PDFs are common fare in our everyday work dealings, be it simple documents like whitepapers, reports, quotations, or invoices.

Usually we don’t encounter any bandwidth difficulties with such documents, which are usually under 1MB and e-mail friendly. But what happens when you have a graphic-intensive PDF that you would like to send to your client or colleague for viewing?

These documents may be 10MB and above - if you emailed it to your recipient, they might pull a long face or tell you off for clogging up their inbox.

Here is our favourite way to put PDFs on an instant diet via Acrobat Professional 8.0 - without too much of image quality loss. (Note that you will need Adobe Acrobat Professional 5.0 at least)

(more…)

After about 2.5 years of starting Bionic Creative, here’s pretty much how my design business runs (I’m sure many of you will find yours similar):

1. A dash of PR
2. Marketing, lots of it
3. Networking, lots of it
4. Getting leads from the above
5. Pitching to the prospects
6. Negotiating (And sometimes…dealing with fish market kind of haggling)
7. Sealing the deal
8. Design and deliver
9. Get paid (Duh.)
10. Thanking the client
11. Asking for a referral or more work

I was pretty happy with this, and thought to myself, “Wow, I’ve really got it together!” So I carried on my merry way.

(more…)

Public Relations is not the same as Sales & Marketing. So why do so many people confuse the two?

Probably because how intertwined they are and so many areas do actually overlap. But firstly let’s look at the definition of PR as defined by the PR Institute of Australia.

“The deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain a mutual understanding between and organization and it’s publics.”

(more…)

Do you use your regular email program like Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, Gmail or Hotmail to send mass emails?

If you are, you should consider using specialized software to get the job done. The only option for you to send bulk emails using such programs is to Bcc your entire recipient list. Quite often, you may find yourself having to send your messages in batches because your ISP limits the number of recipients you can include in the Bcc header. But that’s not the only shortcoming. Here is a list of other issues.

(more…)

I was browsing through the Adobe forums and saw this post, asking for assistance:

“sir , my name is sidharth, am a animation and graphics designing student, i am an indian. my problem is that we have started working on illustrator CS2,we switched to CS2 from CS, thus fortunately i Have both the CDs. which are pirated copies obtained at just aruond $1.00 (compared to ur currency),the problem is when i installed CS2 and uninstalled illustrator CS, it was working properly but i was not able to save files, i could only save them by installing illustrator CS,that is now i have both CS and CS2 in my PC. its only now i can save the files, not when i have only CS2 on my PC. can u get back to me at fruitloop@gmail.com (email address changed to protect the silly soul) with a solution to my problem?????????? “

What can I say…Beyond duh.

A favourite blog of mine about the freelancing life is FreelanceSwitch.com.

Recently they came up with their own book chock full of tips, and advice on how to get started in the freelance business.

(more…)