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Who wouldn’t want to put in the same effort or even less and make consistently more money than they did before?

Is this really possible?

Absolutely!

Here’s how in five steps:

1. Figure out your most profitable activity. This shouldn’t take too long but it does require some objectivity. The important part about this that I have found is to NOT get too far away from the “numbers”.

What I mean by “not getting too far from the numbers” is focus on the activities that you do that are directly contributing to the income generation. The closer those activities are to actually creating the money the better. If it’s art then it’s a matter of finding the most profitable art jobs that take the least amount of time - or generate the largest (or repeat) orders. If it is sales, then it is closing orders on a certain style customer with a certain product. If it’s management, then it’s boosting others to find and achieve more with their most profitable activities.

Once this activity is uncovered, switch so you can invest 80% of your efforts to being able to do this specific style of task.

2. Eliminate distractions. Everything from phone calls to unnecessary checking of emails multiple times a day will sap small amounts of attention away from profitable tasks. The goal is to be more efficient during the right time of day so that the maximum can be achieved. Everyone has several sweet spots during the day where they are better at their chosen tasks. The challenge is to become aware of your own personal rhythms and to not fight them, but plan with them so that you can get more done.

To aid in this - put up a funny do not disturb sign, use headphones, turn off email pop-ups, focus, focus, focus, and you will see an amazing burst of productivity.

3. Define short-time goals. You will notice that if company is coming over in two hours that it is somehow possible to clean the entire house in that time. On a normal day cleaning the house might take all day and still not get done. Why? There is nothing like a sense of looming deadline with REAL consequences to get us motivated.

How can you use this in your favor? Everyone has a motivator button for short term goals. Kind of like the Hulk inside that comes out when it’s all on the line. Finding that button is a key to unlocking the ability to self-motivate. For one person it may be the thought of a monetary reward. Artists will often work like slaves if they receive verbal approval of their work. I have found for myself that it helps me to have a very specific goal and achievement. “If I finish this DVD recording, I can watch Iron Man for the 22nd time…”

The key to making this work is in making them micro goals of less than a day - several hours is even better. This way both effort and reward are nicely sandwiched together in one simple mental package.

4. Work less.   Whoa, this is a nutty one isn’t it? How can you possibly make more money by on purposely working less?

Well, remember the company that is coming over analogy? This is where that style can pay off. Plan a shorter work time, yet fit in a set goal that must be finished in that amount of time. Make sure it is possible to do, yet challenging to fit in. The idea is the urgency and sense of limited time will create greater efficiency in set tasks. One of the best examples of this was when two artists (John & Jenny) had to come into the office on Saturday to finish a couple of designs. Normally, they didn’t work on the weekend but these jobs had to be done.

John had a fantasy football draw at noon that day and he was running the event.

Jenny didn’t have firm plans but was thinking about going out for dinner later.

Who do you think showed up early and finished in record time and was out of there in an hour? Compressing time and energy increases output dramatically.

One warning: This can also increase stress if it is attempted without greater time off. Heavier workloads in shorter times must be balanced with longer periods of decompression.
5. Here’s the shocker that few really get - but those that do will continually make 10 to 1 more money than those who don’t: 

Ask for it.

Simple? Maybe - but consider this: I was proud to help a local charity to help create a fundraiser. At one point the leader of the discussion stopped everyone and said, “Okay, now it is time for us to pick who is going to do the ASK.”  I think you can still hear the crickets in the room underneath the silence…  He was using a fundraiser term for describing the specific person who would stand up during the event and literally ASK everyone to donate money. Is this a tough thing to do?

Probably for most people it is - that is why sales professionals are so celebrated.

Early in my art career I felt grateful that I was doing art so I wouldn’t have to do sales… It was unknown to me, and somewhat scary. What if people said NO. Or worse, what if people thought I was one of those salesman that annoy people.

Well, now I have found the simple secret that needs telling about the whole issue: People like to spend money and buy things. They like it even more if they are getting a good deal or if it is something that will make them feel “cool” or “special”. In contrast, people hate to be sold and feel like they have to buy something or else.

The key then is to step back and ask people to buy.

So you might wonder what the big deal is, and you already do this, etc. But do you do it enough? Here’s a challenge to really magnify the money in per unit sales: With every sale, thank the customer and right after they have paid for their order - and believe it or not, this is one of the best times - ask them when they might need something else, ask them for a referral, and then ask them if they might reorder.

Once you get good at doing this, practice asking customers to buy extra products during the sales process. The key to up-selling is to make it a great deal for the customers (the extra volume discount can really offset a lot of the extra item’s cost) and to let them buy it. You are just offering the items and then asking them to buy.

Doing these concepts on a regular basis are guaranteed to magnify the money made doing the same amount or even less work time so practice with them and have fun on your greater time off!

- Don’t forget about my Corel 0-60 DVD which can train artists for screen printing to do things faster so everyone makes more money!

My senior year at SIUC included a class lesson I never forgot:

We had an excellent instructor (hat’s off to Larry Briggs everybody) who had a client that assigned the class a paying logo design. Everyone in the class was to design a logo and the one that the client picked was going to be awarded some cash.

Whoa - it was the real deal - people lost sleep over this one.

side note: This would be a hard sell assignment to schools these days (too many disappointed students) but back then (in 90) they weren’t as worried about people being “sensitive” to losing.

The assignment was to create a corparate logo for a carpet cleaning company. We were not given any other direction than the name and company information and a week to develop it.

I got an “A” on the assignment but lost the contest - the company chose another design. I was really angry about it - I thought mine looked the best, easy!

But the client choose a design with their company logo in a simple block lettering with a graphic of a carpet cleaning element sweeping through it. They liked the design that spoke function over aesthetics.

Most clients are just like this. They like communicated function in a logo - literal, boring?, function.

and it sells products and services too…

Some logo fundamentals that have served this process:
1.  With a small start up company - marketing research suggests that legibility and clarity of purpose are primary and style and image are secondary. It is important to make sure the logo can clearly be read from a distance and from up close and that it is read from left to right easily (integrating a word with an icon or using overlapping images/elements on logo words decreases legibility).

2.  There is a desire to pattern logo development of a small company to a larger, franchise business. Research suggests that branding is irrelevant and counter productive in single business’ under 5 million. Having a consistent logo and appearance is a big boost for professional, established looking reputation but using a logo that doesn’t communicate what you do clearly will make marketing more difficult instead of magnify results.

3.  A logos primary function is to unify and support marketing efforts. This means that your logo should be a tool for people to recognize and identify your company name and purpose as quickly as possible to be able to find and buy your service. In the same glance a logo should establish a reputation of professionalism and commitment. Ideally, a logo should feel iconic and fit the message and purpose of the business.
It is very common for logo development to go through a series of changes and eventually come back to the original submission. This is not suggesting that a client pick the first one submitted, merely stating that the best results are typically achieved by looking at your logo as a new customer would. What are the first thoughts that pop into the mind? When making changes to a marketing piece, logo, or interior design - narrow down the why and make sure it serves the function of communication, sales, and service before image.

- thanks again for letting me lose, Mr. Briggs!

Don’t forget about my CorelDRAW 0-60 DVD with over 7.5 hours of production/speed training!

 Six fundamentals to doubling your speed in CorelDRAW

1.    Quickkeys – A surprising amount of artists neglect to use the quick keys and prefer to still scroll the mouse through and select tools and commands by clicking on them.

Several years ago I was working in an art office and one of the intern artist’s (who seemed more like a programmer than an artist at the time) was helping the company with the giant project of archiving the art files from the past five years. This project was an enormous mess, but this student was diligently hammering away at the process and I had to interrupt him at one point to ask for his help with a side project. The other artists told me in advance that he had “freaky” skills on the computer. Once I saw what he could do I was truly impressed. His speed in navigating the windows system was astounding. It seemed like he hardly paused on any screen while he was moving files and saving and copying, renaming, or deleting items.

Instead of jumping into my project right away and just labeling him “freaky computer guy” like the others I had him carefully break down how he did it and what he was using to navigate and make edits so quickly.

The answer?  - that’s right, all quick keys in combination with arrow and tab navigation in windows. Inside of the software programs it wasn’t much slower.

The conclusion? – artist’s (myself included) assume that using the mouse is the fastest way to select things. We all have our comfort zones but this is one that is meant to be broken.

The challenge is to investigate all possible quick keys in the software and file menus and begin to use as many as possible in combination. The motto that runs through all of the 0-60 training is the same: do the simple tasks as fast as possible so you have more time for the details and doing extra crazy versions of designs.

How do you find/learn the quick keys – CorelDRAW has a quick key guide that comes with the software. In addition the common commands that you can quick key through will have the short cut listed next to them. The alt-letter will usually select a menu item and then it is just a quick key or two to activate a dialog box. Most dialog boxes have quick key options as well.

Don’t forget that you can customize these keys to your liking if you are coming over from illustrator and you want the program to feel closer in style. In addition you can (at an advanced level) make macros to link several commands together to really automate some simple tasks. The real deal is the little repetitive tasks that can be simplified. This is where hours will be saved at the end of the week by mastering the quick keys.

A big reason a lot of artist’s don’t really embrace the quick keys the way they should is because they have yet to memorize the keyboard and they have to hunt for the keys. Inside of this reasoning it would make sense to start the typing practice at the same time so both skills can arrive together.

2. Pressure sensitive pen – I had to outsource some artwork to a newspaper once, and in the process I sat down with the editor (who was admittedly not an artist). I noticed right away that he was unusually fast at moving the cursor and selecting items on the monitor. When I looked at what he was doing I noticed that he was using a pen tool instead of a mouse. I asked him about it and he explained that he used this because he tested everything and this tool was twice as fast as a mouse for him.

How could this be?

He explained that the mouse requires you to move it a certain distance. So you have no choice but to roll it or slide it to create the movement. With a pen tool you just move the tool in a slight hover over the board and the cursor moves along with it. At the end of the job, it consistently tested out at double the speed in just moving and clicking on objects. And this doesn’t even include the advantages in control, pressure sensitivity, and angle or eraser options.

Since they are inexpensive, I thought it would make sense to check it out, and I have never worked without one since. It doesn’t totally replace the mouse for me, but some artist’s use them exclusively. If you’re not using one, you should try it.

3.    Create import templates – an import template is a file that is created for you to use as a support element. The most common one for CorelDRAW users is probably a t-shirt outline for approvals and for production art it is several sets of crosshairs. It is an efficient and functional idea to create several sets of crosshairs and then save them in a prominent location for easy retrieval as you process your work you can quickly import them and quickly place them for setting up the separations.

The reason this saves so much time is obvious. There is no need to recreate a file or support elements each time they are needed. It can also help to standardize location of items and streamline the production process. If your company employs a pin registration system this can be a great thing to create a template of so that each time the file will fall in the same spot on the films and be ready for attaching to a carrier sheet or punched with the reference holes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome! You are one of the few that have the opportunity to view the fastest way to learn CorelDRAW Production Art techniques.
You can now pre-order CorelDraw 0-60 training for screen printers and graphic artists on DVD. The final version has been mastered and DVD’s will be shipping by Dec 16th!

Dear Art4Screen letter subscriber:

I recently received a letter from JT asking me for help with CorelDRAW production artwork that he was working on.

He complained to me that he was frustrated with how to accomplish art tasks from the crazy variety of art he was dealing with and wanted to know if I knew of any training that could help him learn just what he needed to know.

“Is there a quick way to learn how to do art jobs faster and get good results from separations when they are printed? Can you help to show me a way of setting up files so they are simple for recreating, separating, and some simple special effects?” JT asked me.

So that’s just what I did.

I took 17yrs of on the job training and information and packed the most important pieces into 20 lessons.

JT already knows the basics of CorelDRAW, like how to install the program and use the tools. He doesn’t need to learn startup stuff that he can get from free tutorial disks. What he needs is real solutions for the production projects that come in every day… A training tool that could help him feel more comfortable with art in CorelDRAW and increase his speed on every job.

With all of the free training available to him, JT was still struggling to get comfortable with CorelDRAW as a production tool.

Why was that?

Because even though JT was smart, and willing to learn through classes or courses he was unable to get the important methods of how to use CorelDRAW to accomplish specific job tasks in the fastest way possible.

And by the “fastest way,” I mean reaching the level where the workload of two artists’ can easily be handled by one person… with time to spare – maybe whole days.

It took me over ten years to slowly figure out the best methods for increasing speed on production artwork while not sacrificing quality.

In my new DVD training program I have distilled all of the information down and shown you the core group of skills that will allow you to achieve greater speeds and handle more complex creative and production art tasks like intense color separations.

A lot of the information that is contained on the DVD set was hammered out through trial and error on hundreds of jobs to find the best way to handle production and creative art tasks.

An amazing thing is that the work methods are not version specific either. Most of the skills and processes that are outlined on the videos will work with far older versions of the software – even 10 or below.

In the first 12 lessons you’ll learn the core of quick creation and manipulation in CorelDRAW. All of the lessons have the actual project files included so you can follow through on the real art jobs and practice the essential skills. You’ll quickly see why it is easier to learn from applying the information in real CorelDRAW projects.

You’ll Discover:

• Fundamental navigation concepts for higher speeds and basic type design – covers quick keys, selections, and alignments. Type design creation using simple steps then adding overlays for effects.
• High speed importing, adjusting, and power tracing a logo for recreation – covers essential bitmap editing techniques you must know to get the most out of powertrace. Shows effective after trace editing techniques and final vector clean up.
• The fastest recreation of a logo from a low resolution bitmap – shows the fastest way to redraw a logo that is too low resolution to trace with powertrace. Drawing techniques in this lesson have been proven as the fastest method vs. other styles and tools out of all that I have tested.
• Finishing logo recreation with a quick review of font manipulation –review of important text recreation points in logos and graphics. A look at kerning, sizing, font styles and multiple methods of font and type shape adjustments.
• High speed duplication of geometric graphics – Multiple time-saving techniques for quickly creating and duplicating complex geometric designs. This includes using the smart duplicate command combined with trimming and fast alignment methods.
• Super fast logo creation from scratch using custom type – The fastest way to create a custom type face with rendered highlights for an original logo. An overview in this tutorial is on reworking type fonts, custom gradients, and highlight accents.
• Using gradients to dress up type in a snap – A quick way to illustrate and render some color effects to make title graphics really POP off of the page. This step covers fast contouring combined with gradients and editing.
• High speed rendering using production methods – This style of colorizing is one of the fastest ways to get a design looking vibrant without spending time on each piece. This lesson shows details on drag drop filling, mass rendering, and highlights.
• Cruising through complicated geometric duplications and rendering – A clear method that can save hours of time in duplicating complicated logos. This process includes complete start to finish that shows all the necessary steps.
• A streamlined method of type modification for logos and sports teams – How to create a type shape that is legible but has a unique outline that works with the team or logo concept. This tutorial covers how to mold and modify type to fit a dramatic shape.
• Mastering mascots in a production style method – This project shows clearly how a rough drawing is scanned in, edited, traced into shapes, and then rendered to demonstrate a super fast way to get high quality cartoons or mascots ready for printing.
• Integrating type with a mascot to finalize a design – Create high end graphic designs by integrating custom fonts with originally illustrated mascots in the shortest production time possible.

Have you ever designed a shirt layout for clients and had trouble with a placed bitmap in your layout that  never seemed to match the background? Even when using the same color numbers that the eyedropper or Photopaint says are in the bitmap and filling the background  with these exact numbers it still always seems to leave a box around the placed image that is a different color than the bitmap when it is printed.

Through trial and error I found a super simple way to reformat the background behind an image if you want to resize it and you don’t even need to leave CorelDraw to do it!

The process goes as follows:

1. Size your bitmap to fit in the shape that you want. (see figure 1)
2. Make a duplicate of the bitmap using Ctrl-D.
3. Select the bitmap only and click on the crop tool
4. Crop out a small square of even background color in the duplicate bitmap. (see figure 2)

5. Send this file to the back layer or powerclip it and expand it to fill the template shape behind the bitmap. (see figure 3)

6. Bam! You now have no edges that will show in your printouts or displays. (see figure 4)

Don’t forget to check back soon for more quick tutorials and my pre-release of my CorelDraw training DVDs with over 7 hours of industry specific, design and separation skills broken down for production level speeds. Learn the fastest methods of using CorelDraw to create garment graphics and how to separate your designs for screen printing in a snap!

Not a day goes by as a working artist where I don’t have to deal with opinions of one sort or another. Some days span the whole gamut from insightful comments that make designs better to clients that just don’t like the color green for some bizarre reason. Through the years of dealing with critics and swimming through opinions I have put together a short list that helps when the judgments start flying. Many will seem obvious but it helps to have reminders on those because sometimes the obvious ideas also the most important.

If someone is criticizing your work:

Good things to do -

1. Listen carefully and try to hear what it is they are really saying. Use clarification sentences, “So what you’re trying to say about the piece is…” so that they know you understand.

2. Write it down. The act of writing makes everyone focus better - both the writer and the speaker. And it can help to let people know you are taking them seriously. This works especially well with hothead clients. For some reason they tend to calm down when you are copying their words onto paper in front of them.

3. Use confirming language and questions that draws out more information. “So you feel this way about it because…” and “What are your specific concerns? It is the color? Or the…”

4. Enforce focus and staying on topic. If a customer digresses onto other areas, or concerns gently bring up the piece again until a decision is made. “I understand that was a tough situation, hmm, now on this design you were saying that…”

Read the rest of this entry »

What is a logo to a team? It’s their identity and their masthead, and a place to focus when the going gets tough. A great logo can inspire and motivate, while a dull logo can make a team feel cheap and amateurish. With all this pressure on producing a design that gets people excited the stress can start to affect an artist. Logos are one of the most challenging tasks a designer will tackle in screen-printing because of the expectations. No one (no matter how small the budget) hires a designer for a mediocre logo. Everyone wants the best, something that will make the crowds say, “That’s a killer logo!”
The way to consistent, high-quality logos is to develop a method of design that works with your particular skills. Not every artist is great at drawing, and some that are good with the pen have trouble with typography. To find your niche keep a mental log of successful logos that are well received and try to glean what it was that people really liked about them. You may be surprised by what customers consider your design strengths to be.
After doing hundreds of logos for clubs, teams, and local businesses I developed a strong method for quickly whipping up logos that satisfied the customers. The steps I devised were fairly simple to follow and worked well with my style of design. I will use my steps as a reference for you to compare to, but the best results for you will be achieved by using your inner eye and skills in a way that feels right. The heart of creating team logos still rides on achieving the proper visual feel.
Before I start roughing out the design, I like to remind myself of some basic logo “rules” that I use to keep me focusing on the customer. As with all artistic rules, they are made to be broken and exist only as a guideline for injecting function at the outset of creation. Read the rest of this entry »

My article made the cover of Screen Printing this month! I have a lot of new content to add over the next few weeks. The tutorials are coming soon! CorelDraw X4 and Photoshop tricks for separations will be in the near future. I am developing tutorial DVD’s as products that should be out in a month. Let me know if there is something that you want to see and I will do my best to include it in a future post.

As a gift to those that decided to drop by you can download the graphic that I created to print a reference of the PMS color table using a DTG machine. It is quite useful. All you have to do is create a printed version on a t-shirt and then use it as a reference to pick out colors that you want and use those values in your source image. Kind of a reverse engineering approach but it works great. Additionally, you can see how close your RGB conversions of pantones simulate the hues in the book. If you have a CMYK machine you can use it to test the conversion of the RGB to CMYK to find the truest method. This file is nice because it has a boatload of colors from all of the swatches. If I would have been a true masochist then I would have put in all of the numbers… sheesh - but you can find a number by going down from the beginning of the swatch table and finding it on the shirt - they are in descending order.

A second file that is included for download is my CMYK Photoshop painting reference which I use for both color matching and creating CMYK painted files that can import and print out quickly from CorelDraw. This file also works great for profiling common colors on a CMYK DTG machine.

Happy printing -

P.S.: The PMS file looks cool on a black shirt to wear around too…

Fast isn’t always good. Unless you’ve already agreed on a price, then fast or faster is not only good, it’s the way to go. If you think about an artist that works fast what is the vision that comes to mind? Most people are programmed to think that artists need to slowly craft their work like we are carving sculptures or molding clay. Not so with graphic software! The faster you work in software, the more things you can try which equals the more options you can test which results in the best version for the client. So how can you be as fast as possible in the art/designer game without it cheapening the quality?

Well… short of outsourcing your artwork to Pakistan or India, (this is a joke on Tim Ferriss, the genius of fourhourworkweek) there are ways of significantly increasing your art speed in a very short time without sacrificing quality:

1. Master the quick keys - those are those pesky little symbolic keystroke combinations that are listed next to primary commands in most graphic software. Learn the main ones for navigation, zooming, layout ordering (what is below what) first and move onward from there. This can double or triple your speed by itself. Next - look into the next stage of keys which is shortcutting the dialog menus and navagation menus like windows explorer (you can shortcut most of this as well using keystrokes to zoom alphabetically and reorder the layouts as well).

2. Practice with the pen tool - using the pen tool for navigation and common graphical tasks can also increase speed by up to 40% over the mouse. I tested this with a side by side comparison of moving and clicking the mouse and using a tablet for all navigation. Moving the mouse takes 25-40% longer and is less precise. It’s just comfortable, right? The price of comfort is easily broken if you add up small amounts of time over a whole week. You may earn an extra hour or even two whole hours in a week in just navigation time! Thats enough time to catch Borne Ultimatum again… (I will post the time differences in a later spreadsheet for those interested)

3. Organize your work space and file system - the hardest things to do are often the best ones to start with. Organization pays off in the obvious ways (easier to find stuff) but don’t underestimate the freeing of mental clutter that physical or computer file clutter causes on our easily distracted brains. Easier to focus equals easier to concentrate and more work in less time.

4. Reboot at lunch and defrag once a week - I have taken the practice of rebooting the computer at lunch and it really helps with the slow drag (this is the phenomenon where the computer runs out of memory after running large graphic files and things just get slower and slower) - practice backing up all working files before of course. Read the rest of this entry »