Great article at Design Observer about what happens to creative business during a recession, and what you can do about it. As a freelancer with very little overhead I’ve been fortunate so far; but there’s no telling what ‘09 will bring.
Recently I spent a week working from the beach. There were a few reasons for this; the two biggest were that I was offered a cheap trip, and I’ve been in the middle of a huge project for weeks and needed the change of scenery.
I noticed today for the second time since the relaunch that my site was loading under the default WordPress theme, and nothing worked. My first thought was that it’s a bug; my second was that someone was hacking it just to annoy me.
But then a little Google informed me that this guy had the same problem I did, and figured it out over a year ago. If you have this problem, here’s the solution.
I spent last week working from a beach house on Dauphin Island. My family had originally planned a beach trip back in September, but it was postponed by Gustav. So instead we had a beach Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately, the rescheduled trip was a terrible time to take vacation - the week before the actual Thanksgiving holiday, when everybody would be off, and right in the middle of a huge project. So instead of taking off, I just took work with me. The beach house had wireless internet as a feature, so I was counting on everything running smoothly.
And…it did. And as soon as I’m caught up on everything that needs to be done today, I’ll do a real post about it.
It has been a hell of a week. I’m working on one of those complicated projects that takes as much time to wrap your head around as it does to actually design the pieces. It will be exciting when it’s finished though.
Just now, on the radio, I heard a guy talking about Charles M. Schwab. Not the investment guy; the first president of U.S. Steel in the early 1900s. He Apparently he was a superb businessman with a wild streak and a willingness to take risks.
Disclaimer: I am not a programmer. I know just enough about coding to get things to work, but not enough to make it pretty or even usually be able to explain it to someone else. However, I thought this might be helpful.
I am my own worst client. I’m an indecisive, know-it-all procrastinator. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all of the choices when you have no one to please but yourself. So designing, or in this case redesigning, a website is an arduous process.
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When I was a kid, I had a theory that you could make more money by selling pencils for $.75 apiece than for $1.00, because more people would be attracted to the lower price and you’d sell more pencils.
I got to Mad Men late—missed the first season completely. AMC is one of my not my usual Sunday-night-channel-surfing stops. But after the Emmy’s, you couldn’t spit without hitting a blog post about the great period advertising drama.
At first I was unimpressed. Maybe because there was so much hype; but also, all the characters just seemed so stereotyped. Sexist men who cheated on their wives with anything that breathed. Flighty secretaries who seem perfectly happy to file their nails and nail their bosses. Everyone drinking and chain smoking because life is just so hard.
But it seemed like everybody loved this damn show. (Although I searched diligently for a review by a female, and came up empty.) So I kept watching. And after 12 of 13 episodes this season, I’m not so frustrated by the sexism as I am plain bored.
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