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6 Things To Consider For A Better Web Design Career Posted: 18 Jan 2012 01:00 PM PST For most of us web design started as a passion or a part-time job. For many of us it started before we turned 18, but most of us ended up working full-time in an agency or as freelance web designers and developers and will probably continue doing so for years and years to come. But being a designer can take a great deal of time, with multiple clients to please, working in an environment that moves fast and changes even faster, where we have to learn new skills over and over again, market ourselves and even find clients on a monthly basis if we don’t work in an agency. As with any other career, web design has its own challenges and they arise all the time for us, even if we are experienced or well-known. It can be a difficult client to work with, an impossible deadline or a bad example of outsourcing, it doesn’t really matter. Unfortunately these things can’t be avoided, but to ensure you enjoy a better career anyway I created a list with some tips for all of you. Success only comes if you work smarter and more efficiently, not necessarily more than you do now. It will not be possible to pull all nighters or work 36 hours straight in 20 years anymore, your body will just not be able to handle it. You will end up burning out and will start hating your job and career choice. Therefore you have to reconsider the way you work; design and development are careers for organized and smart people. Not that we do something incredibly special, but let’s face it, there are more designers that don’t manage it than the ones who do and enjoy success – it is definitely not easy. 1. Be organized This should be the first new rule of your career. You can only work more efficiently and smarter by being organized. Everything from your working hours and sleep to breaks and time for a personal life. Being organized or becoming organized is difficult and requires time and effort. We try to focus more on deadlines and projects (which are short-term) than on improving the way we work (which is long-term and more efficient). If you just can’t handle both of them, take a break from design for a month and organize your life. Catch up with your bills, see everybody in the family, get out with all your friends and handle anything that has been causing you stress. Then start being organized. Keeping yourself and your schedule organized is crucial. Image by tome213 Create and use a schedule, this will allow you to avoid a chaotic life. It is not important what kind of system you use, the most important thing is to actually have one – and to rigidly respect it no matter what. Actually, this part of the article is focusing more on freelancers than on agency employees and this is simply because the first have to manage their own schedule, while the second already have a schedule imposed by their companies. You decide what your schedule going to look like. You know what you want to start with and at what time, although I do not think that starting after 9 is beneficial. On a normal, 8 hour work day  you will finish at 5pm, which might be a bit too late if you need time for other activities such as running, family meetings, working out or seeing a football game. E-mails with new tasks might appear throughout the day, the best way of dealing with them is ignoring and revising them at the end of the day, when the work you planned to do is already done. Otherwise you will end up reading e-mails and not delivering the projects on time. Having a schedule is more important than you think - stick with it! Image by biewoef Another tip is to take 30 minutes at the beginning of each day to read e-mails, plan ahead and get rid of everything that might concern you. Then just start working. At the end of the day take another 30 minutes to read and write e-mails, send milestone reports and other work related emails. Sure, you lose an hour a day, but being organized is important and this hour you use for things other than work will pay off long-term. You will notice that you will not be concerned with new e-mails after you get used to only reading your email twice a day. Incoming e-mails are only a distraction. Talking about distractions… 2. Get rid of Social Media Yes, of all of them. From Twitter and Facebook to e-mail and phone. By being surrounded by all of these you only risk getting distracted and doing anything besides your work. You might not realize it, but your probably use Facebook and Twitter even more than you think. Install one of the activity tracking applications you can find on the internet and you will be amazed at how much you use Facebook and Twitter. By only checking them from time to time, I spent almost two hours per day on Twitter, Facebook and e-mail combined. Quite a lot thinking I can bill a client $50 for two hours of development here in Denmark. Using this logic I lose around $250 per week by being distracted, which means $1000 per month. Quite a lot, I would say, there are freelancers out there not even earning $1000 per month. Facebook is one of the biggest distractions a freelancer can have. Image source Even if you think Facebook and Twitter are the biggest distractions, they are not. E-mail is the biggest and I can’t stress enough about how important it is to only check it in the morning and in the afternoon, before and after your working schedule. If you don’t believe me, use one of the tools recommended above and see for yourself. You might be afraid of missing important e-mail messages, but we all know most of our e-mails end up in spam anyway and very few of the others require immediate attention. You will not miss your dream job or even a big client if you answer at 4.30 instead of 12.30. You can also create filters and only get notices when a specific person sends you an e-mail, so you can act on it immediately if needed. Cleaning and managing your inbox is important too, because it will turn your one-hour habit of checking e-mails into a 30-minute one – and there’s half an hour more of earning money per day. Make sure your inbox is not cluttered, get rid of anything you don’t need and move all the spam to the spam folder – don’t forget to always block the sender and maybe even the sender’s domain. If spam is sent from there, you might not want to have anything to do with them anyway. 3. Use methods to concentrate Our bodies are not like computers. This means we can’t just inject food and energy drinks into it and expect it to work at its best all the time. Our bodies work according to how much energy we have. Therefore we can aid our schedule by using some well-known methods. Our energy, however, depends on our natural rhythm. This means some of us work better in the morning, while others are more energetic at night. And even under these circumstances, our concentration increases or decreases throughout the day. These methods I am talking about are ways of properly managing your energy so that you work as effectively as possible. The Pomodoro Technique is one of the best out there. It means you force yourself to work in short bursts. You set a timer to 25 minutes and during the 25 minutes the only thing you do is work without being distracted at all. Just work. After the 25-minute cycle take a five minute break and continue with another sprint afterwards. After four cycles take a longer break. If The Pomodoro Technique does not fit your working style, then try something else. Use the morning and the first hours of work for the more demanding jobs – this is when you have the most energy – and then keep the easier tasks for later in the day. You don’t really feel like coding, but would like to read something, save the reading for later since it isn’t as demanding as coding is. There is nothing wrong with taking naps after lunch either, just don’t take long ones. Half an hour should be enough for your body to rest and to give you enough energy for finishing the work day. We know that once you are done working, the energy just comes back out of the blue. And if this doesn’t help and you still feel tired, then it’s time for… 4. Working out and exercising Yes, this is always a way to get rid of the tiredness. I am not saying you have to work out until your muscles get sore. Go out and take a short run, do some push-ups (I love this one, that one or the other one) or just move around the house for few minutes. Just moving your muscles for a short amount of time will give you back some energy and will make you active again. Exercise during your breaks - it will give your energy back. Image by Johhnyberg In general, having a healthy life style will do much more for your freelance career than you think. Only being healthy and managing to sleep well during the night will give you more energy than others have. Therefore you will be able to work for longer periods of time, avoid naps and be able to concentrate better. I’m not saying you should, but going and talking to a doctor about your situation might be good advice. See if you need some vitamins and if you do, don’t hesitate to take them. You might not feel a difference, but I am sure your body will. 5. Outsource if you can Outsourcing is one of the ways a freelance designer can take on a huge amount of work. Because you can’t do them all, having someone to help you might come in handy. If there are things that you hate doing or are just not good at, think of getting another freelancer to help you. It can be paying bills, invoicing, administrative tasks or even chasing clients. Get somebody who can find clients for you, this way you will never have to spend time on it. Find somebody to market you and the only thing you will have to worry about are your deadlines. Paying somebody else to handle some of your business is not wrong and is a very common practice these days. You can even charge the client a bit more and use that extra cash to pay someone to help you. There are so many virtual assistants out there that price will not be a problem at all – there are many of them who will do a fantastic administration job for a few dollars an hour. If you want to get more serious and hire other designers or developers to work with you, this means you are ready to create a small business and as long as it works for you, why not try it? 6. Reuse work Because time is important, it’s smart to “recycle” the products created before and use them again in new projects. You can save some time and stress and get a bit more free time and also get ahead of schedule. There is nothing wrong with using the same JavaScript snippet again, as long as it is developed by you. If you develop a really good default CSS stylesheet, reuse it every time you start a new project. Moreover, search for work on the internet which is available for free and make use of it. The three hours spared by using something free from the internet can be used for other projects or tasks. Reuse your previous work if you can - it will spare you time. Image by 7rains Lots of clients come and ask if I can develop a web page with a Content Management System. Well yes I can, WordPress is out there and it also takes only a few minutes to install. Why develop their own, when I can instead use the same amount of time to customize a theme for them? Reusing work you’ve previously done is a smart way of saving time and working more efficiently, and don’t forget, free stuff from the internet can help too. Conclusion It fascinates me how people choose web design for a career when they are young and so passionate about it, but when they get close to their 30′s start hating their job and are not motivated anymore. Success is one way of staying motivated and if you can follow the rules above, you will most likely achieve it. Pulling all-nighters is something you will have to do often and if your body can’t handle it, then you need to make sure you’re the most organized person you know so that you can complete your work and not need to pull all nighters. Being organized is one of the most important skills of a web designer in my opinion because I am sure not many of us can afford being otherwise for the following 20 years. Try to have a schedule and stick with it, it is important for short-term, but crucial for long-term. This is the only way you will be able to achieve success, stay motivated and have a better design career and a happier life. Now it’s your turn. What advice do you have for your fellow freelance web designers / developers?

12 Creative Web Applications for Creative People Posted: 18 Jan 2012 02:00 AM PST Photoshop is still one of the most complex photo editing tools out there. Though the web is loaded with Photoshop tutorials and people have become accustomed to using Photoshop, there is this section of digital art lovers that are afraid of Photoshop. Somehow it seems over stuffed with options. It was to win over this genre of end-user that various web-based applications popped up and slowly became famous. We have already covered plenty of such tools but somehow the list seems to be growing exponentially. This article will list some of the new (and some that were missed earlier) tools that make our lives exciting. I will start with web-based tools for designers and then include few A.V. based tools to keep you intrigued. 1. CloudCanvas CloudCanvas mostly targets the vector drawing based lovers. Every stroke of yours in CloudCanvas will become more like an object instead of just a pixel. This feature enables designers to scale their objects and give them the desired shape. It helps to expand the end-user’s level of thinking. CloudCanvas gives you the chance to animate your drawing and add effects to them. One can import ClipArt and other graphics to improve the end results. All-in-all CloudCanvas is one web-based application that will not leave you disappointed. 2. Flame Flame is for true artists. It is an experimental project of Peter Blaskovic who was born in 1975. His application, Flame, is one web-based application that can be used by designers to create wonderful results. Flame gives you the room to do whatever you want with a design and expand its horizons. It’s backed by a very easy to use GUI which makes your life a lot more easier. Dive into the world of Flame and be amazed by its capabilities. Let us know what you did with Flame. 3. Viscosity I haven’t seen a tool like Viscosity before. This tool lets you start with a simple set of colors which can later on be distorted to create effects that are simply jaw dropping. The end result generated by this tool is worth admiring.  If you are a believer of abstract art then Viscosity is just the best tool for you to use. Viscosity gives the end user the opportunity to move each pixel on the screen in order to fine tune the end result and also to give new meaning to a design. 4. PhotoCopa PhotoCopa is one application that will help you extract color information from any image super quick. The tool gives you the option to upload your own image or use Flickr to opt for the image that you need to analyze. PhotoCopa have their own online community of Color Lovers where one can showcase their choice of pallettes for display and appreciation. Remember, we also want to see your experiment so if you have anything interesting then the comment section below is all yours. 5. Odosketch Odosketch happens to be one of the cutest of all the applications that we are going through in this list. Odosketch focuses more on sketching images and replaying your art work. The amount of choices provided by Odosketch and the number of examples that are shared by other users are enough to inspire you to come up with something of your own. If it is unique and inspirational then you can publish that on Odosketch and let others admire your hard work. Browse the best sketches from the masters and draw some of your own. Do let us know what you sketched! 6. FotoFlexer FotoFlexer is one of the advanced web-based applications that expands the horizons of an end-user. This online digital photo editor comes loaded with advanced effects that were previously available only if you bought costly software. FotoFlexer runs on flash so you might be disappointed if you do not have flash on your machine. One can upload an image of any size in FotoFlexer and start editing it. FotoFlexer is designed to add multiple layers of an image with grace. The advanced features of FotoFlexer are all available for free which exponentially increases the value of this tool. 7. Picture2Life Picture2Life is another online photo editing tool that provides multiple features to keep you intrigued. Picture2Life smartly promotes some of the basic features that are part of this tool like creating collages, animating the uploaded photographs and performing basic edits. This tool is free and that makes it worth at least a shot. One has the opportunity to add various effects to their images like Fading Edges and various other effects to bring their images to life. Try the tool and let us know how effective it was in your quest for the ultimate photo editing tool. 8. LunaPic LunaPic is one of the very few HTML based image editing tools. Henceforth, don’t be surprised if you find the tool serving only a few very basic purposes. LunaPic will not be able to distinguish various layers in your image which is quite sad. It has a 4 MB restriction and the only reason it’s really on this list is because it can be run without flash, which is not the case with most of the web-based image editing tools that I am aware of. LunaPic can be used for some of its unique effects like the Fire effect and reflective water effect. Have fun using LunaPic. 9. Pixenate Pixenate is another old school HTML based photo editor that comes loaded with basic photo editing features. As Pixenate uses basic HTML so any browser will run Pixenate without any issues. You will not require flash to run Pixenate! This is one tool that can be used for quick photo editing and printing of the results. The maximum size of an image that can be uploaded to Pixenate is 10 MB which can be restrictive at times. Also, as expected, Pixenate does not support layers. Now, let us get a bit off track and discuss web-based tools that aren’t really for web designers but very important for us all, as music is the best medicine.  10. Indaba Music Mantis Indaba Music Mantis is one community of music producers which gives you the platform that can be used to smoothly remix some very famous artists and their best work. Mantis is actually the tool that does all this and is provided (and maintained) by Indaba. One can cut and edit sample sound files. Mantis provides the options to apply various sound effects to these cut files and comes up with astonishing results. Make them your cellphone’s ringtone if you like your work. 11. Skale Tracker Skale (not “Scale”) is one music based web application that will keep your engrossed for a long time. In this tool music is created by things called as trackers. The tracker is programmed to read data from input tables and then output music as per that data. Skale Tracker is one of the very few online trackers that will keep you busy. I had to close my browser window quickly because I did not want to get addicted. See if you are able do the same. 12. YouTube Editor How do you expect me to make a list of creative web-based applications and not include a YouTube video editing tool. It is customary just because of the popularity that YouTube has achieved. The online YouTube Editor can be used to add YouTube videos and add various soundtracks to your videos. YouTube editor comes loaded with plenty of transitions that can be used in your own videos. The app is pretty easy to use as most of the features in YouTube Editor are drag and drop. Conclusion I agree that we have already covered many of the web based applications but as you can see, this list contained some of the applications that we had missed out before. Some of these applications might be old while few are new and very exciting. Share your experiences with these apps and let us know if you have any other tools that we can cover.

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