Your efficiency as a freelancer can make or break you. Many times it can be hard to see how much more efficient you can actually be if you spend some time fine-tuning a couple of things. In this article we’ll have a look at some of my top tips on how you can give your efficiency a major boost. Let’s get started!

Why boost it?

Planning

Picture by Patrick Hajzler

Take your job seriously!

Some people tend to think that freelancing is a walk in the park. These usually don’t make it for long, basically because they’re wrong. Make sure to take your job 100% seriously and do your best when you’re working. The second you notice you’re not giving all you can, your efficiency has dropped a whole lot. So make sure to remind yourself of why you’re doing this and do your best to stay focused while at work.

Stick to the plan

Picture by Dominik Gwarek

Don’t allow yourself to be distracted. If you’ve made a plan for the day, stick to it as long as possible. Once you start doing other things than those you’ve planned, it’s easier to keep doing it. Before you know it, you haven’t done more than a fragment of what you were supposed to do that day. Planning is obviously worthless if you’re not sticking to it.

Take breaks

Taking smaller breaks during the day can be a hard thing to remember, but it’s very important. This will make you perform better through a long day. It’s also important to your overall health. So remember to take those breaks, preferably at least five minutes for every hour.

Taking some time off

Picture by Faey Szeuw

Taking time off occasionally, will definitely make you more efficient when you’re supposed to be working. On one day off you’ll get your batteries charged and have a lot more energy when you’re back again. It can be hard to do this if you have a lot of ongoing projects, so try to include a day off or a vacation in your plans a couple of times yearly. It will do you good in many ways!

Look at others

Read up on blogs and forums. What do others do? There are thousands of freelancers out there who all have had their share of challenges along the way. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, you can harvest a lot of valuable information that’s already out there. There are also lots of articles on efficiency and on how designers make their websites, logos, brochures and so on to try be more efficient.

Efficient software

Picture by Carlos Paes

Sometimes it will definitely pay off to upgrade your software a bit. Depending on what you’re designing there could be alternatives out there that do certain tasks a lot quicker than what you are doing today. Adding a plug-in for example, can boost your work-speed, the same goes for creating actions/macros for tasks that you spend a lot of time doing over and over.

Know your software

It doesn’t help that you have the top of the line software if you’re using it the wrong way. Even though you may have spent years working with Photoshop, Illustrator or other programs, that doesn’t have to mean you’re effective. Remember to keep yourself updated regularly. I always give fellow designers the advice of checking out new tutorials on the software of choice and doing these. More often than not, you may discover new techniques and easier ways of doing things.

Knowing the market

Picture by Dominik Gwarek

Reading up on blogs and websites related to your field will save you a lot of time when it comes to researching. By knowing trends, new technologies and so on – you will have to spend less time researching as you already have a good clue about what’s going on.

Specific deadlines

By setting very specific deadlines, most of us can be quicker and more focused in what we do. Not only should you do some planning, as mentioned earlier, you should also break it down into specific deadlines.

Learning from your mistakes

Picture by Michaela Kobyakov

Take the time to evaluate your projects. Make a list of what is working in order to hold on to those things, along with listing what doesn’t work in order to eliminate those elements in future projects.

Conclusion

There are probably many things you can do to boost your efficiency. Check out some of these tips to see if they can be helpful. There’s a good chance you will be surprised by how much more you can get done in the long run just from changing what could seem to be minor things.

Have any comments or suggestions to other tips? We would love to hear from you in the comments section!

Good luck!

On my professional opinion, real-estate websites are among the most complicated types of projects to be planned and designed. One of the reasons is that competition is extremely high and with the standard approach you will be buried under the heap of your competitor’s websites and secondly, the creative design does not guarantee anything.

Most of the industry websites have old-fashioned tabled designs with small fonts and cluttered layout, however the traffic to this websites is tremendous. That said and having observed the behavior of website visitors from some of the studies, I can make the following conclusions:

• people don’t pay much attention to the look and feel of real estate websites;
• it’s the properties database and convenience of search that play the main role;
• the older the design is, the longer the company is on the market and thus, there’s more trust.

In my post today I’d like to present you the collection of thoroughly chosen and best in their niches websites related to real estate market that should help you with your own real estate project. The designs presented in this showcase below cover a wide range of property and real estate related websites and thus I hope will be useful for every designer and project manager.

The websites do not stand out by their designs only, the parameters I used when making this list are:

• clean layout;
• great presentation of the property search;
• call to action buttons that make you want to click;
• effective header area;
• creative use of photos, icons, illustrations;
• workable color-scheme;
• website memorability.

None of the websites in this list are perfect (except for probably Remax which is my favorite one) but every single site has something worth seeing and analyzing. Some of the websites may have a unique property search presentation only, others may have cool call to action buttons but lack user-friendliness and clean page structure. Some of the websites present real estate standards formed for ages and nicely embedded into new design, others are quite innovative and created in the mixed style you will probably love. Like in every niche, there’s always place for experimentation but there’s also customer experience that we should never neglect.

Browsing trough the list you will find the one-property websites, vacation rental websites, property portals, corporate websites of property companies and much more. Enjoy the first-class concept presentation and share your thoughts with us!

Terminus Real Estate

Zoopla

Vacation Rental Station


Cantera Real Estate

Naked Apartments

Find a Property

Equity Apartments

Houston Apartment Help

BirdBoxx

Avalon Communities

Optimal Rentals

First National

Lincoln Property Company

Globrix

Real Estate

Be The Middle Man

realestate.drawingonthepromises.com

Lanikai Properties

Emlak Center

Rachline

Preview Naples

Meadow Castle Rock

Belvedere Inc

Woolshed Grove

Rental Property Shop

Batico

Kensington Lakes

Prudential Real Estate

Windermere Real Estate

Rental Homes Plus

HomeAway

Otalo

StreetFolio

Remax

CapriMoveis

For Rent

Better Homes Real Estate

MrRental

RentPing

T-shirt is a part of our everyday clothing and it is used extensively no matter what your age is, we can also say that, it is a basic clothing need of everyone. T-shirts are being used widely in every society whether it is simple or designed but T-shirts with unique and creative designs are always appreciated and accepted. Due to high demand of fancy and beautiful t-shirt design, designers are, always, in search of unusual and creative ideas to boost their recognition in market. That's why today we have collected some best tips and tutorials of t-shirt designing and on screen printing too because it is also an important part of printing t-shirts. We hope if you go through these tutorials you will certainly learn something out of these useful tutorials and tips

1. Create Vintage Style Zombie T-shirt

2. DIY vintage T-shirts

3. How to Show your T-shirt Designs With Realism

4. How to Create Photorealistic T-Shirt Mockups

5. Design a Retro, Rock T-Shirt Design

6. Create a balanced T-shirt graphic

7. CMYK Process Printing for the Emerging T-Shirt Designer

8. Designing Ultra SceneXCore Apparel!

9. How to create a T-shirt from scratch

10. How to Create Awesome T-Shirt Mockups Like Jimiyo

11. How to design a funny Monkey T-Shirt illustration

12. How to Prepare Artwork for Screen-Printing

13. Photoshop T-shirt Design

14. How to Create a Cute Vector Bear T-Shirt Design

15. Skull T-Shirt Design

16. Create a Custom T-Shirt Stencil Design

17. How To-Create A T-Shirt Stitch Design

18. Create a Three-Color Illustration for Screen Printing

19. Screen-print effects

20. Super-Slick, Screen Printing Separations with Illustrator

21. Rapid-Fire Illustration Technique

22. How to design a t-shirt on a budget and a tight deadline

23. Create a Complete Apparel Tech Pack

24. Design Process: "Sick" Metal Band T-Shirt

25. Make it Look Like Affliction

INSPIRATIONS

Apart for the tutorials listed above, we have also collected a bunch of creative t-shirts designs for your inspiration. You can have some ideas for your next design but don’t copy, try to use your own imagination and creativity too.

1. Every Night I Have the Same Dream

2. Hairwolves

3. Pass It On

4. Rabbit Valley

5. Altitude Sickness T-shirt

6. Colorblind

7. If music be the food of love

8. MISS MAY I

9. Orgasm

10. Spoonful of Sugar

11. Tawdry Hepburn

12. The Eraser

13. Use your brain

14. Every Day Decay T-shirt

15. Hello T-Shirt

16. Hip hop is dead

17. Giant Step

18. Math Problem

19. Pisces beauty T-shirt

20. Reverse city T-shirt

21. Space Jammin’ T-shirt

22. The Swarm T-shirt

23. Zen Garden 2.0 T-shirt

24. A Walk in the Clouds

25. Blowfish

RESOURCES

If you have made your mind to do something right now regarding t-shirt design, you can use these free high-quality t-shirt templates for your initial projects.

Blank T-Shirt – Black

Blank T-Shirt – White

Well done abstract and lighting effects can enhance your artworks exceedingly and this is very popular trend now in photo manipulations, backgrounds, website headers – definitely useful tutorials to be aware of .

You can add them to premade photos, or create whole new scenes from scratch. Photoshop gives you those abilities and allows you to express in all ways. In this post you'll find 40 best tutorials around web to master abstract and lighting effects.

1. Super Slick Dusky Lighting Effects in Photoshop

In this tutorial you are going to put together a sunset image mixing some vector shapes and dusky lighting effects to produce a slick image that will make a nice album cover for a chillout mix.

2. Space Lighting Effects in 10 Steps

In this Photoshop tutorial you will be shown how to create a space scene with some nice lighting effects in 10 easy steps.

3. Advanced Glow Effects

In this tutorial, you're going to create some really sharp-looking glow effects using a combination of layer styles, the Pen Tool and Color Blending. The end effect is quite stunning and you'll pick up some tips effecting the tutorial.

4. A Cool Lighting Effect In Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create that effect you was able to see on the screen at the Macworld San Francisco. It's basically some lighting effects with blurs and blend modes, but the effect is awesome.

5. Windows Vista Aurora Effect Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial, you're going to see how to create the Windows Vista wallpaper effect yourself. This Vista lighting effect, sometimes referred to as the Aurora effect, can really transform an ordinary wallpaper to something extraordinary.

6. Awesome Digital Bokeh Effect in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create a digital bokeh effect in Photoshop. The process is very easy and we will be using the super powerful Brush Engine, one of the coolest things in Photoshop.

7. Make Abstract Wallpaper with Brushes

In this tutorial, you will try to mimic the nice abstract preview that Axeraider70 made for his Ultimate Brush Pack 3. This will give the beginners a better idea on how to use these great resources.

8. Space Environment

Learn how to create realistic space scene from scratch using Photoshop.

9. Light and Glow Effect In Photoshop

This Photoshop effect tutorial covers the creation of several different light and glow effects in Photoshop. The effects in outcome consist of smoke, light trails, sparkles, stars and bokeh effects. Luckily it’s pretty simple to create each of these effects in Photoshop.

10. Create an Amazing Ad in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will use some images and play with Blend Modes and Color Adjustments to create a really cool Nike Ad in Photoshop.

11. Create a Dark and Surreal Geometric Space Poster using Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create an abstract space poster using geometrical shapes, masks and apply some filters in Photoshop. Layered PSD file is included.

12. Make a Freezing Cold Snow-themed Abstract Piece

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a snow-themed large piece. You'll learn how to plan the composition of the piece, to add elements into the composition, how to recycle the piece itself to generate more elements for the piece, how to incorporate pen tools into a design and finally how to finish off and fine tune the piece to make it look great.

13. Use Lighting Effects to Make Photos Sparkle

This tutorial shows how to create a variety of light effects that can be applied to photography or illustration with equal impact. From sparkles, pixie dust effects, colored light spots and light beams, to using splatter effects as a form of lighting, it's all here.

14. Sparkling Hot Girl in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create an image using light effects and sparks technique. It basically mixes some techniques from different tutorials and takes the best from them.

15. Achieve Brilliant Lighting Effects in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you'll learn the essential process of achieving brilliant lighting effects in Photoshop. Using default brushes, blending options and a few stock images, you'll learn step by step a variety of techniques that you can use in your own digital artworks to achieve professional results.

16. Give a Photo a Complete Glamour Makeover With Stunning Light and 3D Effects

This tutorial teaches you how to transform a regular, every day photo into a real glamour shot. In this tutorial, you will learn how to retouch a model's face and subtly manipulate her hair. In addition, you will enhance the canvas by adding attractive lighting and 3D effects. This tutorial requires considerable Pen Tool skills, but with perseverance and a passion for design, you will certainly be able to achieve great results.

17. Amazing Photoshop Light Effect in 10 Steps

Learn how to create beautiful "Buy me a coffee" wallpaper in Photoshop. You'll be using basic brushes and some blending effects.

18. Incredibly Realistic Water Text in Cinema 4D and Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create a water text effect. Even though it might look complex it’s a very simple effect. You will need to use Illustrator for the text, then Cinema 4D to make it a 3D text and Photoshop to mix the 3D with some real photos to create a nice and realistic result.

19. How to Enhance Your Subjects With Striking Light Effects in Photoshop

This Photoshop tutorial will show you a simple technique that can be used to enhance any kind of subject with stunning light effects. You will use in particular selection tools, gradients and brushes to achieve the result.

20. Create an Electrifying Light Guitar

In this tutorial, Pawel Kiec will take you though the steps of extracting an image, creating a background, and then making an electrifying glowing guitar that resembles pure neon light. You'll learn how to manipulate blending modes to achieve color and light, and you'll also learn how to extract images with the pen tool, and even create flowing lines in Illustrator to compliment the Photoshop work.

21. Energize Your Graphics with Abstract Energy Lines

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create some energetic lines you can use to create more lively digital creations. Effects such as this are great for enhancing abstract compositions.

22. Recreating The Aurora Borealis

In this tutorial, you are going to recreate the northern lights effect, otherwise known as "Aurora Borealis". Using a combination of filters such as Render Clouds and Motion Blur, you then transform the combined effect to form the shape of an aurora, with a touch of perspective.

23. How to Create a Gorgeous Glassy Text Effect

This tutorial will show you how to create glassy text effect using a series of shapes with different transparency and color effects.

24. Create an Abstract Design with Patterns in Photoshop

Follow this walk through to recreate this detailed design with nothing more than gradient and pattern effects.

25. How To Design An Abstract Wallpaper In Photoshop and Illustrator

In this tutorial you will be creating abstract shapes using the Pen Tool and Shape Tools in Illustrator and then using those shapes to produce an abstract wallpaper in Photoshop using various color blending techniques, textures and transformation tools.

26. How to Create a Realistic IES Lighting Effect in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create a realistic IES (photometric) lighting effect. Yoy'll be using Photoshop CS4 as well as some free plugins and software.

27. Abduzeedo 2010 Light Effects in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will see how to create new Abduzeedo’s 2010 symbol. It’s a sort of monitor/halftone effect mixed with glows and other light effects. You will play with Blend Modes and Blurs. The whole process is quite simple and it won’t take more than 20 minutes to achieve the same result.

28. Drawing an Abstract Lightbulb

This tutorial covers a couple of simple techniques, which if used accordingly can help you attain great lighting effect.

29. Create Simple, Yet Elegant Abstract Spectrum Lines in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you the method used to design a simple, yet elegant abstract spectrum lines in Photoshop. You will see how easy it is to achieve this nice effect and you can use it a wide range of occasions including perhaps site header backgrounds, logos, or add extra flavor to your photo manipulations.

30. Create an Abstract Composition in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to create an abstract composition using rendered images and light effects. As you can see from the final result preview you will create a mystical and magical effect. In this tutorial you will have to use plenty of Photoshop tools, and also Cinema 4D, but if you don’t have Cinema 4D that’s ok, you will be able do all rest steps of this tutorial.

31. The Making of "Constant Slip"

This tutorial takes you through the creative process of making intriguing light effects and applying them in your work. This is more a process description of making this illustration, than a detailed step by step how to. It will give you some good guidance on how to deal with an illustration like this and cover the overall workflow.

32. Create an Explosive Abstract in Cinema 4D and Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will be creating an explosive abstract piece called "What is Man?". You will have to use Cinema 4D to create the explosive effects. You will then take the 3D elements over to Photoshop for the final composite and lighting.

33. Create a Vibrant Abstract Space Artwork

In this tutorial, Paul from ForCG.com will show you how to create a vibrant and colorful abstract space artwork using Photoshop, Illustrator, and stock images. You'll learn techniques on blending modes, the use of the pen tool in Illustrator, and how to combine elements for a visually stunning effect.

34. Quick and Effective Planet, Star and Meteor Impact Creation in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you will learn how to make planet, star and meteor impact in Photoshop in a quick and effective manner. This is intermediate level tutorial so some steps can be a little tricky, but the outcome is worth it.

35. How to Create Great Abstract Artwork via Custom Brushsets and Particle Effect

In this tutorial, you will be able to follow the steps needed to create this cool abstract artwork via custom brushes and particle effect in Photoshop. You will be demonstrated how to create your own brushes and use them to add particle effect to the image to spice it up.

36. Create a Fantastic Abstract Fan Poster

In this tutorial, you are going to get creative with layering, lighting, and texture to build fantastic abstract piece. More specifically, you're going to employ some unusual techniques to make a fan poster for the band Omega Code, but you'll quickly see many different applications for what is taught here.

37. Calculations and Colorization

This Photoshop tutorial will show you how to create an Alpha Channel using the Calculations dialog and you’ll use it to get a really great abstract colorized photo effect.

38. Create a Trendy Galactic Poster Design in Photoshop

Galactic space scenes are a popular theme for digital art, they're packed full of texture and vibrant colour, which are two ingredients of an awesome design. Using Photoshop's blending modes along with a mix of textures and brushes, you'll get lost in space and create an abstract cosmos poster design.

39. Colorful Glowing Text Effect in Photoshop

This tutorial will teach you how to achieve great looking light text effect with some simple techniques.

40. Create an Abstract Cloud Jumper in Photoshop

In this tutorial, you'll manipulate a photo with abstract elements to make it more interesting and active.