There comes a time in every designer’s life when they feel the urge (or need) to start scouting for new revenue streams (especially freelance designers). In this post I’ll provide you with 10 potential routes you can take to earn more money. These routes range in scope from small side-projects to full-fledged side-businesses. Some options can be done on the cheap while others may require you to shell out a bit (you know what they say, sometimes it takes money to make money).

Before proceeding, let me strike a note of caution: developing these opportunities can take some time. It’s much better to attempt to supplement your income when you don’t need to rather than out of sheer desperation. If you have the idea that you can trade a full-time design job for one of these methods, I’d put that notion on hold and see what develops before doing anything drastic. Let’s go!

Develop Software

Let me clear something up right away. Yes, any designer can sell software. No, you don’t have to code it yourself. Whew! Aren’t you glad you didn’t skip right over this section (I know you thought about it)? Now that we’ve established the fact that you, as a designer, can sell software, let me qualify that statement with this: it can take a good deal of time, effort, research, planning and marketing to be successful in this realm.

As a bit of an aside, you may need a little seed money to sink into your software efforts, especially if you plan on hiring anyone to help you get the job done, but hey, you’re a designer, an innovator, and you can find a way to scrape together some extra dough, right? If you’re short on cash, why not hire a buddy to do a little work in exchange for a cut later on?

Desktop Software Development

While mobile and cloud apps are becoming the new norm these days (do you smell the sweet aroma of opportunity?), I wouldn’t discount the money that can still be made on the desktop just yet. Desktop computers are still the workhorses that do the heavy lifting for industries such as, you guessed it, graphic design, motion graphics, game design and many others. Take a company named Panic for instance. They’ve done quite well selling their coding and FTP software to web designers for $99 and $34 each, respectively.

iPhone / iPad / Mobile App Development

Of course the big draw in the software category is the iPhone and iPad app. Hey, if an 8 year old kid can do it, so can you. There are two great reasons why creating iPhone apps can be tempting: a relatively small financial barrier to entry and a great built-in distribution platform ( iTunes). If you yourself do not know how to program for the iOS, fear not. Numerous app building companies have spring up to make app creation a viable option for non-programmers. This approach works great if you have a simple app in mind (think RSS-driven). Of course, if you’re app will need a lot of customization you’ll probably need to hire a programmer. Don’t forget, there are other mobile devices out there that also run apps such as Android, Nokia and Blackberry handsets.

iPhone / iPad / Mobile App Development Resources:

• iPhone Dev Center
• Android Developers
• Forum Nokia
• Blackberry Developer Zone
• AppMakr
• SwebApps
• My App Builder
• iSites
• TapLynx
• AppBreeder

Facebook App Development

Putting the “app” in Apple isn’t the only way to make a buck or two from software development. Facebook has become an app-powerhouse in it’s own right. Have you ever heard of a little app called FarmVille? It’s got more than 60 million active monthly users at the time of writing. According to Fortune, FarmVille sells an average of 500,000 virtual tractors each day at $20 a piece. Not bad. Whether ad-supported or driven by sales of virtual merchandise, developing a popular Facebook app can be downright lucrative. Addictive social design-themed game anyone?

Facebook App Development Resources:

• Facebook Developers
• Facebook Application Directory

Twitter App Development

Let’s not forget about Twitter. Are people really making money from Twitter apps when Twitter itself is struggling to monetize it’s own service? The answer is yes. Take HootSuite for example which operates on a freemium business model (free to premium plans available) that charges up to $99 a month for a Platinum account. Another company called onforty has developed a social app directory which will eventually feature a marketplace for selling Twitter apps. There are plenty of great Twitter app ideas waiting to be developed and Twitter has provided some excellent dev tools to get you started.

Twitter App Development Resources:

• Twitter Developers
• Twitter API Wiki
• oneforty

When it comes to software development and sales, you’ll need to carefully and thoroughly analyze your market opportunities and decide which platforms make the most sense for your ideas. In some cases there may be opportunities to develop for multiple platforms.

Create an Event

This is a big opportunity for those who are capable of pulling it off. You’ve got to be knowledgeable. You’ve got to love talking or be able to hire people who do. You’ve got to have a big vision and be organized enough to bring it to life. You’ve got to be charismatic enough to draw people into your dream. If you can do these things, you can really rake it in.

To demonstrate an event’s ability to bring in the mega-bucks, let’s do some quick, hypothetical math: let’s say you sell tickets to an event you’ve created for $200 a piece. Let’s also say that 200 seats are available in your chosen venue. Assuming your event is a sell-out, you’ve just pulled in $40,000 (not factoring in expenses, of course). Think that sounds ridiculous? It’s not. TED, a conference covering technology, entertainment and design, charges in the neighborhood of $6,000 per attendee.

The design industry is already rife with events. To plan a successful event of your own, it could be helpful to see how other, previously established, events are organized. UK-based Carsonified is well known for putting together such excellent events as FOWD, FOWA and Chirp. Other well known events include An Event Apart and the How Design Conference.

Any successful design conference is going to have overhead expenses. These can include, but are not necessarily limited to: renting a venue, paying speakers and staff and marketing costs. There may, however, be some creative ways to minimize these expenses. Maybe your company’s office already has an excellent conference room that would be large enough for a conference type crowd. Maybe you have enough friends (volunteers) or employees to fully staff the event. Maybe your Twitter account is large enough to spark a good bit of interest in your event.

These days, it’s quite easy to manage the logistics of a large event thanks to helpful software solutions. These solutions come in packages that range from selling tickets to managing capacity to helping with marketing and range in price from free to premium.

Event Management Software Resources:

• Eventbrite
• Upcoming (Yahoo!)
• eventsbot
• Cvent
• TicketLeap

Video happens to be a great way to give an event a second life. If you can drum up enough interest, you can continue to make money off an event by selling ads against speaker videos on your website.

Get Paid to Write

Are you a good writer? If so, you may well-positioned to bring in some additional income. In fact, writing is probably one of the easiest, most accessible ways a designer can supplement their regular income. All you really need is a good idea, some writing skills and spare time.

Writing Ebooks

Once of the best ways to make money from writing is to package your knowledge and sell it in the form of an ebook. Electronic books are cheap to make and easy to distribute which makes for a winning combination. Now more than ever, ebooks are poised to become high-earners thanks to relatively new reading devices such as the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle. While you may not be getting distribution within the walls of a Barnes and Noble anytime soon, the Long Tail makes it possible to make decent money without breaching the New York Times best seller list.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a way to kill some trees and produce a good old fashioned paper book, there are a few really great self-publishing platforms that can help you achieve your goal. These print-on-demand publishers allow you to sell real books without the need for storing physical inventory which cuts your costs significantly. Many of these platforms also offer marketing packages to help you spread the word about your new book.

Self-Publishing Book Resources:

• Lulu
• Blurb
• CreateSpace
• Xlibris

Freelance Writing

Freelance writing can be a great way for designers to earn extra money on the side, especially guest-blogging. Many niche sites in the blogosphere are looking for talented designers who can write knowledgeably about their industry and are generally willing to pay in the range of $50 to $400 for great articles.

As designers we come in contact with copy day-in and day-out. It’s in the ads we design and on the websites we create. Think about it: if you are a great designer, why not become a great copywriter as well? This would give you a great opportunity to up-sell your clients. As long as they are hiring you to design something for them, why not offer them the convenience of getting everything done all in one place?

If you are a good writer, this also opens the door to ghost-writing. Ghost-writing means writing content, such as a book, on behalf of another person. Many companies hire ghost-writers to produce compelling copy for websites, brochures, reports and the like.

Make Money Blogging

Blogging is another creative outlet that designers can utilize to pull-in some extra cash. While it does have to do with writing, blogging is in a category of it’s own because there’s more to it than just writing. With the exception of guest blogging, nobody is going to hand you a check and say, “here, blog”. It takes a different approach to monetize a blog and that’s what I’m going to discuss below.

Selling Advertising

When you think of monetizing a blog, the first thing that pops into your mind is probably selling advertising or sponsorships. While it’s true that money can be made this way, it’s one of the hardest and least-rewarding ways to earn money from a blog. That said, it shouldn’t be discounted as an income source, but should probably only be considered by bloggers who are able to garner at least 100,000 pageviews per month. Typically, a blogger can charge about $1 per 1,000 pageviews or $1 eCPM. As with any niche, your ads should be relevant to your audience and enhance the readers experience on your blog.

Design-Related Ad Network Resources:

• BuySellAds
• Carbon
• InfluAds
• Fusion Ads
• The Deck

Selling Premium Content to Members

Many design blogs have started erecting a pay wall in a move similar to Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. What this means is that some content is free and other content is considered premium. Access to premium content is granted only to paying members. If you have a big enough audience, this could be a good route to take. If you sold a membership at $7 per month and garnered 1,000 subscribers, you’d automatically be making $7,000 per month.

For this approach to be effective you’ve got to be able to produce content that is compelling enough to make people want to part with their hard-earned cash. To get a glimpse of this model in action, check out: WDL Premium, Blog.SpoonGraphics and Vandelay Premier.

Push In-House Products / Direct Sales

A blog, by nature, comes with a built-in audience. A niche audience is valueable. It’s why advertisers pay big bucks but there’s no reason why you can’t directly benefit from advertising your own products to your audience. Why type of products? Just about anything else this article discusses: books, stock images, services, etc.

Sell Stock

If selling something over and over again sounds good to you, you might be interested in selling stock. You’ve no doubt heard of stock photography, but there are other items that can be sold through stock outlets such as WordPress themes, icons, vector images and Photoshop brushes to name a few. While certain things probably shouldn’t be sold as stock (such as logos), there are plenty of ethical opportunities to sell re-usable design elements to the masses.

Selling Stock WordPress Themes

Developing a premium WordPress theme can be a little tricky. You’ve really got to know your stuff: the WordPress loop, some PHP and of course CSS and XHTML. If you’re pretty comfortable with these four things and have a great original idea for a theme, why not give it a go? Elegant Themes is perhaps one of the best known WordPress theme developers. I’d check out what they have to offer to gauge whether or not your work is up to par.

With thousands of new WordPress sites springing up each month, there are plenty of opportunities to get in on the theme development craze. Ideas for specific theme builds might include: job boards, magazines and photo blogs to name a few. There are basically two different methods for selling a stock theme: on your own or through a marketplace. Which one you choose is going to depend on how well you think you can market your themes on your own.

Stock WordPress Theme Resources:

• WordPress Codex
• WordPress Support Forums
• ThemeForest
• WP Theme Market

Selling Stock Icons, Vectors, Brushes, Etc.

If you are either a great illustrator or Photoshop guru, selling stock icons, vector files or Photoshop brushes may be just up your alley. Keep in mind that upon submitting your files to stock marketplaces your creations will be vetted for quality and only the very best will be accepted. Don’t assume that you will know exactly how to submit a stock file for sale–you can save yourself a lot of wasted time by simply reading the published submission guidelines for each site you hope to upload files to. Some vector sites, for instance, request that you save to a legacy Illustrator version or ask you to simply save your file as an EPS (and skip the Illustrator format all-together).

Stock Icon, Vector and Photoshop Brush Resources:

• GraphicRiver
• MediaLoot
• iStockPhoto
• Shutterstock
• Graphic Leftovers

Selling Stock Photography

How successful you can be at selling stock photography is going to hinge mainly on these four things: the quality of your images (composition, size, etc.), subject originality, market demand and the size of your catalog. The bigger the catalog and the more niche your subject matter the better off you’ll be opening your own “shop”. If you have a smaller catalog, but still have good images, you’ll probably be better off submitting to an established stock photography marketplace. If you do go with a marketplace, you’ll have to do some comparing as different sites offer different royalties. Some sites even offer to pay you more for exclusivity, but that might mean you could miss out on more sales, so you’ll have to weigh your options carefully. Make sure to be very descriptive with your keywords and tags as this will be the main avenue (search) that someone will be able to find your images to buy.

Stock Photography Resources:

• SmugMug
• iStockPhoto
• Dreamstime
• Fotolia
• Crestock

Sell Fonts

Type Foundries such as Typotheque or T.26 are companies that create fonts to release either commercially or for free. Licensing a font is a great way to earn money but, like the music industry, font design is a hit-driven business. If a font you create becomes a smashing success you’ll be well-positioned to reap some serious financial benefits. If, on the other hand, your font completely bombs you’ll have wasted a good bit of time and effort.

While methods differ, one font design process looks something like this: draw it on paper, scan it, clean up the scan in Photoshop and then vectorize in Illustrator. Once you’ve got a vector version, import into font creation software such as Fontlab.

Font Creation Resources and Marketplaces:

• MyFonts
• Linotype
• Typophile TypoWiki
• Fontlab Studio

Become a Reseller

Reselling a product or service is one of the best opportunities for designers to bring in some extra money. As designers, we have plenty of opportunities to outsource services we can’t handle ourselves, but why should that money jump out of your wallet just to find a new home in another service providers bank account?

There are basically two ways to resell something: white-labeled or as-is. To white-label means to re-brand the product or service as your own; slap your own logo and colors on it and your clients will may never need to know that you don’t handle that particular thing in-house. You can still partner with a company to re-sell a product without white-labeling, but it may not look as professional. Typically, companies that allow white-labeling will charge a premium price for the privilege.

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is probably one of the most lucrative, if not the most lucrative, reselling opportunity available for designers (web designers more specifically). As long as you are designing a website for a client, why not pull in some recurring revenue each month for the hosting?

Many hosts that provide reseller services allow designers to set their own prices and charge their clients whatever prices they’d like. This means that you might get charged $9.99 for a specific type of account but you could turn around and sell it to your client for twice that amount. If you could pull down an extra $10 a month per website you design, you could be looking at an extra couple hundred of bucks each month depending on the volume you turn out.

Reseller Hosting Resources:

• Rackspace
• Site5
• Green Geeks
• Host Gator
• WestNIC

Become an Affiliate

Affiliate marketing has been around for many years. It’s an established medium for bringing in some additional dollars, especially for bloggers. While affiliate marketing probably won’t rake in the big bucks unless you’ve got a large-scale audience to share products with, it remains an option nonetheless.

Affiliate Marketing for Designers

There are many great affiliate programs to consider that fit within the design niche. Many self-published authors, for example, offer affiliate programs. Consider Digging Into WordPress affiliate program setup by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. They offer just over $13 per sale of their book through an affiliate channel. Envato’s Rockable Press also has a full-fledged affiliate program which offers commisions of 30% per sale. Books aren’t the only way to sell design-related products or services. Template Monster offers 20% commissions on sales of templates and Carbonite, an online backup service, offers 30% on sales as well. Of course the grand-daddy of all affiliate programs is offered up by Amazon who certainly offers a wide array of design related products.

Become a Consultant

Consulting is a mainstay business in the design world and it’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon. If you are an expert in a particular subject or field, consulting is the best way to bring in a substantial amount of money on the side. The hardest part is finding clients who will hire to to be a consultant.

There are a few ways to tackle the problem of anonymity. First, use channels you already have in place such as your website, blog or social networking accounts to advertise the fact that you are available for consulting. Second, when you are lucky enough to get a consulting client, ask for a couple referrals once your project wraps up. Third, become an expert by writing articles and getting published as much as possible. This will give you some proof to refer to when people ask if you really know your stuff.

As you know, the internet opens doors for non-local consulting gigs. There are a few different ways to accomplish this. You can of course do a phone consultation, which has really become the de-facto way to consult long-distance. You can also become a video consultant if your clients feel that seeing a face is more important than simply hearing a voice. A third option is to use an online consulting facilitator such as GLG. I’ve personally used them and have gotten paid hundreds of dollars for 10-20 minutes of my time at a stretch. If you do decide to pursue this third route, you’ll need some time to train (there’s testing involved) and to become familiar with the company’s rules.

Get Paid to Teach

People have been paying to learn for centuries (although teachers are routinely under-payed in many places). There are more opportunities to teach design than you might think. Teaching doesn’t necessarily have to happen in a traditional classroom, although that’s still a great place to teach, learn and get paid.

Teach in a Classroom

If you have teaching aspirations you can check into guest-teaching a class here or there at a local college or university. If you’ve recently graduated, try contacting your old profs and let them know you’d be willing to come in to speak and let them know which topics you can cover. I’ve personally done this and while I didn’t make a fortune, I was able to increase the thickness of my wallet ever so slightly. Of course, if you were really into teaching you could apply for a part-time teaching job, although these may be somewhat harder to come by in the current global economic climate (since teaching jobs tend to be fiercely pursued by graduates with teaching degrees).

Teach with Tutorials

Another option is to teach online through the creation of tutorials. Online tutorials generally come in two varieties: written and video. Written tutorials often combine photos with text to get certain points across to the reader. Video tutorials often materialize in the form of screencasts where a presenter records their computer screen and talks about whats happening. Many sites will pay you to create tutorials. Video tutorials offer the chance to incorporate video ads or to charge a premium fee for access.

Sites that Pay for Tutorials:

• Tuts+
• Design Instruct
• Tutorial9

Crest design has been around for a very, very long time. It’s probably one of the oldest forms of design in history. This roundup is for designers who need some inspiration for designing a crest, badge, shield or seal. We’ve gathered new and old examples you can use to spark your own creativity. From vector to hand-drawn, you’re sure to find plenty to like.

As you may or may not have heaRd alrEady, Freelance Review is uP to something. Something BIG. We’re hAnding out clues eveRy MOnday for the next few weeks as to what exactly we’re working on. In case you missed it, here’s a link to clue #1 which we published last week. I have to say, “Wow!”, we’ve already had some great guesses including a blogging platform, a social network, a merger and something having to do with social design. I’m not going to comment as to how accurate those may or may not be at this point, sorry.

So this week I wanted to give you something a Little more tAntalizing. Yes, sharp eyes will have noticed that there is an additional symbol in the post teaser image (above) which has appeared next to the mysterious symbol revealed last week — but that’s only part of this weeks clue. Feast your eyes on the hint(s) below. Pay aTtention to the details (there may or may not be more to It than initially meets the eye). Should you be looking for patterns? What do the colors mean? Are there any hidden messages? Even if you do find out what’s going on here… what does it meaN Freelance Review is up to?

Give us your best guest as to what this could mean in the comments below. If by some miraculous chance you happen to guess the big news by the official reveal, you could be a winner… (if we told you what you could win, you’d have an unfair advantage). By the way, it may or may not be a good idea to follow us on Twitter and/or subscribe to our RSS feed in case any extra clues happen to land there in the next two weeks…

I think if someone in the press found out that freelancers who work from home actually do WORK from home that it would make the front page news. Why? The world seems to think that freelancers don’t do any work. It’s odd. This article will explain how to deal with friends and family members that, knowingly or unknowingly, abuse your freelancing schedule and your work at home status.

Do Freelancers Really WORK From Home?

I don’t know about you, but oftentimes as a full-time freelance designer I find that my friends and family assume that my schedule between the hours of 8am and 5pm is totally free and open. It’s not all friends and and all family, but for some curious reason, many of them seem to believe that I can, and will, drop everything I am doing (which they must assume is nothing) at a moments notice to help run errands, do chores, man the garage sale, help with house fix-ups, have a long friendly phone conversation and so on.

What can be done to deter over-eager friends and family members who mean well but don’t quite “get it”? And what about those predators that know full well that you are busy but do their best to guilt you into helping them do something “important”? Here are four ways you can put the kibosh (dispose of decisively) on schedule abuse.

Establish Clear Guidelines

Coming up with a clear set of rules (and effectively communicating them) is an important thing to do for freelancers with nearby relatives and friends. You need to let them know when it is appropriate to contact you and when it is not. Talk to them in person, shoot them an email or mail them a list. Whatever works best. You don’t want to be rude about it, but you do want to get your point across. It may help to phrase it like this: “Please treat my job as you would that of a school principal or stock broker. You wouldn’t contact them during the day unless it was an emergency, would you?”. While freelancers do sometimes have free time during the day, how would anyone else know when that is? You should be the one to tell them you have some free time (or not). The safe thing for people to assume is that you are not going to be available (with the possible exception of lunch) during normal working hours.

Don’t Answer the Phone

If for some reason your rules are being ignored or have been “forgotten”, just don’t answer the phone and/or your email (or at least give it a good screening). As a freelancer it can be hard to know when to answer the phone. Is that unknown number a new client, the garage calling about your car or an acquaintance you barely know checking to see if you are available to dog sit? If you do screen your calls make sure to immediately return important business calls so your customer service doesn’t suffer.

Politely Say No

Again, for freelancers that live near to friends and family, an unscheduled home-visit is not unusual. If the doorbell rings, you’re going to need to be assertive and politely say no. Alternatively, if it’s your friend who is currently out of work and wants to peel you away from work to go do something fun, you’ll need to have some fortitude and politely say no.

Impolitely Say No

Every now and then the above three measures won’t do the trick. There’s always someone who thinks they can take advantage of your time and schedule. For these people, the only alternative is to blatantly ignore them or tell them straight-up no. You may even need to be impolite–it just depends on the type of person you are dealing with. I’d say this is definitely a last resort, but don’t rule it out as an option. If you haven’t had to do this already, chances are that they day is looming somewhere in your (not too) distant future.

Here are 10 fresh new WordPress themes, just released in the month of August. Some are more creative than others, but you are sure to find one that interests you here.

Summ

Glossy Stylo

JustCSS

Produccion Musical

Typografia

Portfolio Theme

Graphene

proClouds

Wallow

Candid

I’m no underwater photographer myself, but I can still say that underwater photography is in a class of it’s own. I can imagine how difficult it is to get the perfect lighting and setup for each shot–I’d imagine a good bit of it comes down to luck and being in the right place at the right time. Like so many of our collections, this roundup is useful not only to photography enthusiasts but also to graphic designers–just look at all of the vibrant colors and patterns you can find under the sea. I’m sure there are a few vector illustrators out there who could draw some inspiration from the faces of some of these interesting sea creatures.

In my opinion, designers make awesome bloggers. While this article speaks directly to designers who want to start a blog, the principles contained herein are universal and could easily be applied to any person in any industry who wants to start a successful new blog.

Planning Your Blog

First things first. Before you blindly go where you’ve never gone before, take a little time and do some planning. I know, I like to get going straight away when I have a new idea for something too, but planning never hurt anybody (so long as you don’t get stuck planning forever). There are a few essential questions you should answer before diving into the world of design blogging such as: What are my goals? Who is my audience? Will I have time to blog and design all in the same day?

One essential cog that you need to put in place before getting too far is what type of a design blog you want to run. After all, not all design blogs are the same. There are blogs dedicated to news, personal blogs, blogs that focus on tutorials and blogs that try to cover every imaginable topic that could possibly be squeezed into the category of design. Some blogs have one author that writes all of the content while others hire teams of regular contributors. It all really comes down to what you feel the most knowledgeable about, how visionary you are and how much money you have.

If you have no money, your blog will probably start out as a one person show. If you have a little extra cash to burn, and burn it will, you could invest in hiring some writing talent. If you are an enthusiastic and ambitious person you may feel like you can take on the likes of Smashing Magazine and cover the whole wide world of design extensively. If you are a little more modest, you might shoot for cornering the market on a specific niche, such as effectively designing with the color green, covering the latest jQuery news and tips or, as in my case, freelance designing. Whatever you decide on, your subject matter should be drawn from your personal experience so you can speak intelligently and with authority. Also, the subject matter you start out with doesn’t have to be a permanent fixture. Many design bloggers change the focus of their content after a month or two of experimenting, but it helps to have a rough plan to follow. It’s just like following a real map. If you don’t know where you want to end up, how are you doing to know which direction to go in the first place?

Choosing a Name for Your Blog

Two of the most important decisions you can make when starting a design blog are choosing a blog name and a domain name. These can be the same but certainly don’t need to be. A good name is important and can work in your favor while a bad name can work against you. I suppose it’s a little like naming a child in that you want to pick a name that you’ll be happy with forever.

There are basically three ways to approach choosing a name for your blog. The first is to pick a name that literally summarizes what kind of content a reader will encounter on your site. The second approach is to make up a name you think is cool or to choose a symbolic name that has more of an interpretive meaning. The third choice is to simply use your own name. You’ll find many different opinions regarding choosing a domain name but, in my view, no approach is more “right” than any other. Since every blog is formed under unique circumstances, the founder must use their best judgment.

The first approach is the most rational, common-sense approach and the thinking behind it goes like this: when people either type my domain name or see it as a link, I want them to know exactly what they will find on the other side. People who choose this route typically believe that the user experience extends beyond layouts, colors and buttons to the domain name and therefore the domain name needs to make logical sense. There are many good examples of this type of approach, but a few good ones include I Love Typography, Fuel Your Creativity and Designer Daily. Many would argue that stashing keywords in your domain name will offer a boost to your search engines rankings.

The second approach of fabricating a name from scratch is perhaps slightly less common, but but certainly popular, and there have been some very successful sites that have taken this naming route. One shining example is Abduzeedo, which has become one of the most visited design blogs on the internet. The tagline of the site is “abducted by design” which seems to fit perfectly with the phonetics of the name. Some design blogs that use this approach have interesting, and sometimes nebulous, made-up names such as Core77 or AisleOne that could have a symbolic meaning that relates to design, but doesn’t necessarily scream out “I’m a design blog” at first glance.

The third approach of incorporating, either in part or in whole, an individual’s name into the name of their blog is employed by a number of well-known and successful authors. If you are looking to build a strong personal brand and name recognition, this is certainly the best route to take. David Airey’s blog is a prime example.

It’s probably a good idea to develop a list of your favorite name ideas and keep it handy because chances are high that you won’t be able to register your first, second or third choice as a domain name. In fact, the process of picking a blog name and domain name can be downright frustrating. Available domain names generally have a large role to play in picking a name for a company or website these days due mostly to the fact that the pool of accessible domains is constantly dwindling.

I remember how difficult it was picking a new name for the design company I co-founded with my wife back in 2008. Originally called C McConnell Design, we wanted to re-brand with a fresh name that better fit who we were as a company. Also, there were at least two other companies floating around in the search results called McConnell Design, so we needed something that could set us apart. We wanted to incorporate the word “brand” into our name, but a quick search for available domain names containing brand revealed that nothing decent was really available. We finally settled on the combination of two words, “brand” and “deluxe” which gave us Brandeluxe. Thankfully, it was available.

To me, one of the most frustrating aspects of finding a domain name is learning that a domain squatter, as they are called, is sitting on a perfectly good address in hopes that they can sell it to some poor (or rich) sap. There are some creative ways around this of course. Taking a cue from Delicio.us, some design blogs have started cropping up with names that make use of both sides of the dot. DesignM.ag and Webdesign-ne.ws are two such sites.
While your first instinct man be to purchase a domain name ending in .com, you should feel free to keep your options open. Some of the Net’s best design blogs have .net domain names. One well-known .net design blog is NaldzGraphics.net which, at the time of writing, had over 13,000 RSS subscribers.

Choosing A Platform

In order to blog in the first place you are going to need to choose a platform, and this is something you want to get right. Despite the dominance of WordPress in the world of design blogs, it’s not the only option available to you. In fact, in some instances, there are clearly better choices. Whatever platform you eventually choose is going to be a direct result of which solution best addresses your needs.

As a warning let me say from my own personal experience that I had to learn the hard way how important it is to choose the right blogging platform in the beginning. When I started Freelance Review, I was already a Business Catalyst premium partner so I decided that I might as well try running the blog on my existing BC account. I was well aware of the fact that many in the design blog community used WordPress, but I didn’t want to be like everyone else out there–I wanted to do my own thing. My choice of using BC ended up being a terrible decision. For every step I took forward with great content, BC’s blog platform took me three steps in the wrong direction. Now that Adobe has purchased Business Catalyst, I hope that the blog gets some major upgrades, but while I was using it for Freelance Review it offered incredibly limited functionality.

Needless to say, I eventually decided to switch everything over to WordPress. Oh how I wish I would have used WordPress in the first place. It was a huge pain to move old posts to the new platform. While WordPress does have an import feature, we did everything by hand to make sure it turned out properly. One thing I noticed immediately was that our new posts were appearing much, much higher in search engine rankings. After struggling to run our blog with a micro feature set it was as if we were in a whole new world. WordPress does so much right out of the box and can be extended indefinitely thanks to the gigantic community of plugin developers that I realized immediately why so many other designers were blogging on WordPress.

10 WordPress Alternatives

I’m not going to go into more detail on choosing a blogging platform than to mention some alternatives to WordPress because I think there is a lot of information readily available on exactly that. A handful of WordPress alternatives include Movable Type, ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, Squarespace, Tumblr, Posterous, Serendipity, b2evolution and of course Drupal and Joomla. If you are looking for a straightforward way to display posts, any of these options will get the job done. If you are looking into setting up a user generated news site with a social voting system similar to DesignBump or The Web Blend then you would probably have the most success using Drupal in combination with the Drigg module, which is what powers both of these sites.

There are an insane amount of WordPress plugin posts out there which list all kinds of plugins–some are useful and others not so much. I wanted to add my own entry into the fray with a post of personal recommendations that I have tested right here on Freelance Review. There were plenty of other plugins out there that sound cool but that didn’t work so well once I actually gave them a try and so they did not make the list. You can rest assured that the plugins that did make the list are tried and true with WordPress version 3.0.1.

Advanced Category Excluder

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Advanced Category Excluder, or ACE, is very useful when it comes to easily choosing which content should be displayed when. For instance, on the homepage of Freelance Review we don’t want to display the news posts from our user news section, but, since those are technically regular posts they would display there without some sort of manipulation. With the last version of our site we did some sort of PHP workaround that we found online somewhere, but using ACE is much, much easier. Simply check the boxes of the pages and categories you want excluded and the plugin takes care of the rest.

Delicious Bookmark Button

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If you are looking for a Delicious button that displays a real-time count of Delicious bookmarks similar to your Twitter button, you’ll love this plugin. It looks great next to your other promotion buttons and works very well. It would be a shame to leave Delicious out of your promotional options just because you can’t find an official button that does the same thing as this plugin. You can see this button in action at the bottom of this very post!

Favicon Rotator

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This plugin makes it easy to display either one or a number of favicons in a rotation. I’m not sure how many sites need to display multiple favicons, but if you ever wanted to you could with this handy little plugin. Here on Freelance Review we use it to display just one Favicon–if you only load one into the plugin it will obviously only display one at a time.

jQuery Lazy Load

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For those bloggers who display list posts with numerous images you should certainly consider implementing a “lazy” loading plugin. Once activated, only images within the viewing range of the screen will be loaded. Other images will load once they come into the active viewing area which can really help reduce page load times on your site. Although this has been around for awhile and was kind of popularized by Mashable, we just installed it and I have been pretty pleased with the results so far.

Most Commented Widget

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This plugin is a really nice way to feature some of your blog’s best content based on how many comments a post has received. You can set the number of items to be displayed and it works as a widget–just add your own CSS and you’re ready to go.

Theme Test Drive

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When you are building a new theme for your site you definitely don’t want to test it out for the first time when it’s live to all of your readers. That’s where Theme Test Drive comes in handy. It lets you activate a theme that can only be viewed by the admin (or any other access level you specify). That way your normal readers aren’t affected while you iron out any bugs or glitches. We made extensive use of this during the recent v4 redesign.

WassUp

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WassUp is a nice way to display real-time visitor statistics for your WordPress blog. It’s pretty neat to be able to see the exact number of people browsing your content (including admins and known commentors). It’s also nice to be able to see what specific post a person is viewing. I personally like to watch the stats right after I tweet about a new article and watch the visitors roll in…

WPtouch

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It’s a very good idea to have a mobile-ready version of your site ready to view in this day and age. WPtouch is a great plugin that automatically creates an iPhone optimized version of your WordPress site which is incredibly handy if you don’t want to sit around creating a million different versions of your site for every type of viewing experience out there.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

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This is probably the most well-known WordPress plugin on this list, but I had to include it because I do find it very useful. It does a great job of picking out content that a reader might be interested on based on the title and content of any given post. To see this one in action, just scroll down a little further on this page…

Something monumental is brewing here at Freelance Review. Over the next few Mondays I’ll be dropping hints as to what this awesome, exciting new thing may be.

Your first clue is the mysterious symbol above. What could it mean? Is there an exciting new feature on the horizon? Are we adding a famous new staffer? Are we launching a new site? Actually, what we’re up to is MUCH bigger than all of those put together. When you finally find out what it is, your jaw will drop to the floor.

I promise, this is not just something small that will be totally disappointing. This is truly something large. Gigantic in fact. It’s so big that it will affect the entire blogosphere. That’s all I am going to say about it this week.

What do you think it could be? Leave us your best guess in the comments below… you never know, you just might win something down the line…

View the creative process as you’ve never seen it before as you step behind the designs of 20 skillfully crafted logos in this one-of-a-kind inspiring roundup. From inception to completion, we’ll show you how these logos came into being. Draw back the curtain and experience a guided tour through the logo construction process that starts at the first spark of inspiration, shows the painstaking attention paid to typographic and color details and ends with a photo showing how each logo has been used in the real world.

There’s a lot more to this post than you might at first perceive. Yes, it’s fun and useful to peek inside the designer’s mind and get a glimpse of what they were thinking when they came up with each of these logos, but it’s equally useful to take a look at the presentation skills of these brand architects. If you’re a designer, you need to know how to present your logo. This essential skill comes in handy when selling a client on a concept (and showing how much thought and work went into creating it!) as well as showing off your work in a portfolio.

Take notes (real or mental) on how these logos are displayed. You’ll notice that most of these creators don’t display their logos in a way that takes up every inch of the available space–instead, they showcase their logos with plenty of margin. You’ll also notice that these logos aren’t displayed on boring backgrounds. They’ve got gradients and color treatments meant to enhance the aesthetic. Question everything you see. Ask yourself, “Why do they do that?” If you do, I promise that you will be a much better logo designer by the end of this post.

Cocoa Stuff Logo Design Process

Avivo Logo Design Process

Roger Oddone Logo Design Process

Bella Sicilia Logo Design Process

Then Logo Design Process

Linda Logo Design Process

xWare Logo Design Process

Konig Architektur Logo Design Process

Embassy Logo Design Process

Ethnique Logo Design Process

EKTA Logo Design Process

St-Thermohus Logo Design Process

Ajeva Logo Design Process

090 – http://www.behance.net/gallery/ajeva/305440

Clearspring Partners Logo Design Process

Taiama Logo Design Process

Tube Logo Design Process

F-Secure Logo Design Process

Eastgate Logo Design Process

Contrast Logo Design Process

Enter the Dragon Logo Design Process