commentary tag

Being a free­lancer is great—the free­dom, the money, the pri­vate office. The flip side can be a harsh dose of real­ity; the paper­work, the account­ing, the jan­i­to­r­ial duties. In a cor­po­rate or stu­dio envi­ron­ment you have staff doing many of these things so you can focus on the task at hand—being a kick-​​​​ass designer. But this al goes bye-​​​​bye when you strike out on your own.

It’s been a cou­ple months since the Apple/​​HTML 5 vs Adobe/​​Flash wars began and I am con­tin­u­ally amazed how much atten­tion this topic receives. While the tech­nol­ogy dri­ving the media we con­sume is an impor­tant dis­cus­sion, it’s not the con­ver­sa­tion which needs to be tak­ing place. What’s being glossed over is this; why, in 2010, are we still dis­cussing code instead of content?

Another good read on the cur­rent deval­u­a­tion of cre­ative services—this time from the per­spec­tive of a Copy­writer. If you’re Web or Graphic Designer who has had the priv­i­lege of work­ing with a good copy­writer than you know they are more than a glo­ri­fied spell check, and how much eas­ier they can make your job. I’ve about had my fill of the cheap copy debate. In truth, there isn’t one. If you’ve got a com­plaint about copy­writ­ers charg­ing too much, you’ve…

Some­times you have to stop and con­sider what the long-​​​​term cost is by sav­ing a few dol­lars by skimp­ing on the ser­vices of a qual­ity designer. I won­der how many sales were lost from this? I bet it cost more than had they payed the designer. Client: “That’s way too much money to charge for an email cam­paign. It’s not hard to put a few graph­ics in an email.” Me: “I charge based off of my reg­u­lar hourly rate and that’s…

The key choices you make—apart from the nat­ural tal­ent you already have—will set you apart from oth­ers who have tal­ent alone. Tal­ent + right choices = a Talent-​​​​Plus Per­son. Via Don’t be suc­cess­ful. Be valu­able. /​​/​​ Processed Iden­tity: Shar­ing How You Got There /​​ The Cre­ative Process of Iden­tity and Logo Design.