You The Designer is accepting guest posts again, but here’s the clincher: All guest posts must be about any of the following: print design, graphic, web or industrial design (You can also submit posts related to architecture and photography)! Now, despite us widening the scope of the topic, it can still get overwhelming sometimes, so you’ll have to excuse us while we set a few conditions and put down a format here for you to stick to when submitting your drafts. If you don’t follow the conditions and/or format, it may result to delays or non-publishing of your post altogether. Sorry! We’ll try and make the system better once we actually have time, but for now here’s the deal:
 

The Conditions:

1. Submitted drafts must be useful for graphic artists, web designers, developers, and/or design enthusiasts in general.
 
2. Submitted drafts must be unique content both in terms of these not having been published anywhere else and pertaining to topics that have not yet been blogged about too often by the rest of the design community at the time the draft has been submitted.
 
3. Articles must be at least 300 words, with at least three (3) featured images. Skewed, pixellated, blurry, ugly, or otherwise low-quality images will be rejected. No more design inspiration posts, please! We don’t have stringent standards for tutorial posts yet, but we do prefer tutorials for programs in the Adobe Creative Suite, or at least similarly popular graphic or web design / programming software.
 
4. Links and anchor text inside guest post drafts must be specified in detail and submitted for approval. We reserve the right to refuse even a well-written draft if we do not like where the draft is linking out to. Usually we refuse links to spammy or low-quality sites, sites very unrelated to You The Designer’s niche, or sites that are in direct competition to our sponsors.
 
5. Submitted drafts must require minimal to no editing, whether in terms of grammatical or technical details. These technical details include how the draft has been submitted to us, which must be submitted with the components enumerated below.
 
6.An Author Bio containing a brief description of the author of the post as well as a 100×100 px image of the author is required for each submission.
 

Drafts Must Be Submitted with the Following Components:

(Yes, it involves HTML, but…)
 
1. .txt file of your draft in HTML, with image links, sources and filepaths following this format:

 
2. .zip file of your images. Images to be used in the post must be resized to be within the minimum of 500 px and the maximum of 600 px in width. No height requirement, as long as images are not distorted. If you have more than one image in the post, all the images must have the same width.

Also provide an image in 3 sizes that we can use to feature your post on the homepage with. The 3 sizes are 92 x 60 px, 232 x 133 px, and 505 x 200 px. Provide attribution to the image at the bottom of your post.

 
3. A short author bio for you to put at the end of your post, preferably included at the bottom of the previously mentioned .txt file in this format:

 
4. A 100 x 100 px image of you to put in your author bio (optional, but highly recommended).
If HTML is too much for you, you can send your draft as a .doc file but still send your images in the format we specified above. The .doc file should also at least mark which image goes where.
If you want to submit your draft/s right away, please send them directly to Cadence over at admin [at] youthedesigner [dot] com. However, if you’d like to check if we’re okay with what you want to write, you may pitch your topic to us using this form. Please end your pitch with “Is this something you’d like me to write about for YTD?” so we’re sure you read this far. (Sometimes we get messages from people who seem to mistake this form for a bookmarking submission page.)

All of the above is all you need to know if you just want to write for us as a one-time deal. But if you’d like to become a regular on You The Designer’s roster, please also use this form to let us know what kind of awesomeness you can contribute to the blog, how often you’re willing to post, etc.

So, yay, you want to write for us! We’re looking forward to seeing what you’ve got!

Your Name *

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Topic *

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