Problems with my current brand

Logo – I used to love my logo, now not so much. I’m not quite sure what’s happened from then till now, but I think I’m looking for something a little simpler.

Website isn’t dynamic – Since I created my current website my skill set has increased greatly. A few things that I’ve added to my belt is some php, wordpress as cms, and a bit of jquery. I want to create a dynamic website using these new found tools.

More social integration – Right now my website is behind a few years mainly because it doesn’t have any kind of social integration i.e. twitter, facebook, digg, and all those others. I use these things but don’t have a way for people to know about them when they visit my website.

Overall visual appeal – My website right now is too dark, I want to get away from that with my new design. I want to make it look more professional but also let it show more of my personality, maybe showcase a bit of my illustration skills.

Inspiration

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been inspired by a few designers websites, so here they are:

After seeing these don’t you want to redesign your website!?

I’ve been designing a lot of websites for authors that are on goodreads and one thing that I always like to do is show more social networking on their websites. I haven’t found any good icons for goodreads so I made some. I hope you enjoy them!

Download!

Sell Stock

Everyone now a days owns a pretty decent camera and can take nice pictures and upload them fast. Instead of having them sit on your computer collecting e-dust (?) why not see if any one of the image stock sites will take them. Some of them have fairly high standards but some of them don’t. Basically though if you know the rule of thirds anyone can make a nice stock photo. It’s nice to be able to upload a photo, forget about it and be able to make some money on it.

• iStockphoto
• graphicriver
• graphic leftovers

Design/Sell T-shirts and Other Stuff

Web design is a very creative field of work but sometimes you just want to design something that you like and not have to worry about what your clients think so If you’re feeling a bit more creative you can design t-shirts. There are a couple options, you can enter design contests and win prizes like on threadless or you can design anything you want and put it out there for sale and make money off of commission like on zazzle.

• Threadless
• Zazzle
• Red Bubble

Design/Sell Templates

We are web designers so I’m sure you, as I do, have some unfinished projects lying around or designs that didn’t make it to the cutting board. Why not try to sell some of those. You’ll have to make it more user friendly (or not) but it’s a good way to make some cash out of those unfinished projects. In my opinion it’s not worth it to create templates from scratch and sell them to these places because if you think about it I’d sell a template for say $750 but they will sell it for $10 plus you usually only get a percentage of that let’s say it’s %60 so really you are getting $6 per each one sold so you’d have to sell 125 templates to make up for what you’d sell normally. Just my opinion though.

• Themeforest
• Theme Galaxy
• Template Monster

Design/Sell Fonts

This is something you can do but you have to have a bit of a different skill set to do this. Meaning you’ll need to learn a couple of new things but if you’re into typography this can be lucrative for you.

• Linotype
• ITCFonts

Search Job Boards

Job boards are not only a decent way to get new web design clients but also to do odds and ends jobs. Some easy quick ways to make a buck through job boards are:

• ebook formatting
• banner design
• simple website fixes
• button design
• photo touch up
• and much more

Here are some job boards that I frequent:

• oDesk
• Get a Freelancer
• Bid Hire

This is one of the most useful generators I’ve come across recently. Finally a generator that will create CSS sprites automatically, no more loading images in photoshop and piecing them together (although I love photoshop). This makes it quick and painless to reduce the number of http requests on the page for smaller images.

I’ve been trying to figure this out, maybe somebody can help me.

For most freelance web designers designing comes easy. That’s what we’re here for…to design! It would be nice if that was all we had to do, but it’s not. Sure we get to be our own bosses but we also have to be entrepreneurs, accountants and much much more.

An important aspect of freelancing is deciding how much to charge for web design. Here’s my question:

Is it okay to charge differently depending on who wants your services?

Let me explain. Say I charge $30 per hour on average (I don’t actually charge by the hour buy I make sure it comes out to that) because I’ve calculated that’s how much I need to live off of plus expenses. Is it okay to charge more for bigger companies and less for say an individual? Or should I keep it a flat rate?

My moral standing on this is that for most individuals this might be breaking their wallet where as it won’t for a big company. But another factor in this would be that most design work comes from referrals from past jobs. Individuals know other individuals. Big companies know other big companies.

So more specifically my question is should I change my rates depending on the wallet of the client in hopes of any work and pick and choose or should I keep my rates at a comfortable level and potentially not get a lot of work?

Discuss.

DesignBump:

Just found this website this week that lets designers submit your articles and “bump” them up if they like them. I believe this has been the thing behind my boost in traffic, so I’ll be continuing to use it to get myself out there.

Oh yes, it comes with a cat too!

Equipment:

Micro Velocity PC with LG screen Windows 7 OS
uses: Gaming, IE web design troubleshooting

Dell Laptop with Linux OS
uses: Some serious programing!

iMac with Leopard OSX and Wacom tablet
uses: All my designing goes on here along with web surfing.

Oh yes, that poster in the background..I’m not supposed to talk about it. :)

I love my set up. I get a good couple hours of it to myself while my husband is at work as long as my cat isn’t sitting on the keyboard that I’m using (she has to use the one I’m at, seriously?)

So what does your workspace look like?

CSS Inspiration

For those days when you can’t quite figure out what you want to do, it’s nice to look at other people’s work and who knows what will trigger your muse! Just be careful not to be a copy cat.

CSS Remix

CSS Import

CSS Envy

Nice Stylesheet

CSS Tricks + Tutorials

As a web designer there are always new tricks that you can learn or how to do that new trend that everyone’s talking about. No matter how skilled you are in CSS there are always new things to learn or people who know how to do what you do better. So take a look at some of these.

CSS Play

Dynamic Drive

W3 Schools CSS

CSS Sticky Footer

I personally love this one and use it all the time!

CSS Menu Maker

Feeling a bit lazy today? This is a great site to make custom css menus if you just don’t feel like doing the code yourself or if you don’t know how to you can always learn from it.

CSS Organization

A rule of thumb for writing up CSS is to be organized, not only for your sake but for others. You can save a lot of that time trying to find that selector or property if you keep it clean and alphabetized. Here are some awesome CSS organization websites.

First here is a style sheet that I use all the time, but I can’t for the life of me remember where I got it, hopefully it will help you.

download the style sheet

Clean CSS

This will often cut down my css file quite a bit and is really useful for keeping your selectors and properties looking the same.

Primer CSS

Format CSS

Style Neat

CSS Layout Templates

I often find myself using the same layouts over and over again so being able to have a good layout template helps me save some time and get started on the real stuff.

Free CSS Layouts

Iron Myers Layouts

Layout Gala

Color

These are a few resources that can help when it comes to choosing color schemes.

W3 Schools Html Color Names

Colour Lovers

Color Schemer

Image Pallete

IE conditional comments are a way to selectively “comment out” any portion of your page in a way that only IE can interpret or the other way around.

Here’s a general example of what you would see in your code:

<!–[if (conditional) IE (version)]>
comments here
<![endif]–>

Conditional variables:

!        The “not” operator.
lt       The “less than” operator.
lte     The “less than or equal to” operator.
gt      The “greater than” operator.
gte    The “greater than or equal to” operator

example:

<!–[if lt IE 7]>
<link href=”style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
<![endif]–>

In this example style.css would be used on any browser less than IE7.

Here’s a few that have helped me out today:

How to Add Twitter to your blog (step-by-step)

This one was great! I hate the clunky look of the widget twitter generates for you and wanted a simple way to add / customize it for a website. This is so simple, two plugs and you’re done.

Simple Double Quotes

I was having trouble figuring out how to have double quote image to line up with text. This tutorial provided an easy fix to my hour of frustration.