Twitter and the freelancer seems like a perfect fit. As a freelancer you either move around quite a lot or you end up working at home on your own with little outside contact. This is where Twitter steps up - you can build a network of colleagues to communicate with and these colleagues can be anyone, from anywhere - heroes, idols, friends, peers, former colleagues, celebrities - whatever you want. Need some feedback on your latest design? struggling with some code? - consult your new found community!

As you build and refine your network, you’ll also notice that news breaks quickly on Twitter, which is very handy indeed when you work in a fast moving industry and staying on top of developments and trends is vital. Where did I first hear about Google Wave, Adobe BrowserLab and Cristiano Ronaldo’s £80m transfer to Real Madrid? You’ve guessed it!

So what initially seemed to me like little more than an extension to one of my most hated facebook features (status updates) is now growing on me rapidly, and is fast becoming a tool that I consider a necessity.

I’m going to take a look at 5 lesser known applications on the mac which I think are all extremely useful and a worth a look for any designers out there.

So, in no particular order, here we go…

DropJPG

Free!!

Barely a day goes by that I don’t fire up DropJPG. It’s a very simple app that does exactly what it says on the tin - you drop a file on the icon in your dock and it creates a jpg for you. You can edit the quality settings in the prefs and you can also drop multiple files onto it at once - very handy!

Xscope

$26.95

7 micro applications for the price of one. Xscope is like a web designers tool belt. It runs over the top of all your other apps and give you access to a set of tools that you’ll quickly wonder how you lived without. Particular favourites of mine are Dimensions which measures any element of your screen as you roll over and Screens which is a fantastic browser overlay so you can quickly see how your designs fit onto various browsers.

Billable

$34.95

Billable has been my invoicing and time tracking software of choice for a number of years now. It has a very elegant user interface which you’ll quickly feel at home with and it’s clutter free and simple approach make it much more accessible than other invoicing apps out on the market.

Tubitunes

€4.95

Tunitunes is a video downloader and a video converter rolled into one. It takes your video files, and indeed any other video files that may be out there on the web and converts them into pretty much any video file that you would like and it does this in one click. No doubt the control freaks among us want a few more options, well the good news is that’s all here too.

Espresso

€59.95

There are a multitude of apps out there that do web development pretty well, but there’s something about Espresso that just feels right. It’s a very slick application that doesn’t feel bloated like other editors, it runs like a dream and it presents the code very well - which is very refreshing if you’re staring at code for more than a few hours a day.

So that’s my round up of some of the lesser know apps out there that I really like and there’s a definite theme there - simplicity seems to be important to me! I hope you find something new that may be able to help you and please, if you’ve found any apps that you just can’t live without feel free to comment!

Over the past 4 years I have established a method to my work, a set of rules that have formed my working code which have now become habit…

• Communicate Well And Often - in my opinion this is the single most important attribute a freelancer has, I value it higher than quality of work. If you effectively communicate on all levels this can alleviate the fears of clients. You need to communicate, what you do, how you do it and the way you work. Communication is often the key to retaining clients and being re-booked.
• Work Quality & Consistency - you don’t have to be the world’s best designer to make a freelance career, what you need to do is be consistent. As with any industry there are requirements for all levels of capability. If you continue to produce work at a consistent level, this will define your standard and it takes the risk away from hiring you.
• Maximise Your Possibilities - if people don’t know of your existence then it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do, you won’t get booked, you won’t get any work. Get your folio online, start using services like Twitter, LinkedIn, comment on blogs, keep in touch with everyone you meet - hand them a business card - you never know when they might need your services or know someone that does!
• Be Adaptable - all agencies and clients differ in the way they like you to work. You need to adapt to their methods and quickly. You may be asked to do things that may not be your niche from time to time, if you effectively communicate this but also adapt to the requirements then this will reflect favourably on you.
• Use Your Initiative - hugely important in the design world. There will be times where if you’re working in-house there will be no-one around to answer any questions you may have. You need to take the initiative in these situations and use your experience to make the right decisions.
• Be Pro-Active - when you’re closely involved in a project you will see opportunities to aid your project, you need to recognise these as early as possible and capitalise on them.
• Listen To Your Instinct - there are good clients and bad clients, you need to work out which category any potential new clients fall in to before you agree to work with them, this is usually a lot easier than it sounds. Look for signs in early communication you have with a client, whether it’s on the telephone, by email or even face to face - the signs are almost always there to see and they’re not usually hard to spot. As soon as the alarm bells start ringing you need to take action fast, your instincts are usually spot on.

Hopefully these methods may help you out with your freelance career. They’ve kept me busy over the years!

The way I see design, it’s all about educated decisions. From the very start of a project you will make numerous decisions and you will discount certain things based upon a combination of the current brief, your experiences from the past and what you believe is right for the project. Producing multiple varying visuals goes completely against this.

Putting myself in the clients shoes for a moment, were I to receive 3 different visuals from the same agency I would question it. It would send me the message that the designer/agency weren’t confident in their approach and trying to cover all their bases. I would question whether it was the best use of time and resources. If I’m paying someone to design something for me, I’m paying them to make these decisions and present me with their answer to the brief.

And finally… anyone who has submitted multiple design variations to a client in the past will know that inevitably the same thing will almost always happen. The  client will select elements from each of the designs submitted and ask you to put them together - something that you should have done in the first place.

If anyone out there has any interesting takes on this I’d love to hear them!

A quick search for web design trends will return you a huge amount of results. Many of these show examples of these so called trends in use - big fonts, photographic backgrounds, handwritten fonts to name but a few. It’s very easy to focus on a particular element of a website you like and to find other websites that also do this (the countless css galleries out there will help you out), but that to me is more indicative of the scale of the web design industry than of designers jumping on a particular style bandwagon.

Of course, we operate in a very fast developing industry and technology will play it’s part in dictating some of the guidelines but design to me is not about trends, it’s about solutions. It’s about finding the best possible solution to the brief regardless of current techniques and trends.

Just lately, as I approach probably the busiest I’ve ever been in my career I’ve learned to embrace the deadline and it’s become one of my biggest allies.

Deadlines set targets, they unite the project team (client included) and get them all focusing on a single goal and that is a good thing. Everyone needs to be singing from the same sheet if you want to deliver a knock-out project on time.

So what happens when you don’t have a deadline? Expectations differ, decisions become less urgent and prominence gets taken way from the project. This leads to a very unordered work-flow and ultimately makes the project much more difficult to manage.

On any given project, I tend to set numerous internal deadlines as well as numerous deadlines with the client. Why? I do this because it is much easier to manage a project in small chunks. It allows you to constantly assess how far you are from your goal and is a really good way of helping you to plan should you start to run behind or even in front.

Don’t fear the deadline!

Anyway, here is a round up of 5 sites that I’ve stumbled upon lately that I think for one reason or another really make the best of texture.

Envisionext
This is the first site I came across that I thought really executed some very controlled use of texture.

Jared Campbell
I don’t know who Jared Campbell is but he’s got himself a tidy little website. I particularly like the way the texture is carried through to the typography without going over the top.

Starbucks Coffee at Home
I must have seen a hundred websites that attempt to recreate a chalboard effect over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one as sweet as the Starbucks site - I love the chalk marks and the use of colour on the board.

Von Dutch Originals
Ok, I admit it, of the 5 this is my least favourite of the designs shown here, but there is still something about it that I like. Somehow this site feels like it’s on paper rather than screen - achieving that is very difficult!

Guillaume Pacheco
Initially, I didn’t like this site - then I clicked a couple of the buttons. I love the transitions between different textures and the use of typography - well worth a look!

Registering a domain is becoming increasingly difficult, the popularity of the internet means it can be very difficult to register a domain that you would actually like because chances are, someone else already registered it. But are we considering the domains we register enough? I don’t think so.

Firstly, lets clear up what a keyword rich domain is. It is simply a domain name that contains at least some keywords from the main search term you wish to be found for.

Take for example a site I created a couple of years back www.mac3dsoftware.com. This domain happens to contain the exact keywords that I want the site to be found for.  Why is that important? Well, it seems now more than ever Google is placing more value in links back to a site, and the words that are used for those links are the key.

A few years ago, a quick search for the term ‘miserable failure’ in Google would return the official White House website in position no.1 and link directly to a page about George W Bush. It goes without saying that those in charge of the White House website weren’t trying to be placed no.1 on Google for that particular term (or maybe it was sabotage!). So why did their site top the rankings? Simply because people were linking to their site and using the words miserable failure as the link text. Like I have done here. (Sorry George, just trying to make a point!)

By creating a site with a keyword rich domain, you are effectively harnessing this power and using it in your favour, getting links back to your site can be difficult enough, getting them with the right link text is even more difficult. Maybe you should be considering a keyword rich domain!

A few years ago I accidentally stumbled on a very simple technique that seems to combat design block and as a result I’ve never suffered from it since.

It happened when I was working on some graphics for an online kids game in Illustrator. I hit the invisible wall, I tried all the usual techniques to combat design block - made a cup of tea (old design favourite), had a surf around for some inspiration, tried stepping back from the screen a bit - nothing worked. Then it happened. For some reason, I zipped the file that I was struggling on down to the dock and sat behind it was the last project I was working on, a very corporate site for a solicitors. I knuckled down to do some work on the site and everything was going great, design block gone! I was flying through it. A couple of hours later I switched back to the game graphics and again I was flying through it. It seems that the contrast of work style did something to my brain that took the block away.

To this day I still use this technique, I always try and work on two contrasting projects simultaneously. Obviously it’s not always possible to work on such contrasting projects, but it is usually possible to work on contrasting parts of different projects - i.e. if you’re struggling with design on one project, switch to coding on another project or if you’re struggling with some code, put your design hat on for a while.

Ok, it’s a fairly obvious technique in theory, but in practice we designers are stubborn beasts. We hit the block and we keep pushing against it not getting anywhere because we become consumed by the problem. So the next time you hit the wall - give this technique a try, I’ve been using it for years and it’s never failed me yet!

An insight into life as a web designer. Recorded with the built in camera on my MacBook Pro and edited with iMovie. I have to say a big thank you to my friend Nicola Campbell for her input. Hope you like it!