Blogging and all that Malarkey

On this week’s Unfinished Business, Alex’s friend Brad Frost and I talked about designing in the open, pro-bono projects for great causes like the Pittsburg Food Bank and the open project he and Melissa are starting for them.

In this week’s episode, designer and co-host of ‘ that other podcast’Liz Elcoate joins me to talk about the difficulties of working alone for long periods, the difficulties of keeping your portfolio full of new work when you work under non-disclosure agreements and why we should never apologise for working with small businesses with smaller budgets. Listen now

Special guest Dan Cederholm joins me on Unfinished Business this week to talk about making money by making things, how making great schwag makes a great impression and what happened to Foamee. We discuss why on Dribbble it’s important for business to not get in the way of a great service and with Dan’s new book coming up, we talk about the process of writing and whether second editions are worth it.

Talking to Dan Cederholm on Unfinished Business this coming week, our conversation to book writing, in particular working on second, maybe even third editions of books we wrote years ago.

On this week’s show, Designer, icon artist, author and possibly Doctor Who’s next companion Jon Hicks joins yours truly to discuss differences in the ways that Jon approaches different types of clients, how publishing his day rate and availability on his web site has improved the ‘quality’ of his enquiries and who ultimately owns the work that we do. As you might expect we couldn’t spend an hour together without talking about Doctor Who. Quite a lot.

In the latest episode of your favourite soap ‘apera,’ Anna and I go off on a tangent (no really) about the winner of out ‘Daft Proposal Of The Week Award.’ We talk about how to respond to proposals and whether it’s ever appropriate to not respond at all.

Back from my holidays, all tanned and gorgeous (obviously,) I rejoined Anna to talk about Laura Kalbag’s ‘Good Designers, Good Clients’ article on A List Apart. We discuss how I was inspired by Seth Godin to start speaking again and the best bits from the last three episodes including our ‘double our day rate Fridays,’ Sarah’s approach to handling low budget enquiries and the problem of doing work under NDA and having little to show for it in your portfolio.

My friend Sarah Parmenter co-hosted this week’s show with Anna while I was driving back from holiday. This week’s topics are money related — Sarah and Anna talk about fair pricing, taking payment before site launch and educating clients with unreasonably low budgets. Anna also asks Sarah about her new venture and what drove her to start a completely different business. They discuss the importance of honesty and how working on side projects can help with motivation.

I sometimes work with other designers helping them to translate their design atmosphere and wide screen layouts into responsive designs. Breaking down their designs into systems is big part of what I do. In practical terms that means working through what are sometimes dozens of static visuals to identify patterns of typography, use of colour and layouts, both smaller modules and whole page compositions. From these patterns I classify and identify elements and compose stylesheets based on them.

I cannot pass up this opportunity to link to this week’s fabulous Happy Monday interview with Seth Godin.