Hey guys, I’ve not been around these days because of the finishing touches to the font we’ve created with my friend Veronika Slavova. These we exhausting 2 weeks in which I’ve also took part in a very important pitch, where I still wait the result. But that’s not important now, the most important thing is that you can purchase the glide font here or download the very special free version here.

More and more often a lot of people decides to switch from their part time jobs to freelance business.This is often considered as the easy way of making money with design.

BUT, reality is quite different and here are the mistakes I made but helped me to realize it:

I thought it would be easy

I have to admit that my first impressions of the freelancing quite candied. I thought that my job would be a lot easier, sleeping till noon, working when I want with all the clients out there looking for my service. I had to face it sooner or later – it’s not like that. I’ve realized that I had to do the job of a lot of people – I had to be designer, account manager, I had to work on my taxes – ALONE! It was a bit of a shock in the beginning, I was chaotic and stressed, wasting time as hell.

I didn’t organize my work

As I said I was wasting time – a LOT! I didn’t know that I had to organize everything, not just my time, but everything – your social life, your working place, and I still had clients with pretty real deadlines!

Combined with my pretty wrong perception of how easy it should be, this lead to a small disaster. I spent so much time enjoying the fact that I don’t have to go to work anymore that my work projects suffered. One must really organize his working process. To distribute your time wisely between work and personal life.

Where’s my money?

I didn’t keep an account for all my incomes and expenses. That was probably my major mistake in the beginning – I didn’t know how much I’ve earned the last month and how much I’ve spent.

As freelancers we never know exactly how much we will earn tomorrow, it is very easy to forget and lose track on what’s going on with your money. Later I understood that to keep track on my income is pretty important for my work, for example how much work I have to take for the next month, can I indulge a vacation or I have to push myself and find more clients in order to satisfy at least some basic needs?

Clients!

One of my major concerns, before was that I have to work on projects which I do not approve – sometimes the client wanted some fix which I do not like, or I’m not in mood to work for casino ad or whatever. I thought it would be different now, but again, I was wrong.

Ok, maybe later I’ll have the opportunity to chose my clients, but believe me in the beginning it’s quite difficult. I’ve learned that no matter the client – the good work is still good work, and the good work leads to good clients.

Pricing!

It was difficult, it is difficult and I suppose that it will still be difficult in the next 5 years. And the mistake I’ve made was because of my problem talking about money.

You’ll never know if the price you offer is ok or not for your client, but you must learn to say no if the sum is not ok for you. Every beginning is difficult, and under-pricing could be one of your worst enemies on the freelance market.

It will be interesting to see your opinion and your solutions.

Hey guys I’ve recently submitted a t-shirt proposal for threadless, which was real fun for me to do, But in order to get the tee printed, I’ll need your support guys! I’ll be thankful if you support me and vote for the t-shirt here.

I am sure you’ve seen all the great tutorial websites out there, full of really helpful tutorials. Nowadays we have the chance to read tutorials directly from the industry leading bloggers, designers and entrepreneurs.

Even I have checked out my luck and sent a tutorial to one of the major websites (hope you’ll have the chance to check it out soon). And this is exactly the reason that made me think a little bit more on our perception of the tutorials we read every day.

Recently I’ve gone through some great tutorials on how to create awesome cute little animal in illustrator! Definitely interesting read, but the question I asked myself was:

So what ?

Can I really create it on my own now? Even if I can, what’s the point of doing that? Isn’t it already created? Ok, I’ve really learned this specific technique of creating it, but I’ve learned something more important – that we should never stop experimenting. We should at least try to use the great art of learning by trial and error in order to achieve something worthy, to earn something by reading this tutorial.

Here are the advantages I see in experimenting:

You have nothing to lose!

While experimenting, with the newly learned technique of creating sweet little puppy in illustrator, you cannot lose what you’ve already learned. But you can find completely new way of doing that. No matter what is the subject – there is always space for improvement.

Use it! Use what you’ve just learned to upgrade your skills.

You learn more!

Forget about the theory you know for a while, try a different approach:

• you will be never able to stand out if you stick strictly to the rules

• you will definitely learn a lot more, and you will find that some of those “mistakes” are actually pretty good looking ones.

Here, comes a very handy quote by Claude Bernard:

“The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in experiment, but also what he did not seek!”

You learn better!

The best way to learn to design better is simply by trying again and again until you find the right combination. Of course there are principles which you really cannot evade, but in the end it’s all about trial and error.

As Nick Campbell – the creator of GRAYSCALE GORILLA says:

“Moving stuff around until it doesn’t look like shit”

Learning how to design involves a lot of mistake. Being creative and make mistakes actually can find the right way of your future.

Satisfaction!

You won’t regret, it’s much better to learn that something is not working for you than just sit and ask yourself “what if ?”.

Icons for free. That’s it – more than 60 wonderful social media icons in 4 sizes 128px, 64px, 48px and 32px. Download link under the preview. I hope you’ll enjoy that pack.

Download

Hey folks, I’ve been looking these days for some decent wallpaper for my desktop when finally I’ve decided to create one on my own. I’m pretty satisfied with the result so I want to share it with you. The wallpaper is available in 5 sizes for your desktop and one for your iphone.

1900×1200

1680×1050

1440×900

1280×1024

1024×768

320×480

Enjoy it!

I’m sure that you’ve already seen the work of the talented Albert Exerigan. He has great collection of alternative TV series posters, among which are: Lost, Prison Break, Twin Peaks and a lot more.Be sure to check them out. Also Available for purchase at Blanka.

I stumbled on this great minimalist poster at Flickr’s photo stream of Umut Pehlivanov. Check out also and the lovely game posters he has designed.

Seek and Speak is the online showcase of Brandon Schaefer, a 25 year old graphic designer. I fell in love with this poster as soon as I first saw it – amazing use of space, color and typeface. Great work!

The Matrix by Alex Eylar aka ProfoundWhatever he has some great collection of alternative movie posters, most of them available for purchase at imagekind.

Mario Graciotti aka mr-bluebird – only 19 years old guy from Brazil, already shows some great skill. Check out his DeviantArt profile.

Do I have to tell you something about Olly Moss? In my opinion he is one of the most popular t-shirt designers, but except that he has also designed some really beautiful movie posters in black and red. Check the rest here.

claes k aka ck/ck is photographer, graphic and type designer. I stumbled on this poster via Fickr.

Christina Perry is from Sydney, Australia. This is where she was educated and recieved a degree in Visual Communication from the Univeristy of Techonology. Christina has created a set of posters for Mad Men series. Lovely!

Meet mister Ibraheem Youssef Toronto based Designer / Art Director. He has designed some really cool posters based on Tarantino movies – available for purchase here.

Type Theory

This is comparatively new blog founded by Ty Wilkins just one year ago. Type Theory is a journal of contemporary typography featuring news, views, reviews and interviews. Latest intriguing posts – 12 days of vintage Christmas typography – love these posts.

Ralf Herrmann’s Typography Weblog

Opentype.info is the weblog of the German designer and author Ralf Herrmann. He provides great typography articles on various topics as typography web typography, and especially traffic typefaces and wayfinding typography.

Swiss Legacy

Swiss Legacy is initiative of Art Director Xavier Encinas, a blog focused on typography, graphic design and inspirational matters.

Upscale Typography

This blog is administered by Parachute®, an independent typefoundry.  Here, you’ll find useful typographic tips, new releases, pre-release notifications, historic references, trends and everything else typographic

Daily Type

Daily Type is a creative project run by several russian type designers. With archive starting from November 2004, this blog is collection of numerous great type experiments.

Aisle One

For the Love of Type

Great Blogger-based resource for typography inspiration. I’ve seen some the most intriguing type treatments there.

WordBoner

Pretty lovely tumblr based typography blog offering type inspiration hosted by Peter Kay.

I’ve recently launched a new project – Ithinkinimages is collection of photography, typography, graphic design, advertising, architecture, fashion, and everything that inspire me. I hope you find it interesting too.

shown image by Svilen Gamolov