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Filling the Downtime: 5 Ways to Earn Money Between Paid Projects

Being a freelancer designer can be described with many terms, but one that you’ll never see used is “stable”. While occasionally lucrative and very often enjoyable, it’s rare for freelance design to bring in a stable income or long-term salary. Sure, total earnings an very easily top that which someone else would earn working as a full-time design employee, but the week-to-week, or sometimes even day-to-day operation can be a roller coaster ride of unstable income.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible to earn a stable income as a freelancer. With these five tactics, you could turn your free time between projects into valuable work time. Enjoy your vacation days by all means, but if you find yourself with too much free time on your hands, these five ways to earn money between projects could be worth your time.

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9 Awesome Business Books, Design Manuals, and Internet Optimization Guides

Business is about more than just action. The most successful businesspeople – the Steve Jobs, Warren Buffetts, and Sergey Brins of the world – didn’t make it to where they are just because they stepped into the ring and made their moves.

Before they founded their businesses, they spent years researching just what made good businesses tick. From specific design and business characteristics to overall strategy, they took abstract information and made it specific, building a complete business knowledge in the process.

While it’s hard to know what yesteryear’s top businesspeople were reading, it’s not difficult to tell what’s important today. These nine business, design, strategy, and optimization books deal with almost everything involved in online business. If you want to flatten your competition, check ‘em out, take detailed notes, and build your business knowledge too.

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5 Design Trends We Don’t Want to See Make a Comeback

When you look at the grand scale of human achievements in the 20th century, it’s vast and impressive. We’ve landed on the moon, we’ve built massive cities, and we’ve developed a global economy so advanced that it’s occasionally difficult to comprehend. The human race achieved just about every possible milestone at some point in the 20th century, but one simple goal eluded us.

The goal, of course, was designing a good website. Sure, the 1990s have some examples of good design and brilliant design innovation – anyone remember the original iMac? – but most of the online examples are, well, shall we just say “not quite brilliant”. Most websites from the 1990s look utterly terrible, even those that represented high profile companies and major global corporations.

These five trends were keys to web design in the 1990s. They were the driving force, the most important elements, and they were absolutely disgusting. If you’re a web designer that’s somehow been frozen for the last ten years, these page elements are forgivable. Otherwise, they’re grounds for a quick contract revision and a severe shortage of work from every web design client out there.

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Read ‘em, take note, and don’t let any of them ever make a comeback:

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