Photo by Andrea Jaccarino

As graphic designers, we constantly have to wear multiple hats and perform a number of different tasks for certain projects. This is especially true if you are a freelance designer. Often, clients don’t have a budget to hire multiple people to get a project done and they expect the designer to do all that’s necessary for a given project. It’s very important for freelance designers to gain knowledge of certain skills that go hand in hand with design, so they don’t have to send a client away just because they don’t know how to do something that’s closely related to design. Below is a list of only 5 of the many skills that a graphic designer should acquire:

Photo by Evangelos Vlasopoulos

It is common for some clients to feel reluctant about hiring a freelance designer as opposed to a design company, but there are a lot of advantages to hiring a freelance designer, five of which are listed below:

• Flexibility

Freelance designers tend to be a lot more flexible when it comes to design ideas and time lines. They make sure they offer their clients flexible service in order to meet their design needs. Also, for a freelance designer, it isn’t always 9-5, 8 hours a day while working on a project, so, clients may even get revisions back within a couple of hours, which helps in speeding the process.

Photo by zehfernando

Typography can be very tricky to implement, especially if you are not sure what it means or what it does to a design. Here is the formal definition of typography on wikipedia:

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning).

Believe it or not, typography can make or break your design. It’s not very uncommon to see beautiful symbols paired with bad typography, making the entire logo a not-so-successful one. For example:

So what are some of the mistakes that graphic designers make when it comes to typography?

A lot of clients ask me this question, “what is the difference between a stock logo and an original logo? Why should I pay more for a logo?” It seems absurd to them to have to pay more for a logo that has the same purpose as the other logo that’s cheaper. Well, that’s where they are wrong. There is a huge difference between a stock logo and a custom brand identity. There is an abundance of stock logos out there, which means they all look the same except for the company’s name and a couple of colors here and there. Whereas, having an original brand identity for your business means that its exclusive to your business and no other business can legally rip it off and call it their own.