One of the coolest links this past week was from Smashing Magazine and they give you another one of their great lists, this time it is the list of code beautifiers and formatters from across the web. Another great link from this past week was from Bitbox who is now notorious for giving away various vector elements, this time they are giving away some cool new Vector Foliage images. For a good laugh I came across this post from downloadsquad on digg about how the web looked in 1994, which is pretty hilarious in comparison. It brings back some good ‘ole memories… ok maybe they weren’t that great. (more…)

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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…)

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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…)

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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.

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The announcement of Microsoft Silverlight comes as somewhat a shock to a lot of the design community, with Microsoft introducing a new flash competitor things could start to heat up in the design world. Especially sense they are also developing Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Expression Designer. They have already released Microsoft Expression Web which was the replacement web design product for Frontpage (which was utter crap). So far Expression Web looks like a good program, as far as standards go at least. (more…)

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In the increasing meddling of companies that have just failed their current business model it seems that security firm F-Secure is attempting to suggest to the ICANN that another new domain name .safe needs to be imposed to provide a secure means for financial institutions to protect their customers from phishing. Not only is this idea just as silly as the .xxx idea but it isn’t the solution to the problem by a long shot. (more…)

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We all remember when popup advertisements were all the rage, advertisers were reaping the benefits of having their advertisement flush in the consumers eyes whenever they visited web sites. Just boom and your product is in their face and they have to look at it. Brilliant. We of course learned our mistakes, well most of us learned our mistakes, and went to more subtle advertisements based on the users interests that gave the consumer the ability to choose to click on an advertisement if they were interested. Now, we have snap preview that takes that choice and adds a little suggestive manipulation to make sure the user sees the advertisement. (more…)

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There are only a few types of people that can ultimately do freelance, and I don’t just mean freelance as the only source of income- even freelance as a part time source of income can be a difficult task for some people. The biggest problem is being self motivated and finding clients, these two are the life and soul of freelance though and they have to be done otherwise you aren’t going to make any money. (more…)

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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…)

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These are the top design podcasts that i frequently watch/listen to throughout the week, they are all updated weekly and have a ton of useful information for the seasoned professional designer and for the new designers whether freelance designer or just starting an entry level design job. I wish I could separate these into the top 5 design video podcasts and top 5 design audio podcasts but unfortunately there just aren’t that many out there and a lot of the podcasts available just aren’t any good or updated enough to be worth your time or mine. (more…)

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