How to win approval for your work

Sometimes design can be the easiest part of your job; whether you work with Photoshop, HTML or CSS, you'll often find that the hard work really starts when you've finished designing and you need to get your bosses and clients to give your work their stamp of approval.

The fact is that you can't always rely on the work to do the talking; getting buy-in from the necessary decision-makers is a skill in itself, and this is the subject of Dan Mall's talk from Generate New York earlier this year.

'Proper etiquette for the advancement of design' is the title of this talk, and in it Dan shares some stories of tools, methodologies and non-traditional deliverables that can help you turn a finished design into one that's approved and ready to go, and which can help you nail down what a client really wants in the first place and so get a flying start on any project.

No matter what area of design you work in, Dan's talk is 45 minutes well spent and will leave you armed some essential new working techniques, as well as the ability to make everyone you work with say 'please' and 'thank you!'

And if you want some more great tips, get to Generate London in September where, among a wide range of workshops and sessions for anyone working in web design and frontend development, you'll find Mike Kus with his talk, Be the black sheep.

Mike believes that every client is unique, and yet many websites are starting to look the same. Rather than follow the crowd, you need to stand out by standing alone, and in this talk Mike will share the secrets of how to extract an organisation's identity, and use it as the inspiration to help you craft truly distinctive web designs.

As well as Generate London, there are upcoming Generate events in San Francisco on 15 July, and in Sydney on 5 September. Hit the Generate site for more details and to book your tickets.