Graphic Design Lead For Graphic Design for Area Rug Poster
Posted: 07/25/2008

Graphic Design Project Description: Number of pages (approx): 1 My Industry: Home Furnishings - Area Rugs need a poster designs with pics of about 25 of our carpets. basic design, creative look required. will sample picture of color scheme. 24 by 36

Graphic Design Details: Best way to reach me is: phone / email I prefer to work with designers located: anywhere ...

Graphic Design Lead For Grass based Eco Farming Yogurt Producer Logo
Posted: 07/25/2008

Graphic Design Project Description: I am returning to the United States after 5 years in New Zealand to start a milk processing plant. My family has been very successful in the dairy area for over 20 years with the latest operation being an artisan cheese production business that retails nationwide. This new endeavour will take advantage of our competitive marketing advantage of having grass based (rotational grazing), non-confinement sourced milk from happy, long lived cows. Our milk is scientifically superior in nutrient density and composition, and to put it plainly, we take great pride in what we do as a farming family and what our cows are able to produce. Our farms are biologically sound and incorporate a holistic production philosophy. We aim to supply wholesome and affordable dairy products across a range of markets. We are looking for a trendy, fun, and memorable logo to place our faith into as an organization. If you have the talent and experience to assist us in this endeavour, we would be very happy to hear from you. Other opportunities are available for website design. One of our core values is the education of the consumer about both their own food chains and how pertinent food quality is for their lives. We aim to realign the distanced consumer to the agricultural roots of their forefathers, and provide them with a broad understanding of how their food is produced and handled, and what impact that methodology has on the world around them.

Graphic Design Details: Best way to reach me is: phone / email I prefer to work with designers located: anywhere The image...

Before going out on their own, many freelancers struggle with the idea of how to position themselves in their market of expertise. Considering many freelancers have at one time worked in an agency setting, it’s tempting to have the agency mind-set when crafting your promotional materials.

For example, the decision of whether to use ‘I’ or ‘We’ can dramatically affect the way you’re perceived by prospective clients; “We can deliver excellent results” sounds much larger than “I can deliver excellent results”. The big question, then, is this: do you want to be an agency or a freelancer?

The truth is, most big agencies started as one or two people. For those who knew they didn’t want their business to stay small, they had to position themselves as something greater than what they were, and grow slowly over time. Therefore, any freelancer starting out has to consider the question of whether he/she wants to stay a freelancer, or grow into a firm. There are definite pros and cons to either approach. Here are just 5 factors to consider:

1. Overhead
2. Competition
3. Client caliber
4. Hourly rate
5. Busyness

Freelance

1. Little overhead. When you work from home, as most freelancers do, you have little to pay for, other than the cost of keeping a roof over your head, food in the fridge and the internet connection plugged in. Most of the money you make can go directly into your pocket, whether that be a savings account, investments, or a new Apple cinema display. The lower your overhead, the higher your profit margins.

2. Competitors are colleagues. Competition is fierce in any business, and the same goes with freelance design/programming/writing. That being said; many of our freelance competitors tend to be colleagues or even friends. People we can have a beer while sharing client horror stories. Sure, we may lose projects to them on occasion, but for the most part, there’s enough work to go around, and clients make their hiring decisions based on our portfolio, price, experience and professionalism — and nothing else.

3. Worth less in the client’s eyes. While reputable freelancers can certainly gather big client work, many large companies tend to favor established firms for their $50K projects. It can be hard to convince a prospective client that you can do the same quality of work as a 10 person company with a downtown office, a team of designers and coders, and an attractive front-desk person who offers to hang up the clients’ jacket and make them a cup of coffee. Meanwhile, the lowly freelancer is sitting with the prospect in a Starbucks. The truth is, many prospects worry a one-man band is unreliable since, as they often put it, we could ‘get hit by a bus tomorrow.’

4. Lower rate = no outsource potential. Let’s face it, freelancers generally can’t command the high rates that even small agencies do. Clients know we don’t have to pay employee salaries, or keep the phone system running, so the same caliber of work will often get sold at half the rate that the big boys charge. Because of this, freelancers generally can’t afford to outsource their work and turn a profit. As a result, they can only bill for the hours that they are physically able to work. This may mean they have to turn down work on occasion.

5. Octopus syndrome. Freelancers tend to suffer from this. They are required to be all things to all people; designer, writer, programmer, copywriter, strategist, accountant, cold-caller, dog walker, networking-event shmoozer — the list goes on. As previously stated, freelancers usually can’t afford to outsource their responsibilities, which means they have less time to be working on the stuff that actually pays the bills.

Firm/agency

1. Major overhead. Office rent, furniture, computer hardware and software (times the number of employees), file servers, phone systems, not to mention salaries — firms and agencies have overhead to spare. It’s usually the ol’ bricks and mortar that destroys the cool little design firm that used to churn-out award winning work… before they went under.

2. Competitors: they’re out to get you. Unlike freelancers, competing agencies are usually not the best of friends. Because of the aforementioned overhead problem, every agency needs all the work they can get. That means they’re usually savagely competing with other firms on proposals, and often bad-talking their competitors when they can. That can be a little unnerving when your monthly break-even rate is 50K.

3. More credible to large clients. One of the benefits of being considered an agency is that big clients with big projects have no problem handing you big wads of cash. You’ve got an office and a fancy phone system, so the client has less concern about liability. In this case, perception is everything.

4. Higher rates mean outsourcing potential. Because agency rates tend to be in the triple-digit-per-hour range, you as a business owner can leverage the talents of other people, whether that be salaried employees or contracted freelancers. This means you can take on more projects, and, if well managed, can turn a good profit.

Think about this in simple terms; imagine you could take on 10 projects a month, at $10,000 per project, each one requiring 50 hours of development time. You have 10 good contractors to outsource to who charge $50/hour, one contractor on each project. If you paid each contractor $2,500 for a job, and took the time to manage each client and each contractor, directing the quality of the work and the expectations of the client — you’ve just made $75,000 that month, you’ve got 10 happy clients, and 10 happy contractors who can be used in future projects. This is something you would have never been able to achieve as a solo freelancer.

5. More time to focus. In theory, if you have a team of either employees or freelancers at your disposal, you should have more time to do what you do best. If you find you’re better at developing business than designing, then you can hire a great designer and have fun watching her work some magic while you profit off of it. If you love being creative, but have trouble managing the business end (paying bills, invoicing, networking etc.), then you can hire someone else to fill that role. That means you’re spending your time doing what you love and what you’re good at, and avoiding the octopus syndrome freelancers often contend with.

Do what feels right

So what do you choose? There is no right or wrong answer because it all depends on what you value most. If you’re positioning yourself as a business, you can hope for more money in the long term, but more initial stress and start-up risks to go with it, and greater complexity overall.

Freelancing tends to offer a simpler way of life: working on what you want, when you want, but it may not bring the prestige of working on million dollar projects for international brands, or making the top CEO list in the local business mag.

Every company starts as one or two people, but it is your positioning that will dictate your growth potential. If you’re content to stay as an independent freelancer without any ball-and-chain overhead, then position yourself honestly as such.

Do you have any other factors that can help you decide whether or not to grow your freelance business bigger?

For over five years, Kyle worked at various Halifax-based publishing, advertising and interactive firms in senior design roles. His entrepreneurial spirit, and passion for his craft led him to form Headspace in early 2007, and he has since gained a loyal base of clients, both local and international.

Graphic Design Lead For Graphic Design for Advertising
Posted: 07/24/2008

Graphic Design Project Description: Number of pages (approx):2 My Industry: mortgage The ads will be approx 8.5 X 11. I need two ads done. I can send an example. I would just need to change some of the verbiage. I'd need it available to color print for direct mail advertising and I'd also need the html or xhtml code for some email campaigns. Also take a look at this link. http://moneymergewealthbuilder.com/ I need something similar to this created and branded with the Qualified Mortgage logo, etc. (I can email you the logo and any of the other images or graphics you're going to need). Again, I'd need it available for print and the code for email advertising. I don't need the "fill out form" section.

Graphic Design Details: Best way to reach me is: phone / email I prefer to work with designers located: anywhere ...

If you’re a web-working freelancer of any sort, you’re probably following umpteen RSS feeds in your favorite feed reader (Feed Demon, Google Reader, etc.), with your subscription list growing by the day. Are you overwhelmed by the number of RSS feed items in your feed reader that you haven’t read? Are you tired of the “same” items appearing over and over in your subscriptions, even though you’ve read them already? Is using an RSS feed reader becoming counterproductive, even with a structured folder system?

Maybe it’s time to declare RSS “feed reader bankruptcy” and find another way to monitor your niches.

That’s what I did maybe 8-9 months ago, though I’ve never said it publicly. In fact, I didn’t even admit it to myself until recently, fully intending to go back to my Feed Demon app. The massive quantities of unread items and the duplicates generated by some blogging platforms just overwhelmed me. Half my day was spent browsing through feed items I’d never have time to read or use in any way.

What Now?

Freelancers tend to be generalists, which means they need to monitor multiple niches all the time. For some people, a good RSS reader is ideal. If you’re not ready to give up feed readers just yet, I recommend you read Chris Garrett’s excellent 21 Niche News and Feed Reading Productivity Tips.

However, if you are fed up with using an RSS reader, what do you do instead to stay on top of a specific niche?

Let’s have a quick look at how the average person keeps up with their favorite sites:

1. Random visits to websites.
2. Browser-bookmarked sites categorized into folders, then visited daily, systematically.
3. Random monitoring via RSS readers.
4. Organized RSS reader folders (daily, weekly, infrequent).
5. A combination of the above.
6. None of the above.

Over the past three years, I’ve transitioned from one method to another, using whatever was most convenient. At some point last year, I used a combination of 1-4. The result was spending 4-6 hours a day browsing. Ridiculous, right? Talk about getting carried away. At the core of this problem lies one thing: following too many sites at once. I have a great deal of respect for Robert Scoble. I don’t know how he follows so many RSS feeds (and Twitter streams). I was up over 1,000 and didn’t manage it. Life’s too short to be spent this way.

A Solution: Niche-focused Monitors

One solution to the problem is to get focused. The answer lies in “niche monitoring”, which I’ve written about at length at Performancing (how to build niche monitors, etc.). There are a number of options for niche monitoring:

1. Meme sites. Techmeme and Megite are great for monitoring the technology niche, and there are other niche versions (such as WeSmirch for celeb gossip) popping up. Megite even licenses their technology - albeit $15,000 (the last time I checked) might be a lot to spend.

2. P*purls-style sites. While Popurls is very useful to me day to day, it’s a little too general to be a “niche monitor”. However, you can use Ericulous’s P*purls Clone Theme for WordPress to build a focused niche monitor. (Note: It’s now called OneNews Theme, because of Popurl’s trademark.) I’ve built several for my own use, and these are what have mostly replaced my feed reader. While you are limited a specific set of sites, unlike with Techmeme, you can always add more “RSS blocks”.

3. Surchur. Surchur. Surchur is an interesting approach that combines a tag cloud and search engine with a p*purls-style interface. Click a keyword in the tag cloud, or enter a keyword into the search field, and you get links from the same types of sources, presented in a fashion similar to Popurls. Surchur goes beyond niche monitoring, right to focusing on a specific keyword.

4. Voting sites. Using the Popurls site gives you an overview of what’s going on at some of the popular social media and voting sites such as Digg, Reddit, etc., as well as a large list of popular sites in many niches. If you want a more focused look at a niche, keep tabs on the section “homes” of voting sites. For example, Digg’s Science “home” page.

5. River of News. The term River of News is normally applied to a feature of some feed readers to present a stream of headlines aggregated from multiple feeds. This isn’t just feed reader feature anymore. An example is Techmeme River.

I’ve also been experimenting with niche-focused “rivers” on web pages, using WordPress. An example is my RideSpottr for the auto niche. It’s by no means pretty, has no style, and needs a lot of features before it’s truly useful. Still, it’s a start, and it frees me from using a feed reader. (There’s also an annoying caching issue with WP’s RSS parser, which results in the occasional blank page. This also affects my p*purls-style niche monitors, which use Ericulous’ OneNews theme, mentioned above.)

6. Timelines. There’s another way to view a river of news: via a timeline interface such as MyTimelines. MyTimelines builds upon MIT’s slick SIMILE Timeline interface. You enter a feed URL, and some other parameters, and it presents the HTML/JavaScript code for you to embed on a web page. Voila. A timeline-view of a river of news. (There are some glitches I’ve found with the MyTimelines service, but for the most part it’s been very handy.)

7. Other Solutions.
If you need to aggregate multiple feeds, there are numerous browser-based “RSS feed mixing” services that you can try. I prefer to use Yahoo Pipes, which generates a custom feed mashup that can be used elsewhere. (Sometimes I’ll burn the Yahoo Pipes’ output RSS feed in Feedburner, though this could slow things down in a production environment.)

There’s also a custom dashboard project that I hope to turn into a free theme. It combines several of the options listed above — including timelines, P*purls, and news rivers — to present multiple views of a niche. So on any given day, you can use whatever seems handiest. It’s still a work in progress at this point, though I’m nearly at the coding stage. (It’s part of a series of “research” WP themes for freelancers that I’m developing for my own use, but I will very likely give them away.)

Why So Many Options?

All this seems more unfocused than using a single interface such as a feed reader, but I actually find my niche monitoring to be far more focused using the tools above. Everything is browser-based, and I can go “wide” or “narrow” as far as monitoring topics. Throw in all the story leads found on Twitter (depending on whom you’re following) and I have a lot of choices for how I’m going to monitor topics on any given day.

Life’s too short to waste the whole day browsing, which is a danger of over-subscribing via feed reader. I’ve eliminated feed readers from my toolkit, and the result is that I’ve cut my reading and browsing down to 1-2 hours/day. This leaves more time to write, and for the first time in three years, time to relax.

Once you have left the land of COLA raises, paid sick days, and employer-matched 401Ks, not only do you need to be the writer/programmer/web designer for your business, you also need to be your own CFO.

Here are some absolutely necessary components for your business (and life) financial portfolio:

1. You need insurance. In addition to car and home insurance, you must also now fund life, health, and disability insurance. Without these critical coverages, not only could you be swamped with debt brought on by an unforeseen medical situation, but your business could lose its most important asset—you!

2. You need to pay your taxes. Religiously. As soon as income hits your mailbox or PayPal account, it is imperative that you take 30% off the top and tuck it securely away in a separate (interest-bearing) savings account. This money will then be ready to pay your monthly, quarterly, or annual IRS bill, in full and on time.

3. You need an emergency fund. Everyone should have an emergency fund of six month’s worth of living expenses put aside in a savings or money market account — even those with six figure incomes. Freelancers need this fund even more than others since income can often be erratic and you don’t want to worry about being able to pay the electricity bill which keeps your computer fired up and work coming in.

4. You need a retirement fund. One thing that many freelancers look back wistfully on, maybe one of the only things from their cubicle days, is their employer-matched retirement funds. Now that you are the employer, it is critical that you don’t put off starting this fund since your senior years will be here faster than you think.

5. You need an accountant. Depending on your financial situation, a CPA may be worth their weight in gold. They can help you strategize about the best way to protect your income, minimize your liabilities, and make sure all of the necessary taxes are done and paid on time.

6. You need to become debt free. Immediately. Freelancers, especially those with highly variable incomes, do not need the added stress of making debt payments each month. Sit back, close your eyes, and think of what life would be like if you had zero debt—no credit card bills, no student loans, no car note, not even a house payment. Would life be easier? Would you be able to do more of the work you want to do instead of the work you have to do? You bet you would.

7. You need a budget and a cash flow plan. Without these items to map out how your income will be spent, you could soon be facing some major cash flow issues.

8. You need to always carry $100 cash with you. Besides a credit card or a debit card, you need to have some cold, hard cash on you. You never know what kind of emergency—major or minor—will pop up. Having cash on hand can often get you out of these little challenges with ease.

9. You need to look at ways to develop multiple streams of income. Whether that means adding more clients to your current roster, spinning off your current business by teaching a class or writing a book, or supplementing your current income with mowing lawns (not a bad idea if it’s the only thing keeping you from sitting at a computer all day), having a number of “paychecks” coming in each month which aren’t all from the same source is a very comforting feeling.

10. You need a business continuity plan. What would happen if something along the lines of Hurricane Katrina suddenly struck your area? Would you be able to continue to work and earn an income? What if you were to, God forbid, die? Would your current work be able to continue to generate an income to support your family, especially in the short term? How would this happen? You need a written plan to outline how your spouse/executor/business partner could continue with what you have started.

Enjoyed the post? Vote for it on Digg!

April Borbon is a business owner, freelance writer, world traveler, and director of a non-profit which she founded five years ago.

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