Now it appears that Bill Gates joined Twitter with calculated intentions. After passing 100,000 followers in eight hours (now he has nearly 250,000 fans), the Microsoft visionary used his now-popular account to announce a new web project: The Gates Notes.

The new website offers a collection of Gates-related information with blog-like sections documenting everything from his travels to what he’s reading and thinking about. There’s even a “Curious Classroom” section serving to house Gates’s responses to students, and an “Infrequently Asked Questions” page to address reader questions.

So what’s the point of the site? On your first visit, you’re greeted with a letter from Gates explaining that he regularly takes notes about his work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He’s decided to share those notes online “in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important.”

At launch, the site is already packed with notes, and we’re impressed and overwhelmed by the collection of content. Now that Gates has captured the attention of more than 200,000 Twitter users, we expect to see him use the platform to share fresh content with his followers and quickly gain an audience for this new online project.

Tags: bill gates, celebrities, social media, the gates notes

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Why start another photo sharing project while there are many choices out there? Most of the other services seems still kind of hard to use or don’t look that user friendly. What’s even worse is that it’s still a lot of trouble to have multiple people put their photos into one place, like when you have had a wedding. Yogile makes it easy for others to add photos to your albums because they don’t need an account; you just give them your URL and they’re ready to go! Don’t like it that anyone with access to your album address can add photos? Just set a password on your album, simple as that! We hope you will find Yogile refreshing and easy to use.

http://www.yogile.com/

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We’ve been working in project for a Web Hosting client. After doing a few wireframes, we realized that we had to find good references to the pricing page. A good table just pops out in the middle of the layout, and makes it unique.

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So, I had to find some examples of Pricing tables to use as reference, so I spent my afternoon looking for these… we even had some kind people helping us at Twitter (thanks guys). So, here are the ones that we got to get together. I hope you enjoy it!

Media Temple

LightCMS

Squarespace

Wufoo

Backboard

HiTask

Gloss

Shopify

SlideDeck

Check the link for full view.

Big Cartel

The Invoice Machine

Newsberry

Pulse

Ballpark

MailChimp

The Resumator

Highrise

Web Notes

Crazy Egg

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1. Be a Jack of all trades

It seems the conventional wisdom lies in how much you know rather than how well you know it. I see people who have skill sets that take up a lot of space on a resume. Admirable? I suppose so. Does it make you more valuable to a potential client? Absolutely not.

Think about it: has a client ever hired you just because you knew 8 programming languages and 10 web development frameworks? They hired you to work on a specific project that requires a specific skill set, and chances are you have represented yourself as an expert that is the best fit for that project.

If you can’t settle on a particular tool set, you won’t be able to gain that competitive edge we all desperately need to be successful. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but if you really think about it, no successful development company becomes so merely based on the size of their tool set. They become experts in a particular skill set, and they have value because they leverage their knowledge and find their competitive edge in that context. You can specialize in so many things; find a niche that works for you, and focus on that.

2. Take on every project that comes along

Getting work is great, isn’t it? As young, nubile professionals, there is a tendency to covet every job we get; billable time is billable time, right?

Inevitably, though, what happens as the workload increases? We gravitate towards certain types of clients that fit our skill set better, or people that we can tell understand our role as the experts versus "order-takers".

The point is this that you should be selective of who you work with. Don’t think of it as losing revenue as much as adding value for those you do choose to work with. Spread too thin, you lose the ability to be responsive to your client base; those people who are already sold on what you do, how you do it, and are willing to compensate you for the value you offer them.

3. Don’t have a business strategy

If business is good for you right now, then I would like to congratulate you on that. Often when business is good, it is easy to forge ahead and spend 8 hours in a day on billable work. You owe every moment in the office–and many of your moments out of it–to your clients first and foremost, right? It sounds harmless, but think of it like this: if you never sharpen your machete, how will you be able to cut a path through the forest?

It’s simply too easy to lose your competitive edge without knowing it, and then realizing as your clients move on one by one that the money didn’t come from manual labor, it came from your ability to continually improve upon the solutions you gave them in the first place, which in turn improves their ability to make money through the web channel.

On top of that, these are the people that are easiest to sell to. In sales, it’s called the low-hanging fruit.

4. Neglect your existing clients

Once you land a client and finish a project, be sure to put them on a nice ride that circles the park and walk away. They are happy and therefore they need nothing else from you. Time to hurry up and wait for the next word-of-mouth customer, right? Sounds like a safe plan. Occasionally you might need to call or email and see if they are doing okay, but that’s about it.

Now back to reality. When was the last time you reviewed your current client base looking at ways to improve upon their existing solution? Or talk to them for ten minutes and find out how things are going? If you are doing this, great, but all too often clients are left to grow old and hairy and slowly fade into the sunset.

Now imagine that there is a potential dollar figure that floats above each client and this represents lost potential revenue. You just can’t ignore your clients for long after that first project is completed. If they are happy with you, the first thing you have to do is think of another way to make them happy. You may want to give them some time to settle into their new digs, but at that point, you have a customer who understands the value you add to their company and will listen willingly to you for the next recommendation you can make to help increase their bottom lines. It really doesn’t get any easier than that to generate additional income.

It is good to talk to existing clients at least seasonally, but ideally to check in once per month and call it a value-added service because that is how attentive you are (to the money they are holding in their hand and ready to give to you for more awesomeness). Sounds exciting to me!

5. Don’t invest your revenue into your growth

Take the revenue, put it in the bank, and retire it from the business. "It’s been great working with you, but you can relax now and pursue whatever it is you like to pursue – maybe vacation in someone’s mortgage somewhere or take a ride in a 401K. Have fun".

Doesn’t that sound crazy? As crazy as that might sound, if you aren’t investing some portion back into growing your business (provided that is one of your directives), that is essentially what you are doing! You are sending perfectly good capital on a permanent vacation, perhaps eventually to be traded for a lifetime supply of unicorn glitter or a data plan for your cell phone.

It’s easy to be shy about using some of the capital you may have saved up to take a calculated risk on your business future, but then again, you took a risk going into business in the first place, didn’t you?

One entrepreneur thinks of his dollars as soldiers: they go out and they come back every day with hostages – more dollars. You can guarantee those dollars went out with a mission in mind though, not to wander aimlessly around waiting to be snatched up by someone else.

Related Content

• How to Design for Your Worst Client: You.
• A Simple Guide on How to Effectively Talk to Clients
• How to Get Your Ideas Across to Clients
• Related categories: Project Management and Web Development

About the Author

Fred Bliss is a slightly over-seasoned bleeding edge web-evangelist. He is a married father of 3 boys. He has been working for the past year on Isotope eCommerce (a hybrid solution built in with TYPOlight CMS/ Framework) as lead developer, and one third of Winans Creative.  Connect with him via Twitter: @fbliss and LinkedIn.

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The IT services giant has been appointed to design and implement an integrated request management and delivery system. This will dramatically change and improve the online services which the British Library provides to its users.

A test phase of the project is set get underway soon. Capgemini and Adobe have successfully worked together on a number of other government projects, hence the decision to use the LiveCycle software suite.

This is a great example of a public institution investing in state-of-the-art technology solutions. We’re incredibly excited to be involved.

If you are interested in this project, Adobe plans to provide updates on its progress at the aforementioned blog.

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: 5pm

Quick Pitch: 5pm is a web-based project management tool

Genius Idea: There are lots of different web-based project management tools out there. Of the big names, 37 Signals’ Basecamp is probably the most well known. 5pm offers a similar featureset, but also offers stuff like custom report creation, time tracking as a standard feature, a free desktop time tracking widget, and a strong mobile interface.

We like that you can try 5pm for 14 days without having to use a credit card. That’s always a nice plus, especially since the only way to really evaluate a project management service is to actually use it. 5pm has its own SOAP API and can integrate with iCal, import Gmail contacts and import Google Docs.

You can also create project groups, share files and customize the interface. Using the 5pm demo, I was struck by two things: 1) how awesome the “Office Space” references are, 2) how easy the system was to use without any sort of primer. Pricing starts at $18 a month for 5 users and there are multiple pricing tiers.

5pm is attractive and packs a good featurset. If you are on the lookout for a web-based project management tool, give the free trial a shot.

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Tags: 5pm, project management, software

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What can you use the application for?


Vois.com is a social media outsourcing site. The site is designed to bring together buyers and service providers in a social networking environment. Buyers post projects on the site and sellers place bids on the projects. The buyer then chooses the bidder based on their feedback, profile, sample work and cost of the bid. Payment for services is handled between the buyer and the seller, or they can use the escrow service provided by the site to place the money in escrow until the project is satisfactorily completed. The site uses a credit system as payment to the site. Credits are required to place a bid or post a project. Each new member is alloted 625 credits, and more credits are earned by both buyer and seller for each successfully completed project.
The site relies heavily on feedback to function, as this is the incentive for buyers and sellers to deal honestly and fairly with one another. Both buyer and seller provide feedback, in the form of a rating as well as a description, at the successful completion of a project. Projects are posted by buyers into categories. Sellers can then browse projects via category or search via keyword. The site has social networking features such as friends, groups, networks, messaging and comments. Users have a My Dashboard page, where they can view a summary of all of the social networking items, plus view projects they have posted or bid on.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Boca Raton, FL-based Vois.com was founded in November 2006.

What are the differences to other applications?


Competition to Vois.com comes from sites such as Rentacoder.com and Elance.com. Both of these sites are well-established, but do not offer the social networking features offered by Vois.com. They both have a much larger userbase of buyers and sellers than Vois.com. Both sites place the same heavy emphasis on feedback as Vois.com does.

How does the application look and feel to use?


Pages are very clean and uncluttered. The site is quite responsive, and page loads happen quickly. The social networking features of the site work well and the tools provided for posting and bidding on projects function well also. There is no advertising displayed on the site.

How does the registration process work?


Registration to the Vois.com site is free and is required to use the site. The registration process asks for first and last name, email address, country, password, date of birth and state or province and zip code. Validation of the email address is required.

What does it cost to use the application?


A free account is granted 625 credits – if these are used up more can be purchased. Users can also spend credits on bold listings or featured placement of their bids or projects. The basic cost to post a project is 100 credits. The basic cost to bid on a project is 5 credits. More credits can be purchased at the following rates: $15 for $375, $30 for 825, $60 for 1,800 and $90 for 3375.

Who would you recommend the application to?


The Vois.com site is recommended to anyone who has a service to offer or needs to purchase the services of others. The site brings a social networking aspect to the outsourcing and freelancing world, and does a good job of providing both buyers and sellers with the tools they need to complete successful projects.

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It is a great honor for me to present you the new project that I was working on called Refilmagem. A site about movies that was planned to add in a same place all the information about movies premiers, upcoming and showtimes from our home town, Porto Alegre. The project is from our partner at Zee and his girlfriend, Eduardo and Gisele (yeap, GisMullr!), and bellow I will show you how was the whole process of this project.

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When Eduardo spoke to me about this project and asked me to create the layout for the site, I loved the idea – not because I love movies, because I only go to the movies, watch some films and that is it – but I loved the concept, the approach of showing this kind of content in a simple and direct way, without all of that ‘over information’ and ‘over colors’ from other movies sites.

The idea of Refilmagem came from a great frustration and difficulty of finding in a single site all the information about the premiers, showtimes, box office of the weekends and also the film review, poster and subtitled trailer. Gisele/Eduardo

To begin the work, he sent me some sites’ references that apply interesting concepts, as typography usage, content disposal, simple presentation, etc, so I could understand what he was looking for. Here are some of the references:

Emptees

Strange Beautiful

Volumedia

Robbie Manson

Development before the Design

The site was developed in Drupal, we love this CMS, and Eduardo is having lots of fun with the diversity of its modules. By the way he is being very successful with it. He had already started everything when I came along, and this process was pretty cool since we started the layout with the idea of the structure already defined.

Refilmagem is basically a mashup where almost 90% of the service is automatic utilizing many types of API’s and technologies like yahoo pipes, yql, json and jquery. Besides that the site counts with an editor/admin to give a special/personal touch to assure the that the service will run smoothly. Eduardo Sasso

Drupal with very basic CSS.

After that we started some mockups using pen and paper to see what we could do to maintain that same structure, or if we were going to test something different, how we would present the content, the header we were going to use and so on.

First wireframes ‘hand made’.

And of course, having a defined wireframe we went through a lot of layout tests until we got to the final design.

Different design tests

Fabio also participated in this final part of process to help with the layout, and his help was very important in this step of the work. When we found the model we all liked, we started to improve its design working on Fireworks and CSS at the same time. In some moments it’s faster to test straight at the CSS before, because we can gain time and we can have a notion about how it will the the behavior at the browser.

Adjusting the Design

basic CSS already with some definitions of colors and spaces.

Started to work with header elements, shades and gradients.

used lots of CSS3 at the shades and Round Corners

Header detail, it gave us a lot of work to refine and organize the content.

Some ‘last minute’ details.

And as Eduardo is a huge fan of Rocky, he also joined the project!

Right now this project (showtimes, movies, etc) is available for our home town – Porto Alegre, but soon it will be available for other cities in Brazil and maybe some cities around the world. We are already working on it. If you are not from Porto Alegre but you want to take a look at the project and browse around the site, go to refilmagem.com.br.

Final Design

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With Glowing Hearts

Snowboarding Parallel Giant Slalom

Ski Jumping

Para Alpine Skiing

Bobsleigh

Biathlon

Illustrations Integrated into Vancouver Homepage

Illustrations Integrated into the Twitter Accounts

@FollowtheFlame

@2010Tweets

“My name is Leo Obstbaum, and I am a dreamer.” Remembering Vancoucer 2010’s Design Director

While doing research about the Vancouver 2010 Graphics I made a sad discovery. The Design Director of the project: Leo Obstbaum passed away at the age of 40. His final day, August 21st 2009 and he died of natural causes. It touched me deeply because after looking through so many different image threads and slides to see his deep involvement with the project and know he is not here to witness its outcome. One of his very good friends Mark Busse wrote a detailed article about Leo after his passing. You should read the article over at GDC/BC Blog.

Need More Vancouver Info?

Vancouver 2010 Brand and Image

Olympic and Paralympic Games design has a long tradition of creativity and excellence. Each Organizing Committee tries to visually capture the Olympic and Paralympic spirit, while telling the unique story of the host region and country.

Vancouver 2010 Graphic Identity

The Host Country of every Olympic and Paralympic Games tells a unique story of culture and imagination through design and artistry. The Vancouver 2010 graphic identity seeks to unify and beautify the Games with a consistent look and feel throughout all its environments and communications.

Transmoflection – A video about the research put in

The Story of the Vancouver 2010 Paralympic Winter Games Emblem

Olympic and Paralympic Games design has a long tradition of creativity and excellence. Each Organizing Committee tries to visually capture the Olympic and Paralympic spirit, while telling the unique story of the host region and country.

Vancouver 2010 Pictograms and Sport Illustrations

Pictograms are icons representing each sport and are found on maps, signage and other communications and creative applications. Every Olympic and Paralympic Games Host Country has added its own unique design to its pictograms.

Social?

@2010Tweets

@followtheflame

@code2010

Vancouver 2010 on Facebook

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Your Creativity.
Fuel Your Creativity 2009 cc (creative commons license)

Stellar Vancouver 2010 Illustrations

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If you have an idea for a web app and you don’t believe that it will be successful or you don’t think you have the time to build it, think again. It’s possible!

We invited Stu Green of Haloweb and Great Web Apps to share with us how he built a web app to meet a particular need and launch it successfully in just three months.

The Story of My Web App

I always found project management something very scary. Agencies that I worked for used Basecamp, MS Project and other very complicated (and pricey) systems. I tried them myself but I really needed something a lot simpler and ‘less serious’. Because I had some spare time, and because I was already learning a ‘rapid application development framework’ I knew it wouldn’t take me that long to build, so I decided to do it.

I designed everything the way I thought it should work. Because I wasn’t a project manager and had no experience in that area there were no plans in my designs for Gantt charts or complicated reporting systems. Everything was very simple and fun to use. After three months of building the app I decided to share it with the world in November and since then it has rapidly grown to a user-base of two thousand. Apparently I was not alone in believing that there was a need for a project management web app that handled projects and invoices in a simple fashion.

The web app is called Project Bubble. I continue to develop and support it every day and I love seeing other users really enjoying using it. I particularly enjoy seeing people suggesting new ideas and us all gathering together as a community and discussing whether or not to implement these ideas. Because I believe in keeping things simple, a lot of the time these features don’t make it but it’s fun to be a part of something so agile and fluid in it’s development. I also believe that customer service is critical to the success of the web app (as I’ll explain later) and proving that your web app is alive with activity and social buzz will also keep user retention and satisfaction.

What About Your Web App Idea?

Some people, particularly entrepreneurs, go to bed at night and can’t sleep because they have so many ideas for websites. It might be some new community website that is focused on a particular passion of yours, or a unique web application that integrates with Twitter, or perhaps you have ideas for how you can rebuild your current site and utilize all the latest web technologies. This is your inspiration and your dream, but how do you make it a reality when you have a day job and twenty other websites that you look after?

With this inspiration you have taken your first step. The next step is making that dream a reality and building your web app, even though there are many factors that could stop you such as time and money. Here are some tips that will help you down that road of inspiration to reality. Start believing that you can make this happen, because you can.

1. Stay Motivated

These days it is very possible to build those web applications that you previously only dreamed about. A few years ago you would need to build everything from scratch, today you can benefit from the vast array of open-source code libraries and freeware design resources that are out there.

So much of the hard work has been done already so time shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Also a lot of the resources out there are free so money cannot be an excuse either. You have to stay motivated and believe that you can take your new project on. Commit yourself to at least getting a public beta launched so people can give you their feedback, and just block out some spare time when you can work on your web app.

2. Don’t Be Afraid of Competition

I learnt this lesson when I built Project Bubble. The reason why I wasn’t afraid of competition was because I didn’t think I was going to be competing with anyone! I built Project Bubble firstly for my own business, months before I ever thought I would release it publicly. Now it has become very successful. If I think about competition today part of me still wonders how on earth it could possibly succeed when you compare it with the greats. So don’t worry about competition. Your app will be unique, because you made it.

3. Plan Everything

Set deadlines and plan everything from the early development through to the Beta launch. You could even make wire-frames using online tools such as Mockingbird to help you with the design phase. Whatever you do make sure you’ve thought it all out on paper (or stickies!) before you ever get to the design or build stage.

4. Use a Rapid Application Development Framework

Development frameworks such as Ruby-on-Rails, CodeIgniter and Kohana have done all the hard work for you and are really easy to learn. I use CodeIgniter and I love it. On their website they will show you how you can build a blog engine in just twenty minutes! A lot of cool web apps that you see these days are built on Ruby-on-Rails including Basecamp and the beauty of using something like Ruby is that not only do you have that massive library of time-saving functions but you also have a huge community of other developers who will help you if you get stuck.

5. Get Feedback

Once you have your public beta live, use widgets like Get Satisfaction and User Voice to get feedback from your users. They will be happy because you are listening to them, and you will be happy because you will know straight away if something is wrong and also you will get ideas that you probably would never have otherwise thought of. Don’t be afraid of saying “No” to people if they suggest something that you don’t think is appropriate and always welcome peoples suggestions and ideas no matter how crazy they might seem.

6. Use Social Media

Once you are happy with your app, use social media to create a buzz for your app. Submit it to all the web app reviews you can possibly think of such as:

- Feedmyapp
- Killer Startups
- Great Web Apps

Make sure you are on Twitter and you have a clear link on your website so people can follow you. Get involved with your community, respond to them, and show that your web app is new, exciting, buzzing and active. Your users will be excited to be a part of something fresh and evolving.

7. Keep Trying

If it doesn’t work out, don’t worry just try again. I built a web app recently for car owners and it wasn’t successful at all. It wasn’t because the idea wasn’t original and it wasn’t the design, in fact I still don’t know why it hasn’t worked out but the point is it really doesn’t matter. Just pick yourself up and try again with another idea because one day you will just ‘hit the nail on the head’ and get it right. Practice always makes perfect.

I hope you have enjoyed reading and I hope that now you are now inspired and motived. If you have a new web app that you want to tell us about why not comment and let us know?

Stu works for his own web company developing web apps and has experience in PHP, jQuery and user-centered design. Be sure to connect with him on Twitter.

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Chances are you’ve come in contact with a piece of flat-pack furniture from Ikea. You may even have put a shelf or desk together with the help of an allen wrench and a single-sheet instruction manual. Ikea has successfully innovated in pricing, logistics, packaging, and store layout to become a global phenomenon.

But the lesson we, the UX community, can learn from Ikea isn’t directly related to their low prices, or making customers put products together themselves. Rather, the valuable lesson we can take from the self-assembly giant comes from an earlier point in a product’s lifecycle: the design stage.

When it comes to design, Ikea is a price-first company. Sure, they pride themselves of their Scandinavian design and ingenuity, but above all else they want their products to be as affordable as possible. As a result, the target price for a product defines and constrains the product design, rather than the other way around. Instead of specifying a product and then determining how much it will cost, Ikea decides how much a product should cost and then designs it to fit within the cost constraint. In an interview with CNET, Ikea product developer June Deboehmler said, “When we decide about a product, we always start with the price… Then, what is the consumer need?”

To some this may seem like a counter-intuitive approach. But in actuality, creativity loves constraints. It may seem that a cost constraint would be burdensome to designers but in fact it helps focus and guide their work. Even if cost isn’t the leading constraint (as it is with Ikea), it’s always a critical constraint that should be factored into design.

But in the world of software and UX design, you seldom see projects where cost is treated as a primary, initial constraint. Instead, cost is treated as something that’s derived from scope. Foundational problems with scope, budgets, and constraints are a setup for failed projects and poor UX. But how can we all learn from Ikea in a way that makes sense to industry? We have defined four lessons that will guarantee smoother projects before they even start.

1. Cost is a primary constraint

After they’ve outlined a product’s scope, most companies already have a strong sense of what they think the product should cost, or at the very least how much they can afford. But, in the majority of cases, rather than communicating both the scope and cost expectations to their vendor or internal development team, they withhold the cost information. This forces the development team to go through a complicated, error-prone process of trying to extrapolate a cost estimate from the scope. This is followed by a back-and-forth of discussion until the estimate comes into alignment with the original cost expectation. The cost expectation (or limit) was known all along but everyone has to participate in a ritual dance before it’s disclosed.

In most other settings, this practice would be considered dysfunctional, and an example of how poor trust and communication wastes time and money. But, oddly, it’s standard practice in software and Web development. If the cost expectation is fixed and present from the beginning—in other words, it is a primary constraint—why not simply let the development team know about it? Constraints give the team better understanding of what will be possible, reduces errors in their projections, and gets them working sooner.

Companies are generally wary of sharing their budget numbers upfront for fear of having the development team take advantage of their trust. Their concern is that the development team will charge the full amount in the budget even though the scope of the project should actually cost something less. But, in actual practice, this can’t happen because the scope is never smaller than the budget. For innovative, UX-focused product and website development efforts, the project’s requirements will always grow as large as the budget will allow—again, cost is the project’s primary constraint. The entire course of a project always entails an ongoing negotiation between the stakeholders and the development team about how much work can reasonably be accomplished, and how many requirements can reasonably be fulfilled, before the budget runs out. This is true whether or not the budget is initially disclosed, and whether the project is charged fixed-bid or hourly, because of the weaknesses of upfront planning and the ambiguity inherent to scoping documentation. If the development team is aware of the real cost constraint from the outset, their projections about what they can accomplish will be much more accurate—and, often, much more ambitious—than if they were left to make guarded guesses about what the cost constraint might be.

2. Goals are more important than specs

Initial scope and specifications documents are a form of guesswork product design often done by whoever owns the project, rather than by actual product designers. Such documentation is meant to serve as the definitive blueprint for the project, but have you ever (seriously, ever in your life) seen an early scoping document that turned out to be anywhere close to accurate when the project was done? This isn’t because the people drafting these documents are incompetent; it’s just that product design is something best left to, well, product designers.

And even for the most experienced product design professionals, the beginning planning stages of a project are the time when the least is known about what the project will actually entail. This is the worst time to have to lay out definitive specifications for the product. Complex, UX-focused software projects just don’t lend themselves to extensive upfront planning and specifications efforts—too much of the project’s actual needs won’t be discovered until design and development commence. So how, then, can project stakeholders ensure their vision and requirements for the product are met? By expressing their needs very clearly in terms of the business’ goals for the product. Goals are another form of constraint.

When business stakeholders attempt to build detailed specifications up front, they are attempting to extrapolate specific requirements from their general goals. If Ikea took this approach in their product design, businesspeople would spend a week in a conference room trying to describe in words in long, numbered lists, exactly what a chair or table should look like and what features it should have. This would obviously be silly; product requirements (for both furniture and software) are best expressed through design materials and prototypes, not through lengthy specs built by business stakeholders. The stakeholders’ role is to clearly express the constraining goals for the product and hand those off to product designers who can begin to design the specifics.

Business stakeholders need to ask themselves, what does it mean for a project to succeed? Is it successful if it fulfills on guesswork requirements built by the wrong people at the wrong time in the project, or is it successful if it meets the business’ goals and stays within its budget constraints? Business stakeholders have the clearest understanding of what the company needs the product to accomplish, but the team that will build the product will advise them best on how to meet the goals. Setting clear, high-level goal and sharing the project’s budgetary constraint gives a reliable development team the ability to plan accurately, reduce risk, and squeeze the most bang out of a buck.

3. Honesty and trust are mandatory

As we mentioned, many companies refuse to share their budget out of worry that they’ll be taken advantage of. If you tell a car salesman that you’re willing to spend $30K, he’ll try to sell you a $20K car for $30K. If, on the other hand, you keep your budget constraint to yourself, you may drive out with a $20K car and $10K in savings in your pocket. But when shopping for cars, you’re dealing with products that have already been built, and you’re just picking the one that suits you. But when you’re building software or a website, you’re building something entirely new with great uncertainty about, and flexibility in, the details of the implementation. The scope of the product is a direct function of its available budget.

It’s critical that you be able to work honestly and openly with your development team or vendor. You’ll collaboratively manage a project to ensure it fulfills its goals, stays within its cost constraint, and delivers the best value possible. If you don’t think you can trust your development team or vendor enough to share your budget with them, then you’re working with the wrong team. That lack of trust will undermine the success of the project by crippling your ability to collaborate effectively. You and the development team need to be partners in building a great product, not adversaries who are managing each other as risks. In an adversarial or arms-length relationship, the development team will always be trying to do the least amount of work for the most money. The business stakeholders, for their part, will be trying to take advantage of the ambiguities in the initial scoping documents to get the development team or vendor to do more work for the same price. Both parties will be focused on protecting their interests, rather than working as true partners toward the joint goal of a good outcome for the project.

This partnership with the design team is what Ikea achieves by staying goal- and cost-focused. While it’s uncertain what the product will look like, it’s never ambiguous what the definition of success is for that product. This business stakeholders and design team are working toward the same goals without needing to keep information from each other.

4. Abandon guesswork for concrete understandings

This guessing game of “what’s my budget” is very much a waste of time. Some business stakeholders think they couldn’t possibly guess what a project should cost, but in thinking this they’re approaching the problem backwards. When it comes to important, high-complexity, UX focused software and website development efforts, the question isn’t “what should this cost,” but instead “what can this cost?” One needs to have a number in mind—a limit that will constrain the scope and ambitiousness of the project. Giving development teams a pile of guesswork specifications documentation will just get you a pile of guesswork price estimates. What you end up with are unreliable specifications and unreliable cost estimates. By providing development teams with a specific understanding of your cost constraints, you make it much easier for those teams to make accurate projections about what will be possible. This also lets development teams show you other projects from their portfolios that had similar budgets. This, in turn, allows everyone to work from a solid understanding of the cost constraint with a concrete example of achievable scope. Development teams can help stakeholders by providing detailed information about the budgets and challenges encountered in their portfolio projects.

We believe that these four lessons are important to succeed in the high-complexity domain UX-focused software and Web development. Making cost a primary constraint and sharing budgets with development teams may require a shift in thinking by all parties involved. Business stakeholders need to trust the teams they work with, and therefore choose to work with teams that are trustworthy. Development teams need to earn that trust by clearly communicating what they will do with the information and by being honest and transparent about their projections and about project progress once it’s underway. And if there’s any doubt on either side, you can always say, “Hey, it works for Ikea”.

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I love those minimalist constructions, and I don’t mean that should be a white building to be minimalist. Look this project by H Architects for an example, it is an apartment block in Barcelona, Spain, with an amazing shape, simple windows and looking at the whole thing, even the dark color seems minimalist.

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The building has been made with basalt stone, because of the fact that due to its porosity and texture, it constantly changes in colour and reflection according to the different degrees of humidity. The wood fibers and the gray color playing togheter brings the perfect composition of colors and materials.

The three facades of the building become a single skin that, thank to the continuous use of the stone even in the shutters, unifies the volume and consolidates the characteristic predominance of the massive-wall facades in the old quarter.

In the inside, the shutters are wood-panelled and, once open, evolve from their anonymous presence towards singularity.

Photos by: H Architects

More details at dezeen.com

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Gavin Elliot is the creative mind behind DIBI conference. What exactly is this magical DIBI conference? We will get to that in a minute along with a promo code for the conference and a wicked competition to win a free ticket. But, first we are going behind the scenes with Gavin Elliot- you can also follow him on twitter.

The Skinny on Gavin

Gavin has some notable facts to bring him into the role that he is in today. He worked as a civil servant, a soldier in the Royal Corps of Engineers & ran his own business.

He now works at Codeworks as the Marketing & Creative Executive where he primarily works on looking after the Thinking Digital Conference and other projects within Codeworks.

What is your typical daily routine?

Typical doesn’t happen for me that often. Every day is usually different. I’ll generally get up at approximately 6.30am get things sorted and make myself a coffee (Starbucks ground coffee FTW) for the trip into the office. I’ll arrive around 7:40am and look over Twitter, I still don’t use an RSS feed and Twitter seems to work well for me. I like to get my emails sorted as soon as I sit down, so the music goes on and before 9am and I can usually have all of my replies done. I’ll check my diary to see if I have any meetings but my work pretty much is around the creative and ‘social’ side of Thinking Digital, DIBI then working with the other teams within Codeworks. I get up to alsorts whether it’s designing or writing. I’m pretty much busy all day. Head back home approximately 5pm before getting in to other projects or more writing. I love what I do so I probably seem like a workaholic.

What are the three things you could not live without?

1. My macbook and macbook pro (we’ll count those as one)

2. Basecamp (For managing my daily life and all the project I’m involved with).

3. My notebook where I draw or make notes. (I carry this pretty much everywhere these days.)

Do you find time to devote to all of your creative endeavors?

I do, I often think of ideas on the fly and quickly have to tell someone. I’ve set up various blogs over the years but am starting to tailor these back. I write quite often about design on my personal blog and have just had an article published in .net (Practical Web Design in the US). I enjoy writing and joining the Project 52 I’ll be publishing a specific post every week. Working out the time between design and writing can be somewhat cumbersome. I’ll be working on a small personal project over the next few months which the design community can use which I’m definitely looking forward to getting started on.

What do you think we will see in the design community in 2010?

I’m hoping there will be a lot more collaboration between designers. I think we’re now finally starting to see the community coming together and learning from each other. In past years there have been a select few who’ve been fortunate to build strong bonds with others but now with all of the social apps we’re seeing more communication with the community as a whole. I would say that the financial climate doesn’t seem to have hit the design/development community so bad over the past year or so however a lot of companies and freelancers have upped their game to hone their skills and decide what is exactly for them and then price themselves accordingly for being a professional in that particular field. 2010 could bring some very specialised designers in to the public spotlight. On top of that we’ll definitely see a surge in mobile design.

What drove DIBI conference to become a reality instead of just a dream in someones head?

We have a lot of web conferences in the UK including the likes of dConstruct, FOWA, FOWD, UX London and Build. Generally though, the conferences never reach further than Leeds/Manchester. Build took place in Northern Ireland last year so when you look at it, conferences have never been taken further North to the likes of Newcastle upon Tyne/Gateshead where DIBI will be taking place. We have a vibrant web community in the North East of England and it is an ideal place for people to travel to. With an international airport, train and ferry links it is an ideal location.

DIBI has a unique cast of characters speaking. Most of which are very prevalent in the web design community, how is it important to make sure you get people to present who are on top of their game?

We thought long and hard about what we wanted to achieve with the conference. It’s highly prevalent that you must reach out to speakers which are either doing something new or leading various areas of the industry to new places. It’s all well and good saying that you want to set a conference up but when looking at the finer details you want to create longevity and a good sense of hype and communication with the people who will be attending. Codeworks have a long standing commitment with the digital agencies in the North East of England and regularly hold ‘Think and a Drink’ evening events on a monthly basis.

What are you trying to make your audience aware of? Is it more of a conference where you talk about current trends and happenings or something that will educate them as a whole?

Definitely education. Whilst we’re expecting lots of attendees who are on top of their game, there is always the opportunity for people to learn more. Making sure that the topics are correct for the audience is paramount, attendees expect something different which is what we’re hoping to achieve with DIBI.

Will the success of DIBI determine the if the conference will be around next year or do you already have ideas of doing another?

Codeworks have had major success with other conferences such as Thinking Digital and GameHorizon and we’ll be looking to achieve the same with DIBI. Definitely look out for DIBI being around again next year.

How does DIBI set itself apart from other conferences? It seems the age of the speakers at DIBI is less than others. What else?

DIBI is one of the first two-track web conferences that we know of. The tickets are limited to 350 and we’re hoping for an equal amount of designers and developers attending. They will then form the DIBI 350, a unique set of professionals taking part in the first North East of England Web Conference. It’s unusual to bring both designers and developers together at the same time, we hope that whilst they’re in the same place as each other, relationships can be made and collaborations can happen. With regards to the speakers, we looked around to see who was available so that we could provide a good amount of variation from other conferences. The DIBI Conference itself will be running from 9am till approx 5pm then we’ll be moving on to a Think and a Drink/After Party in Newcastle upon Tyne.

THE GIVEAWAY

Here’s where you get a chance to win a free ticket to DIBI! Now, all you need to do is put the most creative reason why you want to go to DIBI (and a valid email in the comment box) and we will handle the rest. Do you want to go to learn? Network? See long lost friends? Tell us and you have a chance to get a free ticket!

Need More DIBI?

Site: dibiconference.com

Twitter: twitter.com/dibiconf

Discount for being a reader: Promo Code: “DIBI_hohoho”

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Your Creativity.
Fuel Your Creativity 2009 cc (creative commons license)

The Creative Mind Behind the DIBI Conference

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Enter GitHub. With this web service, you can share your coding projects and collaborate with ease!

Disclaimer

This tutorial will assume that you’re familiar with Git, arguably the best distributed version control software there is. Already lost? Don’t worry: read my introduction to Git to get up and running. Then come on back here and find out all about GitHub, the social network for developers!

Getting Started

Of course, you’ll need a GitHub account if you’re to experience any of the social coding goodness. Let’s do that right now. Head over to the GitHub website and click “Pricing and Signup” at the top.

Creating an Account

There are several different plans you can use, depending on your needs. Right now, the free “open source” account is all we want; so let’s click “Sign Up.” It’s your standard sign up page; enter your name, email address, and password. You’ll also need an SSH public key; I explained how to get one in my previous article:

Open up your terminal and type this: ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your@email.com". The t option assigns a type, and the C option adds a comment, traditionally your email address. You’ll then be asked where to save the key; just hitting enter will do (that saves the file to the default location). Then, enter a pass-phrase, twice. Now you have a key; let’s give it to GitHub.

First, get your key from the file; the terminal will have told you where the key was stored; open the file, copy the key (be careful not to add any newlines or white-space).

Once you have the key, just paste it into correct field. Like it says, you don’t have to do this now; you can add a key later. Then click the button to agree and sign up.

Warming up to the Interface

When you first log in, you’ll see the dashboard; it’s something like this:

In the top right corner, you can see a toolbar with options for controlling your account. There are also some links for getting around GitHub, as well as the search box.

The main panel offers a number of actions; later, it will be used to keep you up to date on projects you’re interested in. And on the right of that, your own repositories will be listed. Remember, in Git, repositories are the containers that hold all the code and history related to one project.
When you have a chance, browse around the Account Settings, It’s all what you’d expect, so I won’t go over it; but if you plan to be an avid githubber, you should probably fill out your profile and see what else is in there.

It’s all about Repos

Really, the whole purpose of GitHub is making Git repositories available to the world; therefore, it follows that working with repositories (or repos, as they’re often called) is something you should be comfy with.

Creating a repository is pretty simply. On the dashboard, click “New Repository” on top of your repo list (which is currently empty).

Three textboxes await you here; your repository will need a project name, a description, and the URL for the project’s website. If you’ve upgraded to one of the paid plans, you can choose whether this should be available to the public or not. When you’re done, hit “Create Repository.”
GitHub will now give you instructions for hooking the GitHub repository up to one of your local Git repository. If you’re familiar with Git, this should be pretty old hat to you. The important part is the last two lines of either the “Next Steps” or “Existing Git Repo?”

  git remote add origin git@github.com:aburgess/My-First-GitHub-Repo.git
  git push origin master

The git-remote command allows you to track other repositories and keep them “synchronized” with your local one. In our case, we’re tracking the repository on GitHub from our local repository. So, that first line is adding a remote; we’re calling it “origin” and giving it a URL. This is a private URL that only you can use to read and write to your GitHub repo.

In the second line, we’re using the git-push command to send everything in the master branch out to origin (our GitHub repository). Notice that none of the coding or project work (creating files, etc) is done on GitHub. That’s all local work; you should work on your project just as you would a plain vanilla local repo. However, you’ll regularly push it to GitHub with that second line.

So let’s say you’ve been working on a project for a while and you’ve been pushing your commits to a GitHub repo. What project meta-data can we explore on GitHub? Let’s look at the jQuery repository.

See that toolbar near the top, just under the project name? These options allow us to drill down into some of the Git information that we uncovered in the command line last time. Right now, we’re on the source tab. It starts with drop-downs for the repo branches and tags; use these to view the different branches or tags. There’s also some project meta-data; we have the project name, URL, and cloning URLs (These URLs are read-only).

Then, you can see the information about the latest commit: author, time, comment, and hashes. Under that, you’ve got a file browser, which shows you the latest versions of all the files in the project, as well as their age and the message of the last commit they were changed in.

If the project has a readme file, it’s displayed under the file browser.

Commits

Let’s switch to the commits tab at the top and see what it holds.

As you might expect, we can view a backlog of commits on this project. Clicking the commit hash (on the right of the commit entry) will let you view what was changed in the commit.

Green lines (prepended with a ‘+’) are additions and red lines (prepended with a ‘-’) are deletions.
You can subscribe to the commit history RSS feed of any repo if you want to keep track of it.

Network

The next tab is the network tab; this shows you a graphical representation of the repository’s history. This graph is drawn from the perspective of the committer ‘jquery.’ Each commit only show up once, so commits not on jQuery’s line are not in jQuery’s repo. This way, we can see what commits other people have made that we don’t have. It’s incredibly useful, but somewhat confusing if you’re not grokking git all the way. If you want to know more, check out GitHub’s blog post about it.
The network tab also offers a list of members (people who have forked the repo) and a feed as well.

Graphs

The graphs tab offers you a number of different view of your project from a graphical perspective. It’s really just meta-data, but it may offer some interesting insights:

Fork Queue

If you’re viewing a repository you own, you’ll see another tab, Fork Queue. This shows you the same information you saw in the network graph, but differently. From here, you can choose which commits to apply to your repository, on whichever branch you want. For more on the fork queue, check out this post and video on the GitHub blog.

You can enable three other tabs from the repo admin panel: Wiki, Issues, and Downloads. These allow you to create a wiki, track bugs in your project, and offer downloadable copies of your repo. They are all pretty intuitive.

The Social Side

Like the tagline says, GitHub is all about social coding. Although we’ve already seen a few of them, it’s time to check out the rest of the social features of GitHub.

Exploring Other Repositories

If you ever have some free time and want to dig into a coding project for a while, GitHub is the ideal place to go. Let’s see how we can find interesting projects.
Start by clicking the “Explore GitHub” to the right of the search box. We’ve got a couple of tabs to choose from here:

• Repositories
• Search
• Timeline
• Languages
• Changelog

For me, the most interested is the languages tab; choose your language and check out the most watched and most forked projects for that language.

So let’s say you’ve found a project you’re interested in; what next?

Interacting with other repositories

When viewing a repo, the social tools are underneath the search bar. Starting at the right, you can see how many people have forked the project, and how many people are watching it. We’ve been talking about forking and watching, but it’s time to get some formal definitions on the table.

• Forking a project means that you’ll get a copy of that repository that you can play with all you want.
• Watching a project means that any actions on it will show up in your news feed, on your dashboard.

I’m taking a rabbit trail, but you can do more than watch projects; if you find particularly talented developers, you can follow them to track their every keystroke. Just click the follow button on their profile page.

You can also send them a message if you’d like. Now we’re talking social network!

Back on the social toolbar, the next button (moving left) predictably lets you download the source code of the project. The next button let’s you fork the repo, and the last one let’s you watch it (you saw that coming).

If you’re looking at a repository of your own, there will be two other buttons in the row: ‘Pull Request’ and ‘Admin.’ We’ll come back to ‘Pull Request’ in a minute; feel free to look around the admin panel.

It should be obvious most of the basic features are:

• change your default branch
• create a project page (we’ll come back to this)
• turn those extra tabs (wiki, downloads, issues) on/off
• rename or delete the repo

When you’re done, click your project name at the top to return to the source view.

Our scenario before introducing the social tools was that you had found a repo you want to work on. The first thing to do is fork the project; just click that ‘fork’ button. Now you’ve got a copy of the repo in your account. Let’s clone the repo to your computer, using your private clone URL. Doing this automatically sets up a remote called origin, as we discussed earlier. That origin is not the original project you forked (you can’t write to that) but your forked copy of it. You do need to set up a remote for the original project, however; do that with this command:

git remote add upstream [original project's public clone URL here]
git fetch upstream

That last line gets the latest branches from the upstream remote and stores them in tracking branches.
Now’s the time to begin coding. As you make commits, they’ll show up the the original project’s network graph, because they aren’t in that repo. They’ll also show up in that repo’s fork queue, so the owner can pull them in if he/she likes them. However, you can request that they be pulled in. That’s what the pull request button is for: you can send the owner of the original repo a message.

It’s nothing fancy; really, it just lets them know that they should check out their fork queue.
But what if they’ve made changes to the project since you forked it? It’s best practice to integrate their changes into your repo before requesting they pull in your changes. You can easily get their updates using that upstream remote you made! Just run this command:

git fetch upstream master
git merge upstream/master

As we just saw a moment ago, the fetch command gets the latest content from the specified remote, in this case our upstream remote. Also, we’re specifying that we only want the master branch. The second line merges the specified branch with the one we’re on. We’re on the master branch of our local repo, and we want to merge our tracking branch upstream/master.

Note: If this tracking branch talk is confusing you, check out this article on gitready.com. Basically, tracking branches are simply branches that keep track of where other repos with the same project are in relation to your repo. To see all your branches run the command git branch -a. Here’s what I get for a forked repo:

If you’re lazy, you could run the command git pull upstream master. This does both the fetch and merge commands at once. However, this could cause merging problems, so stay away from it!
Once you’ve merged the changes, you can request a pull with peace of mind, knowing your fork is up to date with the upstream repository.

User and Project Pages

Github gives you a rather unique ability to create a personal website from a GitHub repository. My GitHub username is andrew8088, so if I created a repo named andrew8088.github.com, it would be published at http://andrew8088.github.com. Simple as that!

You can also create a site for a project; this is a bit more complicated, but GitHub makes it easy to get a generic, single page explaining your project. Click that admin button in your social toolbar. Then click ‘Generate Your Project Page’ under ‘Repository Information.’

Then, just fill in all the fields:

And click “Create Page.”

If you want to customize your page further or add pages, you can follow the advanced instructions at the GitHub Pages Help.

When it’s only a Snippet

Ever been talking code with a friend online and wanted to share a snippet? It happens to all of us, and GitHub offers a quick way to do it. It’s Gist. They say it best:

Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as a git repository.

Click the Gist link to the left of the search box, or go to Gist.GitHub.com. You can simply paste in your snippet or type it all in. Give it a file name and let them know what language your writing (for syntax highlighting). Then click ‘Create Public Gist.’ Copy the URL and share!

Keeping in the Know

Any social network can become addicting, and GitHub is no different. If you want to keep track of your repos on the go, check out iOctocat, the GitHub app for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Conclusion

Well, it’s been a whirlwind tour, but I hope you’re feeling more familiar with what could be the best code hosting/sharing site on the web! Ever used GitHub? Have a better option? Hit the comments!

Write a Plus Tutorial

Did you know that you can earn up to $600 for writing a PLUS tutorial and/or screencast for us? We’re looking for in depth and well-written tutorials on HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. If you’re of the ability, please contact Jeffrey at nettuts@tutsplus.com.

Please note that actual compensation will be dependent upon the quality of the final tutorial and screencast.

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for the best web development tutorials on the web.

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This building is more them simply cool, it’s really well done and have some very useful functions: housing, public facilities and school. It’s called Bottière Chenaie and is located in Nantes, France. The project was done by Block Architects, a local office in Nantes, which seems to know a lot about architecture!

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The particular point of this building is the vertical color stripes, bringing a special movement to this concrete block and like they said “redrawing the landscape”. And what I really love in this project is how the mix of uses bring value to the urban neighborhood.

This formal intention, in addition to its impact, symbolically shows the quality program of urban neighbourhoods.

More about Bottière Chenaie at: dezeen.com

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Write for Ten is a writing project with one simple rule: write for 10 minutes about anything. Describe where you are right now. Ramble about your day. Imagine a scenario between two strangers. What you write doesn’t have to be perfect nor complete. Just write it.

http://writeforten.com/

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You’ll need a web server to host it on that has PHP on it, or if you want to use it on your local Windows machine you can install WAMP (we showed you how to install WAMP to host your own WordPress install and set up your own personal Wikipedia).

Once you have Collabtive up and running—you can try out their demo before you dive into downloading and installing it—you’ll be able to create projects and tasks, assign due dates to them, survey your project progress from the dashboard and calendar, and review project milestones. Because you run Collabtive on your own server, it’s possible to not only backup data from within Collabtive, but backup the entire installation down to the last script—a kind of security you simply don’t have when using a tool on 3rd-party servers.

Collabtive is open source and works wherever PHP does. Have a collaborative tool you love? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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You can use your native language and make project team communications at no barrier with 29 languages available. Drag and drop Comindwork widgets allows you creating project workspace that is right for you. It will help you to know exactly what any of the project team members was doing with custom project history filtering options.

It has an option to keep all the project stakeholders informed on project documents and tasks thanks to instant email notifications. Collaborating on project documents has never been easier, email your documents directly to Comindwork. Now Fell the power of online document editing and collaboration features with Comindwork Google Docs integration.

Time tracking is one of the most critical parts of any project, keep your projects on time and on schedule and track expenses. You can easily associate your tasks and cases/issues with time log entries for clear project reporting. It will also give you an option to track who is currently responsible for tasks and all the last change. With Comindwork, Let’s stay on schedule and track your project progress by effectively managing project milestone.

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

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For this months book giveaway we have jQuery 1.3 with PHP, written by Kae Verens.
jQuery 1.3 with PHP is for PHP application developers who want to improve their user interfaces through jQuery’s capabilities and responsiveness. Whether you are familiar with jQuery or have only dabbled a little with JavaScript, this book will provide you with numerous practical examples of how to improve your applications.

All you have to do to win this book is leave a comment below, and tell us how you plan to you use jQuery in your next project.

About the Book “jQuery 1.3 with PHP”

This book takes a practical approach to integrating PHP and jQuery, showing examples of every point discussed. All examples are written such that you should be able to copy out the code into your own projects and see immediate results, no matter what your experience with JavaScript. You will find projects developed within a chapter, building them up step-by-step, describing the process and thought that goes into it. Minimal requirements are needed on the server-side, so the examples should work with any setup.

What you can learn from this book

• Integrate jQuery into your PHP applications.
• Add tabs and accordions using the jQuery-UI project to make your pages easier to read.
• Validate forms locally and remotely.
• Enhance your existing form controls, optimize large select-boxes, build auto-suggest fields for your forms.
• Manipulate images non-destructively.
• Manage your files and directories.
• Create your own jQuery plugins.
• Write a weekly calendar.
• Use a drag/drop mechanism to sort lists and create hierarchical menus.
• Paginate, order, and search large data sets.

Even if you don’t win the book, it is a book you should consider: jQuery 1.3 with PHP.

How to win this book

All you have to do to win this book is leave a comment below, and tell us how you plan to you use jQuery in your next project.

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By Thursday Bram

Pricing a website design can seem impossible. A good website design can cost anywhere between thousands of dollars and under fifty dollars, depending on the type of site, how you build it and a hundred other numbers. Those numbers can make it difficult to decide where the right price point for your own work is: how do you know what your work is worth when other designers’ prices are all over the place?

All prices are not created equal: while it may seem to the lay person that all websites are similar, differences like the framework the site is built upon and the process the website designer uses can require drastically different prices. A website design that doesn’t require you to do much more than design a new theme for WordPress probably shouldn’t be priced the same way that an e-commerce site that expects to see plenty of traffic should be. It comes down to the question of what’s in your price. In this article, we’ll look at how four web designers set their prices — and how you can learn from their experiences.

The Basics of Pricing

At the most basic, your prices must cover your expenses with hopefully a little extra left over, unless you have another source of income. The standard advice for determining your prices is to calculate what you need to live for a month — and then break that down to what you need to earn per hour. There are some nuances: it’s rare for a web designer to have 40 hours of paying work every week. It’s not impossible for a freelancer to have only 20 billable hours a week, especially when he’s just starting out. The rest of the week may be spent marketing to new clients, handling paperwork and other necessary tasks.

There’s also the danger of underestimating your expenses when you decide on your rates. It’s easy to miss one or two expenses, like health insurance, and wind up with prices that just won’t work. It’s important to build in a buffer when estimating the money that you need to bring in: your income needs to be able to cover savings, emergencies and even price hikes on your standard expenses. These factors mean that the price range you find by estimating what you need to cover your expenses should actually be the bottom end of where you set your prices. Your own expenses are only a small part of what goes into the price you charge for a website design.

1. Deciding Between Per Project and Per Hour

One of the biggest decisions you have to make as a web designer is whether you’ll charge per hour or per project. Most website designers think in terms of how many hours a project will take them to complete, which translates easily to charging by the hour. There are some other benefits, as well: an hourly rate makes it easy to revise an estimate if a client suddenly changes a project or needs an extra round of revisions.

Should I Charge Per Hour?

Mary-Frances Main is a web designer based in Colorado. She chooses to only work on an hourly basis. As Main says:

“We only quote per hour. Very very occasionally we will get a ballpark complete project cost, but rarely… We find that project bids very rarely end up in our favor. It’s too difficult to adjust for design dilemmas or changes in direction or lack of organization from a client. We make up for not giving whole project bids by only charging updates with a base rate of a quarter of an hour.”

The type of client Main usually works with is a big factor in her decision to work on an hourly basis. She prefers clients that need a web designer for the long haul — they need the web designer to handle updates, maintenance and any adjustments the site needs. Because Main charges an hourly rate, she can comfortably handle those updates, while still making enough money to cover her needs.

Charging per hour makes sense if:

Project requirements may change after you’ve already started working,
It’s hard to tell exactly how long a project will take,
You’re handling lots of small tasks or projects as they come up,
Your client wants something beyond what you ordinarily offer.

Should I Charge Per Project?

While charging per hour makes sense for some web designers, it doesn’t always make sense for everyone. There are drawbacks to pricing by the hour, as well. A client who doesn’t really know what to expect in terms of the amount of work it takes to create a website can look at an hourly rate and quickly become concerned. Having a rate of $100 per hour can scare off a client who thinks in terms of people working 40-hour workweeks. If you say that you can have the project done in 3 weeks, you can wind up with a client picturing a bill in the tens of thousands of dollars, no matter how large or small his project actually is. Giving a set rate for a whole project can eliminate that sort of pricing confusion.

Noel Green, a web designer based in New Mexico, takes a per project approach to pricing his work:

“While we have a per hour rate, we prefer to quote per project rather than per hour. After 8 years of doing this, we’re quite good at knowing, approximately, how long a project is going to take us, so giving a client a ‘flat fee’ lets them feel more comfortable with the process.”

Pricing per project has had other benefits for Green, as well. He’s found that clients are less likely to add on to the original project if they know that they’ll have to pay an hourly rate for any changes.

Charging per project makes sense if:

You do this type of project often enough that you know how long it should take,
Your client has a budget that doesn’t allow for an open-ended number of hours,
You want to offer a package deal, such as a website and hosting for a certain price,
The project is relatively short and specific.

Price Per Project And Per Hour

There is one other option, which Dixie Vogel, a web designer with more than 10 years of experience, uses. You can use per hour pricing in some situations and per project in others:

“For larger projects, I price by project (after figuring out a time estimate to multiply against my base rate). I dislike time tracking and the feeling of rushing through work to keep my clients from being overcharged. I’m also frequently interrupted, which made tracking difficult. For small, limited scope projects, I do bill hourly as I tend to underestimate the time on simpler tasks and ended up undercharging. Either way, however, I give my clients a range at the outset and stick very close to that.”

How Low Should I Go?

It can be tempting to price yourself below your competition, especially if you can bring in enough income to cover your expenses even at those lower prices. It seems like a lower price would get you more work and more clients. But it’s a temptation you should avoid: not all clients assume that a low price means that a particular web designer is offering a deal. Instead, many prospective clients will think that there is a reason your prices are below other web designers with similar portfolios and skills. Maybe there’s something wrong with your work or maybe you’re a particularly slow worker — a low price could be more easily explained by a problem than by a web designer trying to set a price lower than his or her competition.

Charging For All The Time You Spend

There’s a more subtle version of this problem that can appear depending on just what you charge for. Many new web designers charge only for the time the spend actually creating and implementing a website. When Main first started designing websites, about nine years ago, she fell into this trap. Now, her prices cover a lot more:
We used to have entire email exchanges and design processes that went uncharged, we now log all of that time and charge for it accordingly.
Beyond the actual time you spend on designing a website, you can and should bill your clients for the following:

Revisions: It’s rare for a client to like a design exactly the way you come up with it, but you can bill them for the time you spend revising your designs.

Education: With some clients, you can spend hours going back and forth, educating them on what a website design actually includes. That is time you’ve spent on your project and it’s time you can bill to your client.

Set up: Some designers take care of setting up hosting, if not providing it entirely. The time it takes to get everything ready on the hosting end of things is an expense your client can cover.

Explaining Your Prices

There may be a client or two who questions your prices. It seems to happen more with clients that aren’t familiar with the work necessary to create a website, but it can happen with a wide variety of client types. As long as you can explain your prices — and you remain firm on them — clients are typically willing to work with you. Green has had clients try bargain and barter with him on his rates:

We didn’t budge, so they chose someone else…the client who left because we wouldn’t go down in price ended up coming back to us after the company they DID go with didn’t deliver what they’d promised.

When a prospective client wants to argue prices with you, it can be hard to stand firm, if only because you want the project even if it means dropping your rates a little. But there are a lot of reasons that a web designer can ask for high prices and get them:

You can complete a project significantly faster than an amateur. It’s cheaper to pay your hourly rate and get a good design quickly than to let a non-designer drag out the process for weeks or even months.

You do more than just design — you manage the project as a whole, from creating a design to coordinating content.

You’re a professional. Your clients wouldn’t ask a vendor to drop their prices.

It can be hard for a new web designer to price a project high enough, simply because of a lack of confidence. As you build your skills and gain confidence, it becomes easier to quote higher prices to clients without worrying that the price is too high. Stephanie Hobbs, a web designer based in South Carolina, has increased her prices along with her confidence:

When I started in 2003, my first paying website was $450 for 5 pages. Once I figured out a reasonable time estimate, I offered a four page site for $600. As my skill level has increased and I’ve raised my hourly rate, that number has gone to $800, $1000, and now $1200. My hourly rate started at $40 (I think, it might have been $50) and is now at $75. But I’ve raised my rates because I was very low to begin with because I didn’t have confidence in myself.

When Should I Increase My Prices?

What you charge today isn’t necessarily what you should be charging for it a year from now. As you add to your skills, as well as your reputation, you’ll not only be more valuable to your clients but you’ll be able to demonstrate your worth with a larger portfolio of completed projects. You’ll be able to increase your prices — and you should.

Vogel started freelancing at $25 per hour. She actually considers clients not complaining about prices a bad sign: “If no potential client complains, you’re not charging enough.”

As she raised her prices, Vogel would start quoting new projects at her higher rates, as well as informing her existing clients.

For any rate increases, I’ve always sent out notices to my clients explaining what I was doing beforehand and giving them all plenty of opportunity to opt out. I’ve never lost a single client raising my rates.

Timing A Price Increase

Timing when you’re going to announce your rate increase can be tricky, especially when you have existing clients or you’ve already offered an estimate for a new project. New clients are much easier to deal with: it’s just a matter of quoting your new rate as you talk about new projects. With existing clients, however, you may find that they’ve gotten used to your old rates and aren’t prepared to budget more for your services. There are a couple of times that it can be easier to announce those new rates:

The New Year: With the end of the year approaching, you can simply send out a notice that your rates will be going up on the first of the year. The same approaches works with the beginning of a new month if you aren’t prepared to wait until the end of the year.

New Projects: If your client brings you a new project, it can be an ideal time to make the switchover. You can explain that for future projects, you’ve increased your rates, which provides you and your client a chance to talk about the matter.

Contracts: If you have a contract with your client to provide certain services, like maintenance, on a continuing basis, that contract should have an ending date. That date gives you an opportunity to renegotiate your rates.

Increasing your prices may not always be just a matter of making more money. If you want to be able to offer a discount on your work, as Hobbs does, having higher rates is necessary:

I do offer a 20% discount for people in my networking group, and a 30% discount to nonprofits (which is part of why I raised my rates from $1000… I’m actually making closer to what I intended to make, since many of my clients are from my networking organization).

Prices in the Wild

All the information on how to set prices may not be enough to help you decide what is a reasonable price for your web design work. Actually seeing what other web designers charge is necessary to decide if your prices are comparable.

Mary-Frances Main charges $60 per hour for most web design work. For programming, her rate is $72 per hour and for Flash, her rate is $65 per hour.

Noel Green charges between $2,500 and $5,000 for a complete website, guaranteeing a 4-week turnaround on projects. Projects at the upper end of that range typically involve more complex features, such as shopping carts.

Dixie Vogel charges between $60 and $80 per hour for most web design work.

Stephanie Hobbs’s rates start at $1,200 for a 4-page website, add to her estimate for larger projects and sites with extra features, like Flash.

These prices differ due to factors like the designer’s location, their experience and even the type of clients they prefer to work with. But, in each case, the web designer in question has thought through not only what he or she needs to earn but how comparable those prices are to other designers and where the prices can be increased.

About the author

Thursday Bram is a full-time freelancer who has been working on her own for more than seven years. She writes about the business side of freelancing and maintains her own website at ThursdayBram.com.

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Have a pet project to collaborate with your friends

It’s not uncommon to find me staring at my screen, looking at beautiful websites my friends have made, grinning inanely because I feel so honoured to know such talented individuals. But one thing really frustrates me: I hardly ever get to work with these people! Sure, there are times when it’s possible to do so, but due to various project situations, it’s a rarity.

So, in order to work with my friends, I’ve found the best way is to instigate the collaboration outside of client work; in other words, have a pet project together! Free from the hard realities of budgets, time restraints, and client demands, you and your friends can come up with something purely for your own pleasures. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to work with other designers or developers whose work you love, the pet project is that excuse. They don’t necessarily have to be friends, either: if the respect is mutual, it can be a great way of breaking the ice and getting to know someone.

Figure 1: A forthcoming secret love-child from myself and Tim Van Damme

Have a pet project to escape from your day job

We all like to moan about our clients and bosses, don’t we? But if leaving your job or firing your evil client just isn’t an option, why not escape from all that and pour your creative energies into something you genuinely enjoy?

It’s not just about reacting to negativity, either: a pet project is a great way to give yourself a bit of variety. As web designers, our day-to-day work forces us to work within a set of web-related contraints and sometimes it can be demoralising to spend so many hours fixing IE bugs. The perfect antidote? Go and do some print design! If it’s not possible in your day job or client work, the pet project is the perfect place to exercise your other creative muscles. Yes, print design (or your chosen alternative) has its own constraints, but if they’re different to those you experience on a daily basis, it’ll be a welcome relief and you’ll return to your regular work feeling refreshed.

Figure 2: Ligature, Loop & Stem, from Scott Boms & Luke Dorny

Have a pet project to fulfill your own needs

Many pet projects come into being because the designers and/or developers behind them are looking for a tool to accomplish a task and find that it doesn’t exist, thus prompting them to create their own solution. In fact, the very app I’m using to write this article — Ommwriter, from Herraiz Soto & Co — was originally a tool they’d created for their internal staff, before releasing it to the public so that it could be enjoyed by others.

Just last week, Tina Roth Eisenberg launched Teux Deux, a pet project she’d designed to meet her own requirements for a to-do list, having found that no existing apps fulfilled her needs. Oh, and it was a collaboration with her studio mate Cameron. Remember what I was saying about working with your friends?

Figure 3: Teux Deux, the GTD pet project that launched just last week

Have a pet project to help people out

Ommwriter and Teux Deux are free for anyone to use. Let’s just think about that for a moment: the creators have invested their time and effort in the project, and then given it away to be used by others. That’s very cool and something we’re used to seeing a lot of in the web community (how lucky we are)! People love free stuff and giving away the fruits of your labour will earn you major kudos. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with making some money, either — more on that in a second.

Figure 4: Dan Rubin‘s extremely helpful Make Photoshop Faster

Have a pet project to raise your profile

So, giving away free stuff earns you kudos. And kudos usually helps you raise your profile in the industry. We all like a bit of shameless fame, don’t we? But seriously, if you want to become well known, make something cool. It could be free (to buy you the love and respect of the community) or it could be purchasable (if you’ve made something that’s cool enough to deserve hard-earned cash), but ultimately it needs to be something that people will love.

Figure 5: Type designer Jos Buivenga has shot to fame thanks to his beautiful typefaces and ‘freemium’ business model

If you’re a developer with no design skills, team up with a good designer so that the design community appreciate its aesthetic. If you’re a designer with no development skills, team up with a good developer so that it works. Oh, and not that I’d recommend you ever do this for selfish reasons, but collaborating with someone you admire — whose work is well-respected by the community — will also help raise your profile.

Have a pet project to make money

In spite of our best hippy-esque intentions to give away free stuff to the masses, there’s also nothing wrong with making a bit of money from your pet project. In fact, if your project involves you having to make a considerable financial investment, it’s probably a good idea to try and recoup those costs in some way.

Figure 6: The success of Shaun Inman‘s various pet projects — Mint, Fever, Horror Vacui, etc. — have allowed him to give up client work entirely.

A very common way to do that in both the online and offline worlds is to get some sort of advertising. For a slightly different approach, try contacting a company who are relevant to your audience and ask them if they’d be interesting in sponsoring your project, which would usually just mean having their brand associated with yours in some way. This is still a form of advertising but tends to allow for a more tasteful implementation, so it’s worth pursuing.

Advertising is a great way to cover your own costs and keep things free for your audience, but when costs are considerably higher (like if you’re producing a magazine with high production values, for instance), there’s nothing wrong with charging people for your product. But, as I mentioned above, you’ve got to be positive that it’s worth paying for!

Have a pet project just for fun

Sometimes there’s a very good reason for having a pet project — and sometimes even a viable business reason — but actually you don’t need any reason at all. Wanting to have fun is just as worthy a motivation, and if you’re not going to have fun doing it, then what’s the point? Assuming that almost all pet projects are designed, developed, written, printed, marketed and supported in our free time, why not do something enjoyable?

Figure 7: Jessica Hische‘s beautiful Daily Drop Cap

In conclusion

The fact that you’re reading 24 ways shows that you have a passion for the web, and that’s something I’m happy to see in abundance throughout our community. Passion is a term that’s thrown about all over the place, but it really is evident in the work that people do. It’s perhaps most evident, however, in the pet projects that people create. Don’t forget that the very site you’re reading this article on is… a pet project.

If you’ve yet to do so, make it a new year’s resolution for 2010 to have your own pet project so that you can collaborate with your friends, escape from your day job, fulfil your own needs, help people out, raise your profile, make money, and — above all — have fun.

Go to Source

WhoDoes is a fresh and intuitive web-based project management software. WhoDoes is designed to assist you and your team in planning projects of different complexity, from the small project to the biggest one.

With WhoDoes you can manage your activities and share information with your team, whether you are in the same office or distributed all over the World.

http://whodo.es/

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Go to Source

The project isn’t very expensive or difficult, but it does involve cutting into the desk’s surface. Make sure that a) you know what you’re doing and b) you’re fully okay with defiling your workspace (albeit with good reason). All you’ll need from the hardware store is a standard wall socket and faceplate. You can even do what Pat did and add a switch too, for especially hard to turn on devices. Hit the link for more pictures and details on Pat’s DIY project.

Go to Source

The logic behind that maxim is that, as long as the source code is out there and freely available, someone will always show up to work on it, add to it, improve it. Indeed, that’s often the motivation behind releasing a project under an open source license.

One example is tr.im, the URL shortening service that shut down temporarily, but whose code is now open source. Another is OpenTape, a clone of the popular (and long gone) Muxtape music streaming app. Both released into the wild after the original developers became overwhelmed in the hopes that someone, anyone, would keep those projects alive. Whether or not the community actually forms around the release is irrelevant. The point is that it could.

But what do you do when an ostensibly open source project lacks support from its creators, and it becomes nearly impossible for the community to contribute? That’s the question programmer Jeff Atwood raised in a blog post Tuesday regarding John Gruber’s Markdown software.

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool which allows you to write web code using an easy-to-understand plain text format. Markdown text is then converted to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Markdown is used all over the web — it’s even understood by the content fields and comment forms within most popular blogging platforms, including WordPress and Movable Type. It’s been ported to Python, Ruby, PHP and other popular languages.

However, the original Perl script has remained largely unchanged since its release in 2004. In his post, Atwood takes Gruber to task for what Atwood calls “bad parenting,” an indictment of Markdown’s lack of bug fixes, updates and improvements.

Markdown was released under a BSD-style open source license, meaning the community can do pretty much whatever it likes with the code, so long as it respects the copyright notices and naming rules. Indeed, many ports of Markdown enjoy rather widespread support with numerous contributors and an aggregate community of active developers that the original Markdown lacks.

So while the various implementations of Markdown have regular fixes and updates, Gruber’s original code lacks such activity. What’s the difference? Atwood lays some of the blame at Gruber’s feet, citing what Atwood calls “passive-aggressive interaction with the community,” and quotes one of Gruber’s famously bristly e-mails (Gruber also writes the famously bristly blog, Daring Fireball) that shows the author discouraging changes. Single programmers rarely have that sort of influence. Which isn’t to say we disagree with Atwood’s assessment, just that Gruber is an extreme example and that it shouldn’t matter either way.

The bigger reason Markdown’s original Perl source doesn’t see bug fixes and maintenance releases seems to lie more its hosting situation than any other single problem Atwood raises. Without a way to easily contribute to your project, your potential users can’t improve your code.

The Perl source of Markdown is hosted as static download on Gruber’s website. Download the zip file and you’ve got a copy of Markdown you can use, modify and even redistribute according to the terms of the license.

But you don’t have a copy that’s easy to patch, and there’s no simple way to contribute back to the project, short of sending code directly to Gruber or to the support mailing list.

If the Markdown source code lived somewhere like GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code or any of the other free, open source code repository hosts, it would be infinitely easier for the community to contribute. To be fair, none of those sites existed when Markdown was released, but moving the code wouldn’t be hard — it’s a single archive with a license and readme text file.

A good project hosting service allows the community to contribute in ways that it just can’t when the code is static download.

Markdown isn’t alone in this respect. Django programmers were very excited to get their hands on the EveryBlock source code when it was finally released. However, since the EveryBlock code is, like Markdown, a static download, there isn’t and easy way for the community to contribute.

I have been using the EveryBlock code in a personal project for some time, and I’ve found at least a dozen bugs and several oversights and contradictions in the documentation. None of these stumbling blocks have stopped me from using the code, but it would be nice if I could contribute patches so others don’t also have to bang their heads against a wall for days on end trying to make the code work.

Yet a static hosting environment prevents that. There’s no easy way for me or anyone else to contribute to the code, update the documentation, add helpful links to a wiki, ask a question and get it answered. As a result, the whole community around the project suffers.

While it’s true I could put the codebase into a version control system and host my own copy, but not only does that feel wrong, it shouldn’t be necessary. The “you can always fork it” motto of open source has proved one of its least helpful tenets, leading to a proliferation of nearly identical code forks that are difficult to keep track of and work with.

We understand that the people who release open source code might not have time to work on it, or might simply lose interest in it over time, but that’s precisely why version control systems exist — to take the burden off the developer and let the contributions of the community pick up the slack in an open, organized manner.

Does a project still need an maintainer and someone to check in code, run tests, merge branches and so on? Sure, but that need not be a single person. Sizable open source projects — take Firefox for example — have dozens of committers and (in theory) no one person winds up feeling overwhelmed.

While in this particular case, it could be argued that Markdown doesn’t need further development. We use it everyday without issue. But the larger issue remains for other projects. Without active development, particularly bug fixes and maintenance releases, your open source project will rarely be successful.

Get your code into a decent version control system and make it easy for other users to do what you don’t have to — make your code better.

Photo by gerhard3/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

See Also:

• Why Great Documentation Matters in Open Source
• Making Open Source Software More “Humane”
• Money, Not Spare Cycles, Drives Open Source

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I read somewhere that showing your client the full range of your creative ideas during a project is important, the rationale being that the client is entitled to see the ideas coming from the creative professional who they have hired and invested in. While this approach has some benefits, in some cases showing too many ideas is counter-productive to the natural flow of a project. Proof of how imaginative you are can be shown in other ways.

Spoilt For Choice

Scenario 1

You look at your Illustrator pasteboard and see half a dozen cool logo ideas… not just cool, but super-cool… not just super-cool, actually, but practical and appropriate. You have translated the brief brilliantly. You feel rather pleased with yourself. However, the last time you showed a client all of your ideas, you got caught up in a dizzying merry-go-round, forced to mash up parts of one logo with parts of another, using unsuitable and under-baked concepts.

That client was overwhelmed with ideas and unable to choose one or the other: too many directions, and too many good ideas. You offered all your super-cool ideas on a platter, convinced that you had nailed all possible directions. You worked hard to pre-empt your clients questions and suggestions. But with all of this hard work, you unwittingly set in motion a series of events that many designers before you have experienced.

Putting your client in the position of a kid in candy store can lead to some of the more frustrating experiences in design work. Are we undermining the flow of a project with our need to have our creative ego stroked by the client?

Too much choice can be a bad thing for clients.

Scenario 2

Again, looking at your Illustrator pasteboard, you see half a dozen cool logo ideas: super-cool, practical and appropriate, in fact. You have translated the brief brilliantly, as before.

The client is impressed by your imagination, your interpretation of the brief and your ability to think outside the box. They feel embarrassed — even spoilt — by the choice of amazing ideas; not what they were expecting, given their previous experiences. The client looks at the ideas and realizes you were the right person for the job. They go away to mull over the ideas.

You’re pleased. The client is pleased. Time for a beer.

The client returns with a decisive plan of attack. They have picked out one or several potential winners from among your ideas and are keen to walk through tweaks and changes with you. By showing the client all of your ideas, whether cool or funky, practical or safe, you have covered all bases, left no room for misinterpretation and accounted for that notion of “subjective perceptions.”

As is almost always the case, you have your own favorites, but prior experience has shown that you mustn’t assume the client will feel the same.

Fewer Ideas, Less Choice

We could alter these two scenarios by changing the “showing all ideas” to “showing just a few.” The advantages would be that the client would not be overwhelmed: you will have provided just a few promising ideas. This way, you are being assertive and confident in your ability to interpret the brief. You also believe that the client would be handicapped by more choice.

In both cases, the client might be pleased with the ideas you have picked out and your ability to get the job done. You are a creative laser-guided missile. You don’t need your ego stroked, and you don’t need to show off your awesome imagination to every client. Your portfolio does that just fine.

You have many other cool and practical ideas up your sleeve, but putting all your cards on the table at this time is not necessary. Save them. If the client does not buy any of the ideas you’ve filtered for them, even after you have justified their suitability, you can fall back on those. Even if you lose round 1, you’re prepared for round 2.

Be Aware

Consider these points before attempting a full-360 triple-duck-tailed high-board dive. This is not a comprehensive list but a good starting point when deciding whether to show some or all of your ideas.

Knowing Your Client: A Psychological Angle

Ultimately, your flexibility in your presentation of ideas will be determined by how well you know the client: getting a good sense of their personality, their brief and other personality- and business-related issues. You will also have to know the process that your contact will go through back at their base: are they the decider, or do they report back to a board or senior staff member?

When a group of people is involved in making decisions, you may want to keep a tighter reign on the creative process. Presenting too many ideas to one person can be overwhelming, but too many ideas for a board of six spells disaster.

Being able to read people is not only useful: it can save your sanity over time. Design and creativity are one thing, but if you want to excel at business and attract new clients, especially as a freelancer, being well versed in basic psychology goes a long way.

Cover Your Back: A Solid Brief

A tight brief is always essential and one of the first things to cover before doing anything creative. A firm and assured hand is often required. Research the company. Understand its decision-making structure. Your point of contact may not always be the decision-maker; you don’t want to pander to the wrong person. Pre-empt undesirable outcomes by familiarizing yourself as much as possible with your client and their business. For example, you may have been given a thorough brief, but if the person who prepared it is not responsible for making decisions, it could be all for nought.

The brief can change during a project, and it can change significantly without you being aware of it. The very nature of the creative process and your collaboration with the client can unearth ideas not previously considered. Be fluid and organic in your approach. When you feel the brief no longer reflects the direction of the project, be prepared to revise it with the client.

Take a time-out, and give yourself time to breath and re-evaluate. Don’t feel pressured to commit. Assess the situation and determine whether a realignment is in order. Better to backtrack a little now, because at the end you will just have further to backtrack.

Ask a lot of questions. The more you immerse yourself in the project, the more familiar you will become with the subject matter. Don’t be afraid to keep asking questions if you feel they are important to the outcome of the project.

Communication

For many freelancers, meeting the client face to face is not always possible, and you may run into complications if you haven’t made provisions. Personally, I liaise with clients through email or Skype, but only when the brief and communication are solid. If the responses are short or not forthcoming, then I take it to the phone. Only then am I able to get a sense of what the client is about.

In my experience, we are getting lazy as communicators, trying to deal with all aspects of life — business and personal — via email and text messages. Some clients I’ve had have refused to speak with me by phone, while their written communication failed to inspire me with confidence.

If this happens to you, reflect on whether the project is worth taking on. If you have problems communicating before the project has even started, you will likely hit a brick wall when trying to get feedback on creative ideas or dealing with set-backs. I have on occasion “fired” clients because they were not pulling their weight, yet expected me to bust my gut. It doesn’t work like that.

A true collaboration requires the commitment of at least two people: the designer and client.

To Conclude

There is no right or wrong answer to the question of whether to show all of your best ideas right away. Assess each client on their own terms and figure out what’s best. Would the client be overwhelmed by too many choices, or would they welcome the variety? No one size fits all. On occasion, your experience or a hunch will tell you to focus on only one concept, with perhaps a few minor variations. The work period may be slow, and you have only one project on the go and are happy to spend the extra time on what may be a valuable repeat client.

Sometimes sticking your neck out and giving more than you are being paid to do is worthwhile, but that’s a choice only you can make. Don’t make it a habit, or your clients will come to expect that extra workload of you all the time: a quick path to freelance burn-out.

Being a good judge of character, understanding human interaction, being able to see past the here and now to pre-empt later problems, all of this helps you keep your sanity. Spend time learning and researching not only creative techniques but people, too. Your job and overall quality of life will improve as a result.

Your Thoughts

Are you guarded or care-free in sharing your ideas with clients? Do you have a one-size-fits-all solution, or do you approach each client on their own terms? Have you discovered certain winning methods of dealing with particular situations?

We can all learn from one another’s experiences in dealing with people in business. If you are starting out as a freelancer, take whatever advice others are willing to give.

Image Credits

• Choices by andreiz
• Be aware by pictureperfectpose
• Creative Brief by meine-erde
• Communication by larskflem
• Conclusion by mrtea

(al)

© Graham Smith for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: brief, ideas, logo design

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Glasscubes takes project management online and using a combination of features and tools addresses the key challenges faced by project managers. Their version control feature is perfect if you need to work from the latest version of a document, and need to find it quickly. Rather than having multiple versions scattered across multiple computers and email addresses, keep them stored in one place – and always keep the latest version available. You can then comment – sending notifications at any stage.

Built-in contact management systems allow users/organizations to improve the way they manage their contacts. Often a little simpler than traditional customer relationship management systems, contact management systems focus on delivering improved ways of managing your contacts. Improving your contact management is proven to save time and money.

Organisations across the world meet with many obstacles. The latest is ensuring your are prepared for significant downtime this winter due to swine flu (H1N1). If predictions are correct, nearly 30% of the national workforce is going to be struck with it (and that’s before we consider parents who are required to be at home for sick children). What is important therefore is having a resource in place, such as an online intranet solution which can be securely accessed from anywhere by any computer – ensuring your employees can still communicate and work – even when they are unexpectedly away from the office.

Salient Features

- Share files and documents
– Branded workspaces
– Online discussions
– Online document editing and previews
– Share online workspaces with project contributors
– Share any size or type of document
– Calendars per project and per individual
– Tasks to manage key milestones
– Facilitate online discussions
– Make announcements
– SMS and email notifications
– Manage individuals and companies
– Track sales opportunities
– Manage customer issues
– Manage call backs, meetings and progress
– Create your own custom fields
– Import contacts from any .csv file

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By Matthew C. Gallagher

So you have sold your idea the your client has committed to the project, the next step is – How do I manage this most effectively to successfully complete this job?

There are generally 3 accepted rules of project management: time (delivery to client or launch of product), budget (cost to deliver project) and scope (definition of contracted project).

Some folks substitute quality for scope, but focusing on time, budget and the scope of any project inevitably affects the quality delivered to the client. For the sake of this article, we will stick with time, budget and scope as the guiding principles for project management.

Furthermore, we will only address the time issue in our approach and how best to manage the project on your computer. So you have a new project and are looking to complete it in the most efficient and effective manner to maximize its success, your client’s happiness and your bank account. Let’s get started.

Creative Projects

The creative process is different for everyone but mainly follows 3 simple steps: brainstorming, concepting, finished work.

All of these can be solitary pursuits or group-based efforts and usually involve a team working towards a common end goal.

Brainstorming is the advent of the idea. It is the first in a series of steps in solving your client’s business problem. Sometimes you may be involved in the original brainstorm with the client, but many times you may be brought in to create what the client has already determined they require.

The concepting phase is where the solution is detailed and prototypes built. Much of the creative development occurs during this phase. The general roadmap is established and the creative finish is determined that will guide whatever production is to follow towards completion.

Finally, the finished work is completed. This can be an illustration or a complete website. The process for them both is the same; a series of time-frames with milestones in the development for review and revisions to ultimately meet the client’s original requirements.

Some of the best applications available revolve around creative development. A truly great applications is one that combines the experience of pen and paper design with the ease of production of allowed via the computer.

There are numerous developers, both small and large, creating applications for brainstorming, wire-framing, flowcharting, etc. Ultimately, it is not nearly as important who the developer is, as does their solution fit your needs and work-flow.

Omnigraffle Pro is a diagramming program that provides the necessary tools to develop much of the documentation required for today’s interactive projects. Some of the basic templates provided are in the key areas required for your creative production: brainstorming, organizational charts and drawing.

Once you begin using it however, there is really no limit to what you can create with the application. The work area is clean and clear, allowing the use of multiple layers and the toolset provided rivals many of the traditional graphic programs costing much more.

Regardless, any application that provides tools that complement your natural workflow and aid the organizational process will help any project succeed.

Getting Things Done

There is a commonly used action management method, created by David Allen, that revolves around the principle of moving recording tasks externally in order to focus attention on completing them; getting things done (GTD). There are 5 phases to its workflow model: collect, process, organize, revew, do.

The GTD method has become very popular across the business spectrum and there are a few applications that allow you to implement this strategy for your business.

Developers like Cultured Code and Omni both offer GTD based applications that can easily integrate into your workflow. Cultured Code’s offers Things (their mobile application received one of this year’s Apple Design Awards at the 2009 WWDC) while Omni offers OmniFocus.

These types of GTD applications allow you to set up your projects, establish the related tasks required and manage the workflow in a straightforward application. The ease of using such a simple application insures that you will use it.

While so much of business today is done away from your office having mobile applications is fast becoming a norm for today’s professionals. One of the other key features of the more effective applications is their option of providing a corresponding iPhone app.

An iPhone application that integrates seamlessly with the desktop application allows you to focus on the tasks necessary to succeed while letting the applications do some of the heavy lifting.

There are many tools available today to manage your project’s schedule and enhance your time management. One of the things I have found over the years, however, is these applications need to integrate well into your established workflow, rather than vice-versa. If the applications require us to learn a whole new set of dynamics, that lessena the likelihood of successfully using them.

Client Expectations

One key to a successful project is open communications; between team members and most importantly with the client. Engaging everyone involved in the project will enable their ownership and active participation during its life-cycle to ensure its successful completion.

This communication can be managed through Mail, just as easily as any other means. Apple’s Mail is a great application that is also quite powerful in its management of data and integration into other applications.

Mail can become your central hub for this activity for now Mail can provide a place for your Notes and tasks with their new To Dos. In addition to this, Mail is also a great RSS reader as well. If you have several feeds you monitor for your projects all of this can be easily integrated within a single application.

Mail is also an integral part of your iPhone. So even though you may be away from your desk you are never away from your data and the ability to successfully manage those client relationships.

There are a few things that Mail does not do as well or not without a bit of 3rd party application integration; that is customer relationship management (CRM). Where Mail might exhibit gaps, other effective applications step in to cover those gap.

I like to be able to manage my communications through an enhanced CRM application that connect my tasks, emails and daily activity and tie it back to projects and opportunities for my business. MarketCircle’s Daylite is a handy application that allows these activities as well as provides a framework for planning the entire life cycle of your project. From opportunities to documentation you can track most every task required for keeping yourself and your clients in the loop since it can easily be integrated with Apple’s Mail.

Regardless of the tool, some of the most effectives steps I take with my own projects is a daily ledger of activities, a weekly progress report and finally monthly updates (if the project warrants) for my clients.

Any application that can integrate with my workflow, provide detailed reports which can easily be shared with colleagues and clients will ease the production schedule of most any project. An application that allows me to establish roles, responsibilities, tasks, etc. will more easily integrate into my workday and let me offload some of my tasks to intelligently designed software.

Daylite divides your data into calendar, contacts, organization, projects, opportunities, groups, tasks, appointments and notes. It is efficiently designed and it integrates with Mail, through the Daylite Mail Integration module, so keeping everyone on the team informed is a breeze.

Good software can be of great service to any business looking to lessen the time managing the work and maximize the time doing the work. Some of these applications can be extended to work with other integral applications in your business through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (API). An open API means that other developers can take a valuable piece of software and write a plugin to extend one application’s functionality and extend it into another application.

Daylite also has such an API that allows it to integrate with the likes of; MYOB, Filemaker, Lightspeed, MoneyWorks and more. This integration with other applications allows you to customize a software solution to fit almost any businesses need.

Again, the more robust applications feature mobile versions to keep you up-to-date and informed on the go. Many of the applications on the market offers a similarly feature-rich version for the iPhone while providing an option for you to examine through their 30-day trial versions.

The applications are not nearly as important, however, as the tasks they allow you to manage. Keeping an open dialogue during production is a key to its eventual success. As long as everyone is aware of the progress of the project surprises and the inevitable issues that arise during production can be successfully mitigated. Having great software that helps keep you on top of communication can help mitigate any bumps along the road.

Managing the Production Schedule

So what tools can assist your production schedule? There are a wealth of tools in the marketplace designed to assist time management and I have used quite a few over the years. As I have stated above, the ones that are most successful are the easiest ones to use.

Having stated that, a project management application needs to have a few key features. First it needs the ability to track time. Second, the ability to track resources; both people and equipment. Finally, the application needs to track revenue. If a job isn’t profitable, you need to know why and where its profitability fell off the projection so you can learn from the past to profit in the future.

There are numerous providers of applications designed to track production. The above-mentioned Daylite can serve in this capacity, but lacks some of the traditional features usually incorporated into a dedicated project manager (i.e. Gannt charts, resource allocation, etc.). If you want a more dedicated application for project management there are a few that I have used and would recommend.

The first application recommended for your review would be OmniGroup’s OmniPlan. One of the strengths of OmniPlan is its ease of use while offering easy integration with other application from their software library.

Another developer of dedicated project management applications are the Project Wizards, out of Germany. Their app, keeping with the Wizards theme, called Merlin, is a simple-to-use project manager that offers serious depth which will serve any project manager well.

Finally, the last desktop application for recommended review is FastTrack Scheduler. I used this application a bit back in my days at Disney and it is the foundation that a lot of the newer developers have built upon when designing their applications.

FastTrack’s design is not as elegant as Omni Group or Project Wizards. As such it can be intimidating to some, especially those new to project management software. The application, however, is quite robust is a fine option for anyone to review when looking for a project management application to choose for their organization.

In addition to the desktop applications available for project management, there are quite a few web apps available. The first is one that created quite a stir when they launched – 37signals’ Basecamp.

Basecamp is a combination CRM, like Daylite, and Project Manager. It is entirely web-based and offers different pricing per month based upon your usage. It is an exceptional alternative to the traditional desktop solutions we are all so familiar with but there is the monthly fee to consider.

Some companies also, do not want their data hosted anywhere but within their own server environments. ActivCollab has much of the same functionality as Basecamp, but it can be hosted in your own server environment.

ActivCollab actually started as an open-source application but migrated, to the great ire of many, to a commercial product. The fork, or branch, where they moved from the open-source world has a continuing development of the open-source version called Project Pier. Project Pier retains much of the core features of ActivCollab, keeping it open source and a viable option for any organization looking for a web-based project management app.

All of these applications offer a great wealth of resources necessary to manage any project you may be working on currently. There strengths lie in their user interface and ease of integration with other applications you may use on a daily basis in your company.

A great feature of any of these apps is the ability to share the data with other team members to keep them informed of the progress. Insuring the reports functions are easy to customize and share with your team will allow everyone to keep their eyes on their tasks in the production.

One of the biggest hurdles I have personally faced with the web-apps like Basecamp or ActivCollab is the ability to get the clients to participate in the process. Early on in Basecamp’s existence we tried to use it as the home for all of our projects. The internal team members all participated with the scheduling and comments systems, but not one client would even log into the system.

Despite wanting to be informed, much of these applications are perceived too overwhelming for many folks and therefore will remain unused. That is why it is imperative to find a solution that works for you and your clients.

We ultimately went with a system that used the Basecamp for our internal developments and utilized the account services team for client management. As stated above, if the system is not used, it is not a good system so you will have to dedicate enough time to research applications that fit into your company’s dynamic processes.

Conclusion

So we have covered some basic rules of project management and offered a few tools and techniques to help manage those projects on your computer. The key to this process is to incorporate a workflow that is comfortable to you and integrates nicely with your current work style. Otherwise you will not utilize the tools and techniques necessary to work more efficiently and effectively.

All of these applications rely on active participation to effectively monitor the projects. You must update the data to keep the schedule fresh and accurate as well as communicate frequently with your partners during the production to insure the plan is accurate.

Keeping on task and on time will insure you deliver your projects to your clients within their budgets. After all, if you can work more effectively you will have more time to enjoy the fruits of your labor

Further Resources

Software mentioned in this article (in order of appearance):

OmniGroup’s OmniGraffle Pro

Cultured Code’s Things Desktop Application

Cultured Code’s Things Desktop Application

Apple’s Mail

Marketcircle’s Daylite

Marketcircle’s Daylite Touch

OmniGroup’s OmniPlan

Project Wizard’s Merlin

AEC Software’s FastTrack Schedule

37signals’ Basecamp

activeCollab

Project Pier

Related articles and other relevant resources for further reading (alphabetical by subject title).

A List Apart
The site, for people who make websites, has some great articles on project management and workflow by a wide variety of authors.

Communication Arts
A great article on managing your studio.

Gannt
Wikipedia’s entry on Gannt Charts.

GTD
Wikipedia’s entry on Getting Things Done.

Project Management Institute
Leading membership association for project management professionals.

Prototyping with XHTML
Great article on importance of integrating the right systems in your workflow for a better result in the end.

SlickMap CSS
Stylesheet for displaying a sitemap directly from a simple unordered list.

Jeffrey Zeldman
Simple thoughts on project management from a complex mind.

About the author

Matthew Gallagher has spent his career working in all forms of creative development for companies ranging from The Walt Disney Co to Hallmark. He currently runs the boutique design studio designoMatt, building branded websites for destination design, based in Windermere, FL.

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The definition of a Christmas miracle is pretty broad — most probably include either an undying belief in magic or rampant consumerism. Well, my friends who persist in lingering on the Internets on Christmas Eve, do I have a miracle for you.

Behold: The timeless holiday tale, Home Alone, told entirely via Twitter lists. Currently the project, which has been going on since December 22, only has 126 followers. You can get in on the action here. Put down the spiked eggnog and step away from the mistletoe, this is a real holiday treat.

At this point in what’s being called “The Home Alone Project,” we’re roughly at the part in the movie where Kevin (played by Macaulay Culkin) announces, “When those guys come back, I’ll be ready…”, signifying his intention to give the robbers a run for their money. Still, the tweets are coming in slowly (one every hour or so), meaning the movie still has a ways to go before the credits roll.

While we’ve seen online technology used to tell stories in unconventional ways before, this project has an air of teamwork to it that really gets us in the holiday spirit (provided there’re actually 22 Twitter accounts lending their typing talents). Kudos to the Nation design studio in London, England, for making this Christmas miracle manifest.

Tags: Film, home alone, humor, twitter

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This is final post in the “7 Questions, 7 Designers” series, in which I throw out a different question each day and compile the answers from seven different designers. There are participants from all over the world, each offering a different and unique perspective on the realm of design.

To finish off the week’s discussions, we are going to take a look at some of wisdom that our designers have gained through their own, various experiences!

Well, here were are – the last day and the last question! Today, I’d like to ask you to share one story from your design career from which you think others can learn a valuable lesson. I’m gonna leave this one pretty open ended. It could be anything – something you learned while working on a project, an interaction (good or bad) with a client or even just something that you read somewhere that really stuck with you? Why is the experience meaningful and what do you think that others could learn from it?

Nick La
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Before you start on any project, always have a clear agreement with the client (ie. a legal agreement on the project scope, payment, etc.) because this will protect both parties in case conflicts arise.

Chris Spooner
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There’s one tip I’ve found that has resulted in more free time, which is to batch tasks such as email. It’s amazing how much extra time can be generated for working through client projects, personal projects or purely for more personal time simply by checking email once a day, spending an hour or two responding to every item, then leaving it until the next day, or even the day after before opening up that inbox again.

At first it seems crazy to ignore what might be some important messages, but in reality it makes no difference whether there’s a response within 30 minutes, or in 30 hours. I’m sure there’s stacks of other experiences more interesting to write about, but if there’s anyone out there still clicking the new email notification every time the ‘ding dong’ chime sounds – Try quitting email for a day and see the benefits!

Sneh Roy
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There are a lot of experiences that I have had, that have made me the person I am. Good or bad, they have enriched my knowledge and made me better equipped to handle a situation till the next crisis arises. One thing that sticks out like a sore thumb though is my first branding project. The client company wanted to see 3-4 concepts with appropriate taglines and a mission statement that would be used extensively. Now there were some hierarchy issues in the corporate structure and because of that the marketing director [with whom I was working] insisted that once the concepts were ready, I should explain them to the marketing manager and let them present it to the board in their upcoming meeting. I tried to tactfully steer the situation away from this direction and did manage to present it to part of the board. But I didn’t have much of a say and I had to eventually give up my thought process, my ideas and concepts to the marketing manager. I am sure they didn’t present it the way I would’ve presented it because I had lived this project for 4 weeks and had researched extensively before developing those concepts. They ended up choosing a very basic design because of “confusion” in the presentation where the concepts were cut off on the projector and couldn’t be properly viewed.

I learnt my lesson very quickly. It was my first project and I was obviously nervous and a bit intimidated by the whole corporate scene. But ever since, I and only I have presented all my branding concepts and design and in all my projects so far, the client has usually picked the first concept presented to them. The moral of the story is, If you are a chef and you cook an exclusive dish, you plate it and present it, don’t leave it to someone else who wouldn’t even know what ingredients went in it in the first place.

Mike Smith
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I can’t really touch on the specifics of the clients I have previously worked with, but if I could give a word of warning, it would be to make sure you’re not taking on clients because you’re desparate for work. Don’t let your guard down and always make sure you’re picking clients that will not burn you in the long run. If your guy tells you to move on – do it!

Jeff Finley
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I’ll go with something recently. I watched the Pixar Story and learned about how this group of artists and scientists got started and grew their business. It was truly inspiring and relatable as Go Media started in a similar way.

However, it made me realize that to truly pioneer in this industry you need smart “tech” people. I’ve realized that as art/design company we are truly experts in the art department, but we’re probably getting a B or C in the tech area. Unlike Pixar, we cannot engineer software in-house to suit our exact needs. There have been many moments the past few years where an idea we had fizzled out due to lack of technical resources and know-how. Brilliant ideas gone to waste. You need that perfect blend of artistry, science/tech, and entrepreneurism.

It made me wonder who in MY generation (born in the 80s) will be the pioneers of tomorrow? What small team of artists and tech guys are starting today? Could it be us? Could it be your team? I take the Pixar pioneering spirit as a huge inspiration for how I want to run an art/design company. I don’t know if we’ll be able to invent a new medium (3D Animation) but we hope to find a gap in the creative community and fill it. Do we stay a for-hire design company? Do we focus on filling a need for the greater creative good? These are questions that will be answered in the coming years.

Brad Colbow
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I learn best from screwing up. A couple years ago I had a fairly complicated interface project where I did everything right, or so I thought. Before designing I talked with the client, got a feel for all the features, and created wireframes of all the pages before designing, and the designs looked great. Just before launch they did some usability testing. It performed miserably. There were many reasons why, some my fault some not.

This experience changed my entire outlook on web/interface design. It’s great to know the tools and techniques of our craft but it’s all pretty worthless if you don’t understand the human side of what you’re doing. I’ve spent the last few years focusing less on the “how” and more on the “why” of design and at times it creates work that might not win awards or attention but it works.

Grace Smith
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One of the most valuable experiences I’ve had as a designer (and small business owner) happened one evening in January 2008 when i received a question on LinkedIn from Leo Babauta (one of my connections) asking if any of his contacts were available to design the cover and layout of an e-book he had written which was due to go on sale.

I didn’t have much experience designing e-books but i thought i would reply hoping my other portfolio items would show my graphic design experience as a whole. I sent a reply that evening with a brief overview of my experience along with a link to my portfolio.

In all honesty i didn’t think i would hear back (as e-book design was not my speciality) however a few weeks later i received an email from Leo. He explained although he had chosen someone else to design the e-book, he was very impressed with my portfolio and asked if i would like to design and develop a new website he was working on called Web Warrior Tools with this partner in the project – Glen Stansberry. After i had collected the necessary information i quoted for the project and once accepted we began work in mid February.

It was an amazing project to work on, Leo and Glen were an absolute pleasure to work with. We collaborated well together and the final result was both a very successful launch and website.

Shortly after finishing work on Web Warrior Tools, Glen and Leo referred me onto Muhammad Saleem, one of the top Diggers and social media mavens, along with Jay White, creator of Dumb Little Man, an amazing life and productivity blog both of whom have also sent me referrals since working together. I have recently finished a new project with Mu and have just completed the second redesign of Dumb Little Man and two other projects for Glen, which shows the connections i have made have been long-lasting.

In answering one question i have had the privledge to work with some of the top experts in their niches, this has had a hugely positive effect on my freelancing. Although i had carved out a successful freelance career before this, the contacts i have made since working with Leo and Glen have been invaluable.

The takeaway lessons for myself (and hopefully anyone else reading this) is to make the most of your opportunities and build your network before you need it because by doing this I was there to answer a question that ultimately opened up a niche of clientele that otherwise i would not have had access to.

That’s some great advice for young and aspiring designers, or even for those with a bit more experience. What do you guys think? What are some the experiences that have provided valuable lessons of knowledge to you in your design career?

I would also like to take a moment to say a huge thank you to Chris, Sneh, Jeff, Brad, Mike, Grace and Nick for all agreeing to be a part of this interview series. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and I know that many of my readers have also really enjoyed reading their answers! So thanks to out 7 great designers!

Exclusive Content

To thank you for subscribing to my feed, I am including exclusive, feed-only content for you at the bottom of each post!

Current Freebie Code – 0rx655ws

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The more loved type of paper flower is the rose, then the tulips others like the sunflower. But whatever type you like here are some links that I hope will get you started:

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Make-Paper-Roses/

http://joostlangeveldorigami.nl/home.html

http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple_Paper_Flowers/

http://www.instructables.com/id/Paper-Cd-Case-!!!-Flower-Design/

http://www.instructables.com/id/Paper-flower-night-lamp-./

Hope the links are helpful and if you have made one share it with us here by leaving a comment and a link to where we and our readers can check it.

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What can you use the application for?


Zoho Projects (http://projects.zoho.com) is an online project management and collaboration tool. It is part of the Zoho suite of web productivity applications. Zoho Project users have access to a number of project management and collaboration features. Each project has a Dashboard, where the user can view a summary of the activity stream for the project. In addition, users can add or view Tasks and Milestones, add to or view the project Calendar, schedule or view Meetings, and view, edit or add Documents. Other features include a project Timesheet, a Reports section, project Forums, the project Wiki, a project Chat application, and a list of project Users.

Each project has an RSS feed which gives a summary of all activity on the project. Users communicate using the project Chat feature – going to the User list and clicking on a person’s entry will open a chat with that person. The Zoho Projects application has an Administrator who exercises control over all projects. Other types of users are Manager, who can exercise control over only those projects which they have been given access to. Employee is a normal user who works for the project with limited access to administrative abilities. A Contractor is a person who works for the project for a specified period of time, after which their access to the project will expire. Zoho Projects also offers integration with Google Projects.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Pleasonton, CA-based Zoho.com, the parent of Zoho Projects, was founded in September 2005. The site has undergone continuous growth since launch, and currently has over 1 million users (all applications). Sridhar Vembu is CEO of the company. The site continues to follow a policy of adding integration with other online tools to its suite of productivity applications.

What are the differences to other applications?


Competition to Zoho Projects comes from sites such as Cubetree.com and Google Apps. Cubetree.com has more of an emphasis on social networking in their online collaboration tool. Google Apps, when taken as a whole, provide an online collaboration tool, but they do not have the wealth of features offered by Zoho Projects.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The Zoho Projects site has a clean and uncluttered look and feel. The site is quite responsive, and page loads and file transfers happen quickly. The various features have the feel of dedicated desktop apps, and are quite responsive. User navigation of the site is accomplished through a convenient top menu bar with tabs. There is no advertising displayed on the Zoho Projects site.

How does the registration process work?


Registration to Zoho Projects is free and is required to use the site. The registration process simply asks for email address, password, and a name for the users web portal, which is a subdomain of projects.zoho.com. A free membership is limited to 1 project with an unlimited number of users and a 100MB file storage limit. There are 4 levels of premium membership available.

What does it cost to use the application?


Premium memberships include Standard, Express, Premium and Enterprise. Standard allows for 10 projects, an unlimited number of users and a file storage limit of 2GB. Express allows for 20 projects, unlimited users, and 3GB file storage. Premium allows for 50 projects, unlimited users and 5GB of file storage. Enterprise allows for unlimited projects, unlimited users, and 25GB of storage. The Standard, Express, Premium and Enterprise memberships cost $6, $10, $20 and $40 per month respectively.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Zoho Projects is recommended to any group or organization who has need of an online collaboration tool. The service is ideal for groups or organizations which are geographically diverse or which employ a lot of freelance contractors. The wealth of features provided by the service make for a complete project management and collaboration solution.

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One of the most difficult kinds of textures to find is Denim (Jeans). I had this one project in which I just had to use a good, quality denim texture, and I had to look for it really bad. Thankfully, after a little hard work, I managed to find some really great texture, which I share now with you!

<!–break–>

These were all found at Flickr, so you should check their status for commercial use. Just click the image and check it out at a bigger size. Also, check out each author’s page. Anyways, I hope you find these handy and useful. Cheers!

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Mark Verhaagen is an illustrator from Bovensmilde, Holland with a beautfil portfolio full of character designs and other colorful illustration. You have probably seen his work before, he has designed covers for popular design magazines such as Computer Arts and Computer Arts Projects.

His clients include MTV networks, Vodafone UK, Amsterdam Historical Museum, TBWA group, Domestic, Nickelodeon, Digital Creative Arts magazine, Fontmonster, Laidback Luke, Sprout magazine, Roger magazine (Virgin), Colombo Amsterdam, Vrij Nederland, Dzone magazin and others.

When Mark is not working projects he likes to stay with his friends and family, playing with his Holga camera and practicing Moonwalk in front of the mirror.

Mark Verhaagen has been creating tree houses and sand castles, origami flower bouquets, food sculptures, Lego space ships, and electronic blip-bleep music on his Atari computer… which has been replaced by a shiny Apple machine some time ago. After high school Mark decided to focus on drawing, so he went to art school to learn the proper job of illustration. Since his graduation in 2003, Mark has been freelancing in the field of illustration and animation. When not working on commissions, he likes to keep in shape by making personal work.

For more information about Mark Verhaagen visit his website at http://markverhaagen.com/ or his Flickr Page

A giant spider wants to be our friend. We are very frightened but we discover we can trust her.
Dream by Pandalou/ Châlons en Champagne, France

Computer Arts Projects magazine (issue 123)

Another fun project for the guys at Domestic! This time they approached me to illustrate a strip of wallpaper (50×250 cm) for their One Strip project. Now you can add a bit of nature to your bright and shiny design loft (see picture).

For its 10th anniversary, Publish asked 20 designers to collaborate and make a cover. The theme for this issue was Looking into the future. This fun project was art directed by Zeptonn. Other contributors include Carrie & Stephan, Ditte Winkelman, Eva Lindeman, Farb, Leendert Masselink, Lennard Schuurmans, LouLou & Tummie, MAKI, Nick Deakin, Sauerkids, Skaffa, Tan Nuyen and me!

Today I dreamed that I woke up and my mother was an extraterrestrial, my brother was a horse and I touched myself and I was hairy. I went to see the doctor and he told me that I had to be inside a bubble.

About the author

My name is Fabio Sasso, I’m a graphic/web designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil and I’m the founder of Abduzeedo. I hope we can share lots of information, tips, and ideas through Abduzeedo. Also you can follow me on Twitter or my personal site at http://fabiosasso.com.

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As designers, we’re all trying to get better at what we do. We surf the Web daily for hours trying to find useful tips and tricks to enhance our design skills. But what if we spent less time surfing the Web looking for inspiration and more time creating and designing things?

The Challenge

Someone once said, “Practice makes perfect“. While that statement might not be completely true, I do believe that practice makes you better. That is why in this blog post, I would like to propose something to every designer: Why not try to design something every day for one year?

Actors rehearse their lines until they learn them perfectly. Musicians practice their songs until every note is just right. Athletes practice their particular sport so they can excel. As designers, why can’t we do the same? Ask any successful designer in the community about how they have succeeded and they will attribute much of their success to practice. I challenge you today to design something daily. Take fifteen to twenty minutes that you would normally use to surf the Web today and devote it to designing something.

Most of you are probably thinking that I am out of my mind for proposing this. How can you, as a designer working either for a company or for yourself, find the time to design something daily? More importantly, how will I come up with design ideas for a whole year’s worth of projects? Well, to answer those questions, here are some practical tips.

Some Practical Advice

15 – 20 Minutes Daily

This challenge is for you to practice your skills. It doesn’t have to be a final, polished project, so you can limit it to a short period of time. Additionally, you can actually schedule this as part of your daily routine, which will make you more likely to follow through on your decision to design something daily.

And don’t worry or get discouraged if you miss a day due to other more important commitments. The key is to jump back into it as soon as possible. Keep doing it, and try your best to stay consistent. If you don’t find it reasonable to design something daily for a whole year, then you could try instead for one month, or another more manageable time period.

Design Ideas

You’re probably wondering how you will be able to come up with a fresh new design daily for 365 days. Actually, it’s quite simple. You can use a theme for your designs. Maybe for one month you can try to design something retro. For another month, you can try your hand at some typographic posters. The possibilities are endless. A good example is Jessica Hische. She started a project called the Daily Drop Cap, where she designs a drop cap every day and makes her Drop Cap designs available for free download.

Daily Drop Cap is Jessica Hische’s personal project: she designs a drop cap every day and makes her designs available for free download.

Another thing you can do is experiment with different ideas that you have. Maybe you’ve been thinking about doing a collage effect, for example. You might have an idea that you’ve been wanting to try, so this might be the perfect time for it. You can also use this "practice time" to try out different tutorials that have caught your attention.

Be Accountable

Some of us will have a hard time staying motivated during such a lengthy commitment. One way to stay motivated is to create a blog specifically for tracking the project’s progress during the year, and post the results daily. People will be expecting to see something from us and this will keep us motivated.

This method of blogging daily for one year has recently been popularized in the mainstream movie Julie and Julia, which follows American author Julie Powell’s year-long attempt to cook every recipe from a famous cookbook by Julia Child, while blogging about the experience each day. In Powell’s experience, her accountability was part of what kept her motivated for the 365 days.

Another way to stay accountable and keep motivated is to get a fellow designer to do the challenge with you. During the year, you can show each other what you’ve designed each day, allowing for some healthy, friendly competition.

It’s Been Done Before

As mentioned, the concept of blogging daily for a full year has been done before in a variety of contexts. It’s also been done successfully by a lot of great designers. Here are some designers that I have asked about designing something daily.

Stephan G. Bucher – The Daily Monster

Daily Monsters Website

How long did you design / have you been designing daily?
I filmed myself drawing Daily Monsters for 100 days straight (including weekends and holidays). I capped it at 100 days since I also started animating the Monsters in more and more elaborate ways as the project grew. Since then I’ve done month-long bursts of Daily Monsters, and also documented the making of the book 100 Days of Monsters as a daily process. These days I usually do Monsters with lots of animation for special events or occasions.

What are some challenges associated with designing daily?
The main challenge for me is integrating a daily practice with the demands of my regular work, and my occasional attempts at having a social life. There are just so many hours in the day, and it becomes a nerdy endurance challenge. The process itself is great, though. The real challenge is to not block out everything else.

Can you give me at least 5 benefits of partaking in this daily project?

1. I got to draw every day again after almost stopping entirely for a few years.
2. I’m getting better at creating characters every day.
3. I’m teaching myself how to animate in the process.
4. When I release the Daily Monsters daily it quickly attracts a great, active, and creative audience of kind, amazing people.
5. Doing something every day short-circuits procrastination and self-doubt. There’s only time for doing, and doing = happiness.

Where do you get ideas for your daily designs?
The Monsters are a process. As long as I sit myself down and do the work, I don’t have to worry about ideas; they simply appear. That’s the best part. You’d think I’d have learned that lesson now, but I still fall out of the habit, and get right back into my head. “What am I going to draw? Is this any good? What’ll I do next?” When you’re committed to putting something out there every day, you just don’t have the luxury of doubt. And if something comes out a little wonky, well… you know you can redeem yourself the next day.

Any advice for anyone who wants to get started doing this?
Don’t think about it. Don’t plan for it. If I had thought about how much work the Daily Monsters would be, I’d have never started. If you get an idea for something, just sit down and start doing it. Also, you might consider not telling anybody about your daily project until you’re a few days or weeks into it. Commit to it, but allow yourself some privacy to work out the early kinks. Most importantly: Make sure you don’t ever skip a day. If you know you’re going out of town, or if you feel a cold coming on, create a few posts in advance. You mustn’t skip a day. As soon as you’ve skipped one day, it becomes so much easier to skip the second. And then you’re screwed. But here’s the thing: You won’t want to skip. Doing the Daily Monsters was completely addictive. I got to be proud of something I’d done every single day.

Matt Lyon

Make Something Cool Everyday Flickr Group

How long did you design / have you been designing daily?
I’ve been designing on a strictly daily basis since January 1st this year… It was one of my New Year’s resolutions.

What are some challenges associated with designing daily?

Most of the challenges centre upon either time or inspiration, but it’s these challenges that form the reason for doing daily work alongside other commitments.

Can you give me at least 5 benefits of partaking in this daily project?
I’ve discovered plenty of benefits over the year, but I think that these have been the most valuable:

1. Keeping the creative juices flowing
2. Working in different ways as a means to overcome potential obstacles (e.g. creating a piece of work with limited materials or within a strict time limit)
3. Daily work inevitably improves your skills / craft, be it in terms of drawing, using creative software, etc.
4. Daily work creates its own momentum in terms of recurring themes, directions and ideas, that will feed into other work.
5. The process instills and supports a sense of discipline to work.
6. Allows for experimentation and unadulterated freedom to try anything out.

Where do you get ideas for your daily designs?

All of my work evolves from drawing, and for a while many of the themes and ideas in what I create have generated over time through the process of just letting things happen. Simply put, I take a line for a walk and see what happens, be it in response to something I’ve read, heard, or am just feeling. There are no rules – this is my time to do what I want.

Any advice for anyone who wants to get started doing this?
I would recommend anyone and everyone with an interest in image-making to take up the challenge of creating something every day. My ‘drawing a day’ project has been so rewarding to me this year that I’ll be continuing it come 2010. Illustrators or character designers should keep a daily sketchbook to keep their ideas fresh… Alternatively, taking a photograph a day can prove just as valuable for others. Perhaps graphic designers or typographers could do a ‘layout a day’ project?! Who knows?! The sky’s the limit!

Joshua Wysocki – Wysocki Weekday

Wysocki Weekday

How long did you design / or have been designing daily?
I started doing those dailies since November 25, 2007 — so over 2 years now.

What are some challenges associated with designing daily?
The biggest is trying to keep at it on a normal pace. You probably noticed how I have missed a lot of days so far. Working a 10+ hour day-job wears me out and my brain can’t handle holding the pencil in my hand.

Can you give me at least 5 benefits of partaking in this daily project?

Benefits? Are there any? Maybe it’s the thought of continuing a project. Training yourself to be expressive and challenge yourself creatively. Making new friends and communicating with fellow artists. And hopefully eventually making some money from selling zines/books.

Any advice for anyone who wants to get started doing this?
Just jump into it and doodle a small event that happened to you that day… from something as small as stepping into a puddle of mud, or watching your favorite TV show.

Brock Davis

Make Something Cool Every Day 2009

How long did you design / have you been designing daily?
In my job I think of ideas every day, but this project for 2009 is the first time I put to task
making a new piece of art every single day for a year.

What are some challenges associated with designing daily?
Coming up with ideas I feel are original. I always strive for originality — it is almost impossible to attain
but the effort often conjures interesting results. Another challenge is simply finding the time to do it.
I have a full-time job in a creative field, so I have to separate my professional ideas from my personal
ideas. I have a family as well, so I tend to work late and think when my children are in bed.

Can you give me at least 5 benefits of partaking in this daily project?

1. Keeps my brain fresh.
2. Helps me identify my strengths, weaknesses and consistencies.
3. Creatively challenging, and I love a challenge.
4. Improves my ability to hone in on an idea and learn to execute it quickly as well as meticulously.
5. Shows me creative sides to myself that i didn’t know I had.
6. An interesting way to visually calendar my year; I can look at a piece and think more clearly about what was going on that day.

Where do you get ideas for your daily designs?
From everything. I try to absorb as much from every day life as i can. Also, memories from childhood, pop culture, observations of how the world is always changing in all aspects (socially, technologically, economically, etc.).

Any advice for anyone who wants to get started doing this?
Have fun and always be a student. No one can know everything, it’s better to absorb and learn all the time. Then apply that to your work and let it influence you to reshape it into something original.

Mike Duesenberg – 365 Album Covers

365 Album Covers Tumblr

How long did you design / have you been designing daily?
I’ve had the idea for quite a bit, but I didn’t start actually doing it till October 31st of this year.

What are some challenges associated with designing daily?

The biggest challenge is time. Some days are so busy, it’s hard to make time for this project. The idea is to dedicate an hour or two to the design, but sometimes the day flies by and you aren’t left with much time, which then affects the quality. So that’s been the biggest challenge. The second biggest challenge is trying to stay inspired. For 365albumcovers.tumblr.com, I use http://www.flickr.com/commons as my photo source. The problem I’ve been running into however is that after a while, all these vintage photos tend to direct each piece in the same direction. So to solve that, I’ve been brainstorming up some ways on how to add more variety.

Can you give me at least 5 benefits of partaking in this daily project?

1. Daily projects keep your mind working.
2. It’s a nice creative break from the typical day-to-day design work.
3. It gives you a chance to experiment with ideas that you may not be able to use on other projects.
4. It gets your name out there! For instance, like this interview. It can be good press for you, as a designer.
5. It’s nice to share these with friends and see what their feedback is.

Where do you get ideas for your daily designs?

I usually wait to see what the photo, band name and album name will be. Usually one of those will automatically inspire me to go towards a certain direction.

Any advice for anyone who wants to get started doing this?

Just have fun with it. Think of an idea that you can manage to do every day. The main reason you should do this is for self progression. If it gets some attention from other people, awesome. The problem I ran into is keeping it fresh. You may notice that I haven’t posted something since mid-November. I consider the first entries a trial run. I learned from it. Now I’ve compiled a few ways to keep the concept new and exciting to myself, which I plan on launching January 1st. So stay on the lookout!

Tom Judd

Tom Judd’s Everyday

How long did you design / have you been designing daily?

I spent 1 year from November 2004 drawing a page a day, then in July 2007 I repeated the process for another 365 days.

What are some challenges associated with designing daily?
Keeping the motivation. Maintaining originality.

Can you give me at least 5 benefits of partaking in this daily project?

1. It improved my drawing skills.
2. It was a great way to generate ideas.
3. It emptied my brain.
4. It allowed me to fill empty time with something productive.
5. It got me lots of work.

Where do you get ideas for your daily designs?
Each day was different. I think that is one of the benefits. You never know what you are going to see on your way to work.

Any advice for anyone who wants to get started doing this?
Make sure you are doing it for the right reasons. As soon as I became aware that other people were looking at my daily output, it started to affect the work I was producing in a negative way.

Daily Projects Showcase

Jessica Hische – Daily Drop Cap

The Daily Drop Cap is an ongoing project by typographer and illustrator Jessica Hische. Each day (or at least each work day), a new hand-crafted decorative initial cap will be posted for your enjoyment and for the beautification of blog posts everywhere.

Thomas Fuchs – A Heart a Day

A Heart a Day is a blog by freelance illustrator, Thomas Fuchs. His goal is to incorporate a heart into one of his illustrations every day.

Chow Hon Lam – Flying Mouse 365

The FM 365 Project is the result of Flying Mouse’s Project of doing one design per day for a whole year! Every week there are 7 new products available! These 7 new products are able for a quick pre-sale at a lower price for the entire week and once the week ends there are 7 newer products to replace them, and so on.

Mark Weaver

Mark Weaver is another designer/illustrator that decided to design something every day for one year. He has a plethora of styles in his designs.

Philip Tseng

Philip Tseng has a unique style that he implemented into his daily designs. He chose a theme of fruits and vegetables and each day he designed something that started with a different letter of the alphabet.

Jonas Buntenbruch – DONE: Daily Design Workout

DONE was the personal daily design workout of Jonas Buntenbruch for 2008.
Every day he flexed his design skills by creating one piece in 30 to 60 minutes. The presented works range from scrap and sketches to photos, typographic experiments and random creative designs.

A New Year’s Resolution

Now that you’ve read interviews and seen some strong examples, I hope that you’re now inspired and ready to start on this wonderful daily design adventure. I want to propose a new year’s resolution to you: design something every day.

Each time you design something, you can submit it for everyone to see. Simply tweet the design along with #daily365 and everyone will be able to see your project. By the way, if you’re just starting out as a designer, this is an effective way to build your portfolio. The Smashing Editorial Team will monitor all submissions and present them in posts here at Smashing Magazine, every now and again. I guarantee that at the end of the year, you’ll be able to look back and say that, because of the daily design project that you completed, you’re a better and more well-rounded designer.

So who’s up for the challenge?

(ll)

© Jad Limcaco for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
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There’s very little to stop anyone becoming a freelancer. In a highly competitive and, in most places, saturated market, you need to make sure your reputation as a freelancer is well-managed and continues to grow. It’s very possible to get a good reputation without being the best in the world, and it’s even easier to lose that reputation. In this article, we’ll explore 15 habits that are essential in helping freelancers effectively safeguard and grow their reputation, and we’ll also discuss how to make freelancing work for you. The habits are split into 3 sections:

• Marketing
• Business and time
• Specific business areas

Marketing and Relationships

1. The Presentation Habit

Your website should be at the centre of your marketing strategy. It’s where people go to see who you are, what you’re about, whether you know what you’re talking about and what work you have done. It’s your silent 24/7 salesman, and it needs to be right. Fortunately, what your website needs is straightforward:

• Well-presented work with a good description of the roles you played
• A brief history of who you are and why you’re where you are
• Contact details that are easily accessible
• Content that is continually tweaked, added to, and updated

Other than that, you can go wherever you want with your own website — and so you should. Personality is key. Some great examples:

Elliot Jay Stocks carries a very clear message on his site

Ian Coyle goes for pure simplicity

Jason Santa Maria goes the whole hog with a new design for each post — a lot of work but he stands out from the crowd as a result

2. The Networking Habit

They say that within 6 degrees of separation, everyone knows everyone. So you need to make sure that everyone within your 1st degree (i.e. people you know), know exactly what you do. It needs to be exact as well. If you’re a developer you don’t want people saying you’re a website designer, and so on. Your current network of friends, family, and associates are your free word-of-mouth marketing – so get them talking about you right now.

Once this is done, your network needs to be extended and enhanced. Register with any social networking platforms that can work for you — LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Within those places, start getting into the right circles. On LinkedIn you may join some appropriate discussion groups that are either local or skill based. On Twitter you may start tweeting and including appropriate hashtags so more people can see your tweet on that subject.

There are many ways to network and connect with people, so it’s crucial that a freelancer not be afraid to talk to people and share information and contacts. Learn the networking habit and get yourself known.

3. The Niching Habit

Freelancers can get into the habit of not only finding their niche, but creating niches. A niche in this case is an area in your overall field of work in which you particularly specialise. If you’ve become very good at creating websites for golf courses, for example, then that’s a great niche.

The reasons having a niche is valuable are simple: It’s easier to become an expert in a niche. It’s easier to sell to other prospects within that niche as they can see what you have done before. As an expert in that niche you can charge a premium for your depth of knowledge.

The key to this habit is to proactively build your own niches. Seek out profitable areas in which you can work and concentrate on building niches.

4. The Pricing Habit

How you price your projects can easily be the difference between winning and not winning some work. Your pricing needs to be transparent at all times and should be agreed upon up front. Things go wrong when hidden costs appear later on. Clients like to know how much they’re paying, when they’re going to pay it, and what they’re paying for. So make it clear from the start.

Second part of the pricing habit — protect yourself. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in winning a project that you forgot some simple rules. If you have never worked with a client before, ask for a small percentage of the fee before you do any work. At this early stage, you won’t know whether they will pay! Reduce your bad debt by either only working for clients you trust or having some remuneration first.

Third part of the pricing habit — be flexible. Make sure you find a way to make the commercial deal a win-win for both parties. This could be:

• Monthly payments (regular cash flow over the course of the project)
• Payment when you hit certain project milestones (e.g. project performance)
• Deposit and balance on completion (best avoided for cash flow reasons)
• Possible exchange of services

5. The Growth Habit

It’s been claimed that it costs seven times as much in resources to acquire a new client than it does to grow an existing one. So the growth habit is about proactively looking at your clients in detail so you can discover new ways to help them.

One practical way to do this is to cross reference. Write all your services across the top of an excel sheet, then put your clients down the left hand column. Now place an X in the box where a service you have done matches a client. The boxes without X’s are potential growth opportunities and should all be explored before spending too much energy trying to acquire new clients.

Business and Time

This section is less screenshot, more serious business.

6. The time management habit

Lacking good habits in time management could cause you to over-committing yourself at certain times, which could lead to:

• Missing a deadline and disappointing a client
• Producing sloppy or inaccurate work
• Causing yourself stress because of the pressure to get everything done

The solution to this is an effective planning mechanism. Estimate how long the work will take you, then add a buffer to your estimation. This will ensure that, if it does take longer, it won’t eat into other projects. A 50% buffer works well. That may sound like a lot, but if you go over by 25% and then there are additional client emendations, you’ll need it. Once you have the total time allocation, add it to your diary. Now, here’s the crucial part: Do not move it, shrink it, or change it in any way. If you have to do something urgent that will interfere with that scheduled work, make sure the time is reallocated elsewhere.

A simple calendar application like Google calendar or Outlook can help you plan your time as a freelancer. If you struggle with where all that time goes and want to get serious about making improvements in time management, something like Rescue Time can really help.

7. The Flexibility Habit

Being flexible, responsive, and effective at what you do will allow you to handle unexpected situations, such as when a client contacts you with urgent needs and expects you to help. Having set aside time in advance for such urgent situations will ensure that you earn a reputation as a flexible worker.

What happens if nothing comes up to fill that pre-allocated time? Well you might finish that other project early and can add something special. What happens if the whole day is taken up by urgent project? No problem, you had already planned this might happen, so you won’t let anyone down.

Of course you’re not going to be able to foresee everything, but a certain level of flexibility will allow you to please your clients and be relatively free of stress because of time constraints.

8. The Honesty Habit

Agencies will not use you again if you let a client down, and your chance of repeat work is slim to none. In the same way, you should not over commit your time, but stay within your capabilities. We all need to stretch ourselves on new projects and learn new techniques and practices — that’s not what this is about. This is about promising to do a task in a specified time when, in actuality, you don’t have any idea whether it’s feasible or not. Above all else, people appreciate honesty. You’re better off being honest about whether you can handle a project rather than taking the risk of letting them down.

So how can you grow your skills and help your clients? By being honest and asking some good questions:

• “I don’t think this project is right for me. I don’t have much experience in [insert technology here]“
• “I can really help you with the [insert service here] part of this project, but I know another freelancer who can help with it. Would you be happy if I managed the project for you but outsourced this other work?”
• “I’ll need more information before I know how long this project will take. Would you mind if I spent a couple of hours doing some research so I can give you an accurate timescale?”

9. The Over-Delivery Habit

Do not deliver your projects early. Sound strange? It’s not. If you deliver early, there’s a possibility the client will think you overcharged, and may expect part of his payment to be returned. They might also expect future work to be completed ahead of schedule, which may set a bad precedent.

Instead, use the extra time to focus on whizz-bang elements — those extra bits of polish and creativity that will gain you the reputation you deserve and let you grow. For a designer this might mean spending time adding nice touches to your graphics; for a developer, it could mean more time to implement a cool piece of JavaScript to replace the plain functionality you originally settled for. The “over-deliver” will earn you a solid reputation, whereas finishing early could get you into trouble.

10. The Business Advice Habit

Although as a freelancer you’re skilled at what you do, don’t assume you’ll be able to do your accounts and bookkeeping, fill in tax returns, produce an invoice or write a proposal all by yourself.

Seek regular advice from respected professionals to help you with these aspects of running your business. This might include speaking with people who run their own operations and understand the ins and outs better than you do. Learn as much as possible from their experiences and mistakes.

Specific Business Areas

What’s out there to help you run your business and what areas do you need to focus on? In this section, we’ll discuss some applications that have earned reputations for helping freelancers do their jobs and be more professional.

11. The Email Habit

Email is toxic. As a freelancer you can easily become what’s commonly known as a busy fool. You might spend a significant part of your day just sending and receiving email without ever getting any work done. Instead, be in the habit of controlling email, and not letting it control you.

To do this you need to:

• Turn off all the little reminders, message counts, and other indicators that may catch your eye
• Configure your email client to run a “send and receive” at longer intervals, maybe as little as once per hour
• Set aside blocks of time in the day to deal with all email, then switch it off; if something is urgent, people will use the phone
• Use the ‘touch it once’ philosophy; fully read and deal with every email you open, instead of half-reading some and coming back to them later

12. The Project Management Habit

Some clients will want you to fit in with their processes, while others will not enforce this. You need to have very clear processes for how you start working with a client and start a new project. What questions do you ask a new client? Where do you store the information they tell you? How do you keep track of how close the deadline is? Where do you store all the files they send you?

Email is not sufficient for this! Things will get lost, forgotten or overlooked. You might prefer cardboard folders or ring binders or whatever works for you — but use something and stick to your own system. There are applications like Basecamp and activeCollab that can help with this.

Basecamp is used by many to manage their projects at low cost

activeCollab is a source code editable alternative to Basecamp

13. The Research & Development Habit

Sounds like a big company thing to do but R&D is essential to a good freelance operation. You need to be ahead of the curve or at the very least on it to be servicing your clients most effectively. Be in the habit of investing time for research and development. Expand your current skills and learn new ones.

Never designed a billboard before? That’s development.

Don’t know which email marketing system might help your clients? That’s research.
(Campaign Monitor and MailChimp are good options).

Set aside time every week to do R&D. Build up a list of blogs that feed you new thinking and new ideas. Listen to informative podcasts (Boagworld is a good one).

14. The Sales and CRM Habit

How can you allocate your time and resources and figure out whether or not you need to be hunting for new work or concentrating on servicing current clients? You should know at any given time what your work pipeline looks like, how likely is it all to materialize, and at roughly what value.

There are various applications out there to help, such as Salesforce, SugarCRM (open source edition), as well as 37signals’ popular Highrise.

Highrise is used by many to manage their sales and leads at low cost

15. The Accounts Habit

Making sure you have any easy way to produce, send, and track invoices is essential, as is getting into the habit of running your accounts professionally, because such habits will ensure regular cash flow. Applications like Blinksale, Freshbooks or Simply Invoices can help formalise the accounts side of your business and give a good professional feel to how you operate. Clients will need invoices for their accounts — make sure they’re not hand written or unbranded.

Blinksale can help you create, send, and track professional invoices

Further Resources

• Freelance UK
  Host of articles to help freelancers.
• BestWebGallery
  Inspiration for those times of creative block.
• Elance
  A place to get freelance work – referral work is better though!

About the author

Rob Smith is the digital director of Blueleaf – helping clients with their digital needs from their website to email marketing to analytics. He also writes in his own blog on digital media and ecommerce

(ll)

© Rob Smith for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
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SVET is web based project management system, that helps you to organize your work. Basically it’s an online notebook which you can use to store the information for your projects. It enables you to track your working time and communicate with your team and clients. You can also make detailed reports of what you’ve done for a specific period of time.

http://svetsoft.com

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As you already heard, the Palm Pre Plus is coming at some point in the near future which means webOS developers should be even more interested in creating ingenious applications for future Palm smartphones.
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Read the rest of Palm Project Ares SDK Beta Open to the Public [Palm Project Ares SDK Environment Is Completely Web-Based]

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From the moment I saw qooxdoo, I felt they had an excellent & very polished set of functionality as well as insanely rich UI controls but I never took the time to look at the commitment that the team had put into this project. So when qooxdoo project lead Andreas Ecker buzzed me to tell me that the framework had reached 1.0, I decided to take a peak at the history of the project (at least in terms of first available downloads). I looked at the QooxDoo download repo and was surprised by how mature this project is. When you consider that the project was first registered on SourceForge in January, 2005 and made their first available version of qooxdoo on May 9th, 2005, it shows that an incredible amount of effort & dedication has gone into cultivating the project and framework.

The results are very obvious as qooxdoo v1.0 sports one of the richest feature sets of any JavaScript framework. Apart from the standard JavaScript syntactical sugar and DOM traversal/manipulation capabilities found in all JS libs, qooxdoo’s suite of UI controls are outstanding and are comparable to any of the best UI libs available. Looking at their showcase of demo apps, you can see how appealing the controls & layout capabilities are.

And it really does focus on the “framework” aspect of things with support for internationalization, dependency resolution, integrated unit & functional testing, build management and more.

There is much more offered in qooxdoo, however, than just a large set of widgets, powerful layout managers and virtually unlimited theming capabilities. As a full-fledged application framework, it comes with an integrated, platform-independent tool chain that covers the entire range of app development and deployment – code validation, JS compiling and linking, compression and optimization, just to name a few. Other built-in tools allow for easy unit testing, automated GUI testing, searchable API reference, or cross-browser debugging a la Firebug. Mastering large-scale JavaScript applications is greatly facilitated by build process features such as automatically combined images (”sprites”) or transparently breaking up an app into various parts that are loaded on-demand.

So congratulations to the qooxdoo for reaching a major milestone in your project. The methodical approach for your releases has certainly paid off as qooxdoo v1.0 looks great!

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Palm says Ares is the first complete set of integrated mobile development tools hosted entirely in the browser. The goal is to make it easier and faster to create Palm webOS apps.

The Palm Developer Network Blog provides more details. “Ares streamlines the entire app development process, from design, to coding, to debugging, to app submission. You can preview apps right in the browser, and—with the Palm Mojo SDK installed—it takes just one click in Ares to launch your app in the emulator or on a webOS device. When you’re ready to distribute your app, one more click lets you package and download your app for submission to the App Catalog.”

“We invite you to join us in Project Ares: try it out, build some apps, and give us your feedback as we work to make our vision a reality. To use Ares, you just need to register for a free Palm developer community account. Once you’ve registered, just log in at ares.palm.com and you’ll be off and running. You’ll also find docs and a tutorial there to help you get off on the right foot.”

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Now if only that were true, right?

The truth – and I think most creatives will agree – is that the creative juices that lubricate and facilitate the flow of unique and effective ideas sometimes dries up and you need, from time to time, to refill and ferment those juices before it’s once again ready for public consumption.

One of the most effective ways to inspire creativity, I’ve found, is to do some self-initiated work; its what’s best described as personal design projects.

Whether it’s just sketches, creating a poster, or designing a super awesome personal blog, there’s something to be said about doing things for yourself that really brings out your creativity and nurtures your passions.

Why should you work on personal design projects regularly when you get paid do it for other people?

1. Personal design projects are challenging

Challenging is good. It’s challenging because whether you’re a designer, an illustrator, or any other kind of creative, you’re more an artist than anything else. And if artists have taught us one thing throughout history, it’s that we’re never happy.

There’s always more you can do. There’s always perfection to strive for. This is good and bad.

It’s good because it challenges you to produce your best work. It’s bad because with nobody to tell you stop, you’re more likely to keep working to the detriment of your project. The key is to know when your work is the best it can be.

Working on personal design projects is great practice when it comes to testing the limits of your work. It gives you a chance to set goals for yourself even if you think you should keep going. It teaches you about your own work ethic and can test your self-restraint.

At the end of the day, this practice will be valuable in delivering not only on a client’s deadline, but delivering your best work. 

2. They will help you find your personal tastes

Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of what you find interesting when you’re working for someone else. You always make design decisions for the good of the client’s project. In many instances, it may even be choices that you’d never accept if it were entirely up to you.

Doing work for yourself allows you to focus on what you like since you don’t have to take orders from bosses, clients, and managers about what they would like – or need – you to do. This is very liberating and can propel your work in directions you never thought you could go.

3. They let you reexamine your design style

When you’re working on your own project, you’re not merely concerned about what you will get out of it but also about what goes into it.

Sometimes with client deadlines fast approaching, all you can think about is getting your work done and not disappointing your client. The choices you make rarely get a second glance. This is good for your client (because you didn’t miss the deadline) but bad for you as an artist.

It’s important to slow down and scrutinize your work. Are you improving? Are you getting lazier, opting for easier design methods? Is your work behind the times?

No matter what other things you have going on in your work life, self-initiated work helps you develop your inner artist.

4. They’re opportunities to explore new techniques

If you’re a working creative, it’s easy to get sucked into trends and creating stuff that sell. After all, we all have to eat. There’s nothing wrong with trends. However, doing work for yourself lets you step out of the industry’s influences, giving you a chance to explore new techniques and alternative options for your work.

You can collaborate with other artists. You can work with new tools. You can try other forms of media. In other words, you can take bigger risks without any real repercussions to the work that pays your bills.

The only real investment you make in your personal design project is the time it takes to complete it. Furthermore, at the end of your project, you’re more likely to come out of it with new lessons learned and new tools to put in your creative arsenal. Win-win. 

5. They let you diversify your portfolio

It’s important to put some personal design work in your portfolio. It shows employers that beyond what you’re able to do for your clients, you have your own style and your own thoughts on design.

When you work in a certain field for an extended period, your work will likely reflect the demands of your client. Pretty soon, all your work will start looking like everyone else’s work. One way to distinguish yourself is through your self-initiated work since it’s work you’ve created to consciously step out of the regular grind.

6. Personal design projects are fun!

Sometimes it’s easy to forget why you chose to be a creative: it’s fun, or at least, it’s supposed to be fun.

However, if you’re a working creative, more often than not, all you hear is "change this", "delete that" and "make this bigger" (that’s what she said – beat you to it, ha!).

The critics telling you that you need to do better can sometimes kill all the fun to be had in this type of profession. But that’s the nature of the beast. That’s why self-initiated work is important. If anything, personal design projects remind you that, amidst all the finicky clients and bastardization of your designs, you chose this profession because it gave you joy and fostered your passions.

What do you think about personal design projects?

What are other benefits for working on  personal project? Are personal design projects a waste of your time? Do you set aside some time to work on personal projects?

Link to your favorite personal design projects

In the comments section, link to, and talk about, your favorite personal projects.

Related Content

• How to Design for Your Worst Client: You.
• Feedback. The Creativity Killer.
• 7 Things Web Designers Hate Hearing from Clients
• Related categories: Project Management and Graphic Design

About the Author

Isaac Gube is a photographer, philosopher, illustrator, adventurer, designer, and whatever else he chooses to be on any given day. You can connect with him on Twitter @IAMTHEGUBE or visit his Flickr page to see some of his photos.

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Project Ares is the first mobile development environment hosted entirely in a browser, lowering the barriers for web developers to jump into mobile development.

I am incredibly excited to see the beta release of Project Ares which has been developed by Matt McNulty and his top notch developers at Palm. I am honored to be working with them.

This project is so exciting as the team has managed to kill a couple of birds with one stone. Creating webOS applications has always been simple for Web folk, but with the layout builder you have a UI up and running in an incredibly short order. I am also very proud that we put our money where our mouth is by developing our tools on the Web platform itself. All you need to get going is a Web browser.

The integration features are fantastic too. You can take your application and preview it live, run it in the emulator, or send it all the way to a device, right from the browser!

There are many great features:

Drag and drop Interface Builder

The UI builder is pretty great. It has a very rich layout system that shows how the constraints of a mobile environment allow you to make life a LOT easier for developers.

There are several layout panels that control how widgets are laid out:

• VBox Panel: The default behaviour. Widgets are laid out in a vertical stack
• HBox Panel: Same as VBox but horizontally
• Absolute Panel: Position widgets exactly where you want them, but watch out for orientation and for supporting multiple screen sizes!
• Combining panels: You can recursively embed panels within panels to get you the advanced layout that you need
• Scroller: a special panel that will scroll (default is off)
• Drawer/Collapsable: show and hide internal content

Debugging

Fancy a step through debugger? Now you have one. Easily and visually debug your code in real-time.

Code Editing

I am also proud that Ares uses the Bespin code editor, and this is the first time we have seen the debugging integration at work. I want to thank the Bespin community for continuing to deliver a web based code editor and look forward to see that evolve along with Ares. I do want to make it crystal clear that Matt and his team did this work, as some will incorrectly surmise that Ben and I went over to Palm to do this, and we didn’t. We are incredibly supportive of the work that Matt and his team have done though and love working with them.

Log viewer

webOS has a log system and the built in log viewer is fantastic.

Source Control

It is important to be able to get your files in and out of cloud based editors, and VCS support is available with more coming.

One click access to a lot

Create a new project. Create a new scene in an application. All available from a click in the browser.

Drag and drop file upload

The bottom left area can be a zone for you to upload a file and have it zoom to the cloud.

Preview apps

Because webOS is a Web runtime based on WebKit and V8, and the Mojo framework sits on top of it, you can preview your applications just in a Web browser. Think about that for a sec We don’t mock out the services…. but you can get your UI just right, and when you are ready you can quickly deploy to the webOS emulator or device!

Can you tell I am excited? I know how Web developers need better tools, and I think this is a great one for mobile development. This is just the beginning too. There are many features that will make life even easier for us developers. In fact, if you have suggestions please join us for a chat!.

Finally, check out how well the app runs. It has surpassed my performance expectations, especially considering how rich the feature set is. Ben and I created Bespin to see if the Web was ready for a desktop class application of that nature. Ares has stepped up and gone even further to prove what the Web can do. I have a great feeling about 2010 as we see the fruits of browser innovation, increased support of HTML5 features, and great work that you all do.

Disclosure: Ben and I work for Palm

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5pm features include:

• Sharing projects/tasks, notes and files – one virtual location for your whole team.
• Two-way e-mail integration – generate email notifications and answer them directly from your email.You can even create tasks from emails!
• Time tracking – log the hours spent on tasks and generate reports.
• Customizable Reports – slice and dice your data into different views then export it to CSV or print it out.
• Interactive Timeline – a Gantt-style view with simple drag-and-drop editing.

This list goes on and on: RSS and iCalendar support, security roles, hidden projects/tasks, European/US date/time formats, Time Zones, advanced search, project/task cloning, auto-archive, task dependencies, Google Docs connection, 256-bit SSL encryption, etc. 5pm looks like a pretty mature application and has been evolving for years. And if all of that is not enough – developers will be glad to know that 5pm also offers an open API.

5pm interface is highly customizable – each user can adjust the information they need to see. The dual-panel layout is easy to navigate and makes a good use of monitor space (widescreens in particular). It also auto-refreshes with new data, so you can just keep 5pm open in another window for an up-to-date view.

The Timeline is very handy if you need a bird’s-eye view of your projects and tasks, and you can easily re-schedule them by simply dragging them around.

5pm Mobile version is fast and offers many of the web features. Works on iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry Bold, Palm Pre, etc.

5pm also has a Time Tracker desktop widget available – you can track your time and then log it directly to 5pm – works on PC, Mac and Linux!

PC World describes 5pm as “easy for a project management neophyte to understand” and Autodesk characterizes it as “Straight forward and easy to use”. The only way to see if it fits you is to give it a try.

The subscription plans start at just $18/month. Each of them supports unlimited clients, so you can use it as your portal for interaction with them no matter where they are, 5pm is available in a dozen languages!

If you want to find more about 5pm, a quick 2-minute Video Introduction is a good place to start.

But the best way is just to open a free trial account and start using it – the registration takes about 10 seconds and doesn’t require a credit card.

Give it a try today and see if it helps you get more done by 5pm – make sure you post us back your comments!

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