As a freelance designer, you know your main goal is to keep the client happy. But what happens when the thing that makes your client happy is something that you as a designer know is a terrible idea? It may be impractical, too costly to implement, useless for the client’s business, or just plain ugly or unprofessional looking. Nevertheless, the client is determined to get his or her way.

We’re going to look at some ways you, the designer, can actually reverse this situation, getting your client to consider and often approve your superior design solution. And all without hurt feelings or any unethical behavior.

Recommended Reading: How To Work Better With Your Clients

Are You Really Making It Better?

The first thing you must determine with 100% clarity is whether or not the design solution you’re proposing is actually better than the one the client wants. Most designers have a keener sense of what will work in a design than the average freelance client, but unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

Business-Orientated Design

Sometimes, a designer may think they’re improving a design, when in fact, the client is right to be outraged at the new changes. Remember, design is about more than type or snazzy graphics – the solution you come up with has to be viable for the client’s business and help them achieve the financial results they’re after.

For instance, if your client is a children’s dentist, and wants to appeal to kids with a whimsical, cartoony brand identity that you think is hideous, you may clash with her if you try to make too many fundamental changes to her idea.

It’s More Than Just Design

If your style is more reserved and minimalist, you may attempt to impose your idea of “good design” onto her business without considering the audience she’s trying to reach, she may be justifiably upset.

Yes, your design may be objectively “better” from a designer’s perspective, but as far as solving your client’s problem (appealing to children and soothing their fear of the dentist), it’s an utter failure. It’s important to always keep the client’s business goals in mind, even if they are not outlined in the design brief.

Recommended Reading: 5 Ways To Tame Difficult And Problematic Clients

Beating the Brief

Now, let’s take the same dentist client and put a different spin on her dilemma. You understand what she wants – to appeal to kids and make them less nervous – but you know you have a solution that would accomplish this goal much better than what she has in mind. How do you go about bringing her over to your side of the argument?

Before I continue, I must warn you that this type of solution will take more time and effort on your part than you might be used to. However, it will yield much higher rates of success for getting through to your clients, and will have them raving about you for years after the job is finished.

Follow The Design Brief

Okay, so what’s the solution? Well, first…you do exactly what she wants. That’s right – with your design brief in front of you, and your client’s explicit instructions to design something based around her horrible, ugly, unprofessional idea, the first thing you do is fire up your computer and create her “perfect” solution. No, it’s not pretty. Yes, you’re going to hate it. But do it anyway.

If you show up to a client meeting without the work she specifically asked for, she’s most likely going to get upset, and upset clients are impossible to negotiate with. So first, do what’s expected of you.

Sell Your Idea

After you’ve done what the client has asked for, to the letter, it’s time to introduce her to a new concept – the one you know is better. But you want to do more than simply produce a new version of the work the way you believe it ought to be presented. It’s important to sell your client on your idea as well.

If your client is design savvy, just presenting the two ideas side by side will be enough to convince her that yours is better. But as we all know, most clients need a bit of convincing. Take notes on what exactly the differences are between your idea and theirs, noting especially how your version will better solve their problem and help them achieve their business goals.

Clients love to hear how something will help them make more money, so if you have data or numbers to back up your claim, now is the time to use them.

Getting That Green Light

Most designers get involved in a project on more than just a technical level. Completing a creative work requires an emotional investment, and it’s not at all unusual to feel slightly defensive about the choices you made in a design, especially if you believe your client simply has no idea what they are talking about.

Sometimes, you’re going to run into clients who simply refuse to see things your way. In these cases, it’s best to just please them to the best of your ability, collect payment, and move on. But many times, clients are more than willing to be persuaded if you can master the right language with which to do so.

Make Sense When Making Your Case

As they say, communication is key. I’m going to take that adage a step further here and say that the right communication is key. Anyone can say anything, but in a meeting with a client, expressing your ideas in terms that make sense to them is essential to maintaining the upper hand.

Not that you need to resort to manipulation. This is all about the client’s business and what is truly the best solution to help them increase their profit margin.

Most clients will actually appreciate your attention to detail and willingness to help them uncover an approach that is highly effective. Like I said, this kind of ‘above and beyond’ working method is exactly what quality clients are looking for in a designer, and it’s what will inspire them to give you the glowing testimonials and referrals you’re looking for.

Leaving the Ego Behind

Lastly, I’m going to be blunt here: if you walk into a meeting with fundamental changes that were clearly not pre-approved by your client and they get upset, it probably has something to do with your ego.

I’ve previously worked with designers (thankfully not many) whose arrogance and high opinion of themselves made them impossible to collaborate with. They were under the impression that I ought to have been lucky to work with them, and that any changes they made to my design brief were a blessed improvement.

You don’t want to be this designer.

No one likes that kind of behavior, and clients do talk to one another about the contractors they hire. No client is paying you to be a drone, but finding a healthy balance between your expertise and your client’s expertise is vital.

How do you handle conflicts with your clients about the design process? Are there any helpful tips you’ve learned along the way that you wish you had known earlier?

If your work or studies need you to make presentations in front of an audience, a crowd or your peers, then you know the importance of having good, engaging and effective presentation content in your hands. Powerpoint may not be cutting it for most of us anymore, but fret not, we have here 10 great Powerpoint alternatives as fine replacements.

Whether you need presentation tools for business proposals, HR training, a viva voce, or for teaching a class, these tools will probably help you keep your audience entertained through and through. Manipulate your videos, images, animation, audio clips and more into a winning presentation that will definitely help you win over the crowd.

Recommended Reading: Public Speaking – How To Nail An Interesting Presentation

1. Prezi

Prezi is a zooming presentation tool that lets you create and present your ideas on a large and zoomable virtual canvas. You can easily place ideas, images, and videos and arrange them in a natural flow to tell your story. It works on Cloud, desktop and even on the iPad or iPhone. It offers a Free account which gives you public presentations plus 100MB storage space.

Click here to learn more about its pricing plans.

2. EWC Presenter

Looking for a way to create free and interactive professional-looking, HTML5 presentations? Try EWC Presenter. It provides an HTML5 WYSIWYG editor for you to design simple presentation content in HTML5.

Users can animate their presentations with a Flash-like editor where you can select keyframes, set the length of the various animations, and so on. It’s still under Beta and it’s free to register an account.

3. SlideRocket

SlideRocket is a presentation platform that helps you to create and manage your presentation. Import your existing presentations from PowerPoint or Google, and start using SlideRocket’s authoring and tracking tools to create a vibrant and dynamic presentation.

You can work with HD video, audio, charts, pictures and Flash. SlideRocket has since been acquired by ClearSlide, if you would like to try it out, check out this link.

4. Vuvox

Vuvox offers 3 main features: Collage, Studio and Express to create a multimedia presentations with feeds, links, music, audio, video and photos from Flicker, SmugMug or Picasa. It’s a useful tool to create a documentary-style slideshows.

It is also perfect for multimedia collage presentations that require the use of rich media elements.

5. Empressr

Empresser is an online rich media presentation editor which allows you to add photos, music, audio, video, and even Flash into your presentation. Users are allowed to share their presentations via link or embed them on their websites.

Registration is free and there’s no limit to the number of presentations you can create and store.

6. Oomfo

Charts are importaint in a presentation and that’s why we’re including Oomfo in this list. In short, Oomfo helps you to design interactive charts like Pareto, Waterfall, Funnel, Marimekko, Pyramid and etc. Oomfo allows you to connect your chart data from your Cloud application or multiple Excel files.

You may start by choosing a chart template from its gallery and it only supports Microsoft Office 2003 and above.

7. Scrollshow

As the name suggested, ScrollShow is a scrolling presentation editor for iPad with multi-speed backgrounds. With ScrollShow, can create panoramic presentations with parallax effect. It is ideal to present timeline presentations, animate infographics online or at a personal level, present your vacation photos. It is cool, fun, easy to use and costs only $4.99.

8. Knovio

If you always share your presentations on the Web, Knovio can help you show your personality by letting you attach your voice or a video alongside the presentation. You can coordinate your narration to run parallel to the slides.

You can even import PowerPoint presentations that are already done and work on that with Knovio. Your slides can then be shared on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn or shared privately with close friends.

9. Present.me

Similar to Knovio, Present.me supercharges your presentation by adding videos side by side to your slideshows whether it is in Powerpoint, PDF, Excel, Word, Google Docs or Open Office format. You can even watch the edited presentation on mobile devices using Present.me exclusive apps.

There are limitations for free account. Check it out to find out more.

10. VCASMO

VCASMO is an online presentation editor for multimedia slide shows, business presentations, training, academic teaching and etc. It lets you easily place videos with subtitle and PowerPoint presentation side by side and publish in on your desktop, iPad or even iPhone.

Free account comes with 512MB storage with unlimited presentations.

A few years ago, Google unleashed the Panda Algorithm on search engines and changed the way the world uses the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of freelance content writers held their breath as Panda single handedly did what content writers had been dreaming about since the late 1990s.

The learning algorithm went to work knocking down small percentages (that equated to thousands upon thousands) of websites that abused keywords and occupied rank with stolen or copied content.

Then, Panda did something that may have even surprised Google. The Panda became hungry for originality. It was voracious for it. Freelance content writers, sick of masking good content behind bad keyword cover, stopped holding their breaths and started cheering.

Read also: 9 Things You Should Know About Freelancing Full-time

Panda Declared Content King

Hundreds of thousands of websites have declared 2013 the year of the content writer. The mantle was picked up and enthusiastically carried for a while. It stopped almost as suddenly as it had started. A few websites still declare it here and there but the year of the content writer never really gained the momentum it needed to become viral.

Image source

Perhaps everyone is finally beginning to realize what is happening. The freelance content writer is on the way out, a new kind of writer is coming, and there is not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

Now might be a good time to read – Freelancers: Should You Abandon Low Paying Clients/Jobs

Social Media Killing Freelance Content

Early in the Millennium, online sales crashed and burned, nearly taking several economies with it. Many thought that it was the end of ecommerce and for a short time, it was. Slowly, ecommerce websites rebounded, buoyed on the backs of a few giants that stayed afloat and saved online marketing. Many believed that if ecommerce could overcome that crash, it could overcome anything. Then it met Social Media.

It took 4 years for the largest corporations on the planet to figure out how to crack the Social Media nut and they did it the hard way, taking their knocks, bumps, and bruises along the way. As it turns out… content is king with Social Media as well. As usual, once they have fixed a major problem, they release a report and let it trickle down to the waiting small and medium sized ecommerce websites.

Read this

The report ‘Content: The New Marketing Equation’ released earlier this year through Altimeter’s Slideshare.net website, condemns the average, uneducated content writer to exile. The day of the college-educated Content Journalist will be here very soon. You can see the report here.

Are You Really Writer Material?

Freelance websites are killing credible writers. Freelance websites, the ones that introduce writer to ecommerce owners, are slowly but surely killing the credibility of the content writer. They do this by allowing just anyone to claim to be a writer sign up and be hired.

There is just the right amount of talented, if uneducated freelance writers in the world. Unfortunately, there are excessive number of kids with laptops, a passing grade in English, and a warped sense of what a writer is (read what they write and you may arrive on the same conclusion).

Far From Glamorous

If someone had put some form of testing or a reasonable trial to ensure product quality before unleashing these “writers” on an unsuspecting market, the state of content writing would be in a lot better shape to ward off an attack by collegians with laptops.

Perhaps they take pride in calling themselves writer, which is strange because there is very little about being a writer that is romantic or even ‘cool’. None of us write like Stephen King (nor does he write like us). We are not all living in a cabin in Maine writing a novel; very few of us have ever stepped in to a bed and breakfast. We are a lonely bunch of people who spend more time facing a word processor than we do reality.

Give us your Tired; Give us your Poor, your Wretched Masses…

Because the work is done and paid for online, the market can be influenced by anyone on the planet that is willing to do for fifty cents a job for which a real writer would deservedly charge $75. For instance, the Philippines has hundreds of thousands of writers writing for next to nothing to support themselves and their families.

The market is in a flux and has been for a long time. Unscrupulous or near broke marketers wonder why they should pay top dollar for great content when they can pay next to nothing for ‘meh’ content.

Panda May Change That

Panda is a very smart algorithm. You have to hand it to Google for coming up with this one regardless of why. In fact, Panda should have saved the freelance content writer by eliminating those who cannot write original, informative, keyword rich content. Instead, Panda’s Movement created a new problem and dumped it in the webmaster’s lap.

The site owner looking for a content writer that can meet Google’s criteria faces an enormous task. The solution is the obvious one. Webmasters have disowned freelance writers and are looking forward to Content Journalists.

Days of the Educated

The Content Journalist will have a degree in journalism or some form of writing. They will be well paid. There is no mantle to carry. You can bet your bottom dollar that they will be smart enough to unite in a field-protecting group. The Brotherhood of Content Journalists is here and the freelance writer is dead.

As web designers, we often do this: tweak the codes in the code editor, save the file, head over to the browser and refresh it to see the changes. We often do this back and forth in the middle of code editing, multiple times.

If you are using Sublime Text, you can skip all this and immediately see the result as you go to the browsers. In this post, we will show you how to do this with a Sublime Text package named BrowserRefresh-sublime.

Recommended Reading: Working with Code Snippets in Sublime Text

Browser Refresh for Sublime Text 2

First of all, we need to install it to our Sublime Text, and the easiest way to do so is through the Package Control.

Package Installation

Assuming that you have installed Package Control, you can press Command + Shift + P (OS X) or Ctrl + Shift + P to display the Command Palette, and search for the Install Package.

This will load all available Sublime Text package in the repository. Then, search for Browser Refresh, and simply hit Enter to install it.

Configuration

Once the package has been installed, go to Preferences > Package Settings > Browser Refresh > Key Bindings – Users. This will bring you to a .sublime-keymap file in a new tab.

By default, this file is empty, so let’s add the following syntax between the square brackets [ ... ].

 { { "keys": ["command+shift+r"], "command": "browser_refresh", "args": { "auto_save": true, "delay": 0.0, "activate_browser": true, "browser_name" : "all" } } } 

For those who are not yet familiar with Sublime Text, all the settings are specified with JavaScript objects, including the keys combination.

As we can see from the above syntax, the Browser Refresh is performed with the key combination of Command + Shift + R. If you are not comfortable with the default key combination, you can always change the value within the "keys": ["command+shift+r"].

Furthermore, we can also change the following arguments to specify the action upon hitting the keys:

Arguments	Description
auto_save:	It specifies whether the document should be saved first before refreshing it in the browser. You can set the value to false to disable this action.
delay	It specifies the delay before the page is refreshed. The time is specified in seconds, so 1.0 will be equal to a second.
activate_browser	It specifies whether the browser window should be active. If the browser is not yet open, hitting the keys will open it. If the browser is running, we will be redirected to the browser. I suggest to always set it to true.
browser_name	It specifies which browser to use to refresh the document. By default, it is set to Google Chrome. So, if Google Chrome is not your preference, you can change to one of the following Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE, Iron, and Google Chrome Canary.

This time, we will just leaving the configuration as the default. So, when we hit Command + Shift + R, the document is saved, then we are redirected to the browser, and the browser is refreshed.

A few things to take note

• Open the document on the browser first. Otherwise, the document will not be opened and eventually not be refreshed.
• The browser tab that will be refreshed is the active one. So, make sure that you are in the tab where the document is being displayed.
• At the time of the writing, it seems that there is a bug in which the document is not refreshed in Firefox 19.

Final Thought

We can now perform three tasks at once — Save document, Go to Browser, and Refresh — just by hitting a key combination. We hope that this tip can help streamline your workflow a little.

For more, visit the project at Github: BrowserRefresh-Sublime.