The Six Commandments of Contracting
I’ve been dealing with contract art for nearly fifteen years, and have been a full-time professional for over ten years. I’ve worked both as an artist and as a manager in a variety of settings. As an artist I’ve freelanced from home, in-house at an art studio, and in-house at a developer. As a manager, [...]
smArtist tip: Art directors don’t cut the checks.
Contract artist tip: Your client’s contact point for art management and direction is rarely the person that cuts checks. Their endgame is getting art done and in game, not closing the contract out and getting you paid. It’s not personal, it’s simply the role and it’s easy to forget that the contract ain’t over till [...]
The Art of Getting Noticed – video speech and text
Hi everybody! I spoke at the IGDA Microtalks a couple months ago on the subject of job-getting, being noticed and generally how to market yourself better as an artist. I had a great time and there was a fantastic lineup of speakers, all linked from the video below and all of which are worth watching. [...]
The Art of Getting Noticed
Hello, all! Here’s article for artists seeking employment, contract or full-time. It focuses on using basic marketing techniques to stand out in the crowd, give hiring managers something to notice and remember, and filling out your portfolio most enticingly. This article is based loosely on my Marketing for Artists article from years back, but I’ve [...]
Cloud Living is the Life for Me #1 – The invincible contact list!
Introduction to the series Here’s the first of a multi-part series on how simple and realistic it is to start transitioning into cloud-based computing. I tend to be an early adopter of new technologies, and converting to the cloud has been a focus of mine for the last year and a half. In this series, [...]
Productivity Tip #16: VisiPics for duplicate image search!
I’d like to introduce my readers to a wonderful tool I was introduced to some time back — VisiPics! Ever wanted to clear out your reference folder of duplicate images? Or clean out duplicate photographs you’ve downloaded to your PC? Or simply to clean up your project directories of dupes? If so, then VisiPics is [...]
Productivity Tip #15: StrokeIt!
Here’s another life-enhancing tool I love: StrokeIt! It adds the ability to create global or application-specific mouse gestures in Windows. Incredibly customizable, very simple to use, small memory footprint. Example usage case: Navigating in Windows Explorer. When I need to go Back, I hold the right mouse button, drag the mouse left and release and [...]
Google Browser Size – Great tool for portfolio design testing
This is extremely cool! Check out Google Browser Size. Essentially, this web tool will draw an overlay map of your website marking the different resolution boundaries and showing you how likely people at different resolutions are to be able to see different parts of your website. Some people with low resolutions won’t scroll down to [...]
Productivity tip #14: Lookout – hyperfast indexed search in Outlook
Here is my FAVORITE Outlook tool. It’s lightning fast indexed search that beats the pants off anything Microsoft has. Microsoft liked it so much, in fact, that they purchased the company, then killed the project completely. This paved the way for their horrible and criminally useless Desktop Search without any pesky competition to get in [...]
Tip for smArtists: Cover letter templates
Here’s a small post culled from a question I received in an email. This is by no means an all-inclusive guide or a how-to, but just a couple thoughts on the subject of cover letters. Small disclaimer: The game industry is WAY more loose and laid-back than other industries, and it’s the only one I’m [...]
Tip for smArtists: Making sure you get paid on time
Artists: Getting paid is important. If it’s a small studio, they simply may forget to mail off a check in a timely manner. That sucks. It’s usually not intentional. They got the art, which is all they wanted, so they’ve probably moved onto working on something else and aren’t thinking about it anymore. One way [...]
Tools of the Trade: HTTrack Website Copier!
Ever bookmark a website full of great information, only to revisit it later and discover the link is dead? Worry no more! HTTrack Website Copier is here, and you need never fret over dead links again. It’s a free, very easy-to-use, highly customizable tool that automatically downloads webpages in their entirety. You can set how [...]