“Freelance Design in Practice,” to be published in Spring 2009 by RotoVision, will be a book for freelance graphic designers who are in it for the long run. I’d like to invite experienced, full-time freelance designers from anywhere in the world to contact me directly for possible interviews. Please contact me at cathy@fishel.com if you have advice, anecdotes and insights to share with peers. Design work will also be shown in the book.

Chapters will include succinct advice and real-life case studies on subjects including:

-Evaluating your personal vision and making yourself stand out

-Establishing a business plan, workspace, accounting system, legal back-up, advertising and even your business name

-Setting fees, bidding, billing, dealing with non-payment, tax concerns, how to know if you’re making money, and trade-outs and pro-bono work

-Legal responsibilities, including contracts, insurance and liability

-Self-promotion of all types

-Finding the best clients and the best mix of clients, and turning them into repeat customers

-Managing workflow and maintaining your sanity

-Achieving a healthy life/work balance

-Periodic self-evaluations and other touchstones

-An entire chapter on solving common freelance frustrations

Logo Design Love Awards is a competition that is going to recognize the best logos in the blogosphere. I was lucky enough to help with the judging, and I thought you guys would enjoy browsing through the logos as much as I did. There are ten categories of blogs and somewhere around 100 logos. Check it out, and cast your vote in the comments of their site.

Stay away from the Creative Center! There are plenty of good design schools in the state, but the Creative Center in Omaha is a horrible way to go. I have friends that went there and they would tell you the same thing. A good deal of professional designers in Nebraska will back me up on this. It is extremely expensive and you come out with some antiquated illustrations, some mediocre designs and a hefty debt. I know several successful designers that came from the Creative Center, but this is only because they learned things outside of school and are very talented and driven people.

If you are going to go to school in Nebraska check out UNK or Concordia (yes that is my alma mater). If you are set on a two year school, check out Southeast Community or Metro Community College. I know there are other schools in Nebraska, but these are the ones that I have had direct experience with. Don’t hesitate to check Denver, Kansas City, Chicago and Minneapolis for their great design programs as well.

I haven’t had a chance to read this book yet, but I wanted to do a little video review before the final goodbye here at BADG. Even without reading the interviews, insight and captions, this is a great collection of Modern Dog’s work. Where would posters be without these people? The book appears to be as irreverent and fun as Robynne and Michael … and if Dr. Figus Upshaw endorses this book, how could it not be good?

What is a design blog without shameless self promotion. I had to get one more in here. Here is a very short video for my wife’s show with good friend Adam Nielsen. If you are in Nebraska this weekend, you should check it out. If there is a message for designers in this post, it would be … Get out and see more art (especially printmaking).

Enjoy the five seconds of artwork!

Those ugly dishes: I like the service and price of a dish, but those dishes are ugly enough without the logo on it. You can purchase a cover that will at least hide their logo or replace it with the logo of your choice.

Websites: Unless you received a discount on the pricing, you don’t have to let your web designer put their logo or name on your website. Should print designers start putting their names on the bottom of every business card they design?

Fence companies: So many fences have large name plates on them. Unless they are still paying for the placement or you consider it some sort of status symbol (I hope not), then please take that logo off your fence. You paid for the fence not the logo.

Car dealerships: It may take some work, but you don’t have to keep that ugly dealership logo on the back of your car. Take that Hyundai logo off while you’re at it.

Watermarked paper: Why paper companies embed their own logo in their paper is beyond me. They should have to pay the designer or client to embed their company logo into something that we paid for.

Home repair signs: Lets say that someone is sanding your wood floors or roofing your house. Again, unless they are friends or they are giving you a discount, you don’t have to let them put their sign in front of your house. I can’t imagine how this became the norm for home repair.

What free ads have you noticed?

Bennett and Adrian have lit a bit of an Internet campfire and rustled the hedges in the forest around it to call several of us wayward BA authors and writers back to share in the warmth and swap a few more fireside stories together. So, as I trudge out of the many tangled branches of teaching, research, writing, grading and continuing to work as a freelance designer, it’s great to at least briefly brush the leaves and twigs off my jacket and rejoin good friends in conversation.

When last I left BA Design Group and its group of campers, the podcast was continuing its rapid rise to the most regularly scheduled programming on the site, I was in the midst of leading a workshop in Tennessee, and I think we were all still fielding comments in the Gig Poster thread – the hits just keep on coming, right?!

It’s incredible to see how quickly a year passes and to try making some sense of the individual images that make up the blur once you’re standing at the other end of that time span. It kinda makes my brain hurt to realize that my workshop post was almost exactly a year ago this week!

…Time to move on in the writing then, I suppose!

In aiming to make some sense out of the big, crazy, wonderful thing that has been BA Design Group and the many twists and turns that it’s taken along the way, my brain heads towards a phrase that Stefan Bucher used about a week-and-a-half ago while he was visiting the college I teach at:

Launch and learn…

Like a good little obssessive-compulsive faculty member, I tried to do some research to figure out exactly who to credit that turn of phrase to and came up somewhat dry! I’d even heard Stefan mention a name associated with it, but can’t pull it out of the Berkbigler mental hard drives…Feel free to offer the source if you know it!

It’s a phrase that comes out of the land of web authoring and the goal of releasing a web site especially, but targets the idea that it’s probably best to simply get going on a project and iron out kinks once it’s rolling. Rather than trying to predict all of the hurdles and hiccups involved in something in advance, start running, try to keep your eyes peeled for the things that will smack into you within the next 60 feet and keep the momentum going.

Learn as you go – not an earth-shatteringly new idea, but certainly one that has a lot of pertinence in the realm of blogging!

BA, especially for me, has definitely been a process of learning as I’ve gone:

- Gone forward in becoming part of the writing clan here…

- Gone forward in trying to write about things the really intrigue me but also trying to generate some writing that would pique other readers as well…

- Gone forward in putting my voice out in discussions when the discussions hit the right talking “nerve” in me…

It’s been exciting to watch the way BA has grown, expanded, shed legs, grown wings, shed wings, regrown legs and continued to metamorphosize as its participants (readers and writers) have done likewise. It’s been, in that way, an awfully good diary of the learning and launching each one of us have attempted through this medium.

It’s tough, as a fully admittant control-freak about so many things, to always jump off the end of the diving board with a blindfold on and just see what sort of surface you’re going to hit at the end of the dive, but I feel fortunate to have had several mentors and models encourage a healthy launch-and-learn attitude in me. I’ve definitely found that if you wait for the muse to strike before you start moving, you stand still creatively for a really, really, REALLY long time!

Like this blog, it helps to simply put pen to page or fingers to keyboard and start putting some thoughts in action, tending to them and course-correcting the rocket as the trajectory heads upwards and onwards.

I appreciate greatly the invitation that Bennett and Adrian sent, drawing the range of us into this mix to see what happened. It’s really great to see that two friends from college could ask a range of other design chums to simply start talking to each other publicly online, spark new friendships and watch creative launches and nosedives happen in equal portion here.

Thanks as well for being launchers and learners right alongside each of us as writers…Nice to meet other folks and hear what’s percolating in their brains about all this what-not as well.

To wrap back around to Stefan and the pretty killer example he continues to set for artists and designers, you can find a still new mural sitting in the middle of a quaint little town in Nebraska that stands as a monument to the “try it and see what happens” school of thinking. If we can figure out how and when to get the streetlamps dimmed or shut off for a couple evenings, you might even get to see it glow!

In the meantime, keep banging away at your keys and your drawing boards – it’ll be exciting to see when and where your rockets head off as well…

Paul Berkbigler
Assistant Professor of Art
Concordia University – Nebraska

http://www.knowyourvalues.com/

If you ask me, these are far better than listening to those annoying Be A Design Cast hosts Nate and Donovan.

oh Hai. We’R leavin ur websitz.

What seems like forever ago, Bennett Holzworth moved. He moved to Hastings Nebraska, and if you know where that is, you have my sympathy. Not to be cut off from his close friends back home, he started this blog — this one right here — with his friend Adrian. Some months later, they made the mistake of saying “Hey Nate! How about you write on this blog with us?” To which I replied “Okay.”

150 entries and 53 podcasts later here we are. And hard as it is to say, we’re taking off. As we came to end of the second season of the Be A Design Cast, Donovan and I put a lot of very serious thought into the future of the show. Ultimately, in early December, we decided the time had come to push boldly forward into the undiscovered country of hosting our own show. Er, “web-hosting.” We’ve both called Be A Design Group home for a very long time, and are grateful to Bennett and Adrian for everything they’ve done both for us and the site. In the end, however, it was time to move on.

And move on we are! The new home for the show is 36 Point, which you can find just across the street at 36point.com! That’s a bookmarkin’, there, buddy. Why 36 Point? Headlines, baby. Headlines. The new site will focus on being the home for entertainment for designers, but you’ll still be able to find the random musings of Donovan and I, as well as The Reflex Blue Show, our new — weekly — podcast. What? Well we can’t call it the Be A Design Cast anymore, can we? Chances are, if you were a fan of our old show, you’re probably going to be a fan of the new one. We hope to see you there!

In the end, Donovan and I would like to salute Be A Design Group and its readers. The kind readers, the crazy readers, the readers who spam us with erectile dysfunction ads, and of course everyone who listens to the Be A Design Cast. thanks for everything, and we’ll see you in Teh Futur.

Sincerely,

Nate Voss

Just over a year ago, Adrian went to see Chip Kidd speak in Denver, and his reviews were great. Within hours I had emailed the programming chair on the AIGA Colorado board and contacted Chip Kidd off of Adrian’s word to see if he would be interested in speaking in Omaha.

Turns out, Chip not only said yes, but did so with the understanding that we’d wait a while, as he had a new book coming out (a new novel actually, I hear he has a new book cover come out more often then I make it into bookstores).

And that leads us to this Friday (2/29/08), when AIGA Nebraska is bringing Chip Kidd to Bellevue.

But I want to back it up a month, when Nate was failing at designing a poster for the event. A couple weeks prior to his live-blogging, I had talked with him briefly about Nicole Blauw (the event’s co-chair) and I decided we’d give the poster design a shot ourselves rather than finding a designer, as it was our option. He mentioned making sure we could hang the poster up in bookstores, and making it have examples of his work all over it (and he volunteered to do it at this time).

So the following week I met with Nicole to brainstorm the poster concept at The Homy Inn, and a few things became apparent: posters you hang in bookstores really need to be no larger than 11×17 so they fit on bulletin boards; Chip Kidd has better name recognition than the average speaker; and anything that makes sense to use to hang at a bookstore bulletin board (lot’s of examples of his work) isn’t always the coolest thing to hand to design studios and ad agencies. So we split the project in half, one part for Nate to deal with, and we’d do the posters that would be hand delivered to the agencies and in-house places we knew. (If you didn’t get one, please except our apologies, it had to do more with time and resources than anything, and we mailed a total of one poster (to Paul Berkbigler)).

At this time we came up with our concept, which amounted to three bullet points of art direction: Make his name as big as possible; Use that quote from USA Today that calls him a ‘rock star’; and let’s not make this complicated, if we’re promoting a ‘rock star’, let’s promote it as such, no fancy themes or concepts, just like you’d promote a rock show. Nicole’s first sample pretty much looks like the final print, so I have no process to show. But thanks to Nate for taking the book stores out of the equation, and thanks to Mike Wiehs for screen printing the limited run of 94. It should be noted that Nate’s designed worked perfect for the audience, and his only failure was not completing the poster in his self-alloted time of four hours. Showing so many covers made the clerks notice that these were books they carried, and thus hung up the posters. Postcards based on ‘rock star’ poster were mailed to everyone else on the AIGA Nebraska list.

Final ‘Poster for Bookstores’ designed by Nate Voss:

Final ‘Poster for Designers’ designed by Nicole Blauw: