photo: Thaths

Now that we’re actually seeing the so predicted Climate Change, either we should be worrying or stepping into action.

But as freelancers, how do we go about that? how do we go green? what can we do?

Many would think that for us it’s just a matter gadgets and saving power with the tools that we use. Not that it isn’t true, but we’re already contributing by not using any transport at all to go to work because we stay home, right?

In reality, it’s not that easy. Buying green equipment doesn’t give you a “green freelancer badge”. Think of it this way: money doesn´t solve bad habits, does it?. Going green is rather about choosing a lifestyle that involves a bit more than purchasing trendy stuff.

If you’re concerned about your carbon foot print and you want to look after your planet, the best way to start is by adopting some new habits.

These are some of the things you can do to help:

At home

Photo: E. Marshall

• Replace all light bulbs for low consumption lights – It really made a difference at home. Needless to say, I don’t keeps all lights on at once.
• Don’t leave the telly on all day – Some freelancers enjoy having a show on while working. Fair enough, but there are times that you’re not really watching, like when you’re in the kitchen, bathroom or the phone. It does make a difference turning it off during those moments. Believe!
• Avoid taking ages while taking a bath – Ok, so you’re not gonna be late, but seriously, do we need to waste that much water?
• Don’t leave the water running if you’re not actually using it – If you’re washing your hands, plates or brushing your teeth, you don’t need water while scrubbing.

Shopping habits

Photo: TheGreenPages

• Switch to certified green cleaning products – If you’re lucky enough to find any of these available in your local supermarket, don’t think twice and go for them.
• Environment friendly packaging - I’ve switched to other brands just because they do have biodegradable boxes or containers. Now I can toss them in the bin with a clean conscience.
• Get refills instead of getting more bottles – This is convenient for cleaning products. For instance, let’s say disinfectants: you buy a first big bottle and refill it as many times as you need.
• Use reusable shopping bags instead of paper and plastic – Speaks by itself… Keeping plastic bags with the hope of future use, well it’s never gonna happen. I had accumulated so many, I could have built an Egyptian pyramid with them and still have a few left for something else.

Managing waste

Photo: M. Barros

• Separating and sorting rubbish into glass, papper, plastic, organic (don’t forget electronics) – This is one of the most important for me and it’s made quite a difference around the house. I’ve reduced my waste from 3 bags per week to 1.
• If you’re not sure how to classify your garbage – there are some great resources in the web: look for green communities, they can be really friendly and helpful. (check out takepart.com and zaproot.com)
• Keep separate bins for each kind – It’s cleaner and easier than piling things up in some corner.
• Recycling collection service – If there’s any in town find out where it is and how it works. Otherwise find out where your nearest recycling plant is and talk to them, they can give you a few choices or hints about where to find waste management providers or other similar services. I’ve done it, and I personally deliver all my recycling stuff to two different waste collection centres.
• Food! - This is tricky. Both preparing and eating a meal can produce a great deal of waste. For instance, all fruit and vegetable peelings, I put them in a little compost I’ve got in my backyard, where earthworms take care of the rest.
• Don’t mix meat, bones, and other cooked leftovers with your compost peelings or your place will be swarming with flies.

This is what I do: I try really hard to leave as little leftovers as I possibly can. But when there are a little, my dogs will gladly take care of them. They also love meat cuts and bones. Of course I feed them with proper dog food, but they like a small delicatessen from time to time. (My wife being an animal doctor, kind of helps too)

And if I end up having bread or biscuit leftovers, pigeons and other birds wipe everything in less than a minute. Oh yes, I live in the tropics and you wouldn’t believe the number of birds just on my block.
You could toss a pizza in the air and it would never come down again.
OK, so I’m exaggerating a bit.

Spread the green

Photo: A. Bahrudin (Babrosa)

You don’t have to be activist if it’s not your thing. It’s not like you have to gather in front of government buildings holding signs and everything.

But there is a lot we can do and a lot we can change by just paying attention to small details in our daily activities.

As freelancers, we get to interact with a lot of people, wether it’s colleagues or clients, we should take advantage of that and show off with pride our “green habits” and spread the word.

Don’t forget your gadgets of course, but keep this in mind: the things you do are far more helpful than the things you own.

What other ways do you think freelancers could help?

Photo:Emilie Eagan (Limonada)

Whenever we’re looking for moods, backgrounds and atmospheres for our design projects we usually run to our stash of inspiration resources for a quick slap to wake up our creativity and get things started.

Problem is, our source of inspiration get worn out too at some point. That’s why we need to renew our resources on a regular basis. Ok, so we do that already, we read blogs, we follow guys on Twitter and so on. Right?

There are such brilliant pieces of work you can find in the design community blogs, and so many interesting concepts and ideas that you can’t help it: just like shopping, you come back with a bunch of bags full of ideas for palettes, textures, layouts and that sort of thing.

But then, you keep doing this for some time, over and over again you’ll end up grabbing the same things. Wouldn’t it be great if we try something totally new? … say, from the offline world?

Think of it like eating out at a restaurant: your usual places have a wide variety of delights on the menu, but if you’re craving for some new taste you’ve never tried before, you go some place else. You must. Please do.

Fetch your camera, it’s time step away from your computer, and go out hunting.

1 Public Bathrooms

Photo: Darwin Bell

Whether it’s at a pub, an airport, a university, a train station, you name it. The older the better, specially if there is graffiti all over the place. But wait, your grandma’s bathroom can hold a few bizarre surprises as well. Bonus points if you manage to get in your local cat lady’s loo.

2 Inside of a bus, underground, taxi

Photo: (Trishhhh)

Some buses have many distinctive features and textures, it all depends on what part of town you are, or even what country you live in. You would not believe the things I’ve seen here. Anyways, in some places, drivers are allowed to have personal “ornaments” to decorate their working space, you can see this particulary in taxis. The underground (if there’s one near you) has its own feeling to it. Not only the train itself but the whole setting can provide with a rich atmosphere, the station, the rails, people’s faces when coming back from work at 5 pm.

3 Construction Sites

Photo:Toni Verd

This is one of my favourites. Buildings, houses, apartments anything that is half way built can be fascinating. Where I live most constructions are based on concrete and brick, so they can make the perfect location for mysterious, rough and timeless atmospheres.

4 Restaurant Kitchens

Photo: (Wonderlane)

Restaurant kitchens are some sort of parallel universe where there is a certain and sometimes unusual order for everything. Well this has to do more with city regulations and procedures I know, but for us outsiders, the way some of the equipment and utensils are arranged and used can be a true enigma. Let’s not forget the great many surfaces that can be found here, wood, tiles, metal, grease, and so on. If you have a good relation with your usual lunch place, perhaps they won’t mind you taking pictures in their kitchen.

By the way, I don’t think any fast-food joint will let you in. But it’s worth the shot.

5 Antique Dealers

Photo:Thiago James

Many that I’ve visited have chosen odd places for their stores. This is a plus when hunting unusual atmospheres. Antique market places also count.
It would be polite to buy a little something, at least it would help when asking permission to take a few pictures.

This applies all locations that are stores.

Being honest, and explaining what the pictures are for and how inspiring their store is can also help. Who knows, you might end up walking out with a new client.

6 Tattoo shop

Photo: Pablo Alvarado (Ventolin)

Same deal. This is such a bewitching world / hobby / lifestyle / religious ritual.
The place itself, the things hanging on the walls and the guys themselves.
Ok so perhaps buying a little something here is not what we had in mind when we came out with our camera. If tattooing is not your thing, is OK, but don’t scratch this one out just yet. Maybe a different arrangement can be offered… again, you could be walking out with another client.

7 Churches (the older the better)

Photo:Luz A. Villa (Flowery L*u*z*a*)

Knock yourself out! I don’t even have to say anything here. One thing though: just for the sake of respect, do ask for permission.

8 Old Theatres

Photo: Ana Carmen Foschini

The older the better. Some of them will let you take “self guided tour walks” while others just won’t let you in with a camera.
Some things you’ll find for sure: paintings, chandeliers, elaborate curtains and other window treatments. Keep an eye on floor tiles and ceilings, you might find something interesting. By the way, check the restrooms.
One thing that could be fun to explore is any room or environment that is not meant for visitors but for people who work at the theatre itself. You might stumble with something odd like say… stage props being used as office supplies?

9 Produce Market Place

Photo:(Ninja M)

In this case, people are a key ingredient to the general feeling of this environment. And yes, there is infinite number of texture and pattern possibilities, but grabbing only the visuals would be like making a film with no sound. In other words, narrowing your source of inspiration, which is what you came for after all. Pay attention to people, listen to what they say, see what they do. And if you’re up for it, talk to them find out who they are. You’ll come out with a lot of things in head.

10 The Docks

Photo: Albert Subirats (Alsuvi)

If you live in a city where you can have access at some industrial or commercial docks, you’re in for a treat. This is like Lego, only bigger and made mostly of iron and steel. You’ll find wonderful blends of textures and colours. Let alone the gear and machinery they have. What else can I say? I think you’ll agree.

Banks and government buildings can also offer interesting ingredients to your creativity. Believe! boredom has its own appealing. Unfortunately, walking in with a camera “for inspiration” in any of these places, is nothing but a bad excuse to get arrested.

There are a number of places in your community that you might or might not visit at all, that sometimes you take for granted. Try new things to get inspired. After all, inspiration can always come where you least expect it.

I’m sure I’ve left a lot out… So what other odd places can you think of for inspiration?

Have you ever come across a client who says: “I just want a website out there, that’s all… Just to have my product, contact info and a couple of pictures. I don’t have time for anything else”

Old fashioned

Some clients come up to you very sure, with their minds set on very specific requests. But when they start telling you what they need you suddenly feel a dèja vu and you’re back in the late 90’s when people used to flood their websites with keywords, sit back and hoped for a miracle.

Visit counters, guestbooks, a hundred links on the frontpage, a million keywords, and animated gif icons are some of the things people used to have on their websites back in the day. Now these are nothing but big donts.

Call of duty

As freelancers it is our duty to try to educate our clients and explain to them the whys and hows of today’s best practices. For example, instead of a visit counter, you can provide your client with valuable statistic data from Google Analytics.

You can build a better relationship with a client who has a better understanding of your work. The more they know, the more they’ll trust your recommendations. For instance, this client of mine had no idea about the existence of Facebook and its advertising features. Maybe it was luck, but she fell in love with the whole idea the minute she saw it in action.

Some other clients, depending on their needs, will go for other social networks to help their business grow. But the idea is to walk them into the wonderful world of social media, and help them taking full advantage of the services that best fit their business needs.

Rewards

As a bonus, you’ll be increasing not only your scope of consulting services, but opportunities to provide further services in the future.
Take for example, if you teach your client how to use a Wordpress blog chances are, you’ll end up designing its theme. Same case with Twitter backgrounds, and so on. Anyways, you’ll know how far you can go.

I hope I’m not being too ambitious with this… or am I? What do you reckon?

As an in-house web designer for an NGO, I’ve gained some notions on what their needs are or at least what they can be as far as publishing content on the web and promoting their activities.

Normally, they need a space for donations, volunteering, news, calendar and public relations; just to name a few. This usually means that they need some serious updating on a daily basis.

Cost effective

Since money can be an issue, these organizations can’t afford to flush all their budget in developers and programmers for life. Instead, they choose to have simple but useful websites that are friendly to their users: in most cases public relations team or communications team.
This way, their site can be updated by people they already have, so there’s no need to hire more staff.

Easy to implement

Thanks to the easy-to-install feature on most CMS and the unlimited number of templates and extensions available out there, you can have a fully equipped website up and running in relatively no time. They can really be a life saver for many freelancers.

Plone and PHPNuke are some examples of popular CMS among the NGO community mainly because they can be installed and used very quickly.

Versatile – customizable

Some NGOs are news oriented, others’ main core is fundraising, some are rather dedicated to education and awareness, and many of them would probably need of the above at once. Of course websites are expected to fulfill all these needs.

So the flexibility of a CMS lies on the many modules, plugins, extensions, components you can switch on and off.

Let’s take for instance Joomla: you can turn it into a multi-language site by just using a component called Joomfish, that gives you the structure to easily manage all content in more than one language.
This specially becomes handy when you’re an international NGO constantly publishing news and articles.

Drupal on the other hand can turn an NGO website into the ultimate networking tool.

Easy to manage

The most wonderful feature of a CMS is its friendly usability. It allows people to create, edit and publish content with little effort and more importantly, no knowledge whatsoever of web programming.

They usually come with a dashboard or administrator panel that is very visual and intuitive, where content and media are arranged and organised for the sake of user’s mental health, by making things work smoothly and much simpler.

This is why a CMS becomes the perfect tool for many NGOs. Well, in a very general way at least.

So if you freelancers ever have an NGO for a client, keep in mind they’ll probably be interested in a plug and play product, and definitely in learning how to run it on their own.

What else can you say about Content Management Systems?