As many of you have probably noticed, I have not been actively posting for at least the last two weeks. I have at least continued to update our Extreme Designs of the Week postings, but that is not nearly the posting expectations that our readers come here for nor is it acceptable on my end as well. I mentioned in an earlier post that September kicked in and everyone is busier than usual so I have been busy like everyone else, working harder than ever on starting new projects, finishing old ones, and trying to balance that work load with blogging, website management, and hosting.

The last post that I wrote on titled “10 Tips to Being a Successful Freelancer” has got me thinking about giving this blog a more specific topic to write about instead of general web development and web design. So now instead of that we will be focusing more on the actual definition of web design and web development meaning we will be covering the topics of:

• web design
• print design
• coding: XHTML/CSS/AJAX/JS
• freelance tips
• business tips related to the web world

The above will be the topics the main focus of this blog will be. In addition, I will (re)do what bloggers are supposed to do when they begin blogging. I will outline our weekly posting routine from now on. So each and every week we will now try to:

1. Have our weekly ‘Extreme Designs of the Week’ post.
2. Have at least one design or coding tutorial.
3. Include 3-4 posts on freelance and business advice.
4. Keep our word.

I would like to also mention that I’m a guy that likes to be reminded a lot. So if you ever get the feeling that we’re slacking off with our blog, just shoot me a message and we’ll definitely respond.

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Oh Boy! It’s been a busy week here at my end and for many readers it’s probably a busy month! But regardless, we’re now ready to publish this week’s list of 5 awesome designs!

In No Particular Order:

By Yannick T.,

By Damijan Arnsek,

By Café,

By Echevarria Aquino,

By Friday Design,

Want to have your design featured here? Apply Here

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All designs are displayed with permission from the respective owners.

Popularity: 15% [?]

It is no doubt difficult at times to choose which 5 designs to feature in our Extreme Designs of the Week contests, and it is even harder to stand out in contests such as 99Designs when you’re competing against other freelancers, professionals, or even design companies. So what makes a great design? Here are some of the factors I take into consideration on what makes a design (whether it be webpage or logo) stand above others:

1. Simplicity - Everyone these days is all about simplicity. Why? Because it works. Simple logos, simple web pages, simple business cards, simple brochures, etc. The reason behind this psychology is because simple a) looks good and b) simple is easy to remember. In math terms, it’s easier to remember 10 + 10 rather than 4+2+1+5+7+1. In both cases the answer is the same, but if asked to repeat the equation, you’d probably remember the simpler one.
   In design terms, it works exactly the same way. We want to get the message across, not how many different effects you can stick on a 150px by 150px area. And besides, businessmen also like the idea that they can actually have a logo on their business card and still have room for their name and company information.
2. Skill – Looking at a design by someone who has only been designing for 3 months rather than someone who’s been doing it for several years, its fairly obvious who designed what.
3. Accuracy – If you’re given a task of creating an auto website, don’t go into eCommerce design. I see this with a lot of web designers that become so engrossed in their own category of design that they find it harder to adapt to another style when they’ve worked so long in one area. I find this to be an issue when you’re working for one or several clients that give you numerous projects in one category of design. Sure working like this helps you become specialized in one area very well, but I find that going out and finding clients in different aspects of web design also helps in the long run by specializing you in more areas and diversifying your portfolio.
4. Compatibility – This is something that comes with experience, but what makes a design stand out is the color compatibility. Choosing wrong color variations and styles, focusing on either the wrong primary or secondary colors (or both) often creates very incompatible and eye-burning designs that are hard to look at. I find it helpful on learning about actual colors before jumping in and designing something without knowing whether it will work or not.
5. Professionalism – You know this when you see it. Any design that stands out is one whose author took the time to make sure the all lines match up to one another. If they’re doing parallel lines ore reflective features, they actually are in perfect position. Any obscure or sharp edges are smoothed out. Slight shadows are added when needed, and so forth. Imagine looking at a design where you have lines or curves that are either a couple of pixels unfinished leaving white space, other lines go out too far, some areas of the design contain too much shadowing….would you want to even look at a design like that?
6. Uniqueness – We don’t want the same old blue colored webpage design with a Tahoma logo having a huge glass reflection and a cross-hatched web 2.0 background. Instead uniqueness shows itself when you go outside the box and add some personal touch to a site rather than create the same generic stuff.

This is how I look at a design that stands out. What factors do you consider in a design that are superb or outstanding?

Popularity: 19% [?]

Freelancing may be a hobby for some, but it may also be a full time job for others. In either case, if you want to be successful in freelancing whether it be design, backend development, print design, etc, it is very important to follow these tips in order to not ‘burn out’ as a freelancer:

1. Treat it as a business – Whether you think freelancing is a hobby or an actual business for you, it doesn’t matter. In either case, treat your freelancing work as a real  business. By this I mean when working with clients, provide them documentation, terms of contract, a price chart (I’ll discuss more on why these are helpful in a later post), and be supportive and understanding with your clients.
2. Keep up with the trends – It’s no use designing concepts that were popular in 2006. And your logo design probably won’t win if you drew it in MS Paint. The idea I’m trying to get across is keep up with the latest trends and ideas or even develop your own unique ideas.
   How I do it?
   • Visit popular CSS galleries (ie Website-Gallery.com, and FaveUp)
   • Tutorial sites (such as PSDTuts.com, Tutorialized.com)
   • ColourLover
   • Check out Competitor Sites
   • Browse through other design work

   NOTE: Don’t copy others work. This is not only unethical, but illegal. Oh and might I add it doesn’t really qualify as a tip on being a successful freelancer.

3. Manage your budget – Photoshop CS4 is just around the corner and many designers are getting their cash or (most likely) credit cards ready to spend big. My advice: Buying CS4 isn’t going to get you more clients, nor is CS3 going to cost you clients. Sure CS4 is loaded with goodies you can’t wait to try out, but is it really worth spending several grand for a piece of software? Read more on my five dumb budgeting mistakes.
4. Never stop learning – This is more of a branch-off from point #2, but in my career as a freelance designer as well as a corporate designer is to never stop learning. Tutorial sites are especially great for this and my three favorite ones are PSDTuts.com, NETTuts.com, and VECTORTuts.com. What makes these sites stick out of the crowd? These sites cut out the beginner lessons that many other tutorial sites focus on, and instead focus on technique rather than the actual design. Sure I might create the same design that these sites present without even reading the tutorial, but its the technique that we’re looking for that will help us out.
5. Keep your idea box full – It is not always that you start a new project that an idea immediately gets you into action. More often than not, you’ll sit there analyzing several ideas and thinking what would best fit the situation at hand. And the majority of the time, these ideas seem incomplete or inappropriate to use at that point.
   So what do I do to prevent this from happening? Similarly to how I use a journal to keep all of my blogging ideas, I also have a special bookmark folder with all kinds of links to various sites, images, or anything else that might have stuck to me at some point in time. You might even use a sketchpad to keep your ideas as well, but that is only used when there’s an idea in the real world otherwise click and bookmark beats the sketchpad time-wise.
6. Ethics – One thing I cannot stand is dishonest, blatant, and unethical clients and from a clients point of view, I hate dishonest, blatant, and unethical freelancers that I come across. If you want to be successful in the freelance world of competition, make yourself known for your integrity, honesty, worksmanship, and professionalism.
7. Attitude – Attitude goes hand in hand with ethics. If your ethics aren’t in place, then your attitude probably isn’t either. The kind of attitude I’m talking about is helpful and supportive of clients. Take each new project on with the kind of attitude that this may be the project that will take you to high places. By this I mean put in some actual thought and effort into the project to make it a success.
8. Advertising – Aside from all the attitude and education lessons above, in order to be a successful freelancer, you also need to get yourself known. Advertising may be free in some places, it may not be free in others. Places you can advertise on are web development forums and social networks. You may even advertise on Craigslist if you’re up to it. Winning on 99designs or getting your design or work submitted to a publication agency is also a form of advertising.
9. Portfolio or Website – A portfolio is very crucial to get any part of todays freelancing marketshare. Your portfolio may be anything from DeviantArt, 99Designs to Flickr, as long as it showcases your work. I recommend having a personal website on top of that because a website will get you established in your market, it will have your portfolio, and it will also have your resume of what you do which is especially great for clients because if you’re a designer and also a great coder, this solves quite a few problems on the clients part and may give you even more business.
10. Stay on Schedule – It may be tempting to lay off a project a day or two, but this is exactly what separates a successful freelance boss from an unsuccessful one. Staying on top of things will help you be organized, be prepared for the unexpected, ensure thoroughness of your work, and will open up time for other things you love doing!

I think that’s enough for now. I originally planned to write on 4 tips. Then I jumped to 7, but the ideas just kept coming and I kept writing, so at 10 tips I think its enough.

Popularity: 16% [?]

This week we have another great set of designers that are worthy of having their designs featured.

In no particular order,

By Brian Tom,

By Neticule,

By Keegan Renandy,

By Cafemocha,

By Laslo Sel,

Want to have your design featured here? Apply Here

Want to See more designs? Subscribe Here

All designs are displayed with permission from the respective owners.

Popularity: 18% [?]

I can bet about 80% of my readers check their email every time the new message icon pops up, read their RSS feeds or visit YouTube because they “don’t feel” like starting a project, and chat with people that have absolutely no connection to the project their working on. If you’re one of these people, read on…

Now I’ll make a confession to everyone. I used to do this every single day and it was tough because I would sit till midnight “working” on a design that should have been finished by the time my work day was over. I saw my productivity levels drop to very low rates and my designs were not as thought out as I would have liked. I knew I had to end this habit and I did by eliminating things that distract me from work:

• Email: I run Windows Live Mail and about every 2-10 minutes a new email comes in which I just had to read. I got around this by changing my email settings and getting WLM to check for new messages every 30 minutes (instead of every 1 minute).
• Feeds: RSS feeds may take up hours of your day and at times they did take up that much when I had an unspecified large number of subscriptions. Especially if you’re reading something like Engadget that brings in100+ new posts a day, then this is definitely a time waster. I have removed feeds that don’t really improve my knowledge and productivity and now I only have 34 essential feeds that I watch (although at times even this is too many). So remove feeds that:
  1. You don’t really need: Sure, Engadget was interesting, but is it that important?
  2. Too big: Reading a feed that has 100+ new posts a day is not only distractive, but unhealthy. It’s better off to sign up somewhere that brings in about 5-10 new posts each day because the fewer information you read, the more you can analyze it, think about it, and apply it.
     Note: Don’t unsubscribe from this site though
  3. Outdated : We’re after unique and new information, not the same boring stuff!
• Chat: More often than not, I get friends that have a “quick and urgent question” that they need solved. Their quick question often becomes a time waster that leads to other things resulting in less production time. I now like to set my status to “Busy” or “Working” depending on which IM clients I have running.
• Twitter: All the cool people use it right? I guess this is one time where its best to not be part of the cool crowd. The Twitter Tweets are fun, but they are very distracting, so the best bet is to just shut them off.
• Multiple Project At Once: Several years ago, this has been a major deal for me when I tried to work at different projects at once. This brought me to a point where almost every time I would sit and try to decide which one to do first. Since then, I have organized myself on working on projects on a first-come-first-serve basis and tell clients how much time to expect before they see any first hand results.
• StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon is great. Especially for wasting time. Honestly, I still find it hard at times to stop clicking the Stumble! button, but disabling it for a while has been helpful.
• Other Distractions: TV, Kids, (Wife), Various internet browsing activities, can all be part of your distractions. The above 5 things were my personal time-wasters which I now overcome with ease. Freelancers especially may have a hard time with these, but one thing I can say is this: Getting rid of these time-wasting activities will boost your productivity, career, and client base by at least 150%!
  

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