If you’re like me, you graduated from art school and had dreams of working as an art director at a small agency. You envisioned having your own office on the top floor of a loft with 30-foot ceilings.

Designers would play ping-pong below; people were allowed to drink beer at work; and brilliant ideas would flow effortlessly from your mind into multi-million-dollar campaigns for clients like Nike and Coca-Cola.

In fact, you got a job at a large corporation and were shown to a desk in a sea of light-gray fabric-covered cubicles. Instead of 30-foot ceilings, you have surprisingly low ceilings, covered with a substance that you could swear is asbestos.

You were given a 90-page handbook on how to create drop-shadows and sent off to populate templates for product brochures.

Sounds like hell. But outlined below are a few ways to improve your outlook on work life, foster creativity in you and the business and, most importantly, bring some fun into your corporate job. Read more

Unlike other forms of art, graphic design is not just about taking paper and pen and letting the work flow.

Graphic designers have to help viewers get the message and help sell a service or product.

Creating a design for a client with little or no strategy just doesn’t work. Unlike traditional art, graphic design has to convey a very narrow message.

Developing a system for the graphic design process can help the designer achieve the best results.

Systematizing any sort of project, whether graphic design, web design, programming or otherwise, gets the work done faster, keeps the project organized and yields better results.

Here is a simple six-step graphic design process, which you may want to take wholesale or build on. Read more

The other day my daughter, Sophia, announced that she wanted to set up a lemonade stand.

Seeing as how I didn’t really want to spend the better part of my weekend selling lemonade, I tried to talk her out of it by showing her how much she’d need to spend to buy the lemonade mix, get the cups, that sort of thing.

Regardless of my best efforts, there was no changing her mind. She wanted to go into business and there wasn’t anything I was going to do to stop her.

So as I succumbed to my role as venture capitalist in her first business startup. I decided that at the very least, this would be a great chance to teach my daughter about counting money, basic business principals, that sort of thing. Read more

Efficiency and organization are critical for freelance web designers. Managing finances and tracking down payments is not what drew most freelancers into this line of work. Fortunately, while handling finances is a necessary part of the business of freelancing, there are many tools and resources to that can help to simplify things. These tools can be critical to keeping your business running smoothly and efficiently.

In this post we’ll look at 15 online tools and services that can offer freelancers some help in the area of finances and billing. Most of these tools are paid, but limited free plans or free trials are available in most cases.

While paying for this type of tool or software may not sound appealing, the time you will be able to save should more than make up for the cost, not to mention less headaches and increased accuracy. Read more

In this article, we list several great applications for project and time management as well as collaboration between you and your clients. There are free and commercial options available.

These project management apps are here to save you time, but they can also be very time consuming and not intuitive. If you have a team who works with you remotely, then this is an ideal choice. If you are a freelancer however, you will have to spend some time learning these as well as teaching your clients how to use and interact with the application.

Let’s keep the cons aside and give the apps a chance, you can then see for yourself which ones will suit your needs best. Read more