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A Month In The Creative Community: A November Roundup

Angie Bowen — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:12:05 +0000

The year is drawing nearer to a close and that means that our November’s roundup is ready to go! It was a fantastic month in the creative community, with so many great contributions to the online design blogosphere there was no way we could reasonably shine a spotlight on them all. But below we have a few of the favorites that graced the interface of our RSS readers and we felt that everyone should have another look at, whether you are seeing them for the first time or not. So take a look down through our feature of a few of the month’s finest finds!

Inspiration

65 Stunning Dual-Monitor Wallpapers

The Dual-Screen (Multi-Monitor) is known as the use of multiple output devices to display programs that are running on single computer. The output devices can be a computer monitor, television and projectors. This post includes amazing dual-screen wallpapers to download and share.

70 Absolutely Stunning Portfolio Designs

A huge collection of portfolio sites for your inspiration.

40 Beautiful Examples of Bokeh Photography

I’m sure most of you have heard of the term bokeh. Basically it is referring to the aesthetic quality of the blur produced from a shot with shallow depth of field. Determining factors of bokeh are things like lens aberrations and shape of lens aperture.

28 Creative Tech Advertising

This showcase is an inspiration dose for creative designers and copywriters. Each advertisement is creatively molded to make an impact and also give the message is it supposed to. No doubt creative works like these involve hell of brain storming and sometimes great research work but it’s worth when are able to pull off work like this.

25 Print Ads Featuring Excellent Use Of Typography

Today we’re showcasing 25 excellent print ads that feature great typography. What most of these ads have in common is that they use typography in a very interesting manner in order to get their message across. Of course typography alone is great, but here we’re featuring some ads that combine type and images to convey a strong and influencing message.

Interviews

An Interview With Grace Smith

Today WebM.ag is speaking with Grace Smith, Grace is A freelance web designer from Northern Ireland where she runs her own successful design studio. Grace has been talked about as one of the most influential female designers in the world and a role model for new designers.

Interview with Brad Colbow

Brad Colbow is a web designer, illustrator, and comic creator from Cleveland, Ohio. He’s known for creating vector style illustrations and working this style into his web design. He talks about information style comics, networking, and numerous other awesome topics in this interview. Let’s take a step into Brad’s brain!

Design Interview: Vladimir Tomin

Born in Russia, Vladimir Tomin is the true definition of a graphic illustrator and designer. He has worked professionally with the likes of MTV Worldwide, Reebok, and Adidas, to name a few. From motion graphics to digital art, he does it all!

Interview with Awesome Graphic Designer and Photoshopper Mhark De Guzman

Mhark De Guzman, an awesome graphic designer I came arcoss while browsing on Flickr. I was really amazed about the design of the works and the creativity behind them, not to mention the awesome effects in those works.

Design

An Overview of Brushes In Illustrator

I’ve found that there’s a bit of confusion and uncertainty when it comes to the use of brushes in Illustrator. I think that a lot of this confusion probably stems from the fact that the same name is used for a completely different sort of tool in Photoshop.

The death of the boring blog post?

Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality?

Development

10 Must Have Hacks For WordPress Development

Building your own wordpress themes will open your eyes to a lot of things, mainly the fact that you’ll be retyping a lot of code over and over and over again. So in this post I am going to show you ten wordpress code hacks that you can add to your arsenal that will not only save you a lot of time, but they will also set your themes apart from others who don’t come pre built with these types of features.

5 Damn Easy Ways To Improve User Experience

It’s no secret that in order to build a successful website or web community you have to design with the users in mind. Of course you can’t forget about optimizing for search engines, but let’s focus on the visitors since they’re the ones who are using your site and interacting with it.

Freelancing

Quick Guide for Freelancers to do Well in Recession

During the current recession, many of people may find themselves out of the game and lose their jobs any time, especially with the big recession when companies are losing clients and looking for reducing employees. This article tries to give a solution to find another better way to get more money and more clients, and gives tips to start your freelance career and give resources sites that can help you get more jobs and clients.

Competing Against The Agency – The Freelancer’s Epic Battle

As a ‘noob’ to the freelance design industry, I found myself confronted with one monumental competitor that seemed like Goliath; leaving me feeling like David (without his slingshot).. However, I soon found that the structure of the powerhouses that are graphic/web/media studios and agencies, actually makes my life somewhat easier.

The Creative Critique : A Concept Feedback Review

Angie Bowen — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:05:33 +0000

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Being members of the creative community, we are always looking to improve our designs and hone our skills as we refine our craft. One great way to strengthen your designs is through constructive feedback on your concepts and on the executions of your ideas. However, if you are a freelancer, working independently of others, getting this kind of useful critiques for your work can be a challenge in and of itself. And so most of the freelancers finding themselves in this predicament turn to the online crowd to garner feedback for their work. And as we all know, turning to an online audience of honest constructive criticism can often times be an exercise in futility and abuse. Well that is changing! Enter Concept Feedback, a wonderful crowdsourcing tool for web and graphic designers that has brilliantly answered this community call.

It really is a simple concept, and who knows, that may be the reason that this site works so well. Concept Feedback offers a location for designers to submit their work for review by the community of participating creatives. This reciprocal system works based on a number of checks and balances to keep things both fair and constructive for all those who are bravely putting themselves and their work out there. By requiring reviewers to maintain a ratio of feedback offered to concepts submitted for critique, they make sure that everyone is actively participating and not just leeching off the community for free advice without giving any back. Also, by rewarding each reviewer reputation points that are taken away for leaving negative feedback, they ensure that people are actually being constructive in their comments. Reinforcing the if you don’t have anything nice to say (or in this case, constructive), don’t say anything at all rule, in a way, they keep things helpful not harsh and unwelcoming.

Reviewers are asked to rate concepts based on four specific areas, as well as leaving text feedback for more detailed critiques. The areas rated are Design (How does the concept look? Is it visually appealing?), Purpose (Does the concept accomplish its objective? Is it appropriate for the target market?), Originality (Is the concept original? Is it fresh and creative?) and Engagement (Is the concept engaging? Does it draw you in?). By using this standard review template for all of the feedback given, they keep things consistent and much more helpful than the generic ‘Great job!’ kind of response the internet tends to provoke. You also have the option of making the project open for all to review and rate, or you can set it to private so that you may invite only those whom you wish to give you feedback on your work. And once you have received some helpful critiques, you have the option to add revisions to the project for further review on these newer versions of the concept to make sure that you are heading in the right direction.

When submitting a concept you are asked to provide the following information.

Concept Title
Website URL (if applicable)
Target Market for the Concept
Concept Objective
Images
Concept Description

One of the best things about Concept Feedback, is that it is completely free. All they require of you is that you offer feedback to others. In fact, when you first sign up for your account, you are required to comment on at least 5 projects before you can submit any works of your own for review. And from there, as we mentioned, you have to maintain a ratio at that point in order to be able to continue adding work to be critiqued. It was certainly refreshing to see that when we signed up, and still now, there are no unreviewed projects, which means that the feedback exchange system works well. This is definitely a helpful tool for the creative community, and if you haven’t already checked them out, we recommend that you head on over and see what all they have going on. It may just be the outlet for improvement that you were looking for.

A Month In The Creative Community: An August Roundup

Angie Bowen — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:33:51 +0000

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Another month has worked its way off the calendar and into the past, pushing the year towards its end, which means that it is time for the Fuel Your Creativity monthly roundup of the best that the online design community had to offer in August. With Autumn on the rise, the schedules get busy, so in case you missed any of these fantastic contributions we have taken the time to put them together for you. Even if you didn’t miss them, these are the posts, tutorials, freebies, interviews and more that we feel deserve a second look. So make your way through the list, and don’t worry about falling behind on your reading in September, we’ve got your back.

Inspiration

25 Magazine-Style Layouts for Your Design Inspiration

Magazine and news-style designs have become increasingly popular. Content management systems like WordPress have a wide selection of themes for this type of site, making it easy for the average website owner or blogger to achieve a look that is similar to a news site. In this post we will feature 25 sites that provide inspiration for magazine-style layouts.

60+ Unusual Business Card Ideas & Designs

Most business cards tend to be forgotten, which is why they are not effective. Business cards can become great interactive elements with the added ability to have custom shapes, different materials and matte finishing along with a great design idea.

20 Insane Vintage And Grungy Typographic Poster Designs

I love typography! And good for us type lovers, it’s very difficult to design something without it. Posters are no exception. So I thought I’d go find some typographic posters that are both vintage and grungy looking. I hope you enjoy them.

25 Portfolio Sites Using jQuery Amazingly Well

jQuery is one popular library, and for good reasons! It’s easy to use, flexible, and most of all there’s a lot of jQuery tutorials and plugins available out there. Today we will take a look at some portfolio sites that use jQuery and different jQuery plugins to enhance either their look, functionality or usability.

Dress Your Screens With 53 Breathtaking Typography Wallpapers

I love Typography wallpapers! Who doesn’t? Creatives especially have a thing for typography that is unlike anything you’ll see in designing. As children we are taught letters, the very letters that become such objects of affection when we grow up, that it is sometimes quite amazing to see them affecting adults like that. Letters are powerful, they are beautiful and typography is not just an art, but a religion.

Interviews

Interview with Huseyin OZKAN

After this long stop, we are releasing an interview with a really talented artist Huseyin Ozkan. He is an Illustrator, and Animation Student and in this interview he will give an inside look to his life and jobs.

An Interview With Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot Jay Stocks is a well known designer whose client list includes Wordpress, Blue Flavor, The Beatles, EMI Records, and Carsonified. His work is frequently featured in online and offline publications, showcased on various ‘inspiration’ websites, and used as an example to design students around the world of how accessible web design can still look beautiful.

Interview with Design Bump’s John Campbell

John Campbell is the Maryland-based entrepreneur and developer who is responsible for Design Bump, a Digg-like website that allows the design community to share content in one convenient and easy-to-find place.

Interview with Bubblefriends Creator Sascha Preuß

Sascha works as a freelance Illustrator. He creates massively cute characters and in the case of the BUBBLEARMY, evil cute characters. In this interview, he talks about his training in drawing and design. Also, we’ll discover where he finds inspiration, his workflow and work environment, his passion for drawing and character design, as well as what we can expect from Sascha in the future.

Chictopia Now : An interview with Helen Zhu

Instead of trying to fit in, Chictopia has features where I can find inspiration from people by my body type, age and or coloring. Not that I always look for those things in style, but it was nice to look around a site where there was lots of search capabilities. I also really love the Chictopia community which really has a great following. Here we talk with co-founder Helen Zhu about how she put together this unique network and how bloggers can really leverage the community.

Interview with Alejandro Paul

This month’s interviewee is Sudtipos’ spokesman, who became famous for drawing and programming some of the most intricate script fonts ever digitized. Meet Alejandro “Ale” Paul, a man who likes to raise bars

Design

The Do’s and Don’ts of Dark Web Design

Dark web designs are very popular and can have an elegant and creative appeal. They are also perfect for many types of client work however, they are not suitable for every website and should be used only when appropriate. In spite of the striking visual impact that these dark designs can have, many designers don’t know how to effectively pull them off without turning off the visitor.

10 More Typography Mistakes You Might Be Making

The goal of this post is to help designers and clients understand the importance of good type skills, while avoiding some of the common mistakes. Please keep in mind that most of these mistakes are subjective and can be changed varying on the project, goals, circumstances, or for a specific cause.

8 Ways to Drive a Graphic Designer Mad

As everyone knows, graphic designers are the reason there are so many wars in this world. So to do my part to save the world from them, i made a list of things you can do when working with a graphic designer, to assure that they have a burn-out and leave this business FOREVER.

Development

Learn How To Create Your Own jQuery Plugin

The basis of creating a plugin for jQuery is actually quite simple. You don’t have to be a jQuery ninja, nor do you have to sweat blood to make it work. It’s as easy as script writing!

@font-face and 15 Free Fonts You Can Use Today

Fonts are a huge part of design (as we all know). Text on the web needs to be much more dynamic than in any other media. We have solutions like Cufón, sIFR, etc. but perhaps one of the better options is using @font-face in CSS.

CSS code structure for HTML 5: some useful guidelines

In this post I want to illustrate some useful guidelines about how to implement a well organized CSS code structure in view of introduction of HTML 5 markup language. They are not general rules but simple suggestions you can follow in order to improve the readability, manageability, and general organization of CSS code. These suggestions are especially useful if you have to work on complex CSS files that otherwise can be difficult to manage.

Freebies

Free tool: Symbol Signs collection

This is a collection of 50 common used signage symbols, professional designed. The symbols signs are free of charge available as an OpenType font format, allowing you to easily add symbols & icons to your sign and wayfinding design. All the symbols have been designed & created by Sander Baumann and set to the proportions of a regular typeface, so you no longer need to copy/paste the symbols into your designs.

Free Icons: Grunge Peeling Stickers Social Media Icons

This Icon Pack is chuck full of 20 Grunge Peeling Social Media Stickers free for use in your personal and commercial projects without attribution. Each icon is in .png format sized at 128×128px with transparent backgrounds. The pack comes with a .PSD source file so that you can customize your own icons.

Freelancing

3 Reasons Why Clients Don’t Choose You

It happens to even the best design firms; you send out a proposal, you have a face-to-face meeting, and then you receive the email. Thank you for your proposal and your time to discuss our project with us, but we have decided to go with another firm.

Are These 5 Mistakes Holding You Back from Freelance Success?

In this post, I’ve created a list of 5 big mistakes that could be holding you back from freelance success. Make a little progress with these, and your freelancing will see some definite improvement.

More from the Fuel Brand Network

How could we focus on community, and not bring you some of the best from the Brand? The FUEL Brand! These awesome contributions from within our Network deserved another spotlight shone on them, and we felt it would be amiss for us not to mention them as well!

Fuel Your Apps

Bootstrapping: What it is and how to do it.

We all have great ideas floating around in our heads but how do we get them out into the world without any help and startup cost/outside help? Bootstrapping. This is a term that is thrown around a good amount with start-ups and is not something that is “explained”.

Fuel Your Branding

Brand Identity: Start an Evolution

Maintaining a consistent brand identity has one massive benefit – recognition. That recognition leads to trust. People don’t like strangers and certainly don’t like change. It upsets them, makes them uncomfortable.

Fuel Your Coding

Creating Your First Ruby on Rails Application From Scratch

Ruby is one of the easiest scripting languages I have ever seen; simple enough for non-tech people, powerful enough for advanced programmers and best of all, it doesn’t have a complex syntax or keywords to be memorized. Instead it is written in a simple English syntax. This tutorial which will help you create a basic Ruby on Rails application, without worrying too much about Ruby basics for now

Fuel Your Illustration

Quick Tutorial: Radial Repeat

Below are the steps for figuring out the width and rotation of an even, radially repeating design. Note: this can be done cheaply and might look right to do it by “eye” but I wanted to figure it out because I’m a perfectionist.

Fuel Your Interface

Interface 101 – Part One: Basic Interfaces

Before we dive deep into which icons are most effective or best practices of interface development, let’s cover some basics, shall we? Interface 101 is a basic training on the terminology and theory of interface design. In the first two installment, we will discuss just what an interface actually is, and the differences between basic and advanced interfaces.

Fuel Your Photography

Capturing Emotion

Four tips for capturing genuine emotion in your photographs.

Fuel Your Writing

Getting Back to the Basics With Your Writing

Many times we writers tend to complicate things. We get stuck on ideas (or a lack there of) and forget that sometimes it’s the simplest of things that make the most sense. This poster may be intended for middle school kids, but I think it speaks to writers of all ages:

Finding Fonts: Free and Premium Resources

Angie Bowen — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:35:44 +0000

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And now for the adventurous story of a tiny little fish, searching through the great big sea…wait, that’s Finding Nemo, this is Finding Fonts, not exactly the same thing… And now for something, completely different. For a while now, we have had a fondness for fonts. From the perspectives of a designer and a writer, fonts play a very important role in presenting what we have to say and representing the tone and theme of the piece in which they are included. So making sure that you have the right font to fit your project is a more than a consideration, it is a necessity.

Whenever words are included in any kind of design, they are going to draw attention to themselves for the viewer knows they will be conveying some kind of message that accompanies the overall piece. Therefore, you want to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the font you have selected is filling that role correctly and not effectively working against you. One of the best ways to ensure that you have the right typeface for your work, is by increasing your access to fonts, and thereby, the size of your overall font library. Which is what brings us to today’s post.

Finding Fonts: Free and Premium Resources, is a post designed to help you find that perfect little font in the massive swelling cyber sea…what do you know, it is like Finding Nemo! We have compiled for you some of the go to places we turn when we need to find a font that fits, whatever the job. From web design to print design, no matter the need, we are sure that you will find just what you are looking for from one of the collected resources…Enjoy.

Free Fonts

40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

I’m Just Creative

The League of Moveable Type

Exlijbris Font Foundary

Premium Fonts

30 Fonts That All Designers Must Know & Should Own

13 typefaces for graphic designers

17 designers favorite fonts

80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design

FontShop

MyFonts

Your Turn

Is there any place that you absolutely can’t do without when it comes to fonts that we have forgotten to mention? Then tell us about it in the comments below.

A Month In The Creative Community: A July Roundup

Angie Bowen — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:05:13 +0000

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Having always been about raising up the community, the roundups we used to do, when we were Arbenting, were favorites of ours because it gave us a chance to do just that, by showcasing wonderful contributions to the online community from around the web. Hopefully, by doing so, we can either expose new people to some of the work from the past month that they had missed out on, or at least reiterate some posts that they should check out once more for measure. Either way, we wanted to do monthly versions of the roundup here on our new home at FYC, to still keep that community focus fixed on the folks we admire and respect for doing what it is they do!

We hope you enjoy the monthly editions coming at you, starting with a look back at the month of July that we have just moved on from. Here are some of the posts that we believe stood out from among the rest.

Inspiration

20 Creative Web Forms for Design Inspiration

I know lots of you love our design inspiration, so here is another dose of it. This time I have compiled together some creative web forms from around the internet. Included are contact forms, login forms, comment forms and a few others.

54 Brilliant Wordplay Logos For Inspiration

I love these logos showcased in the post today because they are unbelievably simple [well, most of them] and brilliant in their simplicity. I love words and seeing them used effectively to brand an image gives me a lot of joy. Words are very powerful and with a little imagination once can really produce fantastic logos using just words. Without my usual rambling, I present to you 54 excellent and cool wordplay logos for your inspiration.

45 Creative Advertisement Examples

After several articles, i thought, you can take a break and get some design inspirations from these really amazing advertisement examples.

50 Examples of Vintage Typography

Vintage art reminds us of a time when we were dependent less on technology and more on skill and technique. But we cannot compare the typography of 100 years ago to that of today, with the arrival of so many new typefaces, new ways to create fonts as well as new ways to get our artwork out into the world.

30 Great Examples Of Drop-Down And Sliding Menus

While building a site for a client I had to figure out the best way to display additional navigation in a horizontal menu (and not make it look like it’s 1999 again), so I went ahead and started looking for some inspiration. I’ve found many sites that had drop-down and sliding menus and I thought you’d be interested in my findings.

40 Most Creative Business Cards You Will Ever See

The title of the article explains the whole entire article, a compilation of 40 of the most creative craziest business cards you will ever see. These are some great business cards which are the perfect inspiration for creating your own business cards.

Interviews

Graphic Designer and Blogger Andrew Houle of MyInkBlog

I got an interview with the blogs creator, Andrew Houle. We discuss the impact of blogging on the graphic design and web design community, along with where he plans to bring the blog in the future. Fans of design will love this, and if you haven’t been to MyInkBlog yet I would highly recommend giving it a glance.

Interview with Colorburned Editor Grant Friedman

Creative Nerds interview with Colorburned editor and founder Grant Freidman. Grant Friedman a successful blogger and also a freelance web graphic designer. A great interview with a great blogger and designer which is a must read article.

Interview with tutorial designer Alex Beltechi

Alex Beltechi is a digital illustrator and designer from the sweet little country Romania. Beside studying design he earns money by creating photoshop tutorials for a popular tutorial site. He is excellent in designing typographic fonts and streaks into the image.

10 Questions With Roby Fitzhenry from Always Creative

Designer, Entrepreneur, Music Festival Organizer and avid Twitter-er: Roby Fitzhenry is a busy guy! I managed to track him down to ask him some questions and snag a video tour of his workspace in Bryan, Texas.

Getting To Know The Community: Chris Spooner

I’m Chris Spooner. I work as a mix of self employed designer and blogger. I enjoy producing creative design tutorials and articles for my two blogs, Blog.SpoonGraphics and Line25.

An Interview with Designer/Developer Jacob Gube

Jacob Gube is the popular figure behind web design blog Six Revisions and has a wealth of design and developments skills. I caught up with Jacob to discover a little more about his background and to gather his thoughts and opinions on a range of topics, including accessibility vs aesthetics & the future of web design.

Design

Color Scheming for Designers

efore I start working on a website I will always ensure that I have a color scheme to work with. This is important for not only aesthetic reasons but also for creating a wonderful sense of consistency and familiarity to the website. At times clients will already have a particular color scheme in mind (say, two or three colors) or they will at least have one color they want the site to work around. If they aren’t sure then I will see what their graphical content is (logo, photos, icons, etc) for their website and see if I can find something to work with from there.

Photoshop 101: How To Use Layer Masks

In this short tutorial you will learn what layer masks are and how to utilize them for working faster and more efficiently in Photoshop.

Development

HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using

In this tutorial, we are going to build a blog page using next-generation techniques from HTML 5 and CSS 3. The tutorial aims to demonstrate how we will be building websites when the specifications are finalized and the browser vendors have implemented them. If you already know HTML and CSS, it should be easy to follow along.

Getting Started with CSS: A Practical Exercise

Learning how to write CSS is an essential lesson in any web design classroom. For you who are just starting out, here’s a beginner’s guide to help you learn the basics in proper CSS execution.

Freebies

Torn Paper Edges: 38 High Resolution Photoshop Brushes

There are a variety of brushes in this set. Some of the brushes have torn edges on 1 side; others have torn edges on all sides. This is to give you guys as much freedom in your design as possible. Feel free to download this awesome set of high resolution Photoshop brushes for creating torn paper edges and use them in your designs for free.

Free Set of Social Media Icons – Rivet Social

A set of 14 riveted brushed steel icons that not only include the basics but DesignBump, DesignMoo, and DesignFloat as well! You’ll find 14 different 64px x 64px icons in this set in .jpg format.

Freelancing

How to Compete with the Agencies

I’m going to start this article by showing you a couple of my bruises. (Okay, fellas, I know what you’re thinking. But calm down. These are ego bruises.)

The ‘Hows’ of Pricing Your Design Work

Recently I have been receiving many emails from designers asking me what’s the “best practice” for pricing design work or how much do you charge for a design. I like to start off by saying there is no “best practice”, but there are a number of factors to consider when pricing your work and services. Below are 10 factors to consider when pricing a project and your design services.

More from the Fuel Brand Network

Fuel Your Apps

9 Reasons To Attend an App Conference – Straight From the Attendees Mouth’s

Fuel Your Apps was recently at the Awesome Inc Mini App conference. (Full write-up coming soon.) During this time the app lovers and creators had time to learn and hang out hear stories of others failures and successes.

Fuel Your Branding

Why do we feel better about some products than we do about others?

Ever notice how you feel better about some products than you do about others? Whether you’re shopping for blue jeans, a new iPhone, Nikes, or a Coke, it’s not just about having a phone, shoes or something to drink—and it hasn’t been for a long time. Jeans, athletic shoes, television sets, MP3 players, even automobiles today are functionally are all pretty much the same. They work and they’re easy to come by.

Fuel Your Coding

jQuery Custom Events: They Will Rock Your World!

Ok, maybe they won’t exactly “Rock Your World” but they might completely change the way you look at your jQuery development. At the very least, I hope this simple technique will help you build clean, reusable and extendable front-end code.

Fuel Your Photography

What Makes a Good Photograph?

A couple days ago I asked a question on Twitter that got a lot of different and refreshing responses. I asked “If you had one word, what would you say makes a good photograph?”. Here are some of the answers I got: inspiration, passion, persistence, timing, perception, captivating, feeling, emotion, impact, story, and composition. Tweeple – well said!

Fuel Your Writing

How to be the Secret to Your Own Writing Success

I have failed at almost every single fiction writing goal I’ve set in the past 18 months.key-to-success. I know what you’re thinking. How is this failure of a writer going to help me get better? You get to benefit from my mistakes. Actually, it would be more accurate to say you get to benefit from your own mistakes successes. That’s what I’ve realized: we writers hold ourselves to too high of a standard.

An Added Word of Thanks

If you like this post and the other great content from Fuel Your Creativity then make sure you thank Brandstack for all of their support. Brandstack is a collective one stop launch pad for all of your beginning start-up needs. Anxious to dive into the online business market, but not sure exactly how or where to start? Let Brandstack help, from Domain registration to Logo design, and a few other key services coming soon to help you get your branding underway, without the big price tag carried by major agencies. Brandstack provides an opportunity for designers to sell their unused designs that they have spent their time creating, only to have the project dissolved or disappear leaving them uncompensated for hours of their hard work. This recovers revenue for the designers while generating savings that are passed on to the customer.

Alternative Ideas For Designing A Web Portfolio

Enrique Lite — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:12:14 +0000

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Having a good portfolio on the net can make a difference in getting interesting customers. Obviously, without a few quality projects in your background, it is difficult to sustain a portfolio, but if you do not properly present your work, no matter how good your designs are, they will be unnoticed.

The basics for developing an Internet portfolio, do not differ from those we use for developing any website: accessibility, being user friendly, navigability, clarity, consistency, etc.; elements that are determinant for a bank as well as for a creative site.

However, portfolios have their own characteristics that set them apart from other types of sites, such as “creativity”, a relevant feature that can differentiate us from the competition.

Our portfolio requires a level of originality that is not usually feasible in other projects, but be careful as this “originality” should not adversely affect the above mentioned basics of web design.

Originality is not at odds with knowledge, we would rather say that is part of it, and therefore we believe that keeping abreast of main trends is important, not to copy them, but to learn and adapt our project to get our own identity in the network. We will try to unravel some of the ideas and processes that revolve around the most creative portfolios that we have seen in recent years, to try to uncover concepts that if well understood and applied can make the difference.

Therefore, we will not talk much of “design trends” as minimalism, grunge, or Web 2.0, but as we said before, we will look for the concepts that lie behind this design, from which it is much easier to innovate and develop something different, because in the end, a good design should be the result of a complex creative process and not the mere repetition of a fashion style.

Social extension of your work and yourself

Personally, I’m tired of hearing all the talk, over and over about “social networks“, but they are a reality and we cannot escape their power nor ignore them, especially when it comes to promoting our own work. Not along ago a nice blog within our website, where we occasionally upload some interesting news, was enough to try to draw new users to our main web page. But this is not enough anymore. If you want to promote your work on the net, you have to “deeply” integrate the content of your professional work with your social activity in it. Besides you can also use social networks to show your projects and attract potential customers. Either on Twitter or Facebook, or LinkedIn, etc., you have to take care of both the presentation of your work as well as yourself and your ideas. Obviously this must be approached from a professional point of view, as it is not feasible to have the same Facebook account for your agency and your friends. You can also go one step further and do something revolutionary, as the site of the American agency Modernista! has done, if it can be labeled as such, and to understand why I think it should, I think the only way to find out is to visit it

“The way that they play with multiple web services and social networks to showcase their own content is amazing and innovative. We had never seen anything similar, in fact, rather than a website as such, we should speak of an interactive menu that moves us from one service to another to show their content. We must recognize that on this occasion they have set themselves apart from the rest with a new milestone in website development.”

Featured Examples:

Telling a story

It may sound strange, but the narrative context of your agency if its well built and provides relevant content that enrich the presentation of your works, can radically differentiate you from competition. It is a factor that demonstrates originality and capacity for abstraction and without which it is difficult to be a good creative. When it comes to storytelling is not about writing a story, but inserting our work in a specific universe within which it is easier to perceive and understand the nuances that it has. The atypical portfolio of the dutch designer Coen Grift would be an example to highlight.He turns into it his own interactive experience of browsing his web as the best sample of his work, with no need of telling anything else.

This is a fun web page that invites us to lose time, laughing with its characters and interact with them as well as with the different elements that make up the page, converting it into an experience in itself.

Featured Examples

Concision

If you are able to condense everything relevant to your work on a page, its useless to be annoying with thousands of words and examples that do not contribute more than what has been already said. Many have recently opted for this alternative based on the simplicity and simplification, with excellent results. There is no need to be afraid of summarizing and focusing, but such portfolios requires the ability to choose and properly submit the contents that are really worthy.

Featured Examples

Reinventing the interface

We are so accustomed to certain ways of browsing and interacting on the Internet that we believe these are the only ways to do this. But the truth is that we constantly find alternative solutions that distinguish the quality of a portfolio and discover exceptional operational proposals. Being different is not a matter of experimenting, but of innovating by implementing appropriate interactive resources to show our works, so that they acquire an added value.

Featured Examples:

Sense of Humor

We should not underestimate the power of humor and irony when used properly. This can let us directly connect with potential customers and break barriers through empathy. Obviously their use should be respectful and coherent; their function is to creatively and amusingly illustrate our work, not telling trivial jokes outside of the content of our site.

Humor can be transmitted not only through words, but also through any design element or by adding an allusion to our website interface that attracts the interest of the user and positively predispose them to want to know more about us.

It works out even better if in our campaigns and projects humor plays a key role. This is the case of the Spanish agency La Despensa, in whose website irony is perceived in both the works they present as well as in their comments. This way the customer knows who they are dealing with and what they can expect.

Featured Examples:

An Added Word of Thanks!

If you like this post and the other great content from Fuel Your Creativity then make sure you thank Zendesk for all of their support. Zendesk is an awesome online service that creates a virtual helpdesk for your company. This customizable on-demand support tool allows for your business, no matter the size, to answer all of your customer care needs, easily and effectively. Customer support has never been this manageable, but Zendesk has changed all of that by crafting this wonderful web 2.0 tool for businesses to extend their reach out to their customers, and to help organize all of their comments and concerns in a user-friendly environ.

Building Community – The Sites that are Getting it Right!

Rob Bowen — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:41:46 +0000

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Once upon a time, I was in a corn field when I heard a voice, as if from nowhere. And the voice said unto me, ‘If you build it, they will come!’ Okay, so it wasn’t exactly me, it was Kevin Costner, and I wasn’t in a corn field, it was more like a video rental store. And the voice didn’t really come from nowhere, it came from the monitors in the store where they were playing Field Of Dreams, but still go with me on the idea for another moment, because I want to talk about this concept. ‘If you build it, they will come!’ You see there is a subtle brilliance underlying this statement, that most people are apt to turn away from. There is an idea of pioneering, and striking out. Daring to tread where others have not without promise of anyone following along with you. Ay, there’s the rub…

You see, many trails are never blazed for fear of failure. If there aren’t others doing what you intend to do, many will be leery of supporting you in this bold new direction, because it lacks the safety net of the following flock. So getting started can often be a difficult task, especially when you seek to build a community, where you lack the masses you will need to keep it going. Today, however, we are here to talk about those sites who have struck out to build community and strengthen the community they are in. They did build it, and we arrived as promised! These sites are the ones who have laid their foundations with solid stock, and are building empires upon them.

Community has always been important to Angie and I, so naturally we felt a fit with the Fuel Brand Network who is building a community of sites that feed the creative pursuits that envelope us all. In that tradition, we felt it would be amiss without a tip of our hats to those sites we felt were doing great things for the community, and building a sense of partnership and involvement with the online creative collective that we all proudly claim to be apart of. Here are a few of our favorites

Smashing Magazine

Since they began Smashing Magazine in 2006, Sven and Vitaly have honored a commitment to bringing high quality content to the design world, not only in the form of fantastic articles and helpful how-to’s, but also by building a community around this idea. Through the inclusion of job postings and even a forum to allow for user interaction and sharing, Smashing’s team has earned their place on our list.

The Envato Network

How could we talk about building community, without talking about the Envato Network of sites. These fantastic sites are dedicated to informative and top shelf tutorials to teach the design collective helpful hints, techniques, and shortcuts. They know that the best way to build community is to keep the people in it growing and evolving in their fields. The Envato group has certainly taken on that mission of strengthening us at our core, and for that, we thank them.

Behance

The Behance Network has risen to the challenge of providing a well structured online networking site for designers to come share and showcase their works. With a professional sleek look and a designer focused format, this awesome online gathering and growing gallery has finely filled that niche need that Deviant Art’s camera-phone tweeny-clique laden lunchroom couldn’t quite reach. Behance has provided this service so brilliantly to the design community, that they easily made their way onto the list.

DCTH

Growing from a conversation between some of the online design communities most inspiring and initiative driven residents, DCTH, or Design Community’s Twitter Hours for those who aren’t into the whole brevity thing, came about to be a weekly virtual helpdesk for the design community at large to participate in and contribute to. If you want to talk about building community, this is how you get it done! Realizing the need for this sort of multi-level, international involvement to help grow and solidify the foundation of the creative collective, and then acting quickly to satisfy it, earns DCTH a place in our spotlight! Participate by following @DCTH on twitter.

Chat Creative

Chat Creative came to be with a single mission in a simple mind…wait, I said that wrong…it was a simple mission in a single mind, ‘to help connect the creative community one chat at a time’. And Kyle has certainly done that! By gathering some of the online design communities most respected and favored friends together for a live chat panel discussion, open to the general public, he gave us a focused voice that would be able to rise above the social media drown-out and be able to be heard. Having just had its inaugural run, we expect to see big things from Chat Creative… like will Graham be able to solve his Rubik’s Cube? Find out next month, same Chat-time, same Chat-channel!

What are your favorites?

That does it for our side of the discussion, now it is your turn. Which sites do you feel are building community, and why? Let us know in the comments below which would make your list.

whobuilt.it

Adelle Charles — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:54:01 +0000

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whobuilt.it – Claim the sites you build

whobuilt.it was built by @elliottkember – you can check out his website here. There is also an awesome FireFox Addon for whobuilt.it which is currently in development.

More coming soon!

Editable descriptions to describe your sites!
Add comments to your favourite sites for all to read!
Easy claim-file downloading – one click to download a blank file!
Find out who likes the most sites!
An awesome Firefox extension! Hooray!

*I think this is a great idea and am looking forward to more!

18 Tools I use as a Designer & Blogger

Adelle Charles — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:38:38 +0000

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I’m always sharing what tools are useful to me via Twitter, but just incase you don’t use it – I wanted to share here! I always get asked what productivity tools and apps I use on a regular basis and I pretty much open all of these everyday. There are a few apps that are similar in type because some may be all in one tools or I’m just starting to use one more than the other. Check these out, they are ones I would recommend to a designer/blogger/creative type. If there is something missing from the list that you think should be on here, please share in the comments!

Communication Tools

Yammer

Connect and share with the people in your company or organization. It’s like twitter but for companies. Anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. The privacy of each network is ensured by limiting access to those with a valid company email address.

Skype

Free calls, video calls and instant messaging over the internet.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application for twitter.

Netnewswire

RSS Reader for the mac. Nice UI.

Organization Tools

Things

Task management for the mac.

DropBox

Dropbox syncs your files online and across computers. Up to 2GB for free.

Wufoo

Great way to keep track of forms in a database.

Delicious

Organize all your bookmarks in one place and never lose your local bookmarks.

Curdbee

Web based billing via PayPal or Google Checkout. Free and simple!

Zendesk

Keep track of emails, feedback, requests & helpdesk system. This is one amazing tool and I will be writing a review on it within the coming months.

Design/Dev Tools

CSSEdit

CSS Editor with live preview built in.

Textmate

Code/text editor, simple!

Coda

Just getting into using Coda: CSS, text editor, file transfer and integrates nicely with Transmit.

Transmit

Best FTP client ever. (In my opinion of course!)

Paparazzi

Take screengrabs quickly and easily with just one window. I like that it’s a stand alone app & it runs quickly.

Firebug

Web development within Firefox.

ColorZilla

Eyedropper Firefox extension.

Scrnshots

Screenshots right from your desktop. Easily share, tag and upload!

Warm Forest Flash Sites for Designers

Arron Lock — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:17:29 +0000

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Be sure to check out the contest details at the bottom of the article for your chance to Win!

I should preface this review by saying that I, in no way, am a web expert. It is true, I have built a site or two in my day but I am not fluent in any coding or programming language. That being said I have taken on the challenge to review a couple customizable Flash sites from Warm Forest Flash.

I was given the link to Warm Forest Flash and I gotta say from the get go I was impressed with the clean lines and organization of thier website. I had no trouble navigating and checking out what they had to offer. They also have an outstanding help section for each of the customizable sites so you really should be good to go after installing them.

Overview

Both products include clean, crisp typography and a highly customizable way of showing off your best work. There are subtle details that really make these themes stand out from other pre-built templates. Below I will layout some of the major differences between the two customizable Flash sites.

Cedar

This template comes with two built in demos. Both are very similar just with some different settings to show you what is possible. This site is basically a horizontal oriented slide show. Very clean design and easy navigation. By default it is a very light color scheme consisting of white, brown, seafoam and orange. As I said, it includes a horizontal listing of images that, when clicked, take you to a focus page where you can have more detailed images of the project/item. Overall, a very classy look.

Click here for more information about Cedar

Sycamore

This theme has a decidedly darker, more sophisticated look to it. It is a vertical oriented portfolio allowing you to provide detailed information including multiple photos/designs without the viewer having to leave the page. In the same fashion as Cedar, this theme provides a clean way to showcase your work. There aren’t too many big differences between Sycamore and Cedar other than the vertical alignment and the darker colors. For the aesthetics alone, this was my preference.

Click here for more information about Sycamore

Installing

Really all you have to do to install these themse is to unzip using WinZip, 7-Zip or something similar and upload the contents of the folder to whatever directory you want under your domain. Once the files are uploaded you will be able to see the working site with default settings.

Editing

Both of these products were extremely easy to customize. From what I could tell, every color and image can be changed. To customize things you will need to open the settings.xml file as this is where the bulk of the changes will be made. When I first opened the xml file I must admit that it was a bit daunting. I have never worked with xml or really even seen it but I was determined to figure this thing out. I looked over the file and realized things are pretty simplified and everything is pretty well labeled as to what it is. I also read through the help pages for the different templates and that was more than enough to get me started. You will need to edit some of the other xml files for different pages such as contact.xml or about.xml. You may also need some HTML knowledge for this if you want to change things up at all but if you just use the default markup that is in there you should be just fine.

Conclusion

Whether you are a complete noob or have been programming for years, if you are looking for an easy way to set up an online portfolio then these are definitely great quality customizable Flash sites to do just that. Currently the price for Sycamore and Cedar is $49 and $59 respectively. For more information visit http://www.warmforestflash.com

Pros

Easy customization
Beautiful style
Simple installation
Great help section

Cons

May require a little HTML knowledge
Can be a bit confusing if you don’t read the help

Do you want to win one?

Here’s your chance. Comment here and tell us why you’d like to win a free Warm Forest Flash site! Contest entries must be submitted before Saturday, February 7th at Midnight EST. Winner will be chosen on Monday, February 9th.

10 Useful Marketing Tools For Freelancers

Angeline Vuong — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:32:14 +0000

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It’s not easy being a freelancer. Sure, there are perks such as (technically) being your own boss, escaping the monotony of a typical 9 to 5 desk job, and choosing which projects to take on. However, with the growing turbulence in the world economy and the competitive nature of the design industry, it is more important than ever to have great marketing skills to match one’s creative talent.

As Community Manager for a community-based creative website, I use many marketing tools to manage our blog, Twitter account, and other social networks to enhance the presence of our brand, as well as strengthen and form relationships with creatives worldwide.

Here are some great tools for social media, marketing + PR purposes that freelancers can also use to help increase their personal brand’s presence both online and offline, in no particular order:

1. Ping.fm
Ping.Fm is a “multicast” site that allows you to let all of your social networks know what you are doing without having to individually update each one. For you aspiring social media butterflies, Ping.Fm is a time saver, as you can update your statues, blogs, or micro-blogs all at once across Twitter, Liverjournal, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Wordpress, + more.

2. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a great, professionally-oriented networking site that allows designers a lot of opportunities to market themselves. Whether it’s connecting with existing clients or finding new work, there are many ways for a designer to utilize the site. Asking clients for a recommendation on your profile boosts confidence with potential clients. By utilizing LinkedIn groups, designers can connect with fellow designers or seek out niche groups who may need design services. LinkedIn Answers also provides an opportunity for freelancers to find people looking for creative help.

3. Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a favorite amongst Twitter fiends. The Adobe AIR app makes it easy to divide your followers among groups. This feature is especially useful for several reasons. You can create niche groups to display certain Twitter members (i.e. “clients,” “designers,” “inspiration”) to keep up with specific topics. The ability to filter tweets by keywords is also useful for branding and promotion. When people say they “need design,” you can engage in a conversation, or if you have a tracker on your company name, you will be able to monitor what people are saying about you.

4. Retaggr
Retaggr is essentially a virtual business card that includes your entire online presence. Your Retaggr profile can be embedded into email signatures, blogs, and on other websites for people to see where you are located online. It helps take the guest work out for people to find you on other sites, allowing you to be more connected with your network.

5. SEOMoz Tools
Modern designers know that an online presence is undoubtedly important to have in today’s freelance world. Stay on top of your website / portfolio’s search engine optimization with the free tools from SEOMoz.org. These tools allow you to determine the strength of a website, whether or not pages are being indexed on the big search engines, and analyzing how targeted a page may be for specific keywords.

6. Google Analytics
Pie charts, graphs, and map overlays may seem boring, but Google Analytics is an extremely helpful tool in tracking web metrics, determining referring websites, length of time spent on a site, what keywords were searched to get to a site, where your visitors are coming from, and more. By knowing these statistics, you can optimize against them. If people are coming to your site after searching “logo design” or are being referred via Twitter, then you are able to determine your strong and weak marketing points.

7. Shozu Desktop
Shozu Desktop is similar to Ping.Fm, but for photos and video. This website / application is known for making mobile media content easy to upload and distribute. Their desktop application is a great way to share photos or videos on your computer across over 30+ networks with one click, which is nice if you want to post a logo or illustration you’ve just created to multiple networks without having to update each site manually.

8. Pictobrowser
If coding isn’t your forte and you just want to display your best work, Pictobrowser is a way to convert your Flickr gallery into a portfolio. The easily customizable and embeddable app allows designers to showcase the work simply. Plus, it allows your portfolio to maintain the benefits of having the actual images live on Flickr. With group pools, tags, and ease of search, you never know who will stumble upon your work and want to hire you!

9. Mars Edit
Mars Edit is a powerful blog publishing tool made for Macs that allows for offline writing. The program plays nice with Wordpress, Moveable Type, Blogger, Drupal, and more blog publishing services. It’s organizational system allows for easy re-blogging, media file management (which can be extremely helpful when dealing with tons of images that can be re-used). The ability to write blogs while not connected to the internet is a huge benefit to busy freelancers on the go.

10. Yelp iPhone App
The Yelp iPhone app (or even mobile browser) is a great way to find good meeting places for clients. Especially when in an unfamiliar area, it’s great to read reviews and find out whether or not you are inviting clients to a nice environment. The “search nearby” functionality also allows you to find locations of interest. At a meeting in a coffee shop and need to fax something quickly? Yelp can locate the nearest FedEx/Kinkos. It’s also a great way to find + research local businesses that may need your design services.

Liberated Web Hosting

Adelle Charles — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:35:57 +0000

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Choosing web hosting is to most merely a means to an end. A dull process of technical mumbo jumbo – a simple necessity to launch an inspiring new web design or dynamic website. But as we all are dependent on hosting and deal with our own practically every day, it seems only right to explore its inspirational span and creative potentials.

There are many ways to build a website, dozens of script languages to use, different CSS standards and all with their own pros and cons. But if you are looking for creative freedom and an optimal inspirational atmosphere it comes down to three components; Linux operative system, PHP script language and a dedicated server. All three that can be prompted for when choosing web hosting.

On your terms – Linux operative system
This might sound uninspiring but in an industry where customers often are assumed incapable of self-maintenance, the more freedom you have and space to create your own the better. The Linux operative system is based on the concept Open Source where all source code is modifiable by the user. Total control and no restrictions or technical limitations – unless you say so. Most web hosts offer the option to choose between Windows, Linux or other operative systems installed on their servers. But to get desired developing freedom you need also to choose a certain hosting type.

Creative freedom – Dedicated server
A dedicated server equals all the freedom you can get when picking web hosting. The only other option that comes close is running an own home server. But if you can live with spending a few dollars you can get a dedicated server at a web hosting company with included Linux operative system. Now you will have total control to modify the system to meet your needs and creative framework.

Dynamic programming – PHP
PHP short for Hypertext Preprocessor is the most recent scripting language to take the world by storm. Embeddable into HTML, using css stylesheets and a simple frameset has allowed PHP to become the one common website language at the moment. Blending the basic structure of good ‘ole html and the possibilities of many dynamic preferences, PHP is a leading part of Web design 2.0.

If you include these three elements in your hosting deal you will perhaps not feel the instant gratification or the flow of inspiration. However, a dedicated server, linux and PHP will form a stable platform for any web designer. Now you will be able to set up the most innovative and unique websites, not only graphically but also technically. This is true liberated hosting and if this does not fuel your creativity, ask any hosting customer and they’ll give you a glimpse of just how complicated website hosting can be.

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About the Author

Brian is a dedicated geek for websites and loves to help people be passionate about websites and designing. His blog on Web Hosting Search, Brian’s Hosting blog, is about designing, random bits, and of course website hosting.

Paid Services / Creative Freelance Series

Adelle Charles — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:21:05 +0000

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This is the continuation of the Creative Freelance Series (part 4) on Paid Services (Non Management) . If you missed (part 1) on Project Management & Contacts, (part 2) Invoicing, Time Tracking & Contracts, or (part 3) Collaboration & Proofing/Approval, feel free to have a read and comment.

This is broken up into 4 parts and to make this a useful article, I am asking the creative community to participate as much as possible to gain insight into the applications/process you use and/or even worth paying for. Your answers don’t have to be long just concise. Of course I will weigh in with what I use (in the comments below).

The first 3 parts received detailed responses with some very helpful information. I hope you’ll continue to weigh in with parts 4!

The 4 Essential Parts:

1. Project Management & Contacts
2. Invoicing, Time Tracking & Contracts
3. Collaboration & Proofing
4. Paid Services (non-management)

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4. Paid Services

Can be a paid web app or a paid app that you host yourself.
*Feel free to include services like hosting, domain names, basecamp – by (non-management I mean the focus of this article is not just management apps).

a. Which online paid Services do you use? (Ex. Flickr Pro, PSDtuts)
b. How much do the services cost a month or per year?
c. Do you prefer up front or small reoccurring costs?

Collaboration & Proofing / Creative Freelance Series

Adelle Charles — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:50:33 +0000

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This is the continuation of the Creative Freelance Series (part 3) on Collaboration & Proofing/Approval. If you missed (part 1) on Project Management & Contacts or (part 2) on Invoicing, Time Tracking & Contracts, feel free to have a read and comment.

The first 2 parts received detailed responses with some very helpful information. I hope you’ll continue to weigh in with parts 3-4!

The 4 Essential Parts:

1. Project Management & Contacts
2. Invoicing, Time Tracking & Contracts
3. Collaboration & Proofing / Approval
4. Paid Services (non-management)

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3. Collaboration & Proofing / Approval
(ex. Mind Maps, GetSignOff, BackBoard )

The following questions cover both paid and non paid services:

a. Which tool do you use (if any) to collaborate on projects?
b. What do you use for managing the proofing (feedback) process and edits?
c. What process or tool do you use to get approval on projects?
d. What problems do you face in using your current processes?
e. Which tools / apps do you wish would communicate with each other?

Invoicing, Time Tracking & Contracts / Creative Freelance Series

Adelle Charles — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:30:56 +0000

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This is the continuation of the Creative Freelance Series (part 2) on Invoicing, Time Tracking & Contracts. If you missed (part 1) on Project Management & Contacts you can read here and still comment.

The first part received detailed response with some very helpful information. I hope you’ll continue to weigh in with parts 2-4!

The 4 Essential Parts:

1. Project Management & Contacts
2. Invoicing, Time Tracking & Contracts
3. Collaboration / Proofing
4. Paid Services (non-management)

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2. Invoicing, Time Tracking & Contracts

The following questions cover both paid and non paid services:

a. What applications do you use for billing/invoicing?
b. How do you receive payment (Check, Cash, Paypal etc)?
c. What applications do you use for tracking your time?
d. How do you send contracts to clients?
e. What problems do you face in using your current application(s)?
f. Which tools / apps do you wish would communicate with each other?
g. Is there an application that doesn’t exist that you wish was available?