Cool tips how to easily become a successful freelance designer

1. Choose a specific date to start being an official Freelance Developer.

2. Formulate a plan for starting your own business.

3. Do much saving and economizing during the six-months period for future use.

4. Make a deal with a business account in the bank.

5. Know your duties and responsibilities and also that of your customers then make a Contract Draft.

6. Create a trademark or logo that can be remembered well and is not hard determine.

7. Create the pattern and design for your stationery and print it.

8. Create also a business card and print it.

9. Have business dealings with other designers in town.

10. Have business dealings online with designers.

11. Register a new Area name.

12. Get the best Web Host.

13. Plan the marketing for your Online presence.

14. Create a Gmail Account using your area name.

15. Make a Pownce account.

16. Make a Tumblr account.
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17. Assure that you have an Instant Message account.

18. Specify an area in your house if you are working there.

19. Examine your hardwares, do you need a new computer or printer.

20. Spend for a copy of Adobe Creative Studio.

21. Invest in a copy of the latest Microsoft Office. Make a  contact list with Outlook.

22. Examine your workplace.
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23. Secure a Filing cabinet.

24. Get a chair that’s comfortable.

25. Secure a phone line that is restricted only for business use.

26. Acquaint yourself about tax laws and ask an accontant.

27. Making a leaving notification from work for about a period of months.

28. Do not leave your job in bad condition.

29. Thank your employer about the knowledge and all other things that you got from him.

30. Encode your contracts and make a hard copy of it.

31. Make a proposal model for your expected clients.

32. examine the standards of your area if you’re into business of local range only.

33. Create accounts for designing sites as many as possible if you want a worldwide business.

34. Create your homepage and open it.

35. Write all the services that your business offers.

36. List all contact means on your contacts page.

37. Let your contacts know when you are about to launch your business.

38. Announce in a letter about you and your business.

39. Make business with some newspaper companies and know about the price of announcing.

40. Try online announcements.

41. When you receive questions, answer them quickly.

42. Choose what type of charging you want.

43. Process the money you need and you will get in a year.

44. Make your prices just right for the service..

45. Deal with your accountant on your plans yearly.

46. Let your friends know about your business so that they won’t be bothering you.

47. Start announcing.

48. Do not start your work too early.

49. Make and take breaks.

50. Do not forget about your skills in customer services.

51. Make your work a complete site design.

52. Control yourself in making designs that are too swagerous for other companies.

53. Be creative in your work and take pleasure in it.

2008’s Best Free Fonts for Professional Designs Free truetype fonts are a great way of upping the esthetics of your design. Typography is a very important element when it comes to the overall look of the design. Proper use of truetype fonts throughout the whole design would have a great impact to the elegance and sharpness the designer wants to present. In addition to the appropriate free truetype fonts, precision, accuracy and balance of the geometric formations of the letters would bring a comprehensive look on the body of the design. Moreover, elegant fonts increase the readability of the document and can greatly help relay messages efficiently. As a matter of fact, there are so many customized professional free truetype fonts available to be used on enhancing the visual features of your design. On the other hand, there is a wide variety of low-quality fonts that are not advisable to be used in creating professional designs.

In selecting which font types to use on your professional design, quality of the chosen fonts is highly essential. To obtain such high quality fonts, you may be required to pay at least $50 on every typeface. Nevertheless, these bulletproof fonts are often used only once thus it may be costly for you to purchase fonts on every unique design you will make. In order to be cost efficient when it comes to creating unique professional designs, you may want to consider using some of the free alternative professional fonts.

There are several typo-designers that develop high-quality fonts over the past years. Some of these excellent types of fonts are even available for free on download sites on the Internet. These fonts are also free to be used for personal designs and even commercial designing projects. This article would give you an overview of some of these free fonts that you may find appropriate for your professional designing needs.

2008’s Best Free Fonts for Professional Designs

In creating professional designs, the type of font to be used is one of the most important factors to consider. The following are some of the most anticipated professional types of fonts which are highly recommended to be used for creating designs.

Gentium

This typeface family is mainly designed to allow several ethnic groups from different locations around the globe to create high-quality and readable manuscripts and publications. The wide range of Latin-based letters supported by this type of font includes glyphs corresponding to different Latin ranges within the standard Unicode.

District Thin

The District Thin font has the thinnest weight among the Garage Font’s District font family. This was developed by Kienan and Dylan Smith. It presents a very calm yet serious and impressive sans-serif font. The font is available as a free download in several font download sites on the Internet. Different types such as Mac Postscript, OpenType, PC Truetype, Mac TrueType and PC Postscript are available for this font.

MG Open Moderna

Mg Open Moderna is one of the four types of the MgOpen greek free truetype fontscollection. This font is a typeface sans-serif based on original design in creating the Helvetica font.

Pigiarniq Inuktitut Font

The Pigiarniq Inuktitut Font originated from the small region in Canada known as Munavut. This place is inhabited by Eskimos and is included on the least populated areas all over the world. This type of font was created by its local government in order to provide a typeface to be used uniformly by its 28,000 inhabitants for the region’s four languages – Innuinaqtun, English, French and Inuktitut. The resulting font is a beautifully developed professional looking sans-serif font. This free font family is available on bold, italic, heavy, regular and light font weights.

Delicious

Its homogenic appearance has made this font suitable for professional designs. The uniqueness of the character spacing for the Delicious font can be effectively used for text with small point sizes. The italic of this font is not a slanted Roman but rather a true italic. This Serif font is available for Mac and PC.

Appropriate Pixel Fonts for your Professional Design

Pixel fonts are rarely used for professional designs yet some specialized designs which use this type of fonts are also essential in giving a distinct look for your design. Pixel fonts are often used in designs related to games, applications and websites. These fonts are also appropriate when it comes to integration to Flash. These fonts do not suffer the blurring effect of transferring fonts for editing purposes. There are several types of pixel fonts you may choose from in order to be included on your professional design.

Style-Force Semplice Pixel Fonts

These tiny pixel fonts are usually used for compatibility issues with Flash.

Unibody

The Unibody pixel font is especially used for optimized screen for several editing applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Micromedia Flash MX. This font is designed for the 8 pt size only.

Silkscreen

Silkscreen is mainly used in designs with very small graphical displays are required. The proper use of the silkscreen is on the navigational items such as navigation bars, menus and others. The Silkscreen font is also good for large point sizes for the chunky old-computer look which is much popular for children today. This font was developed by Jason Kottke available in Mac and PC versions. This free font for personal and commercial use is available in TrueType, Windows, Mac and even in Linux.

My favorite 14 web design cheat sheets for you!Here are 14 of my favorite [web] design cheat sheets, for you!

JavaScript Frameworks

Prototype 1.6.0.2 Cheat Sheet

mootools 1.2 cheat sheet

jQuery 1.3 Cheat Sheet

CSS

Mac OS X CSS Cheat Sheet

CSS Cheat Sheet (V2)

CSS CHEAT SHEET

XHTML

HTML/XHTML in one page

(X)HTML Elements and Attributes

Flash

Adobe Flash CS4 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts

Flash CS3 Cheat Sheet

Photoshop

Photoshop Lasso Tool Cheatsheet

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Keyboard Shortcuts

Adobe Pen Tool Cheatsheet

1. Management has renamed its Waterfall process to Agile Waterfall
2. You start hiring consultants so they can take the blame
3. The Continuous Integration server has returned the error message “Fuck it, I give up”
4. You have implemented your own Ruby framework that uses XML configuration files
5. Your eldest team member references Martin Fowler as a ’snot-nosed punk’
6. Your source code control system is a series of folders on a shared drive
7. Allocated QA time is for Q and A why your crap is broken
8. All of your requirements are written on a used cocktail napkin
9. You start considering a new job so you don’t have to maintain the application you are building
10. The lead web developer thinks the X in XHTML means ‘extreme’
11. Ever iteration meeting starts with “Do you want the good news or the bad news…”
12. Your team still gives a crap about its CMM Level
13. Progress is now measured by the number of fixed bugs and not completed features
14. Continuous Integration is getting new employees to read the employee handbook
15. You are friends with the janitor
16. The SCRUM master doesn’t really care what you did yesterday or what you will do today
17. Every milestone ends in a dead sprint
18. Your best developer only has his A+ Certification
19. You do not understand the acronyms DRY, YAGNI, or KISS; but you do understand WTF, PHB, and FUBAR
20. Your manager could be replaced by an email redirection batch file
21. The only certification your software process has is ISO 9001/2000
22. Your manager thinks ‘Metrics’ is a type of protein drink
23. Every bug is prioritized as Critical
24. Every feature is prioritized as Trivial
25. Project estimates magically match the budget
26. Developers use the excuse of ’self documenting code’ for no comments
27. Your favorite software pattern is God Object
28. You still believe compiling is a form of testing
29. Developers still use Notepad as an IDE
30. Your manager wastes 7 hours a week asking for progress reports (true story)
31. You do not have your own machine and you are not doing pair programming
32. Team Rule - No meetings until 10 AM since we were all here until 2 AM
33. Your team believes ORM is a ‘fad’
34. Your team believes the transition from VB6 to VB.NET will be ’seamless’
35. Your manager thinks MS Project is the best management tool the market offers
36. Your spouse only gets to see you on a webcam
37. None of your unit tests have asserts in them
38. FrontPage is your web page editor of choice
39. You get into flame wars if { should be on new line, but you are impartial to patterns such as MVC
40. The company motto is ‘Do more with less’
41. The phrase ‘It works on my machine’ is heard more than once a day
42. The last conference your .NET team attended was Apple WWDC 2000
43. Your manager insists that you track all activity but never uses the information to make decisions
44. All debugging occurs on the live server
45. Your manager does not know how to check email
46. Your manager thinks being SOX compliant means not working on baseball nights
47. The company hires Senetor Ted Stevens to give your project kick-off inspiration speech
48. The last book you read - Visual InterDev 6 Bible
49. The overall budget is mistaken for your weekly Mountain Dew bill
50. Your manager spends his lunch hour crying in his car (another true story)
51. Your lead web developer defines AJAX as a cleaning product
52. Your boss expects you to spend the next 2 days creating a purchase request for a $50 component
53. The sales team decreased your estimates because they believe you can work faster
54. Requirement - Rank #1 on Google
55. Everyday you work until Midnight, everyday your boss leaves at 4:30
56. Your manager loves to say “Why do the developers care? They get paid by the hour.”
57. The night shift at Starbucks knows you by name
58. Management can not understand why anyone needs more than a single monitor
59. Your development team only uses source control as a power failure backup system
60. Developers are not responsible for any testing
61. The team does not use SVN because they believe the merge algorithms are black voodoo magic
62. Your white boards are mostly white (VersionOne)
63. The client continually mistakes your burn-down chart for a burn-up chart
64. The project code name is renamed to ‘The Death March’
65. Now it physically pains you to say the word - Yes
66. Your teammates don’t refactor, they refuctor
67. To reward you for all of your overtime your boss purchases a new coffee maker
68. Your project budget is entered in the company ledger as ‘Corporate Overhead’
69. You secretly outsource pieces of the project so you can blog at work
70. A Change Control Board is created and your product isn’t even its first alpha version
71. Daily you consider breaking your fingers for the short term disability check
72. The deadline has been renamed a ‘milestone’…just like the last ‘milestone’
73. Your project managers ‘open door’ policy only applies between 5:01 PM - 7:59 AM
74. Your boss argues “Why buy it when we can built it!”
75. You bring beer to the office during your 2nd shift
76. The project manager is spotted consulting a Ouija board
77. You give misinformation to your teammates so you look better on your personal review
78. All code reviews are scheduled a week before product launch
79. Budget for testing exists as “if we have time”
80. The client will only talk about the requirements after they receive a fixed estimation
81. The boss does not find the humor in Dilbert
82. You start noticing your boss’s poker tells during planning poker
83. You start wondering if working 2 shifts at Pizza Hut is a better career alternative
84. All performance issues are resolved by getting larger machines
85. The project has been demoted to being released as a permanent ‘Beta’ version
86. Your car is towed from the office parking lot as it was thought to be abandoned
87. The project manager likes to doodle during requirements gathering meetings
88. You are using MOSS 2007
89. Your SCRUM team consists of 1
90. Your timesheet looks like a Powerball ticket
91. The web developer thinks being 508 means looking good in her Levi Red Tabs
92. You think you need Multiple Personality Disorder medication because you are Mort, Elvis, and Einstein
93. Your manager substitutes professional consultant advice for a Magic 8 Ball
94. You know exactly how many compile warnings cause an ‘Out of Memory’ exception in your IDE
95. I have used IDE twice in this list and you still don’t know what it stands for
96. You have cut and pasted code from The Daily WTF
97. Broken unit tests are deleted because they are obviously out of date
98. You are sent to a conference to learn, but you skip sessions to go hunting for swag
99. QA has nicknamed you Chief Off-By-One
100. You have been 90% complete 90% of the time
101. “Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. Ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too… thanks”

A text or code editor is –as its name indicates- a tool for editing text/code. You can use a text editor for a wide variety of tasks from cleaning up data, to editing configuration files on your Mac or server, to writing HTML or coding or simply for writing your fav short story :0 ).

Below is a concise list of 15 of the best free text editors for coders.

Notepad ++
Notepad++ is a free, open source, tabbed and fully customizable editor that handles much more than just plain text. Some of its features are syntax highlighting, code folding, and macros.

[Download]

GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs is an extensible and highly customizable text editor. Some of its features are content-sensitive editing modes, complete built-in documentation, support for many languages and their scripts

[Download]

Vim
Vim is an advanced and highly configurable text editor. Some of its features are multiple windows, syntax highlighting, multiple levels of undo, and color themes.

[Download]

Cream
Cream is a free text editor, and a modern configuration of the powerful and famous Vim. Some of its features are single editing mode, editing of very large files and syntax highlighting.

[Download]

Bluefish
Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and web designers. Some of its features are multiple document interface, unlimited undo/redo functionality, and customizable syntax highlighting.

[Download]

EditPad Lite
EditPad Lite is a free for non-commercial use and general-purpose text editor. Some of its features are reopen menus, block functions and unlimited undo and redo.

[Download]

Smultron
Smultron is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5. Some of its features are easy selection of the opened documents, line numbers, support for syntax colouring for many different languages and support for text encodings.

[Download]

jEdit
jEdit is a mature programmer’s text editor. Some of its features are markers, rectangular selection and Word wrap.

[Download]

Komodo Edit
Komodo Edit is a free, open source editor. Some of its features are utocomplete and calltips, multi-language file support, and syntax checking and coloring.

[Download]

SciTE
SciTE is a SCIntilla-based free text editor for Win32 and X. Some of its features are support for syntax styling, error indicators, code completion and call tips.

[Download]

TextWrangler
TextWrangler is the powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool. Some of its features are powerful single and multi-file search and replace, performing incremental searches, multiple clipboards, splittable editing windows and auto-indent.

[Download]

Caditor
Caditor is an advanced text editor built for productivity. Some of its features are hex viewer, file hasher and auto-complete.

[Download]

Gedit
Gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor. Some of its features are configurable syntax highlighting for various languages, file reverting, auto indentation and text wrapping.

[Download]

Crimson Editor
Crimson Editor is a professional source code editor for Windows. Some of its features are syntax highlighting for HTML, C/C++, Perl, Java, Matlab and LaTeX, user tools, macros, and spell checker.

[Download]

ConTEXT
ConTEXT is a small, fast and powerful freeware text editor, developed to serve as a secondary tool for software developers. Some of its features are powerful syntax highlighting, project workspaces support, project workspaces support and incremental search with text emphasizing.

[Download]

If you know any more excellent free text editors feel free to suggest them to us

Us Programmers  we all have things we find extremely annoying it can be a thing such as scope creep, colleages that have a distinct smell.. or  a an awfull annotation of code .The world is dependent on programmers and their genius to get their business moving. Without the multitude of programs at our disposal we wouldn’t be able to enjoy the global citizen concept. There’s a lot of finesse they provide, and you’ll always find a programmer who can work diligently to create just what you want. Every time there’s a release, all software companies are totally focused on what the programming team is going to create. The following is a list of the top 10 things that annoy programmers.

Here’s a list of what annoys us proggers mostly.

16.  Client fixation with the legacy of C code

C code is of paramount importance, and we take great pride in being to use it aesthetically. However we are faced with a grave situation when it comes to preserving this legacy when an upgrade is required for multicore technology. Obviously clients also want their lines of C code to remain original, and we are hopeless faced such adjustments at our expense.

15.  Restrictive “business” Rules

Programmers are always required to create something new but there’ll always be imposed constraints. As if that’s not all, they have to create their programs within limitations that arise because of complicated business rules and of course those hateful fuzzy requirements, which are a clear representation of the clients limited understanding of what they really need leading to the only conclusion clients  don’t understand what they are requesting and fail to see implications.

14.  Official Politics

We aren’t really involved in office warfare trying to covet the next appraisal. We hate political or organizational matters that govern others in the organization. We hate being left in the lurch when people agree to their suggestions but later backtrack regarding the consent provided if something falls apart. For us , there’s a simple solution to this. Make sure you have a documented agreement whenever someone agrees to something.

13.  Interruptions

Very few programmers can go from 0 to code at the drop of a hat.  In general, we tend to be more akin to locomotives than ferraris; it may take us awhile to get started, but once we hit our stride we can get an impressive amount of work done.  Unfortunately, it’s very hard to get into a programming zone when your train of thought is constantly being derailed by clients, managers, and fellow programmers.

There is simply too much information we need to keep in mind while we’re working on a task to be able to drop the task, handle another issue, then pick up the task without missing a beat.  Interruptions kill our train of thought and getting it back is often a time-consuming, frustrating, and worst of all, error-prone process.

12.  So called Human factors..

In their quest for perfection client send requests that are in all technicality very prototypical but they believe it’s original. Even worse is the fact that the repeat requirements and many clients happily use vague terminology. As a result they may send over a requirement but may not know what they have asked for. Save your hard work for later, and shoot back a mail to your concerned team leader of what you have understood of the project so that they confirm. This will eliminate any possibilities of anyone in a position of power from backtracking later, or making you redo your program or rework on your hard spend efforts.

Dont’ sneeze I think its a bug! :-

11.  Scope creep

From Wikipedia:

Scope creep (also called focus creep, requirement creep, feature creep, and sometimes kitchen sink syndrome) in project management refers to uncontrolled changes in a project’s scope. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled. It is generally considered a negative occurrence that is to be avoided.

Scope creep turns relatively simple requests into horribly complex and time consuming monsters.  It only takes a few innocent keystrokes by the requirements guy for scope creep to happen:

• Version 1: Show a map of the location
• Version 2: Show a 3D map of the location
• Version 3: Show a 3D map of the location that the user can fly through

Argh!  What used to be a 30 minute task just turned into a massively complex system that could take hundreds of man hours.  Even worse, most of the time scope creep happens during development, which requires rewriting, refactoring, and sometimes throwing out code that was developed just days prior.

10.  The i’ll fix it Later approach to error handling..

Programmers like things to happen in a systematic manner because that saves them from extra effort. Between the coding process, and actual implementation there’s a lot of hard work involved. As such, programmers expect any testing that needs to be conducted to be done in a timely manner, rather than be told to make changes when you’ve created almost the entire program. Honestly, error handling needs to be in pace with programming or else nothing will really make it to the release stage efficiently.

9.  Hey your a progger right? so uhmm can you fix my comp..plzzz

We are not hardware engineers so don’t ask us to fix ur so called computer crashes. We aren’t obligated to do other jobs just because that  fact that we are skilled with a comp. So, please don’t approach us for quick fixes on your computer just because we “seem” to be sitting around, There have been  cases being at a party or gig and some dude or a  grrl (nice looking girls are ok though :- ) aks you to fix their lap cause it isn’t working….supposedly

8.  Team chemistry or just plain stress?

Depending upon a programmer’s ability some tend to be more socially talented than others and some smell better…. Despite this they try their best to offer team work and get their coding to be translated to assembly. As such, don’t disrupt this natural team chemistry by trying to shift programmers to other teams because they’ll first have to work out  team chemistry, and then programming. Let things go on in their natural order instead of trying to juggle human resources. There’s a simple solution, get a new (good looking awesomely looking (grrl) programmer :-

7.  Management that doesn’t understand programming

Management is not an easy job.  People suck; we’re fickle and fragile and we’re all out for #1.  Keeping a large group of us content and cohesive is a mountain of a task.  However, that doesn’t mean that managers should be able to get away without having some basic understanding of what their subordinates are doing.  When management cannot grasp the basic concepts of our jobs, we end up with scope creep, unrealistic deadlines, and general frustration on both sides of the table.  This is a pretty common complaint amongst programmers and the source of a lot of angst (as well as one hilarious cartoon).

6.  Documenting our applications

Let me preface this by saying that yes, I know that there are a lot of documentation-generating applications out there, but in my experience those are usually only good for generating API documentation for other programmers to read.  If you are working with an application that normal everyday people are using, you’re going to have to write some documentation that the average layman can understand (e.g. how your application works, troubleshooting guides, etc.).

It’s not hard to see that this is something programmers dread doing.  Take a quick look at all the open-source projects out there.  What’s the one thing that all of them are constantly asking for help with?  Documentation.

I think I can safely speak on behalf of all programmers everywhere when I say, “can’t someone else do it?“.

5.  Applications without documentation

I never said that we weren’t hypocrites.  :-)  Programmers are constantly asked to incorporate 3rd party libraries and applications into their work.  In order to do that, we need documentation.  Unfortunately, as mentioned in item 6, programmers hate writing documentation.  No, the irony is not lost on us.

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to utilize a 3rd party library while having absolutely no fricken idea what half the functions in the API do.  What’s the difference between poorlyNamedFunctionA() and poorlyButSimilarlyNamedFunctionB()?  Do I need to perform a null check before accessing PropertyX?  I guess I’ll just have to find out through trial and error!  Ugh.

4.  Hardware

Any programmer who has ever been called upon to debug a strange crash on the database server or why the RAID drives aren’t working properly knows that hardware problems are a pain.  There seems to be a common misconception that since programmers work with computers, we must know how to fix them.  Granted, this may be true for some programmers, but I reckon the vast majority of us don’t know or really care about what’s going on after the code gets translated into assembly.  We just want the stuff to work like it’s supposed to so we can focus on higher level tasks.

3.  Vagueness

“The website is broken”.  “Feature X isn’t working properly”.  Vague requests are a pain to deal with.  It’s always surprising to me how exasperated non-programmers tend to get when they are asked to reproduce a problem for a programmer.  They don’t seem to understand that “it’s broken, fix it!” is not enough information for us to work off of.

Software is (for the most part) deterministic. We like it that way.  Humor us by letting us figure out which step of the process is broken instead of asking us to simply “fix it”.

2.  Other programmers

Programmers don’t always get along with other programmers.  Shocking, but true.  This could easily be its own top 10 list, so I’m just going to list some of the common traits programmers have that annoy their fellow programmers and save going into detail for a separate post:

• Being grumpy to the point of being hostile.
• Failing to understand that there is a time to debate system architecture and a time to get things done.
• Inability to communicate effectively and confusing terminology.
• Failure to pull ones own weight.
• Being apathetic towards the code base and project

And last, but not least, the number 1 thing that annoys programmers…

1.  Their own code, 6 months later

Ever look back at some of your old code and grimace in pain?  How stupid you were!  How could you, who know so much now, have written that?  Burn it!  Burn it with fire!

Well, good news.  You’re not alone.

The truth is, the programming world is one that is constantly changing.  What we regard as a best practice today can be obsolete tomorrow.  It’s simply not possible to write perfect code because the standards upon which our code is judged is evolving every day.  It’s tough to cope with the fact that your work, as beautiful as it may be now, is probably going to be ridiculed later.  It’s frustrating because no matter how much research we do into the latest and greatest tools, designs, frameworks, and best practices, there’s always the sense that what we’re truly after is slightly out of reach.  For me, this is the most annoying thing about being a programmer.  The fragility of what we do is necessary to facilitate improvement, but I can’t help feeling like I’m one of those sand-painting monks.

Well, there you have it.  The top 10 things that annoy programmers.  Again, if you feel that I missed anything please be sure to let me know in the comments!