By Steven Snell | Published February 2nd, 2010 in Business/Freelance
Most freelance designers are experienced and talented with their trade, but not so much when it comes to financial issues. In this post I’d like to share some things that I have learned through my own experience of being self employed that I think will be able to help others. I am in no way a financial professional and you should always seek the advice of someone qualified on the specifics of your own situation, but these are some general things that have helped me along the way.
1. Have Emergency Savings
If you haven’t started full-time freelancing yet, the best thing you can do for yourself financially is to build up an emergency fund that will allow you to pay all of your bills for at least a few months. Hopefully you won’t need this money, but if things don’t go as expected at least it will be there for you and you won’t have to go scrambling back to a job as soon as things slow down.
If you are already freelancing full-time with no emergency savings, it’s not too late to address the issue. This money will help to reduce the stress that you may be feeling to earn enough each month.
By Steven Snell | Published February 1st, 2010 in Tutorials
Today we’re going to walk through the process of designing an example corporate website in Photoshop.
Here is a look at the end result of what we will be creating (click on the image to see it in full size).
By Steven Snell | Published January 31st, 2010 in Resources
Having the right icons for a web design project can greatly enhance the end results. Finding the right icons, however, is not always an easy task. Fortunately, there are some sites that exist specifically to help people find the icons that they are looking for. If you find yourself looking for icons to use in your own work, try these resources.
Iconfinder is the best icon search engine. There are a lot of high-quality icons available, and you can filter the results to show only those that are licensed for commercial use.
By Steven Snell | Published January 28th, 2010 in Interviews
Over the past few years there has been a drastic increase in the number of premium or commercial themes available to WordPress users, and more theme sellers have continued to enter the market. Some are well-known individuals or companies who have developed a reputation in the WordPress community, and others have just recently started selling themes.
I recently reached out to several people who sell and/or design WordPress themes either through their own companies or through ThemeForest. I asked the same questions to each participant and their responses have been collected in this group interview. For anyone who has considered selling themes or templates, I think you will find a wealth of information from this experienced panel. If you’ve ever bought a WordPress theme or have wondered what it’s like to run a business selling themes, I think you’ll find some helpful info here as well.
By Steven Snell | Published January 27th, 2010 in Resources
One of the major benefits of using WordPress is the large, active community of users. You can find just about anything you need by doing a search. Chances are, someone else has already provided answers to your question on a website, blog, or forum. In this post we’ll feature 15 blogs that produce excellent content that is highly relevant to WordPress theme designers. If you do a lot of work with WordPress, either for your own site or for clients, I recommend that you bookmark these blogs or subscribe to their feeds.
WpRecipes
At WpRecipes Jean-Baptiste Jung publishes short posts that include code snippets for accomplishing specific things with WordPress.
By Steven Snell | Published January 26th, 2010 in Site News
Our friends at UPrinting have offered to give 500 free die cut business cards each to five readers of DesignM.ag! If you’ve been wanting to impress potential clients with some high-quality business cards, this is your chance to get them for free.
By Kahlil Gibran | Published in Tutorials
The new O.S. Windows 7 has improved aesthetics to make the user interface at least more appealing. There are huge ultra detailed icons for folders, devices and so on. This time we will use Illustrator CS4 to create a nice briefcase with the Windows 7 style. You need only a few basics on how to copy, paste, rotate, scale and color the shapes. Let’s focus on business.
Step 1:
Start selecting the Rounded Rectangle Tool (fig. A) and make a single left click on the art board to bring the Rounded Rectangle options configuration window appear. Use 16 px. for corner radius (fig. B) and press Accept. Then left click and drag to draw a shape as shown.
By Steven Snell | Published January 25th, 2010 in Resources
Almost every website uses a form of some kind. Contact forms and other types of forms can be enhanced with the use of a number of jQuery plugins that are readily available. In this post we’ll feature 25 useful plugins that you may be able to use in your own work with forms.
jqTransform will make it easy to give your forms a more attractive look as compared to the default form.
By Steven Snell | Published January 24th, 2010 in Site News
Throughout the month of January we have been offering free job postings and have been working to increase the usefullness of the job board for job seekers and for those who are looking to hire designers and developers. We’re happy to have more than 40 opportunities currently listed, we also wanted to point out some new features and additions related to the job board.
If you’re looking to hire a designer, developer, or marketer, you still have one week to submit for free. Jobs can either be posted for 30 or 60 days, just use the promo code “free”.
By Steven Snell | Published January 22nd, 2010 in Freebies
Today we have a great new set of vintage wallpaper textures from Caleb Kimbrough. The set includes 8 textures (4 are shown below). You can get any of them individually from the Flickr set.
These textures may be used for personal or commercial projects with no attribution needed, although links are always appreciated. They cannot be re-distributed or sold.
