Lonely Pixel

The Picnik’s Over

It is a great shame that last week Google announced they were closing down their photo editing service Picnik, which they acquired at the beginning of 2010. Visiting the site now you will see a message posted by admin that Picnik will be closing from the 19^th April 2012 and that all that have paid for subscriptions will have a full refund.

The site offers a number of good quality and handy free editing tools as well as more advanced premium features which are available only to those who have purchased a subscription package. However due to the imminent closure of the site all tools are as of this week free to everyone.

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Keep it smooth and efficient, get it right first time

I’ll get straight to the point: recently, I was asked to design a website for a certain Divorce solicitors who I won’t mention here. Now, I’ve designed a fair few websites in my time but this one was the exception to the rule: the client understood exactly what they wanted and easily got their concept across to me. This, in turn, made designing the site that much easier. So here, below, are a few tricks and tips I learned from pitching to them. Feel free to use them when you pitch and hopefully you will get the job! (Unless I am up against you, of course, in which case obviously I hope I get the job and not you! No offence!)

1) Ask plenty of questions: if you don’t ask plenty of questions in the beginning, how can you expect to know the project inside out? The truth is that you can never ask too many questions. If there is anything you are unsure of then iron this out on the first meeting and avoid an awkward situation or two later on.

Using technical jargon is all fine and well, but if your client doesn’t actually understand it then you’re just wasting your time!

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