Particularly when your workload is high and you find yourself dancing from one job to another, things like billing and chasing payments can seem less important than meeting deadlines. But remember that you are in business and the only way you get paid is through your invoicing. Here are two things you can do to help you stay on top of your billing.

Make sure you have a clear list of who owes you what and how long they have left to pay.

This can be a simple spreadsheet of invoice numbers, job titles, amounts and due dates. Alternately you can have a couple of folders on your desktop and label them as “Outstanding”, “Overdue” and “Paid” then just move your invoices from folder to folder so you can quickly see which ones need action.

Set aside a day for chasing invoices.

Its a good idea to have a ‘billing day’ where you set aside a few hours to call clients who are overdue, email clients to remind them about outstanding invoices and to send out new ones. Having this happen on the same day every week also ensures that it you don’t need to express any emotions or feel embarassed to be raising the issue of money, it is simply your ‘billing day’.

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After the painting is completed, I scan it in and adjust in photoshop (my style is kind of grungy and I can correct little mistakes a bit this way). This also allows me to send you the final digitally, so it’s easy for you to just plop it down into your layout.

Hopefully you love it, and you email back to say so. And then I’ll send you an invoice. And after it’s in your layout and officially printed, you’ll send me some tearsheets. (Sharing!) And we’re done. You then reflect on how nice was to work with an illustrator and get another creative mind on the problem. And I reflect on how your good design helps the illustration look great (and in turn, you look great… and more importantly: your client looks great). And then I go back to drinking my coffee.

The End. (See? Wasn’t that fun?)

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Now that the web has been around for well over a decade, most professional sites, personal sites or blogs, and in general sites with any credibility at all have a ubiquitously polished look. But lately, possibly emerging out of the low-fi, user-generated-content aesthetic, is a trend in seeking reverse-credibility through deliberately, earnestly bad design. Take as evidence the site Ogilvy Canada designed to promote HoneyComb cereal. The site, beeboy.org, is ostensibly the property of Bee Researcher Barbara Sommerville, and records her research and observation of “Bernard,” a boy raised by bees.

Fake blogs and fake personal sites are now a well-worn trick in marketing attempts (Coke, for example?) but the striking thing about the design of beeboy.org is just how far it goes to make it look like it was done by a design-impaired bee scientist, rather than an ad agency.

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The big trend right now in web design is what is often referred to as the “Web 2.0-style.” It includes large fonts, gradients, the word ‘beta’ and gloss. As a designer it’s good to learn and be able to utilize these trends but be careful not to become the trend.

One of the things I always enjoy hearing from clients or a potential client is that they find my design style unique. I really try not to design what I refer to as cookie-cutter sites—I may not always succeed but at least I try. The point being is if all my sites in my portfolio look the same, I’m not going to get a diverse set of clients and within time, my portfolio will look outdated and no one will want to hire me because I look so “yesterday.”

Though it is important to be able to give the client what they want it’s equally important to try and come up with something fresh that makes you stand out from the masses because everyone and their brother these days are designing for “Web 2.0” so anything that can make you stand out (in a good way) is a good thing.

Whenever I’ve hired a freelancer, my biggest concern has been getting in touch with them at critical times. With an employee you know exactly where they are - in your office, and when they are there - during business hours. This affords some level of comfort for when a rush job or critical change comes in. A freelancer on the other hand is often not onsite and may be working odd hours.

What this means is that freelancers who were always available for contact and who could respond if my needs were urgent were *vastly* preferable to say someone who only replied emails a day later or who never seemed to answer their phone.

As a freelancer it’s great to temper your free work hours with a policy of always being available for contact, a little like a doctor on call.

On the flipside if you do however find yourself answering client calls after hours unless there is a dire emergency make it clear that while you are contactable you are not necessarily on the job. Clients can very quickly get used to having you do things overnight and you must be careful to discourage that sort of habit forming.

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So I emailed you my sketch ideas and gave you my rationale behind them. (Being an illustrator doesn’t mean I just paint pretty pictures… I also need to help you communicate the idea and solve the problem visually. And, at the same time, draw a viewer in by the image. It’s not that difficult, but this illustration needs to pull a lot of weight.)

You looked over the sketches and discussed them with your partner or editor and then got back to me with your choice, and any changes you think would strengthen the image. And I am happy you picked one (hopefully it was my favorite of the bunch) and we move on to the final. This is where I get to paint and be messy and play with color (my favorite part).

For my illustrations, I stick really closely to the approved sketch. I do this because I don’t want to surprise you with something unexpected that leads to you being unsatisfied with the illustration or require tons of changes. And I want you to know what to expect when you hire me back for future projects (you’ll do that, right?… ?cause I’m so nice…)

So here are finals for the sketches in the previous posts:

On to the last phase.
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The title may not sound web design centric but I swear I’ll tie it altogether. Web designer’s live and die by the Internet. We seek out and view numerous web sites for inspiration and to see what the “competition” is doing. Most of us pay our bills online, shop online, have “friends” online we’ve never actually met and we even watch TV and videos online these days. A common misconception among some of these designers is that there is nothing to learn about web design outside the Internet.

If you’re a designer as well as developer, if you don’t keep your mind active on varied things, you’re losing out on great design that doesn’t live inside your monitor. I find my friends sometimes annoyed by me because I’ll be walking along the aisle in the grocery store and they find me staring at a box of food. Often what they’ve found me doing is looking at how it’s designed. Same thing happens when I go to the mall—I’m constantly looking at Point of Purchase displays for inspiration. So remember to look to the “real world” for design inspiration because there is so much of it to be had—good and bad.

In his 2000 bestseller, “The Tipping Point,” author Malcolm Gladwell describes the consumer phenomenon wherein a few cutting-edge influencers are responsible for setting off a mainstream frenzy for a product. Now, in order to launch its new social networking site, Flip.com, Conde Nast is attempting to invoke this principle. Flip.com has been created and is being marketed under the guidance of ultra-hip advertising firm Mother NY, a tight-knit firm famously comprised of all creatives, no suits. Mother NY’s plan is this: identify 5,000 “key influencing” and “opinion-forming” teenage girls all across the United States and send them a delightful freebie.

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After I do some extremely loose sketches to jot down and work out ideas, I can see that some of them have legs and others are total floppers. The ones with legs (doesn’t that sound insect-like?) get a more formal sketch… more thought-out composition, etc. Maybe you sent me an initial layout pdf… I love it when I get these because it allows me to put my sketch into context and think about how the type will fit around the image. Being from a design background, I like to design my illustrations to the allow the reader’s eye to move smoothly around the layout.

Like this (see how I have the hummingbird directing you to read the title?):

So finally I email about 2 or 3 tight sketches to you. (I like to work it all out in the sketch stage and have fun painting, but other illustrators give really loose sketches and then transform it in the final stage.)

Here are tighter sketches from the roughs shown in the previous post:

We’ll continue in my next post.

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