Steps to Becoming a Myspace & Twitter Designer – Part One
With the growing rate of social networks, many request for personal page designs for Myspace and Twitter are in high demand. Although most of the clients you will receive from designing for these social networks will be those in the entertainment industry, such as music, fashion, or modeling, its a perfect way for expanding your brand and market. Designing for clients in the entertainment industry is one of the most enjoyable jobs out there, and one of the best ways to show your creativity.
Almost every independent or major musician or fashion model wants a custom page design nowadays and there are designers who specifically design for these social markets. Having these markets as one of my biggest source of income, I have a lot of personal experience having designed over 100 different page designs for the biggest names in hip hop & pop. This article will guide you through the steps I’ve taken to become a highly requested designer for social networks.
Become a Brand
Branding yourself on Myspace & Twitter could become a key to one’s success as a freelance designer. Branding builds creditability, loyalty, promotion and market strategy. Developing a particular design style for your brand will put you in a league of your own when clients are searching for a certain look & feel. Lets look at some of the brand building techniques
Deciding on a Name
Figuring out a name while designing for these social networks is important to build your brand. Many designers for social media uses different names from their freelance business. Coming up with a name for yourself for twitter or myspace could work in three different ways:
Your Real Name
Nickname
Freelance Design Firm
Personal experience while seeing the success of many designers for social media has shown that Nicknames work best.
A perfect example would be for my design firm. Although my design firm is Digital Designz Media Group, while designing for clients who want a twitter or myspace design, my whole team use our social networking brands. I use Design Star, my partner uses Brilliance. Or we use my most known firm which has provided designs for almost major hip hop artist, themp3leak.
Many of the notable designers for social networks are:
C-LE
Darrell the Designer
mp3leak
Brilliance
Kalikwest
Crea Sixteen
This allows the users of these social networks to single you out from corporate design to freelance. Which builds a more personal relationship with the client, rather than the client thinking they are dealing with a firm.
Your Logo
Designing a logo for your brand is crucial while working on projects for these social networks. This will make you very noticeable. But this is a bit different than branding your freelance company.
Designing your logo for your social networking design allows users and followers to recognize your tag on each of your designs. A small logo with big bold text is suggested because on most of your designs, adding your logo instead of actual text will build recognition.
Finding Your Niche & Developing a Style
Finding your niche is whats going to make the difference in your popularity of becoming a myspace or twitter designer. You must create one particular style that you use throughout your designs. Most users contact designers based upon their style. Once you develop your design style for these social networks it will become very easy to find your target market. You want to design in a market that your very comfortable with. Its easy to switch from hip hop to fashion, or urban. But it could sometimes become difficult to switch to a pop based design for those particular artists.
A lot of different entertainment genres have different looks, you would want to find the market you want to work in and design for that market or maybe spread it out to two different markets. Either way, developing your own design style that is used for all of your clients will create an identity for yourself as a twitter & myspace designer.
Portfolio Building
Building your portfolio for Myspace & Twitter requires a lot of patience and work. I have found a process that I have used to get my name out in the social media market. Its certain steps you take to make your name successful in these markets, but the outcome is well worth the time.
If you are new to the social networking markets the first thing you need to do to build your portfolio and make it effective by attracting clients is something I called sponsored pages. You as a designer must sacrifice a few things in order to make the big bucks in this market.
Offering Free Services
The Main goal is sponsoring pages by contacting clients and designing free pages that will in return promote your name and brand. But dont get me wrong, this isn’t just any free page by any person. Lets start from the top.
Designing myspace pages for entertainers and models or those in the music industry is the best step to take. Lets be honest here, the majority of your clients will be in the entertainment industry and very rarely will be regular users. I know it could become difficult to contact famous entertainers, but it has been done by many designers. So if you want to build your portfolio and have a major impact the first thing to do is offer a well known entertainer your services free. Now realistically if you do not have a portfolio already done, sometimes these people will not want you to do the job. So your best bet is to get entertainers that are not particularly famous, but well known users of these social networks.
I find that contacting top 50 musicians or models with over 10,000 friends does the trick on myspace. Likewise finding entertainers or models on twitter with over 500-1000 followers will surely do the trick. On twitter its quite easy, just doing an @mention, asking if you can develop their page for free to just start your portfolio, most likely if they do not have a page then they would be gladly to have you design their page. Now if you cannot contact people of these fashions, then contacting popular users also does the trick.
They key is finding people with popularity on these networks so you will have many visitors of their pages to see your work. Likewise, other users will then contact you to develop their page. I like to limit it to 5-10 pages just to get it started, from there regular promotion will begin and word of mouth will spread.
Building Your Personal Page
The final step is building your personal page for contacting and viewing purposes. While working on your brand, you must design your personal social networking page, which should be your personal page also. Your page on myspace should incorporate your custom design with thumbnails of your portfolio in the content and your top clients in your top friends page.
Conclusion
This concludes Part One of becoming a twitter & myspace designer. This introduction will surely get your started. Next I will go over many in depth steps to take while building your portfolio, pricing, promotion, and establishing relationships with your clients.
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