doing good work and working for good by Alvalyn Lundgren
client relations

Doing Good Work and Working for Good

On his Dear Design Student blog on Medium, Mike Monteiro, design director at Mule Design, author and speaker, discusses designers and their ethics. He addresses

Read »

How to Design Your Day

Creative freelancers spend a lot of time designing stuff. Good design is structured, organized and unified. When you juggle multiple projects, the ability to focus

Read »
design practice

Why Freelancers Should Not Pitch

As an independent creative, you get to decide how you will attract clients and projects. One option is via Requests for Proposals (RFPs). Whether or

Read »
business

How To Get Clients To Pay You

What do you do when you a client refuses to pay you? According to Freelancers Union nearly  50% of freelancers were stiffed by clients in the past 12

Read »
Your Working FIles and Property Rights
design practice

Property Rights

Although it’s a common assumption, clients are not automatically entitled to a designer’s working files. The tools, preliminary concepts and layouts remain the property of

Read »

How To Budget For A Design Project

To answer the question, “How much will it cost?”, the question, “What do you want to accomplish?” needs to be asked first. Clients are often in the dark

Read »

Good Success

The Practice and Principle of Accomplishing Something Upon learning about what I do by trade, an employed acquaintance asked with some concern, “But will you

Read »

Freedom Through Boundaries

During a downhill event at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, a contestant wiped out against the fence because she lost her footing on a turn.

Read »
Why you can't have the font files by Alvalyn Lundgren
design practice

Why You Can’t Have My Font Files

Business and creative culture now runs on creative rights and intellectual property. Theft, abuse and alteration of intellectual property is as rampant as ID theft,

Read »

Listening Is A Design Skill

Listening is related to empathy. Empathy is valuing another’s experience, and keeps the designer from creating something that is self-expressive.

Read »

Spec Work Is Gambling

Working on spec directly contradicts good business practices and does not even promise payment for work performed.

Read »
design

The Internship Epidemic

It is the responsibility of design professionals, teachers and school administrators to value the next generation of designers so that the profession is respected, appreciated and thrives. Unpaid internships won’t accomplish that.

Read »