credit: Spence Photo/flickr

Presenting designs to clients is a tricky part of the project cycle. You need to convince the client that your vision is worth following, and there’s a lot at stake. On one side of the outcome spectrum lies helpful feedback and renewed motivation; on the other side there are endless design iterations and versioning nightmares. (Ever named a file HomepageFinalForRealThisTimeVersion7.psd?) So how do you consistently land yourself on the better side of the project? The answer is simple: good communication. Moving a project forward without getting bitten later hinges on the ability to state your position clearly as well as listen to feedback from others. Here are some presentation tips that will improve your communication skills and make the design presentation a less harrowing experience. Continue Reading

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Web Typography: Educational Resources, Tools and Techniques

Web typography has evolved a lot over the last years. Today we see rich, accessible typography, a plethora of type design choices for the web and a number of remarkable, type-based web designs. It’s a great time for web design, and it’s a great time for web typography. Still, being as excited as we are, we should not forget about the foundational principles of good type design on the web and use them properly within our projects. Great choice is good, but, most importantly, we should be making meaningful typographic choices in our designs.

The Manager’s Guide to Increasing Employee Productivity

A high demand for the employee productivity lacking in today’s workforce leaves management teams wondering exactly what to do. The dazzling distractions of a high tech world constantly bombard the work environment. Employees are so busy texting, “tweeting” and updating their Facebook statuses that employers are left with unfinished assignments, missed deadlines, and wasted financial resources. Increasing employee productivity should be on the forefront of any managerial mind.

Freelancer’s Guide to Coffee – Part 1: Brew Your Own

Rocket fuel, cup o’ joe, brain juice, mud. Call it what you will, coffee has been the go to fuel for freelancers from around the world. Sheik Abd-al-Kadir may have said it best when he said “no one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee’s frothy goodness.” High-five Sheik!

Making It All Work – Getting Perspective at Ten Thousand Feet: Projects

All of us have ongoing tasks in our lives – individual things that need to be done but are too large to be accomplished in a single sitting or require various things for various steps along the way.

I know that my own life is littered with such projects. I’d like to rearrange my office, moving my mostly-empty bookshelf over to another wall and replacing it with shelving for my game collection. I’d like to write a third book. The list goes on and on.

How and When to Say No to a Client

When you’re first starting out as a freelancer, it can be difficult to find those first few gigs. Many freelancers develop the habit of accepting nearly every project with work that remotely resembles their chosen specialty.

For the brand new freelancer, taking what work you can find is a matter of survival (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Before long, however, you may find yourself overwhelmed with too much work to do and too little time to do it in. When this happens, you know that it is time to start to refuse projects. However, you probably don’t have a refusal strategy in place.

How Connecting Your LinkedIn Contacts Builds Social Influence

Are you wondering how to leverage your presence on LinkedIn to build social influence?

Regularly updating your status, joining and participating in groups and answering questions is just the start.

Increase Your Site’s Speed & Security With CloudFlare

No matter how big or small, your website can always expect at least some activity from spammers if appropriate measures are not in place. This can significantly decrease productivity for you as a webmaster or developer and sometimes more extreme methods are needed to combat these online threats.

Why you need to jump back into Facebook

As we all know, Facebook is growing more quickly that anyone possibly imagined. When I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg at FOWA London 2008, they had 150 million users. He said they wanted to be the platform that the entire world uses to connect to one another. Now, just two years later, they have over 500 million, and I’d say he’s on his way to doing just that.

Mozilla: $104 Million In Revenues, 400 Million Users, Google Deal Running Through 2011

Mozilla has just published their annual “The State of Mozilla” report. They do this once they’ve filed their audited financial statements for the previous year, so these numbers are for 2009. Still, they’re impressive numbers given how much competition their is in the market — particularly from their biggest benefactor: Google.

I was cleaning out our spare room the other day and I found an old IBM laptop bag.  It was like finding an old pair of pants – still lots of wear in them, but hopelessly out of date.  This bag is six inches wide when collapsed – and expands to about three times the size.  I remember having two laptops in it at one time, and still room to hold the rest of my paperwork.  The good news, I don’t think I will ever need to lug around those Pentium paperweights.  The bad news is, I can’t throw out the bag – it’s still in great shape. Continue Reading

credit: TheGiantVermin/Flickr

Rocket fuel, cup o’ joe, brain juice, mud. Call it what you will, coffee has been the go to fuel for freelancers from around the world. Sheik Abd-al-Kadir may have said it best when he said “no one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee’s frothy goodness.” High-five Sheik!

But before you head out the door to your favorite café or run round the supermarket to pick up a can, there are a few things you should know about this liquid of the gods. Join us in our light-hearted look at a Freelancer’s Guide to Coffee – Part 1.
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Credit: RobStone/Flickr

Unless you were immediately snapped up by a manager and/or huge agency after graduating, the business of building your image as a freelance professional rests fairly and squarely on your shoulders alone. Please remember that image without talent is like a violin minus a string. Equally, an awesome artistic gift is severely limited in potential if you fail to develop an appropriate image to accompany it.

As a freelance musician, I’ve seen individual careers dominated by the image the musician cultivates. So what is image? In simple terms, your image is how you are perceived by others. This can refer to your public persona, private life or both.

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Photo credit: m.eckelberg/Flickr

I run my freelance web design business from home where it’s more comfortable, cheaper and generally a lot easier to access. But with that comes distractions from my Xbox, the great British daytime TV, and my bed. The lack of communication and contact with real people can also be a downside as well. Sure it means I can get work done without their distractions but sometimes you need help, input or just a kick up the ass.

I frequently hit motivational brick walls. It’s not a design brick wall, or writer’s block, it’s just having the will power to start work. I’m not sure why it happens but sometimes I can’t bring myself to open those files and start working.

Figuring out how to get motivated in these situations can be a big issue if you’re freelance and depending on yourself, so how do you get over it? I’ve put together a little list of some best practices for getting motivated. Continue Reading

Tell people you are a “ghostwriter” and they will conjure up enticing visions of you rubbing elbows with major entertainment celebrities, top athletes, and business icons. They are thinking of those books where the famous tell their tales and the political heavyweights push their policies, knowing that most of those people needed professional help to craft readable, persuasive, entertaining narratives.

But there are legions of ghostwriters working on more mundane projects in the business world. Mundane, but lucrative. They might identify themselves as “copywriters” or “freelance editors” or “public relations specialists” or something else, but each one is writing words to put in the client’s mouth. Continue Reading

In order to gather enough data to fairly represent freelancers world wide, we’ve extended the run of the 2010 Global Freelancer Survey! We want to create a complete view of freelancers around the world–and we need your help. We need more responses in order to compare results to the success of the 2007 survey.

If you haven’t already, please take the Global Freelancers Survey and let us know what you think! We need YOUR help to spread the word and help out your fellow freelancer. You will be entered to win one of our many fabulous prizes, including a prize package from MOO and a 32GB iPad! All eligible entries will also receive an overview of survey results–find out what other freelancers are charging or finding clients!

Interested? Read the original post for full details. The survey will remain open until November 29th, 2010. Take the survey now! Continue Reading

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Each month we round up the best posts from WorkAwesome and FreelanceSwitch so that you can catch up on anything awesome you might have missed. Pay extra attention to the Global Freelancers Survey–with only a few days left, the clock is ticking on the opportunity to win an iPad and prizes from MOO Business Cards and the Envato Marketplaces! Continue Reading

10 Kick Ass Adobe AIR Apps You Should Try

Remember Adobe AIR? With advancements in HTML5 and even Silverlight, AIR seems to have been left in the back of our minds-at least here at Web.AppStorm. Adobe AIR has some pretty great apps, however, that are still rocking the AIR space and even leading their respective areas (like Twitter).

We’ve pulled together 10 kick ass Adobe AIR apps you should definitely try if you haven’t already. Take a look!

Gender Disparities in the Design Field

Walk into any design classroom, at any college in America, and you’ll see a comfortable mix of male and female students. Turn your attention to the front of the classroom, or down the hall to the faculty and staff offices, and that wonderful gender balance starts to skew. Travel outside the campus, and there’s really no balance at all. Continue Reading