• From Communication Nation: How to win a deal after it’s already been lost
  Some tips on how to close a deal after it has been lost.
• From BrainFuel: Five Tips for Overcoming Burnout
  “Burnout. It’s the word that strikes fear into the heart of every designer and it is something that almost all designers have experienced.”
• From A List Apart: Better Invoices for Better Business
  Invoices are a critical component of every business. They serve as a bill of services, closure for projects, a legal paper trail, and an opportunity to strengthen the rapport between you and your customer.
• From Communication Arts: Freelance Clients Talk Price
  In an informal survey of freelance clients, two pricing issues are clearly important to know before your next assignment. The first one is, how are budgets for outside creative services determined? The second, what do clients like and dislike about the way freelancers handle pricing?
• From Lussumo: Want to Integrate Vanilla Forums with Wordpress? Here’s how.
• Programmer Meet Designer
  This site was created to unite programmers and designers because rarely is a person good at both programming and designing. PMD helps programmers and designers partner up to make websites and web applications that look and work great.
• Designers Who Blog
  At ‘Designers who Blog’ you’ll discover people sharing thoughts, ideas and creativity about their industries. You’ll find off-the-rack blogs amongst well designed, amazing sites.

Over the weekend I received a phone call from someone else’s client. The client was concerned and I can appreciate their concern. However, the situation reminded me of something we may not think about as often as we should—treat clients with respect and honor their business or lose their trust and possibly their business.   Read the rest

I’m quite certain most people know about this handy little trick in Photoshop CS2 but for those of us discovering it late in the game, it can be a god-send. I’m referring to “Smart Guides.”

To enable “Smart Guides” navigate to “View > Show > Smart Guides.” Once you’ve done that move something around in your file and you will see a fuschia line following it about. It’s almost like magic. Enjoy.

Over at Modern Life, a recent “article” was written stating standards don’t matter to the end user. I’ll go as far as to say, I agree. Does that mean it shouldn’t? No, it doesn’t. What the author of the piece doesn’t seem to get is that standards are good for the end user. They save money by using less bandwidth, create money by being more search-engine friendly and are much easier to maintain by someone with casual HTML knowledge.   Read the rest