Fresh out of school, you are a technician not a professional Quote
8th March 2010 2 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/420
Question: “I recently graduated from design school and have started freelancing, and I’m wondering how you get clients? How do you get your name out there?”
This person may just as well have jumped out of an airplane and then asked, “Now, how do I go about finding a parachute? Oh, and should I land somewhere specific? How exactly do I do that?” Even so, this lack of foresight is quite common. The immediate lesson is that you shouldn’t become an independent professional with little to no professional experience, with no prospects and knowing little to nothing about the business.
Andy Rutledge lays down the law on Design Professionalism with answers to some very commonly asked questions from both agency and freelance designers.
Web designers who can't code, need to read this book Notes
3rd March 2010 4 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/419
Upon returning from my month long vacation down-under I arrived home to see that the ‘should designers be able to code’ debate had reared its head once again, there has been plenty said about that already and it is certainly an interesting discussion.
HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions – A Web Standardistas’ Approach →
This book by Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson is the book to read if you are wanting to learn how to write standards-compliant XHTML and CSS the right way. I have been fortunate enough to meet both Chris & Nic on several occasions, have had lengthy discussions with them about how web standards should be taught and also managed to sneak into their workshop at Build Conference. These guys are teaching the right stuff the right way.
Occasionally I am approached by designers looking for someone to write the markup and CSS for their designs and it is always easy to tell who knows how to design for the web and who does not. This is the book I will be recommending from now on, it covers all the fundamentals of web standards today in one neat package that I would thoroughly recommend to anyone looking to learn. Check out the Web Standardistas.
Allowing visitors to leave comments has many benefits Article
29th January 2010 18 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/418
The Comments vs No Comments debate has been a hot topic for some time and is something I have never really been able to get my head around. I am absolutely in favour of having comments enabled on blogs, especially on sites that are writing and promoting great content worth discussing further. Not wanting to kick up another big debate about it here, but I did feel compelled to write about why I have them enabled and the benefits that have come of it.
How-to register an International Domain Name Link
24th January 2010 6 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/417
John Sutherland a fellow Edinburgh Refresher has written a fantastic little guide on:
How-to register an International Domain Name →
I had been meaning to look into this after seeing Gruber's fantastic http://✪df.ws short URL. Thanks to John's how-to guide I picked up http://ɯɐs.com/. Let me know what you nab.
The importance of teaching your clients and being the boss Article
20th January 2010 50 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/416
What I have come to realise over the last few years is that too many people are trying their best to please the client over the visitor. The client is not the primary aim, the visitor is. Of course the client has to like and approve the site but you should not be letting one persons clouded judgement determine the outcome of the entire project – design is personal and subjective – the sooner you realise that and the sooner you teach your client that, the better off you will be.
Helping Carbonmade keep their finger on the Pulse Article
13th January 2010 22 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/415
Web apps generate a lot of data, popular and successful web apps even more so, and when you are at the helm of one of these applications you need to be able to peer in at a glance and get a good overview of how things are doing on a daily basis. Carbonmade hired me towards the end of December 2009 to design and build a backend interface for them to view what activity was happening on the Carbonmade site each day, let me explain what we created, Pulse.
How to stay sane when freelancing from home Article
5th January 2010 22 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/414
Freelancing from home can be a lonesome job fraught with a multitude of interruptions and distractions but with the right setup and a bit of discipline it can be a very enjoyable and fun environment to work in. Here are some of my top tips to help keep yourself sane and help you be the best work from home freelancers around.
Project52 - A personal challenge Link
3rd January 2010 9 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/413
Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!
Find out more about Project52 →
I have decided, along with some 500 other people, to take part in Project52, writing an article a week on my site for 2010. There are a whole host of other great people taking part in this and I can’t wait to read what they have to say on a regular basis. Be sure to sign up and take part.
Bulletproof Rounded Corners with Border Radius Notes
22nd December 2009 8 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/412
I was rather pleased to see that not only does the latest version of Opera (the 10.5 pre-alpha) support border-radius but they made the smart move and didn’t prefix it with a vendor specific property -o- like Gecko (-moz-) and Webkit (-webkit-) do.
If you have not already been writing your border-radius statements with progressive enhancement in mind, now is most definitely the time to do it:
.box {-khtml-border-radius: 5px;-moz-border-radius: 5px;-webkit-border-radius: 5px;border-radius: 5px;}- Download this code: /code/border-radius.txt
The latest Opera pre-alpha includes a whole host of new properties from the W3C’s CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders spec including background-clip, background-origin, border-radius, Multiple background images, background-attachment, box-shadow & border-image. This version also includes the ability to add CSS3 transitions and 2D transforms for richer user interfaces.
My delighters.css stylesheet now includes the Opera specific transitions and animations. Thumbs up to Opera.
Our Snowy Christmas Tree Photo
11th December 2009 2 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/411
It’s that holiday season again and we just put up our Christmas Tree! Have you done yours?
