Creative Community Bulletin 13 May 2009 Through 22 May 2009

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 13 May 2009 through 22 May 2009:

• Spec Work and Crowdsourcing: Gambles that Don’t Pay Off | CreativePro​.com – The econ­o­my’s in the toi­let and you’re hun­gry for jobs, so you’re work­ing on spec or post­ing designs to sites like CrowdSpring. It’s under­stand­able. The prob­lem is, spec and crowd­sourc­ing can low­er your val­ue and hourly rates so far that min­i­mum wage looks like a fat pay­check. Here’s what to do instead.
• How To Be The Freelancer That Everyone Wants To Work With – Have you ever thought about why your clients reach out to you, or what it is they want to buy from you? Maybe an amaz­ing design from a web design­er, or an awe­some arti­cle from a writer? No, that’s not the answer.When your clients decide to hire you they aren’t real­ly buy­ing your ser­vices, they […]
• 9 Things to Understand About a Client When Starting a Design Project – As a design­er, each of your clients and projects is unique. However, there are cer­tain things that you will need to know or under­stand about all of your clients in order to pro­duce your best work for them. An effec­tive web­site will be built to address the spe­cif­ic needs of the busi­ness, which will require the design­er to accu­rate­ly under­stand a lot of details about the busi​ness​.In this arti­cle we’ll look at nine things that should be dis­cussed between the design­er and the client at the start of the project to improve the like­li­hood of suc­cess. These top­ics focus on get­ting to know the busi­ness and their needs, rather than con­trac­tu­al issues like pay­ment and deadlines.
• 5 Productivity Killers and How to Slay Them – Angie recent­ly did an over­haul of her work sched­ule with the intent of try­ing to be more pro­duc­tive. Making an attempt to max­i­mize her days, and squeeze as much effi­cien­cy out of the day, or more to the point, the night, as she can muster. In the process of doing this she found that there were 5 major pro­duc­tiv­i­ty killers stand­ing between her and free­dom… wait, no, that’s not it… stand­ing between her and cer­tain death… whoa, okay that’s not even close… Goals! That’s it!
• Why Twitter’s Engineers Hate the @replies fea­ture #fixreplies – Even though only 3% of all Twitter accounts ever changed this set­ting away from the default, it was caus­ing a strain and impact­ing oth­er parts of the sys­tem. Every time some­one wrote a reply Twitter had to check and see what each of their fol­low­ers’ reply set­ting was and then man­i­fest that tweet accord­ing­ly in their timeline—this was the most expen­sive work the data­base was doing and it was caus­ing oth­er fea­tures to degrade which lead to SMS delays, incon­sis­ten­cies in fol­low­ing, fluc­tu­a­tions in direct mes­sage counts, and more. Ideally, we would redesign and rebuild this fea­ture but there was no time, hence the sud­den deploy.
• Abstract pur­ple back­ground — Workflow: Freelance – Abstract pur­ple back­ground cre­at­ed in Photoshop. Shiny pur­ple and pink waves cre­at­ed with motion blur, on a dark blue back­ground. Computer gen­er­at­ed graph­ic, avail­able in a high res­o­lu­tion. A great dec­o­ra­tive back­ground for your design. Resolution: 5000x3750 px
• From Design Into Print » Hickeys and what to do about them. – At the risk of send­ing the entire room into a fit of the gig­gles, Sandee tack­les the impor­tant top­ic of hick­eys in print­ing. What are hick­eys? What caus­es them? And what should you, as a design­er, do about them.
• 108 Black Inlay on Steel Social Media Icons – 108 Black Inlay on Steel Social Media Icons
• Great for Bloggers! How to Make FireFox a Better Spell Checker – Therefore this quick FireFox toolk­it is about mak­ing it a more pow­er­ful spell checker.
• Where Are They Now? 25 Computer Products That Refuse to Die – Page6 – MSN Tech – Over at Adobe’s Web site, it’s still sell­ing PageMaker 7.0, which dates to 2002. The price: $499. It touts it as “the ide­al page lay­out pro­gram for busi­ness, edu­ca­tion and small- and home-office pro­fes­sion­als who want to cre­ate high-quality pub­li­ca­tions such as brochures and newsletters.”
• Spec Work and Crowdsourcing: Gambles that Don’t Pay Off — Workflow: Freelance – The econ­o­my’s in the toi­let and you’re hun­gry for jobs, so you’re work­ing on spec or post­ing designs to sites like CrowdSpring. It’s under­stand­able. The prob­lem is, spec and crowd­sourc­ing can low­er your val­ue and hourly rates so far that min­i­mum wage looks like a fat pay­check. Here’s what to do instead.