A few tips to consider:

• When someone enters a meeting room, stand and greet them
• When in a room of strangers, extend a warm handshake and introduce yourself, especially to those standing solo
• When dining, don’t chew with your mouth open
• Don’t chew gum during meetings
• Never put your bags on the conference room table; sit them next to your chair or on your chair and unload from there
• Always bring paper, writing utensil and your calendar to ANY meeting
• Always arrive a few minutes prior to a meeting – don’t make everyone wait on you
• Hold the door for others – male or female
• Clean up after yourself; don’t expect someone else to pick up your dirtied glass or trash
• Send a handwritten thank you note after meeting a new person and enclose your business card … not only good etiquette, but also good networking!

For more great tips, check out Emily Post.

I came across a great article last week in Ad Age, How Agencies Are Helping Their Clients Help The Environment. It really puts things in perspective … as individuals, it’s important to make wise decisions concerning the environment (recycling, buying locally-grown produce, etc.). As a corporation, it’s important to take a look at how we can eliminate waste during the manufacturing process, etc. But as a marketer what can we do? We can encourage our clients to create earth-friendly campaigns.

Example: Snackbox is working with a major consumer packaged good brand that has practiced earth-friendly production since the early 1900s. Before it was “cool” to be “green.”  We’re working with said company to create a public relations campaign that educates consumers about their practices in producing disposable tableware.  Most don’t automatically think paper plates = good for the environment. I’m sure demand for their product will increase once our campaign is complete, but more importantly, as consumers, we will know that we have choices. Choices that are actually good for the environment.

We’re also taking the environment into account in other practices: Doing away with paper press kits, emailing our invoices and presenting brand identity systems electronically rather than pasting to presentation boards.

Protecting the environment isn’t another fad. Let’s all do our part to protect and preserve.

One type of client may want to have their website up by the end of the week so that they can be ready to “make money” over the weekend. But I have found that if you sacrifice your time in testing and ensuring proper usability the website will initially flop. It is best to have a good plan of action and stick to it. The client like this I have found will normally want a large project done and wait until two days before their desired deadline to get you essential project information.

Say your job is print related, staring at the MAR+APR 2008 Create magazine sitting beside me I can see a ton of work going into some of the ads placed in here. So if I was designing for something like this; where obviously deadline is an issue. I may have to steer the client out of the target issue if their overall brand or idea wasn’t properly portrayed, suggesting the following issues print deadline for a more successful campaign.

How do others handle clients like these?

A project can start on a few different levels, either taking an existing design and creating a reality, or creating the concept from scratch, and then taking the concept into a reality. This here will only deal wiht the former as it’s all about how to get the look from Photoshop* and putting it successfully to Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.

As most designers know it is easy to slice as design and prep it for the fun part, which is laying it out. I say fun because every design seems to teach me something new about cross-platform/cross-browser success. Most people who have done this a few times will start out with a good building block, I recommend Eric Meyers’ CSS Reset as a starting point. This technique tends to cut down the time it takes to tweak issues you will more than likely run into with standards development (Thank you Eric!).

So with that out of the way, what’s the best way to start? I tend to reach for a trusty pad and pencil to sketch the page out and begin to label my base layout elements.

I usually begin with building blocks like:

• wrapper
• container
• masthead
• content
• navigation
• footer

But of course you will have to elaborate on those most times dependent on the design. But a good block like this works normally for my design needs. Next segment will actually entail code that I use for a basic building block!

Check back soon  as I will post some sample files in the next segment!