So, here I am, a nice Monday afternoon, trying to Quote three different projects and no luck. Today seems like there’s like a huge sandbox on top of my head when I get near numbers. Letters or design not so much. Crunching numbers it’s usually what I do early in the week: I have my mind clear and fresh from the weekend. Maybe it’s my head playing a trick on me. Tomorrow there’s a holiday here so today, like one of my friends says, it’s a Tiny Friday.
I tried with silence, soft music, rock music, podcasts, nothing. Nothing I can do can get my head around numbers or processes at this point. the sky is gray, but the light from the sunset has a dark orange cast over everything. Looks like it’s about to rain, but somehow everything looks greener. This is what I do like about this rainy season that’s just starting around here. Greens look much brighter and richer.
After writing this couple of lines I hoped to be a little clear minded to crunch those numbers, or at least get them half way. But I know my self and will be able to send them until tomorrow. So, I leave you kids here to a pretty cool song: Only Happy when it rains by Garbage:
So, when you go out on a trip (or trips), you need to organize your work and personal errands between what you need to get done before leaving and what you can do while away. In my case, for example, when I have to go for a few days to El Salvador to work with some clients, I have to consider at least a 4-5 hour bus trip, so I rather work late the night before and sleep it off on the bus. Another thing, make sure you carry what you need with you when working remotely. One thing I always travel with is my small Graphire2 USB1 tablet that even though it’s an oldie, it’s small enough so I can travel with it and not worry about space in my laptop bag. Another thing, I travel with both my USB iPod/iPhone cables. Sometimes I get so little time to get the stuff charged that I rather plug both the iPhone and the iPod for a few minutes for a quick charge. If you travel over seas, also make sure you take converters for the wall plugs.
As for organizing your freelance work, make sure you give yourself deadlines so you can give your clients what they need (usually before the date the client thought initially) and travel without that on your head.
So, yesterday I got a call from the son of one of my mom’s co workers, asking me if I could print his business cards. So, I saw no problem and asked him to send me over the design. The email was a big one… Not what I expected from a 3.5″ x 2″ business card. He sent me a JPEG file with the design, then I checked the size: 8.5″ X 12″. I quickly I put together a JPEG for him to work with, and that’s my freebie today!
It’s a very basic guide for clients that want to design their own card: It shows them the bleed size, real size and actual design space available to avoid having type or important information cut off when cutting the cards. I did it in English and Spanish, so feel free to download both.
English Freebie:
Business Card Template - English
Spanish Freebie:
Business Card Template - Spanish
Hope you find this templates useful. I just created a Flickr set with all the Freebies for easy reference. I plan to add more soon, so let me know what would you like to see here!
Being an Apple fan, back in 2003 when Apple released the public beta I didn’t hesitate to download it and give it a test drive. Of course, I couldn’t look back. There are some things that were missing but I didn’t care. It was a browser that delivered. Now, with this week’s final release of Safari 4 lots of things have changed. They added a very nice new icon of a envelope to do Mail links – you still can use the shortcut I mentioned here. Also, now they also have a very much improved “web Inspector”, that works very much like it’s FireFox equal Firebug. Above all, it’s a fast browser!
I do install plugins for Safari, so before upgrading I uninstalled SafariStand. I have it for two features: auto closing of the downloads window and to force the links to open in a new tab (same window) not on a new window like Safari usually does. After testing Safari 4, I decided to install the plugin (they had a version that worked perfectly with the beta version) and so far not a problem in sight.
Give Safari 4 a chance… It’s a well behaved browser that rarely crashes!
Make sure you visit that blog closely, they have a pretty nice Toolbar for Firefox, Camino, Flock, Internet Explorer and Maxthon- coming soon to Safari too – called The Creatives Are Community Toolbar. You can find it here.
