It’s been a busy year here at Envato and over on our marketplaces, we’re finishing it off with a bang! I’m pretty excited to fill you in on 2 new marketplaces, 3 new types of things you can buy and sell, and a dramatic improvement to how you can purchase on the sites. Read on to learn more!

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It’s hard to believe it’s almost a new decade, and with 2010 just around the corner it’s time to get celebrating the holiday season. There’s plenty happening around the Envato network of sites, read on to find out about it all!

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For just over three fantastic years FlashDen has been the jewel in Envato’s crown. It is our longest running and most active community, and thanks to the amazing authors who showcase their work there, has become the largest marketplace for Adobe Flash files in the world with over 8,500 items for sale.

Last week Adobe asked us to change our name and URL so that it would no longer contain the term ‘Flash’, which is a registered trademark of Adobe. We know that the success of our sites is about the community and content, not the names. So here at Envato HQ we’ve been busy thinking up new names and we think we’ve found a great new home for both our marketplace and our Tuts+ blog on Flash.

As of today the two sites now live at ActiveDen and Activetuts+. Continue Reading

From file management to accounting, invoicing to time tracking, there’s a web app for pretty much everything in a freelancer’s life. Over on our sister blog Web.AppStorm you can find a huge roundup of half a hundred web apps freelancers will find useful!

Amidst all those decisions that have to be made, you also have to choose what tools you’re going to use to actually do your job. And the web is both a blessing and a curse in this regard. It’s a blessing in that it gives you a plethora of choices for the different categories of applications. But it can be a curse because there are so many good options to choose from.

What’s a poor, green-behind-the-ears freelancer to do? Well, you can start by letting us whittle down the list a little for you. Separate some of the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. You’ll still have find which of the tools below best fit your needs and style, but this is the right place to start.

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If you’re a Mac user you’ll also enjoy Mac.AppStorm’s much shorter list – 12 Essential Mac Apps for Freelancers. Yep it’s app overdose

In the last three years our Envato Marketplaces (FlashDen, ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, AudioJungle and VideoHive) have grown like gangbusters, with big communities, huge libraries of files and lots of activity. So when we set out to redesign them earlier this year everyone on the team knew it was going to be big. What we didn’t realise was HOW big it would eventually get! Today it gives me great pleasure to show you …

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It’s been a hectic 3 days for us here at Envato. We’ve had a massively successful Birthday Bundle (over 5,000 sales in 3 days), lots of giveaways, a fantastic Tuts+ tutorial set up for free download and our first video interview. Here in the office we’ve also been celebrating today with a big lunch and lots of network gaming! With the birthday all wrapped up now though I thought I’d give you a very quick preview of what’s coming up in September…

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One of the best things about working here at Envato is that we have an awesome team of people building, managing, writing, reviewing and working on our sites. Yep, things have come a long way since the early days when there was just a few of us trying to do everything!

Recently our awesome Tuts+ interviewer Emil asked if I minded being video interviewed with some questions put forward by the Psdtuts+ readers. Since no-one really wants to see my enormous head on screen for too long a period of time, I asked my lovely wife and partner in crime Cyan if she’d be in on the interview and we thought we’d put up the video to help celebrate 3 years of Envato.

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It was back in 2006 that Envato first launched with our very first site FlashDen. That means next week we’ll be turning 3 years old! Since web years are much like dog years, by my count that makes us pretty darn old. Given how we’ve grown, we’ve decided that this year it’s time we really kicked our celebrations up a notch. Next week for 3 days we’re going to have a massive sequence of birthday events, read on to find out what’s happening …

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When we started FreelanceSwitch back in April 2007, the site consisted of just a couple of blog posts and an about page. Over time we upgraded the design to v2, added forums, a job board, podcasts, resources like an hourly rates calculator, spun up a Twitter account and of course boosted the number of blog posts!

Today I’m very happy to unveil the latest iteration of FreelanceSwitch which introduces a bucketload of new features including a directory of freelancers complete with search facilities, profile pages for users, unified logins for the forums and the rest of the site, a resource directory and of course a fresh design for the whole site.

Accounts, Profiles and the Freelance Directory

The biggest change in version 3 is that we’re introducing a much more robust user account system. Previously we used to have forum accounts and job board accounts. We’ve now merged the two into a single FreelanceSwitch account system.

There are two types of accounts:

Free Accounts …

If you sign up to a free FreelanceSwitch account you’ll be able to:

• Chat on the forums
• Create a basic Profile page with contact details, description, external URL and a couple of skills tags
• Appear in the Freelancer Directory

Paid Accounts …

For $7 a month you get to:

• Apply for jobs on the job board
• Additional Profile features including extra URLs, extra tags, testimonials and work samples
• Appear at the top of any searches of the Freelancer Directory and have more details shown with a larger profile image

What the Profile Pages look like

You can see a sample profile page that I’ve made for myself:

The New Design

The new design is an evolution of the previous look and retains many of the same elements, just repackaged with a bit of freshness.

Some things you might be interested to note are:

• The whole site from forums to job board to blog has the same unified design now
• We’re pulling in fresh jobs into the sidebar
• We’ve got a fairly unorthodox comment layout which emphasizes big text for readability
• We’re using sIFR to render out the FreelanceSwitch font in our headings. It means a slight lag in page loads, but it just looks so damn neat!
• We’ve added a welcome panel to the homepage to help clients use the site
• The site is designed so it looks like the old site … but newer!

Here’s a little look at how FreelanceSwitch has evolved over the years:

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Over the last week Psdtuts+ and Vectortuts+ have been running a special event called Graphic Design Week that consisted of no less than 28 posts including tutorials, articles and giveaways. More than a few will be useful to freelance designers, including:

• Preparing and Talking About Your Graphic Design Portfolio
• Design and Print Bold Promo Cards in 60 Minutes
• Make a Quick’n’Dirty Letterhead in … MS Word!
• Make Your Design Work Look Awesome with a Product Mockup
• Win $3500 to Spend on the ULTIMATE Graphic Design Setup!
• And for readers just getting into design: Teach Yourself Graphic Design: A Self-Study Course Outline

So be sure to stop in at our Graphic Design Week Wrap-up post and browse around the great selection of articles.

The web can be a great source for inspiration and in the last couple of years we’ve seen a heap of great galleries for website design in particular. But there’s so much more stuff to be inspired by, that’s why today we’re launching Creattica.com a gallery of great design and inspirational imagery that includes not just websites, but logos, business cards, posters and Photoshop art!

The new Creattica site is in fact a redesign and repurposing of our venerable FaveUp gallery that was in need of a bit of love and attention. So we’ve ported all the old content over to give the new site a flying start in its new super suit of Creattica awesomeness!

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For many of you freelancing is an end in itself, a way to escape the confines of a regular job and work for yourself. If you’re like me, freelancing is a stepping stone to still other types of business. Freelancing makes a good springboard because having your own hours gives you the flexibility to work on a startup business. It also provides you with an income source to help sustain those early days when your new business idea isn’t much more than just a pie in the sky.

Personally, my wife Cyan and I used freelancing as a way to set up Envato and FreelanceSwitch. I won’t lie, it kinda sucked doing client jobs all day, then working on the new business into the night – usually interspersed with even more client work. But it sure beat taking a loan from a bank and having repayments hanging over our new enterprise.

The Netsetter

In the last few weeks I’ve been starting a new blog about my experiences in startups and web business, it’s called TheNetsetter and I thought there might be some freelancers here who’d be interested in coming on over! A few of my favourite posts so far:

1. It Won’t Happen Overnight But It Will Happen!
2. Doing Things Yourself Will Only Get You So Far
3. Guerrilla Marketing for Startups
4. Strategy Games and How They Can Help Your Business

Posting is a little less frequent than here on FreelanceSwitch, but we’ll be ramping up over time. So head over to TheNetsetter and say hello!