#Clients

Picture it: New York City, 2010; you're working full-time as a digital designer for one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. The paycheck is steady, the hours are (somewhat) flexible, and you really never have to take work home with you. To sweeten the pot, there are plenty of perks–free swag from clients and swanky company parties to enjoy. You take for granted the fact that you don't need to worry about where the work is coming from....

As a designer you’re expected to make the impossible happen. Time and time again, you’re expected to take an incredibly complex process and make it easy, simple and beautiful. When it’s handled well, you feel like a rock star. When we fail to live up to those heavy expectations, it leaves many of us feeling... deflated. Designers tend to be perfectionists by nature, we’re our own worst critic. We take those mistakes personally, as if...

Qualifying your clients is an important step that helps to keep you from wasting time on those suspects who will either never buy from you or be a poor fit for your business. Even worse are those suspects who will pick your brain, only to use the information you provide with another, often lower-cost, provider. I have a consulting client who is a startup freelance Web designer. When she came to me, she said her problem was spending a lot of time drafting...

As freelancers, we’ve all had to chase clients to get paid. You submit an invoice, and your client goes quiet. Thirty days, then sixty days go by. They stop emailing you, and suddenly you can’t get a hold of them. And you’re freaking out because your bills keep coming in, but you’re not able to pay them. I’ve had this exact scenario play out in my design business more times than I care to admit. To solve this issue, I went looking for a way...

Plenty of web designers are consummate professionals who strive to do the best for their clients and provide excellent service. These are designers who rightly have pride in their work and love what they do. Then, unfortunately, you also have the other side of the equation: designers who don’t care about making their clients happy, and therefore don’t provide good service. These are designers whose standards are poor. Worse yet, from...

If you work with a team, then you may be struggling with the question of how to best collaborate. Sure, you can e-mail files around; but that quickly gets cumbersome, and can make it hard to keep track of which is the current version. If two team members make changes at the same time, integrating them can become a nightmare. If you’re still using email as your primary means of communicating with your remote team (or even the team in your office)...

The basic idea of a meeting is simple: it's when two or more people get together to discuss one or multiple topics. It can be in a formal or informal setting. It can be among people within an organization or between people in more than one organization. The concept of the meeting is ancient. At their most basic level, meetings are held to bring people together to talk about things. There can be good reasons to have meetings and bad reasons to have meetings,...

There's a problem in the design world. It's not a problem of the magnitude of wage inequality, discrimination in the workplace, or child labor, but it's a problem nonetheless. It's the epidemic of pretentious designers. Some are just a little bit pretentious, and do so in a hipster sort of ironic way. And others seem to take themselves entirely seriously, and are apparently unaware of their pretentious nature. In either case, it's time for...

I write articles about how to get a client to accept a contract, keeping your dignity and rights as a professional creative and, at times, how to really fight against a bad client. I receive emails from people asking advice on solving a problem with a client and even write a “Dear Abby-type” column for creatives to write in about design dilemmas they face. Some people who know me personally will ask to “borrow some of [my] bastardness”...

The creative field, which encompasses design, illustration, photography and anything else that is a commercial-based service and takes imagination and a certain amount of talent on the part of the vendor, is unregulated. There are no real guidelines for ethics among creatives to compare with such things as the Hippocratic Oath for doctors, or the BAR association that keeps lawyers on the straight and narrow. Plumbers, carpenters,...

In 2013, we covered a ton of new apps, resources, and more for designers and developers. In fact, we covered hundreds of resources! So rather than you having to go back through our archive of posts, we’ve gathered up the best of what was new over the past year in one place! We’re not including everything (after all, some resources are no longer available, sites may have changed hands, apps may no longer be active, etc.), but rather have put together...

The December edition of ‘What’s new for web designers and developers’ includes new web apps, graphic design tools, inspirational resources, web design tools, icons, typography resources, and some really great new fonts. Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there. As always, if we've missed something you think should have been included, please let us...

I’m a little choosy about who I follow back on Twitter. As with my other opt-in social sites, I’m not into quantity but quality. Having the right connections are good for business and, after all, business is why we network, in most cases. When I go through my daily Twitter followers, I click the email notification and read the new follower’s profile description to learn a bit about them. Are they in my industry, have they actually tweeted,...

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week. Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out. To keep up to date...