind of how I arrange everything. So I'm going to do that and incorporate that to have that brain consistency, and I'll be right back, - so each one of these concepts are effective in their own ways. That's why it's important to put together several different ideas and layouts to find out which one you think would work in some cases, even getting multiple different versions of your business card printed for different situations. The one here on the left who really works well for high end clientele, with this night's gold foil stamping on the bottom and beautiful use of texture. It's very clean, and it reduces all the extra clutter. I don't have the tagline and just focus on the offering full service graphic design as kind of the main focal point on the front as well of the website. So it's very clean, modern and really would do well at attracting ah, hiring clientele. The one on the middle is very basic. It's got the tagline on the top. It's got my basic information, has everything it needs. It even has a little sketching photo in the background, using photo to kind of help draw the user in and explain a little bit about what you do and how your processes different course where a brainstorming design company So I put a little bit of that sketch pencil in the background. I thought that would be a fitting image for what she does is a graphic designer on the bottom. My future, her work on full display. I would hadn't arranged ah lot of her logos in a particular order and was able to kind of put that on the back and, of course, with a big focal point on that website, because that's where they're gonna be able to look at the's on more detail and get case studies, which will be doing in the next section of the class. Creating our website portfolio in our pdf portfolio on the right is kind of more of your everyday use. I think it's kind of, ah, more flexible and adaptable to different situations, kind of your basic front and a very clean back not showing any work or photos, but just kind of showing what needs to be shown for the business card. So three different layout ideas, you know, took about 20 minutes kind of brainstorm this. You can, of course, put this together in any program you like, but that's kind of my little bit of my rough process of how I think about, um, business card and what needs to be on it not necessarily designed but kind of the effectiveness of the card. So once again, you're seeing a lot of two toned contrast. We have a bright front and kind of the opposite, darker back not required. But I just find that higher contrast nice is the user flips the card over. They could definitely tell the difference between the sides. 13. Personal Branding - Letterhead: way we're gonna be doing that. And Canada, which is something I've already kind of introduce you to a little bit earlier in the classes, just easy to kind of whip things together very quickly. So I uploaded all my assets into a folder on camera, and I'm gonna go ahead and die right in, and we're gonna create our business card. So can the has some really great potential templates you can use. I am a fan of using templates. Whatever. It gives you a head start on your designer layout. I'm not afraid of taking a template and making it my own. So I'm gonna scroll through these and there's a lot of different ways to do an effective letterhead. It depends on how you're going to use the letterhead. There's a lot of ways freelancers used letterhead. Some of them put their proposals on them. Some of them right? Personal thank you. Letters to clients. You may think a letterhead might not be super important to you right now, but it's really nice to have one on hand, especially when you do illegal stuff and tax stuff. Sometimes you send an official letterhead to a business or to a government agency to do something. It looks a lot better. And sometimes for certain official documents, they require you to sin letters with some kind of official business letterhead. So that's important to do. Don't write thes off. Same thing with business cards. Don't think they're too old school. Not everything has to be digital. And let's go ahead and dive into here. There's a lot of different letterheads like let's say this template. This looks like it's got all sorts of stuff on it, which might be interesting, but it depends on the length of your letter, and you never know how much letter you're gonna need to write. So I like to focus more on space for the actual letter and a little, a little bit less and all the graphics. I like to have my logo and my name and contact information, and you could have a little element the background. But nothing may be quite as big as this one. Maybe something more along the lines of this over here. So I got a scroll through here and find one that I think will work. I did find one. I'm already starting to modify this a little bit. What I like to do is make sure I can put a long letter there. So if I can scroll this down and fit even mawr, that would be lovely. And it looks like I'll be able to so going to fill that in with my own contact information ? I'm just trying to think what would be a brand consistency, cause we're really talking about branding here a little bit less about design. How can we kind of brand this to make it look consistent? And we can do our little tagline if we want to take our tagline? Ah, from our business card that we just created, we could do the taglines somewhere in there, but the focus really is on your name and contact information and website. This is not always a marketing piece. This is sometimes more of an official business document. Peace and we want to keep it very, very simple. Very, very clean. So maybe less of that extra stuff that we put on the business card. So I'm gonna continue to work on this layout a little bit the same way we did with the business card is trying to find ways to incorporate that brand a little bit more in here. Remember the colors that we developed a little bit earlier in her branding standards manual ? This is where those hex codes air really to come in handy. If I want to bring that into any kind of online editing program, I can go ahead and pop or paste those hex codes in, and we can go ahead and bring in those exact colors. She's always very helpful to get the right graze the right secondary colors. And this is where having multiple versions of your logo really comes in handy because there might be a situation where a different color might work a little bit better than what we have is the default. Yes, it can always have those to test him out. I'm a big fan of water marks. I think they look really good on letterheads and they don't interfere with the text too much. So I'm just gonna be creating that right now. Of course, you want to make sure you reduce the transparency or the color to a very light gray. You don't want to interfere with any text. It'll ruin the whole efficiency of the letterhead, so just kind of reduce it where you think would be a good level. You can always do a test print in your home printer or an office printer and find out what you think. What level would look good, and also it doesn't have to be in the center. It could be on the left or right. Get a little papa name there. It's entirely up to you. So there would go a very, very, very, very simple letterhead. Nothing that's going to win any design wards. But I think it is effective and definitely consistent with their brand. We have a Finnish logo branding manual brand assets, a rough layout for an and or business card letterhead. We also have some several ideas for other items we can create. We're ready for the next critical step into the going freelance process. This is probably one of the most important things we're gonna cover, and that's to craft your portfolio. Toe land clients 14. (Optional) Student Design Challenge - Create Your Personal Brand: Are you ready for a student design challenge? This one is going to be a bit personal. Your task is to create a personal brand for yourself or your freelance business. You may be a graphic designer, Web designer, illustrator or creative writer, but all of us have something personal about us that makes us unique. I want you to create a logo that best represents your unique approach to your craft. This could be with use of color symbols, abstract art or something, and has personal value to you and your business. Branding is more than just a logo. The logo is a small part of this. For the student project, the only requirement is to create some sort of logo and name presentation, but also to combine it with other brand assets. This could be a business card, a simple letterhead or just a simple social media post using your brand and extending your brand out to one item so we can see how this works in action. I would love to see your work, so make sure you post in the community area of the course you're currently taking our post in the student Facebook group or its message Me your work. Remember the following when creating your personal brand number one. Remember that personal branding is hard. It could be very introspective and require you to really think about your style, skill and uniqueness. Number two. That personal brand development is about hitting your desired target audience. What type of clients do you want to attract? Number three that you may go back and forth between lots of great concepts and still not be able to settle on one. That is why submitting concepts to a community can be helpful in helping you think and process through which one might work out best for you. If you want to follow the entire personal branding process, I do so in my freelance masterclass for creatives course that's on both skill share and you . To me, you are not required to be a student for enroll to participate. Everyone is welcome. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with, and I'm expecting this to be a highly active student design challenge with lots of great projects submitted 15. Portfolio Building - Building Strong Portfolios : strong personal branding is critical to your freelance success. But having and building a strong stellar portfolio is even more important and landing those first few clients. Portfolio's come in a few different flavors, and it's nice to have options for your clients. First of all, I could either be a PdF style portfolio, an online digital portfolio, which functions like a personal website, or a portfolio that exists on 1/3 party website similar to having a social media account. Having at least two out of the three portfolio options and styles is very important. Many larger clients will sometimes prefer. You submit a portfolio and a PDF format. What others prefer. A simple link to an online portfolio. It's nice to be able to have that print or digital pdf option, just in case that situation and rises. Also, don't ignore that third option of having your portfolio on 1/3 party website like be hands dot com, where you can build on add your projects. You have less control over this option, but it's great for those who may not want to build an independent website that requires a hosting plan or a domain name, no matter which of the formats you choose. There's some basic portfolio building basics you should be aware of. First of all, they don't feature too many projects. You may have a detailed work history or tons of great personal projects that can fill up hundreds of pages, but that doesn't mean you should display every one of them. Strong portfolios feature a few projects and present them well, with beautifully crafted images and smaller descriptions. Try featuring 3 to 6 strong projects and leave the rest to another link page or block area . They have an attention grabbing element. This could be a strong quote or a previous client testimonial. This could be a beautifully crafted client project or personal project. There has to be something that makes your portfolio interesting. Recently, I found the use of video appealing in this situation, even for those who are not in motion graphics. You can craft motion videos easily using free software like I movie our Adobe Spark that features and highlights your work. We will craft one of these a little bit later in this section. I know your name in the 1st 5 seconds of your in your portfolio. I need to know who you are before I look at your work. This could be done by having a strong personal logo, our name nearby, toward the top of the first page or home page. I need to remember your name, So displaying it in a clever or unique way also helps. I may view hundreds of portfolios, and I need a way to remember you and connect you back to your work. They feature your personal work. Not all freelancers have large previous client work in their portfolios, especially when they're first starting out. Like many of you guys, I do enjoy seeing at least one personal work as personal work tends to better display your passions in your talents than client work does. As client work can be, limiting the use simple and clean design elements, they're less focused on the extra junk and more interested in showing you what matters their work. They use less photos but make him a little bit larger and easier to see. The work they take on a more magazine design layout style, featuring important items that are larger and easy to view. They show their process. I love seeing sketches and viewing photos of their raw, creative process. I love viewing behind the scenes photos of them at work. It just brings a nice personal touch and richness to their work. There's a man or woman behind your work, and it's nice to take a quick peek at that. This can also be showing your brainstorming process as well with authentic sketches so they can see that final finished project once again, a story driven narrative works really well. I've had the chance to hire many freelancers in my 14 year work history. I've had to survey many portfolios and have come to understand what potential clients are businesses are looking for and what makes them quickly turn away years of things that turn me off when looking at freelancers portfolios. First of all, they feature projects from several different disciplines. You arrive on their portfolio to be greeted by projects that seem disjointed, such as photography over here and then illustration project right next to it. It's not bad showing off your varied skills, but if I'm looking for a photographer, I want to see photographer projects. It goes back to giving your viewer what they want to see. First this may mean your future, your other skills elsewhere on your portfolio, perhaps in the footer of your website, or have to separate portfolios one for illustration and one for photography. I see graphic designers do this all the time. They'll feature personal photography projects, and I'm trying to find a logo designer, not someone to take my photos. There's always the option of applying a graphic design technique to your own photography, making it relevant to the other pieces in your portfolio. Some skills connect very well in connect directly. What other skills are a little less connected? Also, they overwhelm me with project photos. Sometimes I arrive out of portfolio and fined 10 images on the first green above the fold. When building a portfolio, it's best to have a storytelling narrative approach, guiding viewer slowly through a well crafted, curated project. Images or text. Once again, the theme here is less AZM, or try to feature less than five images on the first home page or viewable portion of the screen. Obviously, there are creative ways to include more, and it's project dependent. But a rule of thumb is if you want to feature more than five, make sure they're all connected to the same project and not part of different projects. These were just general guidelines. They're not hard rules. I've seen so many portfolios that can break this rule or use multiple photos very well. Some portfolios are just too long. I find this mostly with PdF base portfolios. They're just too long and future. Too many projects. It gets very tiring viewing many, many, many one projects, one after the other. Another reason to select just 3 to 6 strong projects and keeping it at just that. Another thing I noticed on wheat portfolios is they do not properly introduce or explain their projects or work. I've had to research and hunt down an explanation of what the project is. Even worse, they may not even know what they personally contributed to the project. Did they do the photos and the design? What role did they play? I find having a small narrative. Our story driving sentences help to explain the project as I scroll through the project photos. Nothing too long unless it's imperative to explaining your role in the project such as a U X Y designer were text and project descriptions. Sometimes play an even bigger role than project photos, and lastly, it just try to sell themselves way too hard. Yes, it's a very common thing, and you have these strong statements about how they're the only solution or that the best way to go. But they just feel like empty statements. Try to avoid cliche and common phrases in your headlines or text. You want to create unique headlines that are custom to you. An echo, your unique approach and your craft. Remember when we crafted your bio earlier in this class? They're silver ways to incorporate your bio in your portfolio. You can have a separate page, or you can Sprinkle a little bit about yourself between project photos on the home page. As a creative freelancer, you have more freedom to express yourself and talk more about your personal goals and passions. Make sure you show this throughout to drive a sense of authenticity with your portfolio. I have a great downloadable resource that sums up the last lesson and gives you a few layout tips when we start to build her online portfolio. In later lessons, we had a chance to review some positive portfolio building qualities we talked about a few of the negative ones. Let's start crafting our first portfolio type together. We're gonna go over how to present work in the best way possible, highlighting your skills and talents. We're gonna be doing the PdF style portfolio first. We'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Portfolio Building - PDF Portfolios Gathering Resources: there are many ways to present your projects, and having the right photos can make or break your portfolio will be creating our PDF version of report Folo using Adobe in Design, But you can use any program where you can work with multiple page documents. Believe it or not, you can even build a strong portfolio with Microsoft Word. The first step in creating our Pdf portfolio or any type of portfolio is organizing and creating our project images and writing your project descriptions. This may differ depending on what industry are type of freelance services you will offer. We went super polished, high resolution photos that can best represent our various projects to show off to our potential clients. If your photographer than making sure each photo is presented in its final edited format has the right color correction and this cropped for high impact viewing. Let's say your aux ey designer, perhaps taking some great screenshots of your final website layouts or designs or mock ups , you can start to think about best ways to display or tell your UX are you? I design process through a series of photos that document your whole process. You also want to think about writing your process and a short, easy to digest paragraphs that pair well with the particular photos you choose. Let's say you're a graphic designer. You can apply your final designs onto Polish mock ups. You can find plenty of great photo shop mock ups on graphic burger dot com. You can even create your own custom mock ups using a program called Adobe Dimensions, using stock three D models or importing your own. Also, think about writing a brief statements about your projects. Who the client waas so you can give client proper credits. And make sure you note which projects are personal projects if their personal projects make sure you include a small line underneath the main project title that says personal work. So clients. No, it's not paid work. We never want to mislead anyone. Illustrators. You can start to take photos every work. If it's not currently in digital format. You also apply your patterns to mock ups as well. To make simple pattern projects come toe life. You can include stills of your process at work. You can even stage the creation of an illustration to take snapshots of your drawing process. If you're a digital illustrator, for example, these little shots add a little value to your static projects. They also add a little bit of character and makes the project feel more riel relevant and professional. All photos should be high resolution. If they're not, then try to obtain photos of your projects that are nothing should be blurry when printed or viewed as a digital. Pdf on your final portfolio Written copy should be written in your style. Someone has some of the things you develop in the gold section of the course. Also, get that bio you have written. Ready will be placing your bio and a bit about yourself in the 1st 3 pages of the portfolio . Doesn't have to always be on the first page. Lastly, grab a great professional headshot of yourself will be needing this for our online website . And when we build profiles on other freelancing websites, your headshot should be crisp, clean with great lighting and also have nice background settings. Headshots need to be properly cropped, with your face being the main focal point. Some profile photos can include computers or other equipment necessary for your craft. This is a great way to add a little authenticity to your photos. If you know of an affordable professional photographer, it would not be a bad idea to have them do a small photo shoot to gather some of these professional personal photos and headshots. Now that we gathered everything together, let's talk about strong PDF portfolio Building basics. You could download this downloadable resource to read along as I go through this lesson. Try to keep your portfolio short and manageable. Keep it between 3 to 10 pages of possible. You have to continue to capture the viewer as portfolios that are too long will cause viewer fatigue. Create a cover page that wows future your favorite project on the front. Cover along with your name logo title contact information and create a highlight gallery to highlight multiple projects. If you feel like that can tell a better story to the viewer, Kraft and tell your story. Well, you want to show more than just static portfolio project photos. You'll want to dedicate at least 1/2 of a Page two, including a short bio photo if desired, and maybe a mission statement, headline or sentence. That explains your unique approach process style visions, our goals. You could present this in the 1st 3 pages of her portfolio. Oregon. Sprinkle a bit about yourself throughout the entire PdF and small snippets between projects . So do I do horizontal or vertical presentations? Well, either way works for PdF's that air printed off by your clients or you portrait or vertical orientation tends to work a little bit better. Do not overwhelm with too many photos or text. This is easier said than done. Sometimes the effectiveness of 1 to 3 well chosen photos can outweigh the effect of a big gallery page that may contain over 10 photos. Remember to balance out your photos, project descriptions and testimonials. You will have several pages to display all this information. Feel free to adopt that storytelling narrative approach and show bits and pieces and very planned ways. Create a rough layout for your entire portfolio before adding final photos and text. This really helps if you create a plan for your portfolio. Once you sketch this out, you'll know how many photos you may need or need to create for each project. You also know the amount of tech space you're dedicating to a particular project or space, and how many client testimonials you may need to capture. Switch up your page layouts. This leads to the next tip as the viewer moves through your pages. Sometimes it's nice to switch up the layout. To keep things interesting, try not to use the same presentation or layout for each one of your projects. Doing this may start to make your portfolio look stale. Each project will have its own layout that will work best for its style in the photos that you have. We do this all the time. When building websites, Why not have a layout plan for our PDF portfolios? We're gonna do that right now. Together in Adobe in Design and Design is a great multiple page layout program, perfect for magazine layout design and, of course, creating that PdF portfolio. You can use any multiple page layout, project or programme you would like. Adobe Illustrator has the art board tool, which allows you to create multiple pages and export them as one pdf file. If you feel more comfortable using Adobe Illustrator, Even Camba, that online cloud based design tool I've talked about prior, has the ability to build documents with multiple pages, including our online print PDF portfolio. We're going to first focus on creating are rough page layouts. There are many different layout, options and ideas. I included a handful in that downloadable resource for you to take a look as we start to sketch out are roughly out or PDF portfolio. I'm going to use this as a guide from the next lesson to make some of these page layouts a reality with our chosen project photos for our graphic designer example, Lillian Hernandez. 17. Portfolio Building - Pdf Portfolio - Project Page Layouts: So here we are. We're in Adobe in design, and we're gonna create our layout or our plan for a portfolio. You can see I've already kind of started sketching this out a little bit. You're gonna wanna have to figure out how many total projects you wanna have in your portfolio. I've decided to have three that Lillian Hernandez is going to feature and we're gonna do a little bit more of a detailed overview of each project. So that's why I'm only sticking to three. I'm thinking overall might commit three total pages to each project, although not every project is gonna need all three and so many for so as long as I keep it within 10 pages or less, I'm gonna feel pretty happy if I go over 12 pages. I just need to make sure this two extra pages, I added, are worth it. Is it really needed to have those two pages? If so, you can go beyond 10. But only if you feel like it really, really adds to the descriptions and an extra images you're able to have for your projects. So first things first, we can lay out all these different things. Once we get idea, we gather all of our project images together. I went ahead and did this. I have all of our projects have the three projects and different folders for each one. And I need to figure out I have way more photos than I need to present a 5% at all of these photos. I think it would overwhelm the clients. So, ah, lot of times you need to write your project descriptions to know what photos you need to incorporate and how many. And you need to go cooperate. So we're gonna do that. We're gonna write our project descriptions. And once we have our project descriptions, we can do our basic layout and then start popping in those photos and really figuring out the design and layout side of things. We're going to switch gears a little bit away from in design. I'm just gonna go two word and I'm creating a little bit of a plan, and you can download this as a downloadable resource. You can be able to read these bios and read the the project description so you can get an idea of how I've written mind for Lillian but it could be very different, depending on what kind of work you do. If you're an illustrator, your descriptions might be a lot shorter. If your aux you I designer, you might have a very, very long descriptions. I'm so for Lillian. She's a graphic designer, so that's kind of the example I'm using. So this is Project One we have. Of course, you need a title and you want to go ahead. And just instead of saying what the project name is, go ahead and be a little more descriptive. So for this, it's a branding projects. So for this case, it's elemental local development, brand creation and extension. So I'm pretty much saying what the company name is and all the major things that I did for them. And so the headlines with headline could be anything you feel. I can further describe the project in this case. I'm using a client test and we'll testimonial because I feel like that's gonna have a little bit of a higher impact when viewed on that first page that we're gonna develop. So in this case, it's working with Win. Lilien has been a pure joy. I thought that was a really great testimonial to use, so you could see this is the total description. It's not super long. It's not super short either. And so instead of putting the description all on the front page, we are going to dull the South and little small snippets throughout the three pages I'm dedicating to this project. So I'm gonna put, ah, the first couple of lines on may be the first pages introduction. And then as I describe the project, I have different project images. I'll go to another page and put a little bit of ah explanation for each photo so you don't have one big block of text, your kind of slowly letting them read the description as they move through your project. So after you spent some time writing your prescriptions for each project, I'm going to go ahead and do the first project first so we can see what that looks like so we can start to work on the other projects. So this is kind of the first page is obviously gonna be your front cover. Let's go to your Splash Page is gonna be your hero. Image it maybe one image that is your favorite that you feel like, really captures your skill set. Have it on the front to sail. Or it could be a collage, just maybe a couple of hand selected images. We're gonna do that after we do the first project. We're just gonna kind of put some placeholders. We're gonna put that there. We're also gonna put a logo as we start to develop our other project. Layouts will be thinking of what that hero image is gonna be for the front. What is gonna be that big image that I feel like it's gonna capture the clients attention to move on. And so after we do a couple of pages, I think we might start to get ideas for that. So we're gonna come and visit that front page. But I haven't already planned out already. Have the first page dedicated to that already have the next three pages dedicated to our client project. So right now I'm gonna continually take a look at some of these layout ideas. This is a downloadable resource from the last lesson. There's lots of different ideas here for different ways. You can percent images, and so I'm gonna take a look at this and see if there's any. I feel like it would be really good for this particular project. I'm also going to take a look at my images to see kind of where I can get a little bit of inspiration. So what? I'm thinking for it first. I don't I'm not gonna put a huge long description in the front, so I don't need a lot of text, but I do think kind of having one big hero image to kick off the project might be good for this particular project, cause I'm a lot of great images. So perhaps his magazine feature layout might be really good. Or if I wanted a feature to I could do this headline feature split where I can have, you know, a headline and it and I put our testimonial there, but it can also have two images so I can be able to have more control over cropping those images because they're not taking up the whole page. So let's take a look at that. Lay out to see if it's gonna work. Go to our 1st 1 and I already have this layout right here. Amsco, switch these pages right in in design. You could use whatever software you're using, but I'm just switching those pages out. I feel like this might be a really good headlines. So just going into a word and just copying and pasting my title on headline and I'll be right back. So here's our first page of her first project. It decided a feature. The logo of the company or the project, instead of just having it in a regular type, just can add a little bit toothy project presentation. We're gonna find tuned graphics and everything later. We're just figuring out the basic layout, so we have the ability to do different. Two different photos or one big photo just depends on which photo would choose for this particular header cover. So for project beginning pages, I like to have this wow photos that really capture the project. In its entire E. You can have multiple photos If you feel like it works, just try not to use too many. We also have this quotation for a client testimonial that will want to also incorporate in there as well. So we need to figure out a place for that. We can also start to work in some of our project description, maybe the first couple of lines. But let's see how the front page looks as we start to put it together, we still have to other pages or even 1/4 1 If we wanted to dedicate four pages to this project project, so we need to create the best way possible. So we just need to be flexible with different layout, options and ideas as we start to put this together. So I'm gonna go ahead and open up my project. We have several different project images we can use. Kind of a czar. Well, first page image, and I already have a few in my mind that I want to kind of pick out. Um, this is kind of a branding project where the whole idea was to create a package design in a local design. So what best to feature an image that has both of those on here? So that would be this one right here. It's gonna go and drag this in here. Of course, you're gonna have a lot of different projects that you're gonna wanna feature. You may be a photographer Web designer. you're gonna be presenting is a little bit differently. But the overall idea creating a layout plan is the same. And that or what type of work you do. So this is when layouts need to be flexible. Not all the layouts I have in the downloadable resource of the ones you come up with it first are gonna work perfectly. So feel free to manipulate and change. Everything is needed. So throughout this portfolio building process, I'm looking at her branding standards in the brand that she developed for her personal business or her personal freelance business, trying to find ways to incorporate the color palette, the iconography, the background, the colors. All this consumption will be incorporated into the look of your portfolio. So you can see I've adapted some of that that blue light blue greenish color to the portfolio as well. So I'm just thinking about that as I develop these pages so continuing to figure out what looks best for this first page in terms of her layout plan. And I'm also realizing that if I would have a description and a title in the name of the project, it's starting to get pretty heavy. and and there's a lot of things going on. So there's some things we can do to improve that. I can shift this away and kind of start off with the logo design. You kind of have that be a little bit better of a compliment. We don't need the divider bar anymore. I can also do the quote. So right now I'm starting with the description. And so maybe since there's a lot already going on, I may decide to not do the description and wait til the second page that can move that off to the side. Also working, Working Quote. If this is a real project, it could do quotes. Obviously, if it's a personal project, you want to start off with the description or maybe a title and make sure you have personal work somewhere on the first page. So clients are not misled and thinking it was a real client project you need to be upfront about. That doesn't have to be really big. It could be a little small, Ah, text below the first image that just lets them know it's a personal project. But for this case, we're gonna make it a real project just kind of show that example. So we have the quote and we'll just start a description on the next page. You got three or four pages to do this. Lots of room to slowly tell your story. So don't feel you have to like, you have to cram everything on the front page. You're really just trying to grab their attention, the product project, and then you're ready for that second page. So now we're on to the second page already, and we need to figure out a layout plan for this one as well as we have a couple more pages left. And since we've already written our description, we know exactly what images we're gonna wanna show and with the description as well. So the first thing I talk about is kind of how I sit down and plan with them. So if I have a great brainstorming, sitting down at a meeting kind of image is kind of like the examples I'm showing where you kind of showing that process thinking, preparing, meeting, discussing If you can kind of have an image that really goes well with that description, then great. Let's go ahead and find that 18. Portfolio Building - Project Pages: So when looking at our project description genocide, a story driven narrative might work better for the next page. As we have lots of little descriptions, weaken slowly, work in and find the perfect photo that pairs with the proper description on the right or the left. So this is the layout that I found in the layout downloadable resource off. That would be really helpful. So I'm just kind of applying it forced. You can adjust it to how we think would work best with your particular photos. But I want to really maximize the photos. So this is when you may not have a particular photo for this. So brainstorming do I have a brainstorming photo of this project? Um, maybe Lillian didn't have that when she created this project. So that's where you need to maybe find one. You can get a stock photo. It's best think about this when you're doing your next project. Work to capture some of those beginning stages so that when you do your portfolio you could show some of these more authentic brainstorming type, um, actions where you're showing sketches. You can kind of think about that the next time you do, Ah, personal work or a paid client work. Keep track of all those take photos of that process because it could really come in handy when putting together your portfolio or your website to kind of have this really cool images. So I found this one, but I think it could work for what we have. We can find something a little bit more fitting. We can create our own if we have a little bit of time. So continuing to find photos that I think pair well with the descriptions you could do. If you feel like you need to put all three steps here, that's great. If you feel like you really want to make the images bigger and show more of the details, you can only do two per page. Or it can really focus on one per page. If you don't have a lot of product, Total projects in portfolio can spend more time. Really? Ah, focusing in on detailed photos so we could do that for the next one. This one's pretty description heavy. So for the next page, we're gonna focus ah, lot on just one or two photos to have more of a focus page where they could stop and see a lot more details, especially when it comes to the product or package design that we designed for them. We really want to show that off in a nice, big image. They were to do that for our next page. So when thinking about the layout for this one working to really display the product package design, I really wanted to use this photo. But we already used that as our hero image in the first page introduction of the project. And this is why it's great to do a layout plan ahead of time. You can figure out what what photos were gonna go where. So what I decided to do is go back to the front page and use this one as kind of our hero image, because I feel like it has lots of different things going on. Um, we're using multiple images butts, really one well put together branded image that I think can really capture the branding side of the project, so that will also leave us available for the package design page toe have that image displayed. This probably goes pairs better with a description here. We want to make sure descriptions pair well together. You're probably noticing how each page is presented just a little bit differently. Yet they're still a connecting theme. I think this is nice to break it up, so this one has quite a bit of photos. It tells the story. This one's more about showing off your design or your skill set. So you kind of see kind of the different arrangements I'm having on each page just to shake it up and to keep the viewer on their toes and to kind of make a more rich experience. So this is the next page kind of doing two photos that are trying not to compete with each other, but really highlight the logo and then going down to another page already kind of going past what I planned. That's OK. Sometimes you have to go past it if you have a pretty large project that you want to present. And so here's the social media. I thought I'd kind of maybe show one as a larger image and to a smaller images, because if you were to show all of them at the same time, they can't really get a good idea what it looks like. So having kind of one that zoomed in a little bit bigger helps when you have the kind of projects that have, Ah, lot of detail or maybe have eight different versions or variations. Sometimes it's nice to have a little hierarchy and have one be a little bit bigger. So they can really see the details because it was all small. This is a pdf they have to zoom into really, really look at the details. You don't want them to have to do any work. You don't want them to have to zoom in to see anything. They should be able to see everything right here at this, uh, this view. So for Project number two, we don't have a really big project, which is good, because our 1st 1 took up a lot of pages. So this one will only take up two pages. Only have a few images, but I really wanted to include it in the portfolio because I think it be a nice compliment to the last project. It's a little bit different, but it's still in the branding design side of things. So this is a personal project for a school project that Lillian had. So we want to make sure somewhere there's personal project labeled and will find. It may be a clever way to do that in a very short description. So we're gonna be a little less wordy. We're gonna be a little bit mawr visual with our photos. So let's go ahead and get started. I'm gonna hop into in design just kind of a basic layout I borrowed from our layout ideas guide that I have is the downloadable resource. Let's look at our photos first in our project, this will be Project number two. We have several different photos, not quite as many as the last one. But we need to find one for kind of our hero image is gonna grab people's attention. This one already has kind of, ah label or designed to it, that we can go ahead and put in here, and I always have to kind of fight myself when I have a couple of good photos to use to Onley. Choose the one I think is the most effective because there's 45 I wanna throw in there because I really want to describe my project. But there's always ways you could do that on the next page, so less is more. I always have to fight myself on that, because when I put together my portfolio, I feel like every image is good, but you really want to choose the images. They're gonna be the most effective at showing the details. So really practicing, the less is more approach. With this project, I found one image. I think it really display both the products or package designs that I developed for this project. Instead of showing lots of different ones, I feel like showing the one worked a lot better. I also took AIM or editorial design layout approach to this and don't worry about being tooth matching matches with our first theme. We kind of had our branded colors in this block of copy. We're still using the same type or not changing her Fonar type style. That's part of our brand, but it's okay to do maybe a white on black. If I feel like it matches a little bit better with the project, you don't have to keep the same white bar because it may not look is good with the next project. As long as you keep with the same fonts and type choices, you could be a little bit more creative with how you present another project. So for this particular layout, I had this little circle here why I wanted to kind of zoom in and show little details of a project or illustration or a photo. So if you have a particular illustration where there's a lot of detailed work, having a little circle that zooms in on that really helps because it's a pdf, it's only one size. It's not like a website working down with the photo and zoom in. So kind of have that opportunity. If you want Teoh bring out details of a particular project. So there's our second project. That was a lot quicker to put together, and we have our first project done is already I think we're gonna be ready to create this cover photo. This is gonna be kind of the best page that we need to design. We needed to really make this attention grabbing as much as possible. I'm gonna go ahead, drag in some of the elements that we're gonna have to have on here like the logo and maybe some of her branded colors. And then we can figure out what photos will best represent our portfolio. This is where we need to spend the most time. 19. Portfolio Building - Pdf Portfolio The Cover Page: Let's come up with a layout plan for photo. We have two different local variations. We did a personal branding project. These are some of the logos that Lillian came up with for the brand project, trying to figure out which one will be the most effective. I liked to, since her name and her title are already in the logo. Maybe we could make the logo a little bit bigger and in the front center, so it's really obvious whose portfolio this is. You want your name to be the center object of this piece. Your name is the most important thing because a lot of recruiters or people who are looking for freelancers are seeing portfolio after portfolio and names really get mixed up. They really get lost. So making sure you have a memorable presentation of your name or make it big enough, it's incredibly important to pair it with a really, really good photo of your work. So we're gonna go ahead and use that 1 may be the full color display. Maybe could tuck this away. You never know when we might need that website. Is Justus important as the name? Usually the bottom is where people naturally go to find the website. Not gonna have this on its own bar, so there's no photo to blur it out. So I'm just gonna put a white bar here. So when we do start to dragon photos, that name and the websites gonna be very, very clear. And so this is the only thing we're not quite sure where that needs to be. It's very, very important that we tell them exactly what we do. We can even have this up here and the top Borras. Well, we could go ahead and copy and paste this and put that up there so that it's easy, easy to read. So how are we gonna pick a photo from everything we've done? Let's say you've done well. Lots of personal work. You've done lots of student work that a lot of work you want to display. How do you know which one to pick to feature on the front? We could always send that send this out to other colleagues and go Which one of these two do you like? You can have a poll on your Facebook or social media. Which project do you think deserves the top billing for my portfolio cover. Or you could do a combination of a couple of great screenshots to kind of make a little bit of the gallery. Of course, avoid using too many, because then people will kind of it'll lose its effectiveness. So one thing I'm gonna do is in scroll through my projects. I haven't done the third project yet. We may or may not do that in the class. It depends on how much time we have, but I think a combination of maybe one or two photos might work really Well, we're gonna just kind of figured this out. I'm gonna go and dragsholm photos in and see what I can do for this cover. - So this is what I settled on a horse. You could go do a lot of different layouts, but I wanted to have something that kind of captured everything that she does. So instead of just doing one project image, I used a mock up from graphic burger dot com. I'm gonna go ahead and show the screen should of the one I used and put together lots of her different logos and local designs to create kind of a little bit off a different image here, where you get to see and taste a little bit of all the different style she has, which is kind of nice to be able to not feel like you have to show just one project on that cover photo. You can put to use mock ups to really kind of present all of your couple of different illustrations or designs or photos or Web designs in your own special way. So I wanted to tick off a couple boxes to make sure this is going to be an effective cover . First of all, I know the person's name within the first few seconds, so check I know what they do or what they can offer. So that's their check. Ah, have a contact way to find you. Check. And so next we're going to focus on the bio, and we're gonna figure out where to place this. In the overall portfolio, we have two projects done. We still need to do 1/3 1 We have a cover image. So where does that bio fit in all this? Do we need to have that in the next page? Do we need to have it after the first project? We're gonna go ahead and put that page together right now. 20. Portfolio Building - PDF portfolio BIO page: so every good portfolio needs a great bio page. And what's also good about putting this together now is when we do a website based portfolio and also have our profile on lots of different freelancer websites and other places. Toe, have your portfolio or profile All this is gonna come in handy. So in the gold section of the class, you've already written kind of a bio. But we're going to talk about how to kind of perfect that bio for different situations. So for a print or digital, PDF, you could be a little bit longer with your bio. That's okay. You can dedicated entire page to it, or half a page whatever you feel like you have room for. So you've already written your bio. But what do you do? Do you do 1/3 person bio or a first person bio so you can download this document so you can kind of see how I have written her bio? I've done it from 1/3 person and a first person. Which one works better? That's really up to you. What's great about each one of the 1st 1 The first person bio. What's great about this is you get to write this from your own perspective. I did this. I got these awards. Um, it's great to be able to be personal. You feel like you're talking directly to the viewer, which has that personal touch to it. The great thing about 1/3 person bio, which is where it feels like someone else is writing to you. So talk in the third person. So Lillian Hernandez was always dabbling and creative things, from sketching Portrait's in high school to diving headfirst into Photoshopped. Four photo shop was even a thing. Lillian is now using her very talents so you can kind of see how it looks like someone wrote this for them. It looks really professional, and when you look at a lot of really famous people's bios, usually they use third person because it's really hard. When you reach a certain level of success, it's kind of hard to talk about yourself on the first person without sounding a little conceited. Ah, so that's where the third person is nice, because you can talk about awards that you've won, but you can do it in a way that doesn't sound like your boasting. So That's kind of the benefit to the third person bio so you can take a look and figure out which how you want to crafted if he wanted to do in the third person in the first person and we could be a little bit longer with this. So now that we have our bio put together, we're gonna head into in design and we're going to lay this out. Of course, we need to find the best cropping for our profile image or head shot. We're gonna do that right now. So I'm starting to put together all the essential things that we're gonna need for her bio page, we have a head shot. We have kind of this attention grabbing headline and then the bio. So I just took the first line of her written bio and made it more of a headline to kind of grab your attention. So you just don't have a big old block, A bio? You want to have it be, have little pull quotes or little interesting things to break up large blocks of text. And this is a pretty large bio, so we could even put a pull quote here we can, uh, kind of put a little spacing here and find some kind of pull quote there. There's a lot of different things we can do to make this a little bit more interesting. And so, with headshots, we want to make sure it's nice and big. This is a chance for people to really get to know you and to kind of, um, have a personal connection with you along with the bio. We could also put another photo in the background and be faded of some work. Or maybe her at work. Maybe heard a desk or take a picture of you Or have a friend take a picture of you working a computer at your desk, something that makes you more of a real person. We want to make you a real person, doctor, someone smiling in the camera. So having that secondary photo would be really important tohave along with ah, formal head shot. So I'm gonna kind of work with this. Lay out a little bit. You can also work in client testimonials. You could put three client testimonials here in this area so that people can see your bio. They can read all the great things clients have said about you. Not all of you go to have client testimonials yet, so you may not be able to do that. But you can work in other things. Certain facts about you, certain skill sets that you have. I would think this a little bit like a resume. You don't have to be quite as detailed or have your entire work history. We're not gonna do anything like that, but this will act a little bit like a resume. You're not applying for a job that you're applying for client work a little bit different, but you're gonna want to know and tell people about your skill sets and kind of kind of talk about who you are a little bit. This is the final bio page I came up with after maybe an hour of finding several different versions. I want to do a couple things I definitely wanted have a bigger head shot. I wanted to have that background photo of creation process. Although this particular photos not perfect at least kind of proves the point of having just one other secondary photo of that person. Are you in action? Would be really helpful. I also included a kind of a script. Fought for the bottom toe. Look like it was Ah, hand written signature, I think hand written signatures air. Great. You can actually write it with a pin and take a picture of it and be able to import that in that way. So get a really signature. That'll be even more authentic than using a script font also included a quote down here. Of course, if you're using a quote on your project down here, make sure these quotes are different. Make sure you find a different quote. You don't want to repeat the same one all the time. So we will make sure you have different quotes there if you even have a quote. And then I like to incorporate the logo again here on the on the bio page to kind of bring home that brand consistency and kind of show him a little bit of your talent at work and in branding your own stuff. So this is it. This is kind of what we've created for the bio. No. Where does the bio fit in all of this? So we have our cover photo. We have a bio. We have two projects. Will have 1/3 project there at the bottom, you know, where do we put their bio? A lot of people put it as the first page, but we have a nice cover photo. So we haven't as the second page. Some people wait and they put it after the first project as kind of a storytelling kind of thing where they have a project. Then you show share a little bit about yourself. I kind of prefer it after the cover photo, but she could put it really on any page you'd like. I got zoom out, figure out where you think it would fit well in the plan. As I mentioned before prior lessons, you can Sprinkle in a little bit about yourself throughout between each project. So instead of having one big bio page, you can divide that up and be able to Sprinkle that out between projects. Who people could to know you Ah, through a series of different paragraphs. So here's kind of your ah, I would call it a more of a resume kind of presentation. That's not exactly a resume that's kind of written a little bit more like that you're trying to sell yourself. This is your big marketing page. Your marketing push. So there you have it. We have just created a pdf portfolio. We can export this as a pdf. I'm in adobe, uh, in design. But if you're in Canberra are even inward, just export that and a pdf digital or print, depending on which one you need, I would do a adobe pdf interactive or print our digital version If you're gonna be uploading, uploaded to a website or emailing it if if anybody's ever gonna print it out, which is kind of rare these days you make sure you do a print version, but an interactive version keeps it nice and light, so the file size is not so heavy. We're gonna go ahead and export that. Just another side note. Try not to export Pdf's as spreads, which is what this looks like. It's a spread. You want to do single pages because that's easier for people to look at when you email it. So I'm just gonna keep it as single pages and exporting at all and courses is not finished . Pdf portfolio. It's still kind of in process but just wanting to show you a quick example of how I put together that And of course, next we have lots of different portfolios to do. We can do our online website based one. Next. We're not gonna do a full blown Web design, but I'm gonna go through some of the basics of what you need to gather together and think about before doing your website based portfolio, so I'll see you there. 21. Portfolio Building - Online Website: online portfolios are a little more fun to create way now have the ability to include video on our websites as well. Azad motions, animations and interactions. So the biggest question I get is where do I build my website? Do I need my own website, or can I just host my portfolio and 1/3 party website like hands dot com? The downside to hosting your portfolio on 1/3 party website is you lose control over your portfolio. That website can close down at any time, taking your portfolio with it, another great benefit of having your own website as having a professional domain name. You can purchase a domain name on websites like Go daddy dot com for a fairly cheap price. Depending on what you want your domain name to be, I can look up Lillian Hernandez on Go Daddy. To find her domain name would be fairly cheap. Once you purchase a hosting plan, you can link up your domain name with your hosting plan and you're ready to go. Lillian Hernandez dot com or Lillian Hernandez, designer dot com. Sounds a lot better and easier to remember than be hands dot com slash Lillian Hernandez. There are a lot of options when it comes to finding a good hosting plan. I've used Go Daddy in the past and they've been the cheapest. They also have the option of automatically installing WordPress for you. Seeing it started right away. Built in your website, using WordPress squarespace is a great alternative. They provide hosting and a website builder that includes some pretty great looking templates. There's the ability to customize a squarespace website, but it's a little bit more limited than a WordPress template or website. If you're looking for a super polished out of the box template website or designed than squarespace is worth checking out. There's also the option of building your portfolio on adobes portfolio building solution called Adobe Portfolio. This is free if you're in Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber. This also includes free hosting and a great website builder, although do find it a little limiting when it comes to total customization like you can do with that WordPress website. Speaking of WordPress, WordPress offers a combination of ease of use and customization. I use WordPress myself for over 10 years from my business before switching over to the adobe portfolio option I use Go Daddy, as my host for my WordPress website and also to purchase my domain name. This was the cheapest solution as WordPress, basic templates or free. Once you learn WordPress and understand the basics of how templates work and working with plug ins, you can create just about anything, even from basic templates. There are tons of fantastic premium WordPress themes, so these costs money each with their own style and layout focus. There are some themes that offer out of the box total customization and do not require any coding knowledge. One of those themes is called a Vada. I will be listing in the Resource Guide several great places to find WordPress themes. If this is the route you plan to go, I'll also list several themes that I've used in the past that I think are not only flexible but would also make great portfolio websites. I'll be teaching a WordPress course that teaches the basics of getting WordPress set up and learning all the ends announced, like setting up your plug ins, your widgets themes and adding and customizing templates. I'll be teaching this alongside my buddy Jonathan Davis. If you're interested in going into more detail about building out a WordPress website. I'll briefly touch on the basics, but it would take quite a bit of time to go through. Everything in this course will be focusing on building an adobe portfolio website and will also, as I mentioned before, be showing the very basics of building a WordPress website and walking through, choosing the right template for a freelance business. Later on, we'll be focusing on building our profiles on several freelancer websites and also building a B hands dot com portfolio. As we work through the creation of all these different portfolio types, it gets Onley easier and quicker as we already have gathered or descriptions or photos. We have our layout ideas. We have several graphics now system matter of using different websites and software to maximize our potential and our presentation before we get started building our online portfolios and profiles. I wanted to show you another downloadable resource that walks through several layout ideas for online portfolios. Which one you decide to go with really depends on what will show off your work the best and what industry there. Thousands of layout choices some which are not listed, but these will give you a head start and thinking about your layout for an online portfolio 22. Portfolio Building - Adobe Portfolio: I'm on adobes Adobe portfolio, and this is free for use for anybody who has adobe Creative Cloud subscription. So if you pay your monthly subscription for the adobe cloud, you automatically have ah, place where you can host a website. You can even purchase a domain name from Go daddy and bring it into Adobe portfolio so you can have a professional. You are l or website name. So I've used this for a couple of years, have been pretty impressed with how easy it was to build a portfolio. This is built for portfolios in mind. So all of these templates benefit a portfolio driven website hum, not necessarily magazines or blog's it really, really benefits showing off photos and work and videos as well. So they've since added a lot of extra templates. I'm gonna go through each and everyone but go to go through the basics of creating a basic website here, and we're gonna do that right now, So we're gonna create a new site already have my portfolio loaded there. We're gonna go ahead and create a new site. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on the gallery of work because we really want to show off all of her stuff, and this is where it's great to sketch out your layout, have a layout plan. Look at that downloadable resource to get some ideas of some basic layouts, even if you just take a pen and paper and sketch out what you think is your desire portfolio layout. Do that ahead of time. So when you're finding templates for WordPress or themes for WordPress, are your using adobe portfolio or using squarespace? You kind of know which template out of the box is gonna match what kind of layout you desired the quickest. So we're gonna go ahead and do gallery of work. And so there's a lot of great fantastic themes. You know, I've already kind of thought about what I I think, would be the best layout for Lillian and her portfolio in her projects. And I'm thinking, you know, we have three that we want a future, but on our online website or we had three we featured on the pdf portfolio, but on the online website we can add a few more. I think if we stick to six very simple projects, a lot of these layouts will show those all above the fold. And so if you don't know what website basic terminology is, above the fold is when you get onto a website, that's what you see on the on the screen. You don't have to scroll. It's right there in front of your face. It's above the fold, which comes back from the days of newspaper, where everything that was below, where the newspaper folded or anything that was above it was more important because that's what the user or the viewer sees first. So trying to find a portfolio that I think would work with that I think this one down here . Thomas might work really well. If I had. If I was a writer or if I had something where copyrighting or text was really important, then maybe this Marta might be very good, because it really puts maybe a client testimonial or some kind of headline puts text at the forefront instead of photography. And if it depends on kind of what you do, if you have high resolution images that need to be bigger on screen when you show them off , using something like this Marina template might work out a little bit better for you. We're gonna go with the Thomas layout. We can always change is very easily and automatically make the adjustments for us if we change the templates. So it's gonna automatically load a lot of my projects from Beyonce dot com, Cosby hands and Adobe Portfolio or connected. So every time you post a project on be hands, it can automatically load on your portfolio on Adobe, which is kind of a neat way to connect both both websites, both types of portfolios. So I'm gonna kind of remove the ones that I'm not gonna include for Lillian and go ahead and add her projects in. And of course, you can change the size of these boxes as well. You give them rounded edges padding between each box, which can kind of be nice. You gonna have add a little bit of visual separation between each project and you can also change the amount of columns that you have. So I'm gonna go ahead and just this. And so this is when kind of layout theory comes in handy when it comes to portfolio building. So this would it really overwhelm a user coming in because your profile cover voters for different projects. They're gonna look pretty different. And so it's gonna seem quite disjointed. All these projects slammed together, so if we reduce the amount that were shown to maybe three per bar, we could show are six and have nice big preview files for them to be able to see so they can click on and see the whole project. In all of its detailed glory, We're gonna stick with just three across, just due to rows of three projects each. Of course, with this you can change anything. We could switch it to our font choice that we have, Ah, that we developed in our branding standards for Lillian, we can use those same type faces are the same bonds throughout so that everything matches. Of course, we could even use those hex codes that we developed in the branding. We did the personal branding for Lillian in the previous section of the course. You can add those hex codes that we have in our branding standards to be able to pull those out. So I'm just gonna take this as an example. Take our bleu, grab our hex code here. This is where it really comes in handy and it's paste it in there. And now we have her blue in there. So now we need to add kind of a top header. We need to add her logo in there. And this is why when we did the personal branding for her, we developed a horizontal version for her logo, so it would fit really well on a traditional Web site layout. Not that the big seal that we develop for her may work really well on certain things, but it's not gonna work well all the time in those traditional ah portfolio website layout . So we're gonna add that in right now, and it depends We're gonna need to get that plan going. So if you sketched out your plan and you decided you wanted to do a darker background instead, you can have have the logo load that in with white, so it looks really good on a black background. Or in my case, I think I'm going to stick with a stark white and try to do a very clean contemporary look with my portfolio. I'm going to stick with a just a black ink on a white background, just making sure everything matches up in terms of all the typography or all the font choices. So the links and the ta her logo are all the same tight face, which is bitten Sands and the same type. Wait, so they're all bold, so each project will need a specific cover in this particular layout. So we really want to find a photo that really captures each project. And so we already did the pdf portfolios who already got a lot of our photos gathered together. Those hero images that we used in the pdf portfolios for our first page, Whatever. Whatever image we use for our first page to introduce that project, that's probably what you'll end up cropping for your ah project photos. This is a perfect square cropping if your photographer, if you have something that needs to be in a different ratio. If you're in video, you can always change the ratio of these as well. You can also add social media icons very easily, so we're just going to customize, appear at the top and just kind of switch these on and add as many relevant social media channels as possible. Don't put any social media channel that you haven't built up yet. Make sure it has a really nice at least several projects already posted on there. The clients very well may check the south. So you need to make sure you have all your social media that you're posting. Make sure its final make Sure they're several really great post already on the on there. It doesn't look like an empty social media page. So we have some kind of basic structure here. Each one of these. We need to find kind of the right cover photo for each one of our projects. I need to start loading in all those images. When you click on a particular project. It goes to a landing page, and this is kind of what we want to kind of expand on and talk about. Kind of having a nice title, having a client quote. This is when we did our pdf portfolios. We did a lot of work with that already. So this will be really easy to put together, cause it's gonna be very similar. Your guard already gonna have your descriptions written for your project and already gonna have the types of photos you gonna use as well. So we're gonna be rebuilding that. But in the digital format for each one of these landing pages. And this is where it's nice to show the process as I talked about in prior lessons. Are you showing the brain storing process and your guiding users kind of through a journey , walking him through your project in detail? 23. Portfolio Building - Adobe Portfolio Part 2: So I spent a few minutes using the builder to add new assets and build out this page, and so far I kind of have something very, very simple. Kind of have that quote I used. Our pdf portfolio is a guide to kind of how to build out this page in what images to use. So that's already kind of been determined. And I'm sprinkling a little bit of description throughout. Instead of having one big old description, I can kind of have some photos that go along with it. So it feels like there's a mixture of photos and text to read as you kind of scroll down through each one. So all the way down to the bottom of the website, of course, you don't have too many at this point. You just need to stop. And you know we could always if you feel like you're Project needs a really, really, really long page to describe it all. Sometimes having the use of video is not a bad idea at all. Um, toe have video as a way to help really describe your course without them having to continually scrolls, rolls roll. So we're gonna create a extra little promo video for one of our projects in an upcoming bonus lessons. We can go and check that out if you want to skip ahead. So just kind of using this portfolio builder. I'm not gonna get into too much detail about how to use it. Actually, it's pretty intuitive. You can click here, you can add images text, and you can reorder the water of everything as well. So you can add images, text, photo grids. You could even bring in light room photos, audio video. We can embed YouTube videos as a way to add your videos, of course, social icons and, of course, a contact form, which we all need on our portfolio. And you can easily arrange these by hovering over any element here and then clicking on this edit icon and going down to reorder page content. And this is kind of your big plan. So this lays out all the different things on your particular project page, and you can sit there and you can reorder these. However you wish so you can kind of have to see your whole layout here so you can have a nice plan of how everything looks and blows. So that's just one project. Let me go ahead and go back to the home page. Of course, now that we've finished the project, we need to find a really good cover photo for that. So we need to probably edit and crop this particular one right here So I can just go click on the edit and good to go to edit cover image. You can show whatever you'd like. You can even bring in one of your other project photos. If you feel like that. Really, uh, tells the project better so it can cut of how that have that wow image. What's the most important photo to put on your cover? That's how you get a really grabbed people. I think this is nice because it's clean and you have a lot of thumbnails. You're gonna have a lot of business dizziness going on. So choosing mawr clean thumbnails might be a good idea. So you click on Done, that's gonna update. And so there's our first project will go ahead and add actually like the cover for the second project, and we can go ahead and add all of that and go ahead and do our second project, or third or fourth or fifth or six. Go ahead and load all these end kind of See what this final portfolio will look like. So what about a bio page on here that's gonna be created, Buried? Similar? We're gonna go ahead and add a new page. Of course, it's gonna give you some basic layout options. I think I'd be really need to do kind of a profile pic on the right with a little description on the left. So it's quite and click on that. This will be about me because bio sounds a little impersonal and we've already done a lot of this hard work already. We already have this developed from our pdf portfolio. Let's go ahead and get that nice statement. Highlight quote. Make that a little bit bigger. I'm gonna be adding a button. I think having a button here kind of a call to action. You're on a bio page. Let's have some kind of call to action button work together. Contact me. Let's get together. Find a quote. All these kind of buttons can kind of help. Have some kind of action for that user or viewer to take after they read your beautifully well written bio, and they've seen your picture always have some kind of call to action or send them toothy the contact page where they'll be able to contact you or have that right there below just to make it easy. We're just adding a text box, and we have everything we need here in our bios. Going scroll up to her bio weaken. Decide to use the third person bio on the website. If we feel like that works a little bit better in this portfolio, it's really up to you. We're gonna try the third person bio here. We're going to do some significant little edits to the text on typography. Kind of highlight this and let's go ahead and make it what we've been making. Everything, which is our bitten sands. Let's try a lighter weight. It's too light and make it a lot smaller. This is we're having a little bit more of a reduced bio for a Web digital environment. I know we kind of had a longer one for PdF portfolio, which is more of a formal document for a website bio. I would probably even cut. As much as you can just say less with more, I'd probably cut a fume or, uh, lines of type here. Try to get it to a decent size. So now let's add was Go and change your name Here we can even add her logo instead so we can go ahead and delete this and let's add our logo, cause that's gonna look really nice. And what's great about this space is we can add a nice seal or circular logo. Here you look a little bit more professional. It's changed. The margin here had a little more padding, gets nice. White space helps everything look a little bit more professional. So let's add a little head shot. So there's your headshot added. I would say this is a very nice, clean, professional bio. If I were to arrive on this person's website, I would take them incredibly seriously. I could scroll down here. I can even click on the work together. I can go down the social media. They're giving me something that kind of click on. I got a nice, big, bold photo here. I think this looks great as a bio. So now we haven't about me. We have our work. We have a contact page where you can add a form on the contact page or some way toe toe. Have them contact you. We have kind of, or other social media icons. We even have a footer at the bottom that has kind of are all rights reserved. And we have our six different items here. So you see how clean this is. Let's go ahead and preview the site and see how clean it is. We don't need a lot of junk on our portfolio. There it is. We're on the website. You can scroll over, find the titles. It's very easy to use and that's it. We're not offering rows and rows and rows of projects. It's nice and clean. I feel like if I'm visiting this website, I'm not overwhelmed. I can click on one project, and I could get a lot more detail that way if I want to find out more detail, so there's kind of the landing page have a little quote up at the top. Everything's nice and readable. This is nothing fancy. There's not a whole lot of major design work going on here it is all very, very basic, and we know kind of put this together in about 1/2 hour or so, so you don't have to spend a ton of time putting together a nice website portfolio. Let's go ahead and go back. Of course, there's always the ability to add video. We're gonna do a bonus video. Next, we're gonna be ableto switch out our theme and add a video driven portfolio for those who want to use a video riel or when a show off your projects, you can also embed them like we did in this project. At the end on BET a YouTube video, you can upload it to YouTube and get the embed code. You could be able to embed that on any website where she could switch your themes at any time and automatically populate for you. So if we wanted to switch to maybe this Ludwig Ludwig theme, we can go ahead and click, and it's gonna automatically populate. That's one of the big benefits to this type of website, so you can look I can all have to do is switch my logo out to make sure I have white type. Instead of dark, But other than that, I really, really like this presentation. This looks actually a lot better, so scrolling down. We have just six very simple projects here, and that's it. Look out nice and simple that IHS. And so I would just need to do some work lightning that up. I could even change this background toe blue and maybe have a white logo that would look really nice, too. So it's very easy to switch your themes and find out which one you want, and it will automatically populate with all the content that you have. So if we wanted to have one that had the headline driven thing or an image driven thing, let's do this, Marta. Click on that and kind of see how that looks. So this would be good. Of course I'd have to change all that text out, but this would be good. You could actually put a video, I believe, back here our photo and have it be driven with the headline. And then you scroll down to your content so you can see all the wide variety of templates and options, and it's very, very, very quick to put together That's probably one of the big benefits to using Adobe Portfolio as your Web builder. Of course, you need to have a subscription to access this, but I don't pay anything for my portfolio. I don't I don't have a professional domain name linked up. Um, I just kind of use the one that's that's here that you're seeing right now, but you can easily link went up. If you go to settings, you can buy a domain name off, Go Daddy or any other domain seller, and you can link up a professional domain name so that you don't have to have ah portfolio dot adobe slash something. It could be, um, your you know, graphic design business or your photography business or whatever name that you have for your freelance creative business. So I wanted to go over that real quickly. Of course, I can't dive into all the little details, or this would be the longest class ever. But there's so many different options. I wouldn't really kind of going a little more detail on that one, because this is one that I personally prefer and really like to use because it's made for creative portfolios. It's it's designed for this 24. Portfolio Building - Behance: So now that we built an online portfolio using Adobe Portfolio, I thought I would also talk about be hands dot com. Be hands is owned by Adobe. But this what's great about be hands is it's absolutely free to sign up for an account. It's basically a social media site for creative freelancers and other creatives, not just freelancers but anybody in the creative business and any type of creative business of photography. Web design, graphic design illustration, even copyrighting All sorts of things are represented here. If you're creative freelancer, you have to be on B hands. I've noticed a lot of people getting jobs. Some students getting jobs through, be hands by just posting some strong work. And it was shared and it was featured. And they happen to get a job because a potential client saw that work saw that it was featured and they contacted them. So it's a great way to kind of find work. Um, it's gonna take a while to get to that point. You have to have an incredibly amazing project to really kind of stand out from the crowd because it's a very overcrowded space. There's a lot of creative freelancers on here, buying for the attention of ad agencies and other clients who might be kind of looking for talent. Here s oh, it's so don't expect to disk get jobs falling from the sky, But at least it's a first step because having a profile on here is better than not, and it doesn't take a lot of time to set up, so we're gonna just go through the very basics of getting it set up. And if you're already familiar with the dhobi portfolio, which we just kind of, I just did a little sample overview of that in the last few lessons. Then you'll be right at home cause it's the very same builder to build out your projects. So here is your portfolio or your profile. I guess I should say on Beyonce. Make sure you have if you have your website. This is why having the website is so important. We're also gonna be doing a WordPress kind of reviewing that and a few other website options. But go and get that website, you're gonna be posting it everywhere. When we do our marketing, when we do our social media campaigns, we're gonna need to have that so you can go ahead and list as many projects as you want. Of course, less is more, but this is kind of more of a social media account. So as you come up with new projects and client work, you know, post this as you continually get more projects because it's only gonna give you more exposure. And when you post will go over this in a little bit when you post a new project, you can put in certain tags in terms search terms in there. So if someone searches letterhead design or someone searches product photography, you'll have those tags as a part of your project, and you have a chance to be shown in the search results. So go over how to properly do that soon. So you're gonna be able to put your title. So make sure you have kind of, ah, title developed for yourself, and also that bios gonna come in handy. Of course, when you're doing online profile social media type bios, you may want to tweak it a little bit. You can be a little bit more raw and natural and a little more authentic. You don't have to be so much like you're applying for a job, you could be a little bit more, um, friendly and open and honest with your bios for social media. Eso Let's go ahead and get started. I'm gonna start a new project to go up here to create a new project. And so this will be very similar toe to the last Web builder we worked with. You're gonna be able to add files, texted her buble to in bed YouTube videos or anything as in bed code. You also got to be able to create gallery or photo grids. We're gonna build this out just like we would a landing page on a project on a website. So it's gonna be very similar, bigger, the better. In terms of photos, you really want to show off the visual creative skills you have, So make sure you have big photos that go all the way across the page for the for the B hands type of items. So be hands. Projects are a little less focused on the description and a little more focused on this visual. So this is an example of a really strong post. There's not a lot of text involved in describing the whole project like it would on your personal portfolio. So they're focusing on the images and they're big and they're beautiful, nicely crafted photos here. You could see there's not a lot of words describing each thing because it's pretty obvious what what we're kind of looking at. Ah, the photos kind of help describe the project. So the easiest thing to do is get all of your project images ready and crafted. So all you do is load these in s. We're gonna do just that. I have all these photos ready all the mock ups and everything that I did to create this project. I'm gonna go ahead and upload all the files at once everything in my folder and it's got to do it in a random order. But that's OK, because we're gonna be able to reorder our projects of once. All those load in. You go up to any edit of any photo and we'll have a little option that says a reorder project. We're gonna reorder the project. We can shift these around anyway, We'd like we have already kind of had that has my headline photo are my starter photo, and we can order these any way we want. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on saving the order and see how it looks. You could see how quick it is toe to kind of create this. You can also add a description, text anything here. If you wanted to kind of have a project header. Portia Project will already have a project name. So you can go ahead and describe what your project is using the project name. Do you have the chance to kind of put a little buffer there In terms of having some margin or not, it can have it be full screen. So I'm just looking through the order here. I think this is probably very zoomed in. I kind of want to show a little bit more of these two photos side by side. So I'm gonna go ahead and delete this project or delete that image, and I'm gonna do those side by side. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna insert a gallery, go and click on this icon right here, and I'm gonna upload both of those files that's gonna load them side by side. and what's great about that is it's not so zoomed in. I'm able to kind of really see those projects together so you can also do galleries to do side by side photos. If you feel like a photo is gonna be way too zoomed in, you're not gonna be able to see the details. Especially with photography. That's another way. Can do is putting two side by sides together. And of course, you could do more than two if he wanted Teoh and it just scrolls down. You can also add video as well. You can do in in bed so we can go up here and in bed. Here's Thean bed link. I can copy and paste from YouTube. My promo video for this. This is my promo video that I want to Also embedded. Might be hands profile. I think videos go a long way in helping describe projects big fan of video. So I'm gonna go ahead and in bed this clicking on the in bed option when I go to share, and I'm just gonna pop that into here and it's gonna in bed that video for me. So if we want include at the bottom or the beginning of our project. I think video is very, very helpful and selling yourself. Course you can edit styles and lay out there's gonna be spacing stylings. We're gonna go down here and see the spacing between. These is almost none, but you can increase and decrease it. It also changed background colors. If you want to do black, there's a simple project that does not need descriptions, but you can also add Type in Here is, Well, if you want to add descriptions. So the most important part about posting a project on be Hance is the tags and the descriptions that she put when he posted Let's go and click on Save and We're Gonna Continue and this is the most vital part of everything. Putting it together is the easy part cause we already had those. So project title. You want to use a title that has a lot of key words that people that would be searching for your type of creative skills. So if you're a Web designer, you might want to put you XY y. That's something that's a part of the project, so I'm gonna do logo design and branding project for Pacific Calm. And so I have logo design and branding. So there's there some keywords that are already in their course. It does limit you to how many words and letters that you can use. So cover photo. This is what people will see when on the search that you really need to make this high impact. A lot of times like to zoom in on small details instead of having a lot of detail. So right about here could also be the T shirt, but I don't feel that really describes the project quite as well. So let's just stick to the water bottle. We could even zoom in If this is a high resolution. Enough photo looks a little blurry when I do that, zoom in on the golden ratio part of the logo design or just stick right to that rate. So we have our thing. We can go and crop and continue. So go ahead and add your creative field so I could do branding. I can do graphic design as well get select up to three. Okay, done and tools used. Aiken. You know, say the software that as more is more detail you can provide, the easier searchable your project will be. You can add copyright or licensing or could go for licensing a little bit later in the class. But I usually like to stick with the default unless you have something in mind for that hands, Go ahead and don't forget this is the tab and you're tempted to click on Publish. Don't forget, these little tabs appear. Just make sure you kind of work through those tapped as well. It's easy to miss those. And so especially this tab. This is where all those keywords we're really gonna come in handy. And so it's very easy to miss that tab. So we're gonna go ahead and write a good description for this just as much as they'll allow us to do, because it helps with search for people finding and searching your project when they search for specific keywords. So keywords think about the keywords for your particular type of projects are gonna do branding, logo design, logo marketing golden ratio because he's the golden ratio, which is a way to kind of do a local design, so that's specific to my project. You can add up to 10 so really maximize all 10 if you can. All right. So when we're done with your keywords, let's go ahead and publish this. This is a real project that I'm posting, so I'm ready to go Go out, ready to publish. So it's always a little nerve racking. When you're publishing a project, you can all share your ah profile with anybody that you want, and there it is. There's a little quick project we put together on Be hands. I'll show you what it looks like on my profile course. I can always move the video and put the video a little bit higher up. This is what it looks like in the profile. You could see how important that cover photo is, trying to keep it as simple as possible. So there we go. Continue to add your projects as you get a chance and build that portfolio and be able to send that out to clients, but also be discovered by who knows who 25. Portfolio Building - Wordpress: So let's talk about WordPress. Probably the most powerful, flexible option you have in terms of building your own freelance Web site. So there's a lot of different templates you can use that are free that are already installed when you have WordPress. Where press it does require a hosting plan and the need to install WordPress on your hosting plan. And it can link up your domain name on your hosting plan to have a formal domain name. So after you have installed WordPress is is kind of the basic dashboard. I'm not gonna be going through how to use WordPress, which is kind of showing you through the template process to try to find a layout or a template that would work best for your freelancer website. So first of all, let's talk about the free default themes, so we're just gonna go to appearance and themes and check those out. It's amazing what you can do with what they already have for you for free, and it's going to depend on what you want to focus on first in what industry you're end, where they want it lead with a photo where they want to lead with a video or whether you want to lead with type or a headline. You can preview these at any time. Go ahead and do a live preview to see how it works, forcing customizes pretty heavily if you know coding or CSS. But even out of the box, these things are pretty customizable. You could even change the menu system very easily. They've just recently updated WordPress, and they're continuing to change the desktop. So are the dashboard, so you might see a lot of some differences for when you're looking at it, but its overall pretty much the same. You can go ahead. Just activate that theme, and then you can customize Let's say we won't go and activate this. When go down to customize and thats I can go in and dio some of the theme options at at the Menus, and then you can go down to theme editor, which is gonna be a little bit more advanced. So if you know any kind of coding, or if this is what you do for a living, this is where you're gonna be going to edit all sorts of template files and CSS files and PHP files so if you're kind of the advanced user and go to theme editor, editor and really have a little bit of fun with us. But if not and go to customize and then you can do your themes that way this year old default themes, you know they're not gonna be for everybody Not gonna be this. This one is not necessarily great for a portfolio. It's great for a regular business that may have products. So let's see if we can't find a few free or premium wordpress templates that I think would work really good with the type of layouts you want. So I'm gonna take my layout guide here. I have has some different website layout ideas. I'm gonna find a theme that I think matches really well for each one of those layouts. And I'm gonna have that as another downloadable resource in this lesson so you can get some ideas of wort. War press themes would naturally good with this layouts. Of course, you can add in what's called plug ins. These are extra little plug ins you can add to a wordpress site. It could be social media that you're adding onto your website. It could be S CEO or adding some search stuff onto your website. You can actually search free plug ins on a lot of different places, and you can download those to add additional functionality to your website. And this is the big power and benefit to WordPress is it takes, there's a learning curve and learning What's a plug in and and what's the theme and how do I get started with all that? But once you understand plug ins and themes, you've really understood well, a big part of WordPress and how it works. So there's a great S CEO plug in that you can download to be able to add s CEO and be able to be searchable. These are things that are may not always be in squarespace. Of course, they have some of that built in. But the great thing about WordPress is you have complete control over this. You can have 30 plug ins that all help drive your website and drive customers to website or clients so you don't need a maximum custom ability there. We're gonna look for some webs, templates or WordPress templates. We're gonna go to one of my favorite places to go, which is the creative market dot com, and they have a lot of great not only photos and graphics, but they also have WordPress themes right here. You can also get plug ins as well of their specific plug ins you're looking for, which is basically additional functionalities you're adding to your website is what a plug in is. So let's go ahead and find these air different ideas. So there's a business blawg, Commerce nonprofit, minimal. We want to do portfolio for our particular ones. We're gonna click on the Portfolio ones course. You can order these by popularity, but I like to order them on. Handpicked is pretty good because they're curated. Let's go to go through these, and I've already make sure you download that resource. I've already picked out several. I've done a couple hours of research on templates. I've used several of these for client projects when I did Web design for client work, and they're really flexible on pretty solid options, and they're pretty affordable. Some of them are only $25 some are about 60. Some of the high end ones could be a couple $100 but I don't think you need to really spend all that much to get a really good solid template. I mean, you have one that's $5 right here and has got kind of a lot of functionality built in there . You go ahead and preview this $5. That's not much for a website, is it? So let's go ahead and click on it and see what this looks like. This is great for portfolio. If this is the style that you're 12 could change your background image, you could have a full screen video when they go on the Web page. Always look at the reviews I like. I don't buy anything under four stars. Doesn't matter how cheap it is. If it's under four stars, I'm very weary of it. So this looks like a really nice modern clean design at $60. So let's go ahead and look at the live preview. This is very simplistic. I even like the little touches that it has. Ah, that my arrow icon has turned into a little icon there. It's really nice, really nice touch. This is be great for a photographer, very, very simple, and some of the simple ones are great cause they're gonna be really easy to edit some of these more complex template sites, their overwhelming when you're still learning how to do WordPress. If you're need a WordPress, so sometimes is more simplistic. Ones work really well because they don't have a lot of working parts to them, and they're not confusing to edit. So let's take a look at this one. This one's a little more affordable. What, $24? Let's take a look at this very simplistic clean. I'm sure you can change the column with and the photo size for those. These are all pop up videos. They're very simple, but I would almost, um, be willing to work with a free template if it's gonna be quite this basic. So let's try to find some free templates just so I can show you how to find those to the best place to go for that is wordpress dot org's. It's the non profit organization that covers WordPress. So anything with the DOT organs nonprofit, they're not trying to make money. They're nonprofit open source company, so you can trust anything that wordpress dot org's puts out. These are all free Let's take a look. Of course, the quality goes down a little bit when you're looking at free. But if you kind of spend some time adding a plug in or working with the lay out a little bit, you could probably get this toe where you need it to be. You know, this Neptune looks pretty good, so you can just download it and you would just go and install it. You would go to appearance themes once you download that zip file and you click up here to add new and you'll be able to upload your theme or right here, and then you'll be able to select it on the bottom. So please check out those recommendations. Of course, you can look on your own to find what you think would work best for your portfolio, but just wanted to take a 10 minutes or so to talk about WordPress is it's the most flexible option. Takes a little bit more time to get set up and learn, but it's the most flexible option you have available 26. Student Challenge : ready for a student challenge. Your task is to create a portfolio or revamp a current portfolio. Your portfolio could be one of several different types. First of all, you can try your hand in a traditional PDF portfolio. You could be more creative with how you lay out your projects. And PDF perf lawyers. Air helpful when sending proposals are featuring certain selected works. You can also create a website based portfolio. I find the best Web portfolios. Keep it simple and clean, featuring six or less total projects and a more detailed case study or two with it. Portfolio websites exude personality. Do not be afraid to show off your unique style. Another option is you can create a portfolio on a website like Be hance dot com are another third party website where you can post your projects. Lastly, we cannot forget Instagram. Do you feel like turning your INSTAGRAM account into our portfolio display? I'd love to review it. Feel free to post it in the student Facebook group for feedback, and I really look forward to seeing your portfolio's 27. BONUS- Adobe InDesign Portfolio Building Template: I need to be able to offer you this great resource. I spent a couple days really crafting this to make sure it could be really helpful for my students. So one of the biggest questions I get is how do I build a portfolio? I have classes and lessons that go in more detail about that, but I wanted to provide you guys with a template a portfolio building template when very sizes. So you can at least have a framework to get started with building your portfolio. And this would be a pdf based portfolio for sending to clients for applying to jobs. Whatever it is you need a pdf base portfolio four. So if you look at the resource files I provide you, you're gonna have this file system. I have this in two different sizes. We have a horizontal presentation and a vertical presentation. They both have their benefits. Depends on what kind of work you do and how your photos air working what orientation and you want to go for, um and also I'm happy to announce that I have this in both a four size so European sizes. Asian size is basically the whole world uses this measurement system and then for the United States. For this, For those who use inches, I have 8.5 by 11 template as well. So two different sizes, depending on where you are in the world and two different orientations vertical and horizontal. So I wanted to talk a little bit about how to use the template. If you've taken the in design basic lessons and you'll be right at home, you're gonna be ableto really move around this template without any issues. I also provided an example. Pdf So you can kind of see how I adapted this template, and ah grabbed a couple of different layout pages to craft something a little more custom. I'm seeing kind of see how I've used that in this example, just kind of scroll through this. I have a pdf where you'll be able to access this and see how have used some of the pre made layouts to be able to craft a portfolio. So let's open one of these. In the example. Let's do a horizontal version and one state stick with the A four horizontal size. We're gonna go ahead and open this up and this is a packaged in design file. We studied that in the basic in design lessons, and so you have the links here to all the photos that are used in this case, there's only one photo you have document fonts, which you have roboto. This is from Google fonts. Make sure you check the license. It's free for personal use, so you could just check out the license on that. And that is the only fun I used throughout the entire piece. And you can get it on Google fonts. Or you could install it directly from the template files. And lastly, is a two different files. The i N D D would be the file that you woop, and that's the in design file. The I D. Um El is kind of a more universal format that you can open it up. It's kind of more of that universal documents. So if you have an older version of Adobe in design, this would be kind of the file that she would use. If you don't have a current up to date version, let's go ahead. I have the 2020 version, so let's go ahead and open it up, and here is the basic template. I'm gonna go and zoom out. You can see all the page layout options. You have to go ahead and start with Page one, and it's got some basic instructions on page one. But I figured a video might be a little bit easier, so moving pages around are gonna go up to my pages tab and we could go ahead and move any of these around. So how do you use this portfolio builder? What I like to do is go through all the different layouts to see kind of what particular case study might match with a certain layout. Of course, all these customize you can move this over and make it go bleed, or however you want to customize it. But they're just some basic layouts that I think are personally effective. Win displaying different case studies and graphic design projects. So let's say I want to use this one right here. This is the photo overlap layout. That's the eighth layout. Let's say I want to start with that page for my first case study. I can just drag this page all the way up to the top make that my first page, and same goes for the other ones I can even duplicate. Let's say I want to have two of those in a row. I can right click duplicates, spread and now have Page one and Page two, and you can customize all this is just a header, so I can either say this is my first case study and swap that out with information. So let's say I want to change the color so I don't really like this color for my headers, or I want to use a different color for each one and my portfolio. For each case study, I decided to go with a different header color so that when people were scrolling through the pdf, they'd be able to identify what pages went with what case study. But let's say you wanna have them all changed the same. I'm gonna go over to my colors, watches this, watches panels, go and drag this out, and I have something called branded color so this could transfer over and your template. I'm just gonna double click this branded color, and I'm gonna change it to any old color. Let's say kind of this darker blue click. OK, and this is global. So that's watch is on all of the headers and also all of the type. So let me go ahead and change that again so you can see. So I noticed that changed the top, but also all of the headers as well. So you can kind of change that globally. You don't have to sit there and change it on each page. That's what's so nice about having the swatches assigned to specific objects. Let's say I want to drag this photo right in and just drag it right in. It populates. I can right click goto fitting, go to fill, frame proportionately or however you want to fit it and you can go ahead and do your photo . Of course, we covered a lot of this in my in design basic left lessons where you can double click the photo and crop it within the frame or just click the frame wants to change the frame size, as you could see. For my example, there are so many different varieties of layouts here that she can use, and I find these layouts barely effective, and it's gonna depend on your project type and how many photos you have? What layout might work out best? I like to have a variety of layouts in my pdf presentation so that they're not the same layout over and over Your switching it up. Maybe you have a photo on the right and then you have a photo on the left on the next page just trying to keep her pdf portfolio. Interesting. As people looked through the pages and remember not to make it too long, try to keep it. You know, under 15 pages is possible because that's a whole lot of work for people to look through. They may never get all the way to the bottom. So keeping it with your only your best work maybe pick 3 to 6 different case studies that she can have pick out your best work only all that other smaller work. You could put that on the side or make a gallery page of the very end with some kind of random selected work instead of featuring a whole page on some of those. So there's some quick tips, and hopefully you will enjoy this portfolio building template. I spent a lot of time on it, making sure you had both a vertical and horizontal version and came up with some what I thought were really good layouts. But you can customize it, make it your own. I can't wait to see your pdf portfolios and actions that can land some of that client work and start to get jobs. 28. Finding Clients - Introduction: the biggest question I get from aspiring and current freelancers as Where do you find clients? And how did you get your first few clients? This section is dedicated and reviewing all available options and finding clients both online and off. I'll be following this downloadable guide throughout this section, so make sure you downloaded to have a full list and description of all the online and offline platforms I'll be talking about throughout the next few lessons. A lot of students place they're well made. Personal portfolios profiles written biographies on all of these online freelancer platforms like people per hour dot com or up work dot com. And they're pretty discouraged by the lack of action. Dust balls roll across the desert and discipline. It runs lack of clients, contacting them for work and make them feel like they did something wrong. Like their portfolio was not good enough or their pricing was too high. And I want to be honest before the section starts and say that finding clients online is hard. It is not because of a lack of talent on your part button oversaturation, not only of people wanting to be freelancers in this new freight lands gig economy, but also the high competition on each one of these websites. It is not impossible to do very well online. There are freelancers making a good living off of just working on these online freelancer platforms, but it's not going to be for everybody will be creating an up work profile together in detail later on in the section, and I wanted to make sure expectations are set before we do so. I still recommend trying all sorts of different methods for finding clients both online and off. But we'll need to do as much as we can to put ourselves on the top of the stack by having that killer portfolio profile Bio head shot and being able to set the right pricing for ourselves and speaking of pricing, will learn a lot about that in the next section of the course. While finding clients is the hardest part of starting a freelance business, the good news is after your finding those first few clients. Future clients are not as hard to grab as referral start to take over, and you have established yourself with social proof like reviews and client testimonials. My first year freelancing was mostly continuing to locate new work. While my last 13 years were spent actually doing the client work with little time needed to go out and find new clients, this is the referral system and all of its glory. Realistically, you may want to spend your first month freelancing, locating and finding your 1st 2 clients. Once those clients air obtained and you've completed their work with excellence, there's a good chance they could refer you to another client, but only if they're more than satisfied with your work. That is why those first few clients get the most dedication from you, as they could be worth more than the money they pay for you for that project. They can also give you additional client referrals. Let's say Client one never refers you to anybody else but client to does you complete work for the second clients referral, and that referral gives you another referral. You could start to see this web of relationships that start to develop as your name gets passed around to different contacts. There are two types of clients long term steady clients that give you constant work each month, week or day, and short term clients that have a one time project. Long term clients that give you study work are the most valuable clients around. Sometimes it's even worth charging a little less for this. Clients just established that longer term relationship, overtaking a lot of short term projects that pay more. It only takes several long term steady clients to fill up your weekly work schedule, which is, of course, a good thing of finding clients is a huge tour for you. So take heart. This is the hardest aspect of freelancing, and it will not be your main task forever. Doing great work with the first few clients can pay huge dividends for your future freelancing career. Once you build up a nice combination of long term clients and a few short term clients continuing to get that referral system going, you could see how finding clients will be just a temporary battle. Now, let's review all of the different ways we could start finding clients as mentioned above. All those some platforms and methods may be more difficult to find clients. I do recommend trying out as many avenues as you can, and finding those first new clients is that what is really is gonna get our business going 29. Finding Clients ONLINE: Let's first talk about finding clients online. There's several popular large freelancer websites can create profiles for and start getting your portfolio out there as well as actively bid for client work. The more well known of the Bunches up work, it's a great reputable site for seeking freelance work. Simply build a profile, which will do together in the section of the course, and once you're approved, you'll be searchable by thousands of potential clients. You can also apply to freelancing jobs by submitting proposals, which will include specific things that client requests, like certain portfolio types and pieces, a written cover letter or other types of requests. This platform, like many others listed here, are oversaturated with current freelancers. So just be aware it's still worth the effort building a profile here. But there's heavy competition, and I will make finding this first few clients a bit tough. Sometimes. Lowering your hourly rate for the first tee project is necessary to start building that social proof, which will talk about when we build that profile together here shortly. People per hour is similar toe up work and the fact that you create a profile and are able to not only seek out jobs by sending proposals, but clients confined your profile listed on the website to three things that make people per hour a bit different than up work. First of all, there's less competition on people per hour as it's a newer platform. Second, they offer the ability to have a portfolio type profile, which contains more photos than the up work profiles. And lastly, they have something called offers. Offers give you the ability to post an offer that will be seen on the website for potential clients to see. This could be anything from I can build a five page Wordpress website to I can create a social media post in less than 24 hours. If you're familiar with fiber, it's a very similar concept. And, speaking of fiber freelancers either hate or love fiber. But most freelancers have not found huge success on fiber, although a small percentage still do. This site, with an insane amount of competition, gives you the ability to post a gig on their website, allowing others to purchase your offer and add add ons. These add ons can increase the total price you receive is a freelancer and these add ons could be things like decreasing the time and delivering the project. Or it could be sending extra file types. Not all projects are priced at $5 although that is the standard rate. There is something called fibre pro that requires you to apply to get accepted as a vendor . If you have a great portfolio and some experience, there might be a good chance of being accepted there. Fiber Perot gives freelancers the ability to charge much higher prices and have access to different networks of people. Some gigs can exceed $2000. The key hurdle here is getting accepted into their program, but since you have a great portfolio and personal brand, it's worth a try. The next thing I want to talk about is trying free are spec work. Spec. Worker speculative work is working on a project before getting paid, if at all. And it's one way to improve and fill your portfolio with riel client projects. I highly encourage you to seek out spec work that is non profit based so you can help others in need but also build your portfolio. Spec. Work should only be done for fun and for practice. I encourage my students to pursue spec work on Lee if the project will be enjoyable and fulfilling and could be added to your portfolio in a positive way, are open up new connections for you. Spec. Work on online websites like the examples here don't encourage building client relationships. So I would proceed with caution unless once again, this is a purely fun exercise for you. Pro bono work. Who says working for free has to be unfulfilling? There's several places to volunteer your services to clients in the nonprofit space. There's even a website called Catch a fire dot org's that lists nonprofit companies needing work in a wide variety of fields. This is great for getting your foot in the door at several smaller or even larger nonprofit companies. There's also the possibility that your free services you offer them could turn into paid. If they really enjoyed your project work, are they possibly get funding for more projects? It's a gamble, but also a great way for client testimonials, social proof reviews and getting experience working on projects that you would normally not get the chance to. Now it's time to talk about social media and networking. A big part of finding clients online is networking, and it's just a valuable as networking offline. Their silver professional networking sites. You want to be on as a freelancer who's wanting to expand those connections. The obvious first choice is linked in dot com. Connect with anyone in your current network. The great thing about LinkedIn is being able to see and connect with your connections connections. There's also the ability to private message connections as well, for a more knocking on the door approach to selling yourself. Not everyone feels comfortable doing that, but with a common connection and might seem a bit easier and a more natural way to introduce yourself. Do not underestimate the power of networking and Facebook groups. The key here is finding the right group to connect with. If you're a wedding photographer, it's great to connect with other wedding photographers in a group. But for finding client work, perhaps going where your target audience hangs out in this case a wedding planning group or a group for wedding planners might be a good choice. Graphic. Our Web designers might wanna hang out in a small business group full of small business owners needing branding or marketing website design work. A tip. Here's to make sure not to post a generic post When first joining the group. You need to spend some time investing in the group in the community, helping others out before even thinking about telling others about your services. I personally have run a large Facebook group myself and those who post their services right away when joining raise a big red flag with me. But after they participate in the group for a little while, I start to allow them to mention their services every once in a while, as long as it doesn't seem a little spammy. Share your expertise. There are several social media sites where you can start to share your knowledge and expertise with the world. You can live stream on YouTube or post helpful videos. You can live stream on Facebook and even start your own Facebook group that will attract those who seek your skill set. Remember when posting on social media to include those relevant hashtags. Those hashtags are searchable on platforms and make it easier for your target audience to locate you. For example, if you're calligrapher who does custom stationery designs. Why not host a calligraphy style life stream that shows off different calligraphy lettering styles? Or if your aux you I designer and you host a free webinar to small business owners looking for tips and tricks to building that great e commerce website, there are so many ways to put yourself out there through the use of helpful posts, videos, live streams and articles. This naturally leads to the next idea. Become an online guru in your skill set. Ah, lot of creative freelancers air scared to put themselves out there, mostly because they feel like they're not top talent. I still think there's a lot of opportunities with those with just intermediate skills, especially in those top demand skill sets like Web design. Not only can this help you find client work through speaking and network up opportunities, but will also help you land clients by having some of those helpful videos articles that you've written on your blog's and on your portfolio website 30. Finding Clients - Paid Ads: finding clients through online paid ads. This gets a little bit into marketing your freelance business, but I wanted to talk about the options when it comes to paying for exposure through boosted post or paid online ads. Sometimes to get a business started, there needs to be a little bit of financial investment in terms of marketing. But not everyone will need to pay for ads. A. Some of the other free networking and finding client activities mentioned in this course can land you some of those first few vital clients. For those who struggle even after trying out all the free avenues, it might be time to consider a small investment and test out some paid ads to see how they convert. There are several types of online paid ads first off their display ads, which can be purchased from online news websites and other local websites for a monthly fee . I find these more effective for larger companies and less so for freelancers. But I prefer doing display ads in local networks in your nearby town, as display ads for national or international websites can be just too costly for a new freelancer. Next there are paid Facebook ads. You can set up a Facebook ad account in just a few minutes and craft your first ad. You could do either a Facebook post ad, which shows up and you're targeted users. News. Feed Oregon Do boosted posts, which expose one of your normal Facebook business page post to a broader target audience. Facebook Change Pallor Search algorithm worked back in 2016 to favor paid and boosted business post over organic posts. So it's hard to grow organically on Facebook now without trying to bring in users through other sources. As a freelance owner and small business owner, I prefer boosted posts because they can feel more natural for freelance business. The key to creating a great Facebook boosted post are paid. Ad is to define your target audience well, we've already worked on that a bit earlier in the class, and there's a good reason why it's gonna really help you here. I would start off with a very small budget for your first boosted poster ad, so you can see if small changes in your campaign, whether it be the image you used, the headline are tweaking your audience has any changes in the conversions you get or the new clients in your case. Rarely you can create the perfect ad right away. This is because it takes a few ads running first to find out which ones are more effective . As you're still getting to know your target audience. Instagram is another option for boosting your post. First of all, you'll need to convert your INSTAGRAM account into a business profile by going to the account settings and taking the switch over to business profile option. Once that's complete, you'll notice a new promote buns on all of your posted posts once you sign up for a business account, which is totally free, by the way, and I recommend everybody do it even if you don't even run ads because it'll give you access to more stats about each post, including profile visits your reach where each view came from what it views came from Hashtags Home page or from your followers. This extra detailed information about each post is so vital in helping you define your target audience, but also helps you find out what content tends to lead to a bigger response from your following. I find the use of video driven post, much more engaging with my audience than a single photo post. I also found that posting helpful guides for my target audience worked better than promotional style posts where I show off my work. For example, if you're a Web developer, you can do a series of posts that gives advice to small business owners about proper website loud and structure. Now that we talked about ways to find clients online, let's talk about one of my personal favorite ways to find clients and how I found my first clients, and that's where and how to find them off line. 31. FInding Clients - Offline: finding clients online is not for everyone, but my personal freelance story started with a few clients I found through networking offline. Some of these suggested avenues for finding clients offline take a bit of entrepreneurial spirit and perhaps a boost of confidence being around others and talking about your skill sets. We've already crafted a business card, a website or personal portfolio. We defined our target audience, and we've written our bios and stories, and we have everything we need to pursue clients and network off line making local connections At last, my favorite and most recommended step and finding clients is connecting with local, small or medium size business owners. You could do this online by finding local Facebook business groups. You can do this in person by connecting with your chamber of commerce. Our local small business body group are gathering, serving on the board of directors and volunteering for a local nonprofit to make connections as well, asking to speak or teach at a local small business seminar or workshop, etcetera, about marketing, branding design as another way to get your foot in the door. It may sound a little old school, but visiting local businesses with a business card in hand can help land you this first few clients. Great clients tend to refer you to other clients, and local ones tend to do that a little bit more. Because of that personal relationship you tend to build with them. One thing you could do is volunteering your services. Consider the list below for possible local entities that you could use your services at either a low cost are free to get your foot in the door. Clearly communicate with them. If you do volunteer your services what you may require in exchange for your free work or low cost work. It could be either a testimonial, a client referral or possibly to have future paid work. This does not have to be free services. Sometimes contacting a local school, for example, and letting them know you're giving them a nonprofit discount by cutting your rates by 1/3 can help also motivate them To contact you. You can find phone numbers and emails to administrators of the following below by visiting their websites, preferably email. Someone who would be making those marketing decisions like a marketing coordinator, a principle or a manager and the finding clients guide. I have a little sample of an email you can write to an administrator or a marketing coordinator of one of those local groups. It might help you get started in that course, customize it to your needs connecting with other freelancers. So connecting with other freelancers is a great idea, but not for the reason. You might think being with other freelancers is a healthy thing to do to network and get out of the house and to share your experiences. But a big benefit to connecting with certain freelancers is to share and swap clients. Let's say you're a visual designer who specializes in Web design and graphic design. You're not very comfortable coding but can turn any rough idea into something pretty good looking. One thing you can do is seek out freelancers who have excellent coding and Web development background, but they don't have a strong visual design background. With the two of you now connected, you can share client work and give the client not only the visual side, but that back inside as well and solid coding ideas. Early on, I was able to find through a client's connection, a local programmer who sent me several clients of his clients. I did the Web design, and they did the back end coding and adapted it to a CMS, or content management system like WordPress. Another example of this inaction is if you're an illustrator, elbow finding and teaming up with a T shirt designer, they're bound to need more custom hand drawn illustrations for their T shirts. And if your photographer teaming up with another event planner can help you land future wedding photography gigs, if that's your style. If you're a copywriter and editor, there are many freelancers that needs your skills. Like editorial designers, Web designers and anyone who works with written type copy, you can find people offline or online. And the great thing about connecting with someone locally is finding and serving local clients together and being able to meet face to face to discuss plans and start building that long term relationship that leads to referrals from 32. Finding Clients - Creating An Upwork Profile: I'm gonna walk through the basic set up of an account for up work, and this is gonna be very similar to other freelancer sites. So once you kind of know the process on how to go through this, you'll be able to sign up for a lot of different freelancer sites in similar ways. So we're just gonna go through upward because that is one of the more well known platforms out there. So this is what kind of work do you do? Select up to three categories. So we're gonna be, ah, really just focusing on design and creative with Lily and Hernandez. But we want to go ahead and select this one as well, because just in case she wants to get into a Web design or kind of expand her audience a little bit or her client base, we're gonna go ahead and look at the future of what we want to do. So this is where we're gonna basically select our key words for what? We want people to search when they want to pull up our profiles. There's going to be our strongest skill sets. So we got to really think about what do we do the best. That's what we want to focus on. So you're not gonna put every single one every single item you do go to do not only do what you want to dio, but also what you think you can deliver the best quality work in. So in this case, we're gonna do brand strategy, graphic design, art direction. So we're gonna just double check and make sure there's not other ones we think would be more powerful. So perhaps I can unclip art direction and go into cr