Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/oQdoW-sSza4/movie-wallpapers-designers-12121425

Movie wallpapers usually consist of predictable still-shots that are nice to look at but nothing more. As a creative, though, you're probably looking for something with a little imagination.

That's why we've curated this list of the best movie-inspired desktop wallpapers, which all offer a different insight into your favourite films. Whether minimal, illustrative or 3D art styles are your bag, there's something here for everyone.

01. Léon: The Professional

This hand-drawn take on Léon is bang on target

Some elements of Luc Besson's hitman classic feel a lot more problematic these days than they did back in 1994, but it's still hard not to love the core story of a kind-hearted assassin taking an orphan under his wing and teaching her the trade. And it's this aspect that's reflected in this stunning hand-drawn close-up.

02. Metropolis

This graphic interpretation of the silent sci-fi classic will give your desktop some Bauhaus cool

Fritz Lang's 1927 epic is regarded as a masterpiece of early sci-fi cinema, boasting stunning special effects and beautiful art direction. The film was inspired visually by Bauhaus, Cubism and Futurism, and these inspirations are reflected in this elegant and understated wallpaper.

03. Akira

Tetsuo! Kaneda! Etc!

Katsuhiro Otomo's movie adaptation of Akira was the most expensive animated film ever when it was released in 1988, and it still looks stunning 30 years down the line. We love this atmospheric interpretation by Jonas de Ro, featuring Shotaro Kaneda and his iconic motorcycle, with Neo-Tokyo exploding in the background.

04. The Shawshank Redemption

Inspiration courtesy of Red

Who can resist an inspirational quote every now and then? This wallpaper's based on The Shawshank Redemption and nails its subject using just three elements: the tree in the background, the silhouette of a rock hammer, and a single line of dialogue.

05. Pulp Fiction

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

It would be remiss of us not to include a bit of Quentin Tarantino here, and we've opted for this fantastic vector portrait of Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, catching her just at the moment after she's helped herself to a portion of the wrong substance. Don't try this at home, kids!

06. Dr. Strangelove

Ride ’em, cowboy!

Peter Sellers might have been the star of Stanley Kubrick's Cold War black comedy, but it's Slim Pickens who steals the show right at the last minute, as he rides an atomic bomb, rodeo-style, down to earth. This lovely minimal silhouette captures that moment perfectly.

07. Batman

*squints* Hang on, that’s not Ben Affleck, is it?

There's so much Batman to choose from out there, but we've kept things simple with this delightfully angular polygonal representation of the Dark Knight, and in doing so we've avoided annoying anyone by plumping for a specific Batman (although obviously Michael Keaton was the best). Result!

08. The Shining

Show you’re a real horror buff with this design taken straight from The Shining

If you like your wallpaper creative, abstract and film-related, perhaps this design is for you. This pattern is taken from the gloriously retro carpet found throughout the The Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation of The Shining.

09. The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a stunning piece of architecture

The whole of Wes Anderson's 2014 movie is a work of art, and pretty much any scene would make a stunning desktop background, but the impressive pink front of The Grand Budapest Hotel (which is in reality, Palace Bristol Hotel located in the Czech Republic) makes a grand wallpaper display indeed.

10. The Hunger Games

Get two Katnisses for the price of one in this sleek desktop design

We absolutely adore this negative space Hunger Games design. If you are keen to show off your love of the film series but want something a little classier than the bog-standard film wallpaper, this design is sure to capture your imagination.

11. Fight Club

The two personalities clash with this brilliant Fight Club movie wallpaper

"I saw a Fight Club poster the other day on Imgur's website, which inspired me to create this wallpaper," explains designer Alex Cican. "I'm using two exceptional drawings of Brad Pitt and Edward Norton." A brilliant movie wallpaper for members of Fight Club.

12. Princess Mononoke

The forest spirit from Princess Mononoke makes an appearance

There's plenty of Studio Ghibli movie wallpapers out there, but our pick is this Princess Mononoke-inspired offering from designer David Lanham. Featuring a forest spirit, a Kodama, set against a life-like background gives it that creative edge we were looking for.

13. The Hobbit

Which characters will you pick for your customised wallpaper?

OK, we know we said that we were steering clear of still-shot movie wallpapers – but this one from The Hobbit has a little trick up its sleeve. Launching the 'make your own wallpaper' app, you're able to pick and choose which images you like best from various settings across the film and combine them to make your very own movie wallpaper.

14. Life of Pi

Ang Lee’s Life of Pi was certainly a feast for the cinematographer’s eye

The cinematography in Ang Lee's Life of Pi is out of this world. The movie certainly got critics in a spin, with this epic whale scene stuck in many movie-goers' memories. This wallpaper adds an oil-painted effect to make it even more beautiful.

15. Indiana Jones

Bringing back the old school Indie

Let's just forget about the most recent Indiana Jones release and instead try to concentrate on the old gems. This comic-inspired movie wallpaper will bring a burst of colour to any creative desktop. We love its old school feel; if only the movie makers had felt the same way!

16. Star Wars

We just had to include a Star Wars movie wallpaper, right?!

How could we compile a list of movie wallpapers without including some sort of Star Wars reference?! Here we go for minimal once again, with this Stormtrooper-inspired movie wallpaper. What more could your desktop want? Well, maybe the others in this list…

Read more…

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Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/02/stop-billing-by-the-hour-right-now/

If you are a web designer/developer who currently bills per hour, I hope I can persuade you to change your pricing method to value-based pricing. In this article, I will discuss both methods in detail and without the fluff so you can get to the nuggets and make an informed decision from there.

If you apply the value-based pricing method correctly, you really can earn more, work less, and be a happier freelancer.

Billing by the Hour

Billing by the hour is the most popular pricing method across the world in most industries. Of course, there are many web designers/developers out there who make a great living by using the hourly billing method, but in my opinion, value-based billing is far better than hourly billing.

Here are some home truths about hourly billing:

There are times when you argue over invoices and timesheets which wastes time for both parties (yes, there are software programs to track this, but you’ll still find clients who dispute it).
Feeling like you should be “micro-managed” by the hour. Clients would often want an estimate of the total hours before the project starts. They would then decide to go ahead with the project based on the estimate and not the final cost.
There’s no incentive to stay up to date with the latest technologies and tools available to make your job easier and faster to complete because if you do, you get paid less.
The longer the project is, the better it is for you (more income) and the worse it is for the client (more expenses).

Billing Hourly Is Harmful to Your Relationship With Clients

To illustrate this point, let’s say you wanted to build an additional room on to your house: The builder tells you it will cost $75k based on his best estimates and you go ahead with the agreement. After completing 80% of the project, the builder says it’s going to cost another $15k to complete the remainder of it. How would you feel in this scenario? Would you work with them again? Would you refer them to friends? Probably not. And it’s the same thing with web design/development projects.

Put yourself in the client’s shoes for a second and think if you were hiring a freelance web designer, you would want to know an estimate of how much the project will cost you. If you answer with, “100 hours at my hourly rate of $45,” the client will only budget $4,500 for the project. Where the problem comes in is the interpretation of the word “estimate.” In the client’s mind, they basically understand it as the final price. In a web designer’s mind, they basically understand it as a ‘plus-minus’ total that could potentially be higher if necessary.

The issue comes in when you realize you are not going to complete the project within the estimated timeframe you provided the client and you will lose money because it’s going to take you longer to complete. You then either just absorb the extra hours and not bill the client for it, or you tell the client it’s going to cost 30% more because of ‘XYZ’ and then risk harming your relationship in the future.

Hourly Billing Discourages Efficiency and Innovation

Let’s say that the same web design project comes to you and 9 other web designers. You each have different hourly rates that you decided would be fair for your expertise. “John” charges $45 per hour and others charge $75 per hour. There’s also someone else (who I’ll name Bob) who charges $150 per hour. Bob, with his experience in finding better ways to complete projects, can code the website in 3 hours = total fee of $450. John, with his lack of experience, knowledge and efficiency, can code the website in 16 hours = total fee of $720.

Takeaway: Hourly billing encourages you to not work smart and to drag the hours so you get paid more.

The truth is that some websites can be created in less than a day – even a few hours if you have all the info ready and you know exactly what needs to be done. If you are charging by the hour, why would you rush to get this website done as soon as possible when you could delay it by a few days and get paid more for it?

Maybe there’s a snippet of code you can buy for $100 that can save you 3 days of coding time, but if you purchase it, you lose out on getting paid more. In other words, the client is paying you for 3 days extra because you don’t want to use a $100 code snippet as this means you lose out on 3 days’ worth of paid work.

Can you see why this is harmful to your client?

Here’s another practical example:

If you are working on 3 client projects (retainer or one-off) at the same time and it takes you up to 2 hours per week to track your hours, prepare invoices, process payments, organize the accounting/tax side, etc. this can take almost a full working day each week just to handle this boring administrative task. This is crazy. You are not hired as an Administrator or Debtors Clerk – don’t fall into this pit. On top of that, you’ll deal with one or two clients who always question everything and this takes even more of your time. This leads to a lack of trust down the line and nobody wants to work like that.

I know these are very simple examples, but it still holds true in more complex projects as well.

Your Income Is Capped

One often overlooked aspect of hourly billing is that your income is capped because there are only so many hours you can work in a year.

Let’s say your annual salary is $60,000. If we work on roughly 250 working days, this is $240 per day and $30 per hour (8 working hours each day).

Firstly, not many web developers/designers are booked every hour for the whole year, but let’s say this is the case. What if you wanted to earn $100k next year? That would mean you need to increase your hourly billing to $50. Simple, right? Although it’s only $20 extra per hour, that’s $160 extra per day, $800 per week and over $3k per month extra for a client to consider. It can often be a deal breaker in keeping retainer clients or signing up new clients for weekly/monthly projects.

Unless your existing clients really value your services, they will not understand why you now all of a sudden value your services at almost twice the price for the same amount of work. It’s very likely that they will start looking for other freelance web designers with a lower hourly rate and new clients or prospective clients may not sign up with your premium service as you are almost double the “going rate” for other freelancers with similar expertise.

Conclusion: Increasing your income is not easy. Although you want a higher income, the clients you work with really don’t care about your income desires and they don’t want a higher expense. The conclusion of the conclusion: Guess who really makes the final decision at the end? (it’s not you)

It’s in the client’s best interests that you don’t bill by the hour. You just need to educate them on this. It’s important that your clients know why this pricing method is harmful to them and to you.

Value-Based Pricing

To avoid any misconceptions about this pricing method, it’s not a fixed amount that is calculated by your cost + your desired profit.

Here are some home truths about value-based pricing:

You don’t sell hours – you sell results (or the potential results).
There’s an incentive to stay up to date with the latest technologies and tools to make your job easier and to become more efficient.
It allows you to really create something amazing and not to worry about going over the client’s desired budget or an estimate you provide for hourly billing.
There are no hidden financial surprises to clients. You take all the risk in delivering the project within the total cost you’ve informed the client about.
You can work with fewer clients and provide a better service because you are often earning significantly more.
You are essentially providing a fixed amount based on the projected return or outcome of the project.

How Do You Apply Value-Based Pricing?

Find out the potential value of the project to the client over a year. In other words, find out the potential increase in sales that the business could be making after you create the website. Then base your price off of this potential return.

Example #1 – The Existing Business Website:

A business sells agricultural drones via their website. They ask you to create a website focused on getting more sales. After you ask a few basic questions, your 2 main questions should be:

How many sales do you currently get each month?
What is the average sales value of a drone?

They answer with: 10 sales per month and $8,500 each.

You then do simple math to figure out how much income they generate each month ($8,500 x 10 = $85,000).

You look at their current site and see how they can improve their sales and you work on a low estimate of what you expect sales could increase by after you make a conversion-centered website. In this scenario, let’s say you are confident it would at least be 2 sales extra per month. This would mean the business would make an additional $16,000 per month and almost $200,000 in one year. After informing the client of this in the proposal and why you feel this is a low and realistic estimate, you then give your website cost based on the potential annual return. For this example, your price could be $10,000 – $15,000.

Would you, ‘as the business owner’ be willing to pay around 5% of what you could potentially make after one year?

Of course.

Example #2 – The New Business Website:

A business sells agricultural drones and they want a new website. They ask you to create a website focused on getting sales. After you ask a few basic questions, your main question should be: What is the average sales value of a drone?

They answer with: $8,500 each.

After doing further research about the market and their marketing plans, you are confident that you can create a conversion-centered website that can convert into at least 4 sales each month (or one sale per week). This equals $34,000 per month and over $400,000 in a year. Your price could easily be $10,000 – $15,000 and it would make sense to the prospective client after you have explained the value of the potential return.

It’s important to realize at this point that your responsibility is to make the business see this as a necessary investment and not a cost. You need to explain why you are the right person for the project.

By breaking it down like this and being practical about it, you instantly stand out from the crowd of other freelancers who say things like, “I estimate that this project will take about 120 hours X my hourly rate of $45 = $5,400.”

How Do You Compete With Competitors Offering (Low) Hourly Rates?

We all know that there are thousands of web designers on Fiverr and Upwork that charge $100 for a 5-page website, and the truth is, how do you compete with that?

The answer is to stand out from the crowd. How do you stand out from the crowd? By not thinking and doing things the way they do things. How do you do that? By viewing a website as an effective marketing tool that can drastically improve the sales of a business (if it’s done correctly) and not as an ‘off-the-shelf product’. If you and your prospective clients understand this, then everything else will fall into perspective.

Think of luxury watches for example. These are commodities, but why do people still buy the $10,000 branded watches over the $100 watches that basically look the same and have the same features? It’s no different with websites. There are many that sell $10,000+ websites, and there are many that would sell the same website for $1,000. I’d be surprised if you wouldn’t want to be the one charging more in this case.

Here’s a brief overview of what you should do that prevents you being seen as a commodity which will help you stand out from your competitors:

Choose a niche.
Position yourself as an authority and become an expert in that niche.
Educate your potential clients on your blog and various marketing methods.
Offer services to your potential clients that can help their business grow.

By doing this, potential clients wouldn’t consider you as a ‘commodity’ and would happily pay you more as you understand their needs and you are focused on the outcome and not the hours worked to complete a project.

The key here is how you are perceived by the potential client. It’s either as an expert or ‘commodity.’

How Do Use Value-Based Pricing for a Non-Sales-Based Business?

Let’s say you were creating a website for a political party or charity, how would you use value-based pricing for this? It may sound a bit tricky at first, but if you just give it some thought, it can be simple to do.

For these examples, you need to do this:

Find out how they generate an income.
Find out how much a potential member/donor is worth to them.
Educate them by using ‘their language’ on why a professional website is key to generating more income.
Base your value-price for the project on their potential income from an increase in more members/donors over 12 months.

How they generate income:

A political party generates income from members.
A charity generates income from donors.

It may almost sound a bit rude at first, but you basically need to figure out how much a member/donor is worth to the client and then to ask the question: What would an extra 100 members/donors in a year mean for your organization?

Your objective is simply to help them understand that a professional website focused on getting new members/donors and keeping existing members/donors satisfied should be their main goal and to help them see the potential of receiving an additional 8-9 members/donors per month.

Side note: I always recommend that you provide digital marketing services alongside with the website to improve the chances of overall success with the project.

Remember that your price is based on what the potential income return is for the client, so if you are dealing with small organizations, the price you can charge is relative to their potential success. If their potential income equates to $50,000 over a year from 100 members/donors, you could easily charge $5,000 – $8,000 and it would be a win-win for both of you.

The key here is to speak ‘their language’ and to understand what their needs are. If you deal with a doctor, use the word ‘patients’. If you deal with a charity, use the word ‘donors’.

Obviously, you can’t make any guarantees with the results they might receive, but as long as you can prove that you have experience in helping businesses increase their sales and you make sure you understand their needs, this is all you need to overcome their doubts.

The Bottomline

By thinking about outcomes, it shows you understand the project as the business/organization does. You are not thinking about hours like your competitors do which helps you stand out from the ‘commodity market’. I understand that this is a very simplified summary. You would have to deal with the objections clients or potential clients may have like:

100% payment upfront
Questions about pricing
Doubts and objections of the client

The truth is that this model is simple in theory, but in practice, you might make a lot of mistakes. That’s OK. You are running a marathon and not a sprint. It takes a lot of trial and error and you will learn by experience about what, how and when to say the right things that will get you higher paying clients.

The point is to do it and then to learn from your mistakes and see where you can improve so that you become better and more confident in charging more for your projects and being more efficient along the way.

I hope this article has helped you to rethink this topic.

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/W6tpf24G1Ho/web-design-inspiration-work-adrian-somoza

Web Design Inspiration – Work of Adrián Somoza

abduzeedo
Feb 07, 2018

I have been posting more often about web design. There reason is, of course, I am in the process of redesigning the blog and I need some web design inspiration. For this post I’d love to feature the work of  Adrián Somoza, a senior designer @MediaMonks, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

The work has a lot of style and some patterns that I’ve been noticing more often on sites like Dribbble and Behance that is the use of some modular design with clear blocks of colors. The motion design is another important feature of these designs. They tend to take advantage of the modular approach to create some subtle but yet beautiful transitions. Below I selected a few pieces to share with you

Web design

web design
UI/UX

Original Source: https://inspiredm.com/art-building-better-websites/

Inspired Magazine
Inspired Magazine – creativity & inspiration daily

Creating websites has become almost a commonplace skill these days, and there’s such an overabundance of sites out there competing against yours that anything you can do to stand out from the crowd is going to be a huge help.

What can we do to get our sites noticed, admired, and paid attention to? It requires a certain adjustment of the way we think about site design. In this short article, we’ll take a look at some of the key things that are necessary to creating better websites.

Content must take priority

As designers we’re always going to be really keen to create amazing designs. Of course this doesn’t apply to those who merely call themselves designers, because they do not allow their very souls to weep onto the page, enshrining a moment of inspiration eternally in electronic glory.

What site owners want, of course, is for people to read their content, engage with it, and perhaps even buy something because of it. Pretty pictures are wonderful to have, but not if they’re getting in the way of the user being able to experience the content.

As this is the case, what we might regard as “stylistic enhancements” must certainly take a backseat to the main presentation. If you need to drop something, it should always be the stylistic element.

image courtesy of Studio–JQ

Responsive design is essential (except when it’s not)

Responsive design is so important these days because of the massive numbers of people using their phones for web browsing, and the fact that most phone browsers still do a lousy job of rendering web pages.

There are a few notable exceptions, but they are very rare. Such exceptions would be when something needs to be displayed on the page in order for the content to make sense, and where it needs to be of a set size. Some things simply wouldn’t work if scaled down too much.

Cases like this need to be handled carefully. How you would do it is to use a special responsive column that is displayed only when a screen size is detected which is too small to display the content, with a message instructing the user to view the content on a larger monitor.

This will generally be something you should avoid doing, but in exceptional circumstances it is acceptable as long as it is handled with tact.

illustration courtesy of sarika

Important content needs to be obvious

While it should be obvious, so frequently it doesn’t seem to be. Design should not make important things subtle. It must make what is important stand out and be seen by the viewer first, and yet so many designers try to be “creative” and subdue those important items.

Do not make this mistake. Users may not stay on the site for long, so getting the brand in front of their eyes is crucial. Even if they leave quickly, you’ve at least made an impression. Later when they encounter the brand, they’ll recognize it as familiar, and will be more likely to purchase from a familiar (i.e. “trusted”) brand.

What happens is a kind of cognitive self-trickery, where the conscious mind says “If I have heard of this, it must be good.” This is why companies are willing to spend millions of dollars just to get their logo on a sign at a sports event.

What else is important though? Well, the answer to that question depends on the kind of site you’re building. What you need to do is think about what you would be looking for if you were to visit this site. It’s usually very different to what a corporate honcho will say they want to show. The things people are going to be looking for are the important things to include and feature prominently.

Stylistic elements should blend in easily

Your design embellishments should make the viewer astonished in a good way. They should bring delight rather than annoyance. Quite often designers get carried away and add things to a page to generate the “wow factor” without making sure these things don’t have the potential to be annoying.

You also need to make sure that such embellishments degrade gracefully. When they can’t be displayed properly, they shouldn’t be displayed at all, and it should appear as though they never had been there.

gif courtesy of Tigran Manukyan

Layers to the rescue

You can add these embellishments through the use of layers. People creating responsive designs seem to have forgotten they have a 3D stack to work with, and as a result they’re missing the true potential of responsive design.

An example of how this works… Imagine you have a site where you have a layout with multiple breakpoints. The conventional way of thinking would have you putting everything on one layer, which will lead to crowding on smaller displays, forcing you to drop things, or (as is usually the case), exhibit a hideous design.

Those last two words should never go together when you’re talking about something you created. The good thing is that you actually can avoid the situation through the use of layers.

By stacking stylistic elements on a separate layer, you can hide or show them at your leisure, independently of the content layer, and both layers are fully responsive.

Suppose the user is viewing the site on a monitor with a resolution of 2560 x 1440. Our lower content layer spans the full width of the screen, but we can set margins on it that would place the content inside a decorative border that could be any size we want.

Placing that decorative border on the upper layer without margins, we can just set the width to be equal to the size of the margins on the lower layer.

As the user steps down through different screen breakpoints, the two layers can continue to work together like this, and the upper layer can even display entirely different borders for each breakpoint. Until on the final breakpoint we dismiss the upper layer entirely, just by setting it to be hidden.

The potential here is obvious. Do you have a large number of annoying link ads in the right column? You can hide them from users with small screens, and furthermore you can add them back on demand using jQuery.

Finally a way to properly separate content from design

This is the way web pages are supposed to work. By storing your “extras” on a completely separate layer, you get even greater separation of content from design, because that upper layer can be messed around with at any time without affecting the lower layer, and vice-versa.

Have fun experimenting with the freedom this opens up to you, so you can play around with all kinds of creative ideas while the content itself remains unaffected.

It is exactly the same concept as using virtual machines for sandboxing. No matter what you do, you can’t affect the page content because it is isolated from the decorative layer.

header image courtesy of Matt Carlson

This post The Art of Building Better Websites was written by Inspired Mag Team and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.