Top 50 Accessories for a Geek Chic Desk

You spend a lot of time at your desk. Why not furnish it to suit your style?

While cluttering your desk with a ton of stuff is never a good idea, decorating it with the right stuff that keeps you productive and happy is important. Doing so also makes your desk both functional and fun and is a great way to keep your morale up when things aren’t going as awesome at work as you’d like.

Why Joe Client Doesn’t Care About Standards

Web standards should be a driving force behind the work of any designer or developer. They provide a scale against which to measure the quality, structure, syntax and methodology of design work.

To explain the benefits of web standards, I’ve compared on my own blog the landscape of the web today with that of 10 to 15 years ago. Continue Reading

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.

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

10 Steps To Taking Your Own Simple Stock Photos

Bad stock photography is a cliché, there’s nothing worse than going to an “about us” page and seeing a bunch of people in suits with telephone headsets who all look really happy.

Good stock photography on the other hand has a lot of value, the downside is that it’s often very expensive.

Best Practices of Combining Typefaces

Creating great typeface combinations is an art, not a science. Indeed, the beauty of typography has no borders. While there are no absolute rules to follow, it is crucial that you understand and apply some best practices when combining fonts in a design. When used with diligence and attention, these principles will always yield suitable results. Today we will take a close look at some the best practices for combining typefaces — as well as some blunders to avoid. Continue Reading

Web Designer’s Guide To Copywriting Profits

If a web design agency wants to increase their sales, there’s one way that’s easier and quicker than the rest: sell copywriting services.

When you sell copywriting to your clients, their websites will achieve more sales and better results.

In addition, your projects will run more smoothly and efficiently.

Busting the Top 3 Guest Blogging Myths

What’s smarter? Putting all your eggs into your own blog basket or placing a few real fine blog posts on another person’s blog? If you’ve pondered these thoughts, keep reading…

Guest blogging has been around for a long time, but it’s an especially hot topic now. With the concept becoming even hotter daily, it’s quite natural that myths emerge. Continue Reading

Balancing Work Priorities as an Entrepreneur

We sometimes view entrepreneurs as those born with creative genius or great business acumen, that are able to somehow magically transform their business idea into a successful and profitable venture.

How to Deal With Nightmare Clients

Regardless of how smoothly your business may operate, no one is completely immune to criticism and controversy. With BP’s disastrous oil spill continuing to dominate the headlines almost three months after it took place, it’s becoming alarmingly clear that even the world’s most powerful and formerly respected brands can take a hit online. Continue Reading

The User Is The Anonymous Web Designer

We invest time, money and effort into understanding our audience, and the movement toward a more socially networked Web has made us realize the power that visitors have over how our designs are engineered; and we try to meet their ever-growing needs. Community is integral to the evolution and functioning of a website, and visitors and website owners have become dependent on each other. This reflects a change in the industry: the user has turned into an anonymous designer.

Inbox 101

Have you ever sat down at your desk and dreaded opening your email inbox, knowing that an endless barrage of tasks waited there, ready to pounce on the things you already had intended to accomplish? If you said yes, you probably need to upgrade your inbox practices. Continue Reading

20 Awesome Office Designs

In lieu of asking “Are Traditional Offices Dead?“, we decided to round up some inspiring office spaces. The featured companies have decided to leave the cubicle farms behind in favor of creative and offices designs. Companies such as Google and Zappos have been highlighted in the past few years but it is evident that the non-traditional office is being adopted by companies of all sizes and industry.

Retro Video/DOS Games For The Weekend: Take A Stroll Down Memory Lane

We thought we’d do something a bit different for the weekend, because not everybody is actually working for the weekend. And even if we do, we deserve a break from time to time. For just this occasion, we have poured across the four corners of the Web and amassed a collection of retro games to help you make the absolute most of your break time this weekend… and possibly any break time you take from this day forth. Continue Reading

Breaking Down Doors: Promoting Yourself To Dream Clients

There’s a saying that the School of Visual Arts in New York City once used in its ads: “To be good is not enough when you dream of being great.” We all have dream clients that we would like to add to our portfolio, but either we don’t know how to reach them or have no idea how to even start. Promotion is not a big subject at art school, and I know way too many creatives who stare at the phone and wonder why it’s not ringing.

The Next Level of Design: Being Unique

In a world filled with CSS galleries and showcase websites, everything starts to look the same.

Gradients, rounded corners, drop shadows, it’s extremely hard to get away from the strongest of trends in our industry. Continue Reading

Expressive Web Typography: Useful Examples and Techniques

Wherever we turn online, typography jumps out at us — sometimes literally, with the assistance of some clever coding. And now more than ever, we are seeing greater focus on this design element and its varied implementations around the Web. With the growing popularity of font embedding services and @font-face, typography is the talk of the town, but even though it is a regular topic among communities, not all of our typographic efforts are successful. Sometimes we swing for the fences, only to miss or fall short.

Look Backward, Look Inward, Look Forward for Success

Be it Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela or any of the other 6 billion or so people in the world, we all have one thing in common.

Everybody loses.

Beneath all the victory, power and flamboyance lie the painful scars of failures. Failures are the checks and balances put in place by God, nature, Darth Vader or whoever else you consider the omnipotent. Continue Reading

55 Ways to Relax After Work

Do you ever feel like a zombie after a long day at work? You feel so depleted and tired. You hardly have any energy left at all. The only thing you want to do is eat comfort food, pop open a brewski and watch television until bedtime.

Sales and Marketing Tips for Freelancers

Sales is a four-letter word.

Wait a minute, it’s five letters. And it’s that innocent “s” at the end that changes everything. “Sale” is good. “Sales” is bad. At least it is in many a freelancer’s mind. It conjures up images of plaid-clad, cigar-smoking wheeler-dealers who try to badger you into buying something you neither want nor need. Continue Reading

Blogging For Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides

A few years ago, you might not have pointed out during a meeting with a potential client that you maintained a blog. Over time, though, blogs have evolved from the being a personal hobby to a serious work tool. In fact, today, web designers are supposed to know much more than just how to design and build websites. Customer’s expectations have increased, and unless you are in position to choose your favourite clients, meeting these expectations requires hard work.

Working For A Web Design Agency

The most obvious job for a web designer is working for a web design agency, but if you’ve never done that before… then how do you know what to expect? Is it even the right path for you?

Setting foot in an agency for the first time can be daunting. It’s filled with people who have probably worked in the industry longer than you and who probably know a lot more than you.

5 Ways to be Financially Fit

Let’s face it—no matter how much you might love your job and enjoy going to work every day, when it comes down to it, you rely on your profession to pay the bills and support yourself and your family. Though you may not be in your ideal salary range just yet, if you’re financially fit–responsible with your spending and mindful of how much you have in your accounts–you should still be able to cover your expenses and hopefully have something left over at the end of each month. Continue Reading