Select Your Language Page is that single page you see when you arrived for the first time on a website like cocacola.com or nintendo.com, a pre-home page, with a list of options: language, country, region, etc, normally related to a big brand or name with presence all over the world or some many others sites with the idea of being seen in any country, like mini-sites or promotional sites even personal portfolios.

There are many sites who redirect you automatically to a language by your physical location, and this could be easy in normal cases but in some cases this not the best option. Let’s say you are from South America but you are in a pleasure travel by China and you don’t know a single word of Chinese, but for any reason you want to go to whateveryouwanttoputhere.com and… Taraaa, is in Chinese.

The reason, if they track your location they can know where you are and intermediately redirect you to the Chinese version of the site… three seconds later you just quit the site because you don’t like the Chinese version. But if they have givento you a Select Your Language Page, you would have made just one more click and you’d be stay much longer on that site. That’s what we all want on our site keep our visitors.

I know this kind of options are normally related to flash sites and I know the design community is not a big fan of this sites, for problems like SEO, keywords, google rank, etc.. I personally love this kind of sites, because they are impressive and interactive, and normally it means: beautiful sites with big loading times for most of them. But their objective is totally different than a blog, or forum. And designers have worked on, to create this pages like any other page on the site even if is not the most visited, so they deserve to be shown and appreciated.

Just after I finished my post about Best Coming Soon Pages, I have the idea for this post and after some time digging deep on the net and after a big list with more than 200 I finally choose the 50 Best Select Your Language Pages that could inspired you. Must of people don’t really give them to much attention; so they hopefully give you some ideas for your next project or for your personal site, if you are thinking on making in different languages.

There are not ordered by preference, only by themes.

So let’s see this collection of 50 Best Select  Your Language Pages.

1. Cirque du Soleil

2. Nintendo

3. Coca Cola

4. Pepsi World

5. Oakley

6. Disney

7. Elg

8. Smirnoff

9. Havana Mojito

10. Absolut

11. Coors Light

12. 26000 Vodka

13. Ferrari

14. Lamborghini

15. Audi R8

16. Bentley

17. Hummer

18. Mini Worldwide

19. Dsinside Citroen

20. Kamaz

21. Prototype Experience

22. Smamot

23. Xperiment

24. Mcq Momies

25. Bank of Imagination

26. Nike

27. Nike Troupe Battle

28. Nike Store

29. Nike ID

30. Wee-Mee

31. Reserved

32. Greenpeace Weather

33. Disney Tower of Terror

34. Digitalic

35. Sukiland

36. Grzegorz Kapias

37. Generation Movie Project

38. Hf3 Coca Cola

39. Halo 3

40. Forza Motor Sport

41. Resident Evil 5

42. PES League

43. Fifa Ea Sports

44. Fifa Street 3

45. Fifa 09

46. Riddick

47. The Sims

48. Spore

49. Touch Generations DS

50. Simcity DS

What do you think after all this good examples, if you think I missed some you may like just let me know.

Do you like Select Your Language Pages? or you hate them?

For that reason having a design school background is really important if you want to be a designer, but the experiences you make in professional life are worthless, so here you have only 7 of those things I didn’t learn in design school.

1. Your Diploma Is Nothing.

Only a great portfolio will find you a good job on your design future, when you are a freelance, your client only wants to see what you have done for other clients, or what they said about your work, they do not care about you knowledge on history of art, they are interested on what you can really do or not for them.

Obviously an educational background is a good base for and artist and a diploma is a proof of it, but until now I never had to show my Graphic Designer Diploma to find a job, nor even on the agencies I’ve worked.

2. A Great Design Is Not Made In One Night.

Deadlines in design school are basically made for you and your other tasks (family, student jobs or even hobbies) so the teachers give you enough time to make a good final design, because they know the creating process, they know how to get great design.

But your client works on his own time and you must learn how to work on his time, normally; he will need the job finished ASAP (as soon as possible), because they do not have time to lose and they are normally in a hurry.

When I accept a work with an unrealistic deadline, I know it will not be my best design, so now I try to take only projects with realistic deadlines, or I just say no to the client.

3. You Are An Artist, But They Don’t Know It

As a designer you can create great things from scratch, just having an idea and the domain of some techniques you can bring a great design piece, that is what an artist makes, it could be a logo, a painting, a website, whatever you work on, but for your client you just help him to sell more and more, he doesn’t care about the artistic touch you give a that piece, he is more interested on what he sees right now, not the process behind a great idea and the artist behind.

When I have a client with this problem, I am patient and explain how a design proces works and what things can be most important in the creation of a design.

4. He Will Criticize Even Your Best Design

When you make a great design in your school most of the people there, are going to recognize it, your teachers or your classmates, even if they can disagree with some point of your piece, because they have with you something in common, and that is: you all have at least basic design knowledge about it, because you are all in a design school.

But your average client doesn’t have any design education and he bases his critics on personal likes, trends of the industry or even comments from others and you have to be able to handle this kind of issues all the time, be prepare if your client doesn’t like your work, this moment can be hard to pass on.

I am sure you hear a lot of things that can disappoint you, but don’t forget, they call you for your designer skills, if they were designers they would’ve made the design by themselves.

5. Save as/Backup As Often As Possible

When you are close to finish your work, it’s late or the deadline is really around the corner, the probability that your computer crashes, are higher than at the beginning of the project, that it’s Murphy’s law. This one is also learn in university, but there you can just bring out with an excuse to your teacher and you have another week to present it but in real life is not like that.

So don’t wait until the last opportunity to have a copy of your progress, every time is a good time to save your work, don’t wait until the last moment, it could be so late then.

6. Becoming A Designer Is A Never-end Process

When you obtain your diploma you should be able to make some good things with what you learn in design school for the last years, but 6 months later you can be out-of-date if you disconnect of your field evolution. As a designer you must stay up-to-date with the latest software updates, new trends on the market, news and web blogs, magazines, artists, etc.

If you don’t, you can quickly be lost in a new whole world. The design community goes really fast, every year you have a new release of design software, so if you still work with Macromedia Flash it’s time to change, you must improve your design skills also to became more productive.

7. Networking or Nothing!

After you get your diploma you must start the promotion of your name to get that dreamed first job. You can be the best designer in earth but if nobody knows about you, no one is going to hire you.

So the last advice is: Be sociable, be active on art communities, write in forums, post on blogs, create a blog, use Social Media Sites to promote what you do, don’t lose the opportunity when you think someone could need your skills on a job, but don’t try to oversell yourself either, find a middle.

When I finished school, some years ago Internet wasn’t such important, but in this time, Internet is a great source of jobs all over the world, opportunities and inspiration, use it all you can, because is the principal tool of a designer, in the processing of marketing your self.

How To Be Prepare For The Change?

You have to stay awake all the time if you want to became really good in your work as a designer, the process is never finish in this area, and the best you prepare your knowledge and skills to this change better you’ll do after.

All this things come from my experience as a designer but are not the only truth. You can have different aproach about this subject, so let me know what else you learn only after your design school or what other subject I forgot in this post