Freelance
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5 Ways Listening to Well-Produced Music Can Improve Your Design
Need some fresh inspiration? Listening to well-produced music can improve your design. Sometimes the best inspiration is found in something completely unrelated to what you’re doing. If yet another design book or article — or studying your favorite designs — isn’t helping much, listening to well-produced music can give you fresh, much-needed insight and greatly improve your design.
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How to Not Catch a Social Media Disease
I caught a disease from social media and I don’t know if it’s “tweetable” by modern medicine. I am fully vested in all the important social sites; LinkedIn for business, Facebook for friends, old business coworkers and a few “must know” people registered for the big time waster. I even have a fan page. I have a couple of blogs, write for some blogs that aren’t mine, I tweet, I Plaxo, Spock and other social sites I’ve long since deleted the bookmarks. I was one of the first people to discover social media. Not a pat on the back – just a testament to my ability to keep my sanity.
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Promoting Yourself To… GASP!… Live People!
A friend of mine started an organization named “Creative Connect,” a twice a month get-together for anyone in the creative field. He said it was to, “get people away from their computers and to get them talking at least twice a month.” Mostly designers, programmers, illustrators and photographers with a spattering of marketing and management types show up and it’s something I look forward to attending in the light of day. Twice a month I gnaw through my own leg to escape the shackles of my computer and speak with real people…live…in person. It’s important to deal with the real world from time to time.
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The Perfect Brainstorm: A How To
Given our fields of interest and chosen professions, most of us have at least once in our lives had to brainstorm for one reason or another. But for those of us who apply this mental tool in our creative pursuits much more regularly, learning to do so effectively is crucial.
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Some Reasons You Might Not Want To Become A Web Designer
Web design is often an appealing career choice for artistic and creative people. It’s seen as a potentially lucrative opportunity to be creative on a daily basis. But there are drawbacks that many people don’t realize going into the field.
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Better Time Management for Improved Cash Flow
We’ve all heard it: time is money. And as much as we sometimes hate to look at it in such base terms, it’s mostly true. As service providers (designers and developers), the time we spend on a project is directly proportional to how much we’re getting paid. How we spend our time also has a big effect on when money comes in.
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Tips for More Effective Business Meetings
Whether we like it or not, most of our professional lives are going to have their fair share of time spent in meetings. Be it with our coworkers or clients, a measurable fraction of our working lives will more than likely be taken up in an engaged discussion of tactics, projects, progress, etc.
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Freelancers Leaving the Comfort Zone
You’ve spent years honing your design skills in that corporate cubicle you’ve been living in, hoping for the day when you would finally make the jump to full time freelance. You’ve taken on some side jobs from some friends or friends of friends, but now you are itching to be out on your own. There’s just one glitch…
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When Designers And Developers Work Together
Even in today’s fluctuating job market, one rule that still remains constant and true is to always play to your strengths. Part of this comes from having a complete and firm grasp of your own capabilities and limitations, while part of it also comes from knowing the same about those you are working with. However, as we grow in our abilities we may begin entering a comfort zone wherein wearing every hat and attempting to take on the entire task by ourselves becomes more of a viable reality. And one that we may decide to run with.
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Get More Done: 10 Tips for a More Productive Web Design Process
I’m sure most web designers would love to get more done in a given day. Those that don’t probably wish they could get the work they do have done faster, giving them more free time. The good news is that you can do both: shorten your work day and get more done.
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