James Elliott Designs.

Category Archives for advice

Designer, Developer… Ambassador?

We interrupt VeganMoFo to address a question I was sent regarding payment after completing a project without having a contract.
What sucks most about this type of situation is that you can end up looking like the bad guy if you don’t resolve the matter in a diplomatic fashion. Especially when dealing with companies that do [...]

Anything helps. God bless.

Yesterday I received a tweet asking if I knew anyone looking to hire a designer for work. I didn’t know the twitter user but he is not the only person who has contacted me in hopes I could either use his services or connect him with someone needing design assistance. I put together the following [...]

Ms Miriam Aarons: Patron Saint of Freelance Design

Charging by the hour tells your clients that you mean business. Time is money and you’re keeping the meter running with every meeting and phone conference. No matter how many times I set limits on design iterations or halted work when clients didn’t respond in a timely manner, I learned (the hard way) that flat-fee bids gave [...]

Web Design: A Primer

Last Saturday evening I received an e-mail from a friend:
I wonder if you have already developed, from lots and lots of years of cohorts asking you stuff like this, a primer  à la So You’re Thinking of Freelance Web Design for Weensy Could Be Micromanager Clients! laying around.
As it just so happens… no. Mostly, my friends/cohorts [...]

A Bulletproof Design Contract

The biggest mistake any designer can make is committing to work without a written agreement between oneself and the client. A verbal agreement provides little to no protection in a business transaction since physical proof of what terms were mutually agreed upon by all interested parties cannot be verified or upheld in court. The best [...]

The end of print web

So let’s have a chat about blogs and newspapers.
Seattle is home to many a newspaper, now one less with the passing of Seattle Post-Intelligencer in print format, two of which are free weekly publications: Seattle Weekly and The Stranger. In order to maintain reader interest beyond a laissez-faire interest, both weekly publications have online blogs [...]

Twitter: not just for introverted geeks

Timing is everything on the Internet, which means I need to set aside more time to compose my thoughts. But that’s another post for another time.
So, like, what’s this twitter stuff people in the states seem to be fond of?
So, Twitter. What the hell is it? What does it do? Why does everyone talk about [...]

Great Client Expectations

Get burned enough times and you find yourself coming up with trademark phrases like Learn From My Mistakes™. A lot of little mistakes with past projects added up to one giant mistake: overlooking the importance of risk management. During the course of a project lifecycle, it’s important to mitigate any and all risks so neither [...]

Please check your ego at the door.

A freelance copywriter sent me a review questionnaire asking “Is there anything you’d like to see improved?”. I replied to this question with specific details of the copy deck that was sent to me for inserting into the client’s website: how to better structure the deck, knowing the difference between writing for the web versus [...]

Get what you pay for