There are a lot of ways to find clients as a freelance designer, the one I am going to touch on today is a good way to go about it. This method will ensure that you get in contact with clients directly because that is exactly what it is. Some designers may be timid about using this method because you have to have a somewhat outgoing personality to do this successfully. There are two very distinct methods to this form of setting yourself up for design clients. I will touch on them both and give some simple ideas to help make the method easier for those having trouble with it already. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

There are a lot of extensions out there, most of them are unnecessary because of their limited worth to more advanced users. The big downfall for some of the extensions is that they are a full toolbar and take up entirely too much screen real estate for their total worth as a tool. Just like a Swiss Army Knife you have to be able to conceal the smaller tools until you are ready to use them — hence Swiss Army making it pocket worthy and not made for a lanyard. (more…)

Popularity: 12%

I have completely redesigned the web site and made sure it is 100% standards compliant. I dropped all of the ridiculous tables that I was using previously — I was just being lazy. The new site is all CSS/XHTML and works in every browser as best I can tell. I haven’t tried IE6 but I don’t really care, if you are still using IE6 you need to upgrade to Firefox or Opera. I had enough trouble getting it to work in IE7. (more…)

Popularity: 3%

Adobe Creative Suite 3 has been released for about a week now and everyone has had a chance to try it out and see what kinds of new things it can do or what new features it has. So far everything that we know and love about the products is mostly there. Although the new palettes in illustrator CS3, InDesign CS3 and Photoshop CS3 are similar to InDesign CS2 as in they stay mostly out of the way unless you need them. Which is a huge benefit for saving screen real estate and possibly one of the most useful features so far. There are of course more functional features that are useful but some of the best features are organizational. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

A List Apart is doing their first annual survey of web designers/developers to help create a statistical analysis of the web designers profession. This should help hiring managers, freelance designers and design firms all over the world to better understand the profession as a whole. The survey will remain up until May 22nd of this year and I encourage all my readers to take the survey as well as recommend it to anyone they know that designs.

I took the survey myself obviously and it is a quick survey that only took me about 6 minutes to complete and it doesn’t ask any tough questions so it should be simple for you to take without slowing down your productivity for the day. But just as soon as you get done I would recommend reading some more of this site to even out your productivity for the day. Just to be safe of course.

Popularity: 2%

Dustin Diaz has come up with a wonderful idea about an annual CSS Naked Day that will basically be a day without the use of CSS in your web design to show the benefits of CSS over old HTML or XHTML based designs. It shows how much of a difference the CSS makes to the way your overall web site looks. He currently has a list of over 40 web sites that are going to be participating on April 5th with the CSS Naked day. (more…)

Popularity: 5%

Microsoft recently announced in a press release that they will be acquiring Adobe Systems for $14 billion. This move would further make Microsoft the largest software company in the world and risk bringing Apple down from their recent explosion of popularity by totally monopolizing the industry. Could this means that Adobe products in the future may not work with OSX? (more…)

Popularity: 3%

Adobe Creative Suite CS3 is being announced today and the release date is being set for April 20th (It did say July 1st earlier today though), the software package is going to be coming in 6 different versions and contain a wide array of software. Some of which we haven’t seen before and others that have been improved a great deal. To get a break down of the various versions and what is included in the products along with prices check out this CS3 editions table here. (more…)

Popularity: 8%

PayPerPost has received a lot of bad publicity in the past for allowing anyone to post any article on the most ridiculous blogs and for previously not requiring the author to disclose that they are writing a sponsored article. That has all changed lately with their implementation of Alexa rank, Technorati rank, Google rank and a new �tact� rating that is based off of votes on posts made by users from sponsors. (more…)

Popularity: 3%

There are a lot of books out their to get inspiration from or to learn how to design better. There are a lot. So, picking the right books instead of just a ton of useless books that aren’t worth your time or just regurgitating the same thing developed by someone else. I have compiled a list of the top 10 books I have found that give me inspiration or are truly worth reading for web designers, graphic designers, writers or just hobbyists. All of them will be helpful for graphic designers and web designers but a few are great for writers or anyone in the creative industry. (more…)

Popularity: 9%