As a freelancer, I know that one of the biggest challenges to success is proper money management and maintaining the flow of income so that daily expenses can be met, while also saving in case of a down-period, and also trying to save for retirement.  In fact, money management issues are the leading reason that freelancers fail and are forced to return to full time work for a larger company.

The benefits of being a freelancer are numerous, but in order to succeed, you will need to follow some simple money management tips:

1. Track your finances!  Tracking is the most important part of running a business.  I can’t tell you the number of people I interact with who don’t know how much they made last month, can’t tell you what their hourly rate should be, and can’t give estimates for financial situations that they might encounter.  Whether you’re using accounting software such as Quickbooks, a financial system like Mint, or just tracking invoices via PayPal, staying on top of your income is very important, and tracking will make or break your business regardless of what else you’re doing.
2. Don’t underestimate taxes.  Taxes are a hassle, and pretty much everyone hates them, but you do have to pay them.  Before spending your money on luxuries such as a new TV or a new car, make sure you have enough money set aside to pay your taxes.  In general, it can help a lot to sit down with an accountant before the year is over, that way you can not only understand your financial situation, but can also take steps to reduce your tax burden by making investment purchases, etc.  Depending on your country, your business setup, and other factors, this may be more of an issue for you, or less, depending on the regulations and tax rates.
3. Pay yourself first.  Many people find that if they set aside a certain amount of money for savings or retirement automatically, they will automatically adjust to live within their new means.  However, if you ask someone to cut an amount from their budget, they will always resist that change.  Therefore, having a system in place to automatically set aside a given amount of money for contingency savings or retirement can make all the difference.
4. Careful with investments.  Investments are a key way to grow your wealth for retirement or for the future, but they also carry risk with them.  If you’re investing, avoid complex financial vehicles or products that you don’t understand.  If you can’t explain what it is you’re investing in, then you should not be investing in it.  Index funds and mutual funds can provide more than enough return while still being simple enough that you can understand them.  Also, if you can’t sleep at night because you’re worried about your investments, you are carrying too much risk.
5. Expect delays.  One of the prime mistakes that freelancers make is expecting to get paid immediately (or even before) work starts.  Clients will stall, delay, disappear, get sick, lose checks in the mail, and pretty much everything else imaginable.  You have to manage your finances with the expectation that it may take up to 30 days to get paid for your work.  Ideally, you can cut this delay down using some of the following tips, but still plan that the money may not arrive instantly.
6. Charge a downpayment.  There’s several reasons for this.  First, by charging a downpayment (25%, 50%), you get some money up front which helps with cash flow.  Second, it also lowers the chances of last-second payment surprises, where a client can’t or won’t pay, and third, it ensures that both parties have a stake in the game.  The client has a stake in the game, because you already have some of their money, and you have a stake in the game, because you’re already doing work and haven’t been fully paid.
7. Create a savings account to store money for contingency plans.  What would you do right now, if your computer died?  What would you do if you got evicted, or if your spouse lost their job, or you suddenly are expecting a child?  By setting aside money into savings, you can deal with any unexpected life events with much less stress.  However, keep these savings separate from your retirement savings (you don’t want to have to take your retirement money and spend it).
8. Use time tracking and invoicing apps.  Many freelancers underestimate how much time they spend on a project, and don’t know how to charge appropriately.  FreelanceFolder has a great tool you can use to determine your hourly rate: http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/
9. Don’t charge clients hourly unless the project is truly an hour-by-hour situation.  When you tell a client that your rate is $100 an hour, they will expect you to work super fast and be done within 3 hours.  In reality, it may take you more like 10 hours.  But, when you send that client a $1000 bill, they will fight against it.  Charging a flat rate (with downpayment) tends to be a safer course of action in most situations.  If you do decide to charge hourly, make sure you give the client a realistic expectation of the hours that the project will require.
10. Relax!  Being a freelancer can be very stressful at times, but it’s important to relax, take a deep breath, organize your thoughts and your business.  By simply following the tips outlined above, you can reduce the stress of financial management and drastically increase your chances of success.

Brochure design is one of the areas of print design that most designers must be familiar with. Brochures are important for nonprofits, corporations and other groups, as they help get information out about a specific topic. Most of us deal with brochures on a weekly basis, even if we don’t recognize it.

Here are to 10 awesome brochure design tutorials to help you with your brochure printing.

Brochure with Photoshop and Indesign

Trifold Brochure Design Tutorial

How to Design and Layout a Brochure

Creating a Brochure in Microsoft Publisher

Making a corporative style – Corporate brochure style

Design a Ready to Print Brochure in Photoshop

Designing a Brochure Cover

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial – Brochure Design Makeover

Create brochures that help you sell in Publisher

Corporate Brochure Design

Navigation is one of the most important elements in a website.  Therefore, navigation should be able to work well, and be easy for website visitors to use.  In the past, when you wanted to make a dynamic navigation menu, it required mastery of a programming language, such as Flash, to achieve it.

Today is different, thanks to jQuery.  jQuery is the right choice to create an attractive, dynamic and usable navigation.  The most important of these is making it easier for users to visit your website.  Here are 20 tutorials how to create navigation menus using jQuery, accompanied by demonstrations in each tutorial for web designers and web developers.

You can also achieve similar effects using Flash.  If you don’t know Flash, there are plenty of free flash templates that you can use.

1. Puffer Fish Navigation -  Demo here

2. Fancy Navigation with jQuery – demo here

3. Slide and Hide Section Navigation – demo here

4. Mega Dropdown Navigation – demo here

5. Kwicks Menu with jQuery – demo here

6. Vimeo-like top Navigation – demo here

7. Horizontal Scroll Menu - demo here

8. Horizontal Scrolling Menu with CSS and jQuery -  demo here

9 . Circular Menu with Submenus – demo here

10.  Dock Menu with CSS and JQuery – demo here

11. Fading Menu - demo here

12. Sliding Menu Highlight with JavaScript - demo here

13. Animated Menu using jQuery – demo here

14. Sliding Doors – demo here

15. Vertical Sliding Menu Using Jquery – demo here

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As promised, today we have the follow up to my previous post, 35 breathtaking examples of concept art from deviantART, by collecting up 15 detailed concept art tutorials from around the web.

Concept art tutorials are notoriously difficult to create, as each artist has their own style, brushes, techniques and programs.  However, there are some high quality tutorials available, so today we have the 15 best, detailed and informative tutorials.

Please, if you find this post helpful, Stumble, Digg, reTweet, or share it with your friends.  Also, don’t hesitate to subscribe or add me as a friend on any social network.

Speedpaint Step By Step

Speedpaint Video Tutorial

Landscape Tutorial

Environment Tutorial

Privateers Tutorial

Tosted Tutorial

Creature Design Tutorial

Making of Gorym Capital City

Speedpaint Step by Step 2

Speedpaint Video Tutorial 2

Speedpaint Step By Step 3

Video Landscape Tutorial

Concept Tutorial #1 by AndreeWallin

Speedpaint Tutorial

Dock Tutorial

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Today, we have a guest post by Eva Vesper, one of the masterminds behind Web Hosting Search, a search engine that allows you to view ratings, reviews, and compare hosting packages from various companies.  Hopefully you find her article useful!

SEO has become an important element of any website project. A website is optimized for the search engines will as a result rank better and receive more traffic. But many site owners still neglect to apply search engine optimization, even though more than 80 % of site traffic is generated by search engines. The point of optimizing your site and code is to make sure that Google and Yahoo see the same things that you or me as humans see. If you have bad code, these little bots will get confused and run away, neglecting or misunderstanding what could be very good content on a website. To properly optimize your website here are ten basic tips on how you can improve your site.

1. Friendly URLs
Implementing desired keywords in the domain name is one way to increase rankings  in the search engines. Another, though commonly forgotten, is applying the same strategy for all the URL-strings of the site.

WordPress users should change permalink settings to /%category%/%postname%/ so that the category and post title are included in the URL rather than display as www.yoursite.com/cat=9 or post=1. For example, here on PresidiaCreative, a post is titled, 10 Sites to Find Free Vectors.  To make it easy and friendly, the URL is http://www.presidiacreative.com/10-sites-to-find-free-vectors/ . Easy as pie, a user knows immediately what is the post subject instead of seeing: http://www.presidiacreative.com/post145.

2. Using the noarchive and noindex tags

Not all of the content on your site has to be indexed or crawled by search engine spiders. About pages and Privacy policy pages are good examples of  pages that can be ignored by spiders..

As a caveat, if you install a WordPress theme or Drupal theme, be sure that a global “noindex” is not placed.  I have seen a web designer’s blog that had his whole site noindexed.  Now, how would anyone ever find his site? Check that code!

3. Don’t use images as your links on the site (excluding banners)

When a search engine crawls your website, your task is to make all content as readable and available as possible. Using graphic images instead of texts for links is not recommended as it only makes it harder to read for search engine spiders.  It also creates an accessibility issue because some browsers are not able to read images well.  Your user could end up with a blank site. And if that construction worker image is still on your site, get rid of it too.

4. Create a XML sitemap

Search engines like Google give no guarantee when your website will be indexed. Months may pass before your site appears in the search results. Adding a sitemap will speed up the process and make it easier for the search engine spider to crawl your site and properly index your content; though it is no guarantee still  You can go to http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php . Google Yahoo, MSN and Ask (formally Askjeeves) use the same structure for XML sitemaps.  If you want more information about Google sitemaps, read this article .

5. Keep the footer links to a minimum

Search engines care little about footer links. Bottom based links should primarily be used as a navigation option for the visitor and include only internal links that are not displayed in the main link menu.

6. Use All in One SEO for your WordPress blog- Meta tags and HTML title matter

Adding meta data is a efficient way for you to tell the search engines what you want them to display every time your site is listed in search results. There you can include the keywords you want and describe the site or page to get the search engine users attention. WordPress does not come with meta tags and require the installation and activation of All in One SEO Pack. Unfortunately, All in One is only available if you have real WordPress Hosting, not a WordPress.com hosted site.

7. Don’t Abuse <h1> and <h2> tags

Using headers and sub-headers is not only useful to structure site content, but also makes  it easier to  see a visual layout of a page. Proper header tags are also appreciated by search engines. But whatever you do; do not overuse header tags as it will only loose its structural purpose and value for search engines.

Remember how you do bullet points in MS word?  Work your site the same way.

8. Put the alt tag and description for images

Unlike text, images are invisible to search engines. By always filling in a description  in the alt tag you will simply give the search engine spiders ratable information about the image.  Again, this also plays in accessibility of a site; if a user cannot view the image they will see the ‘alt=’ text.

9. Blogroll List of 100? Trim it Down

Too many external links on a website is never good. So when you are building a list of links,for example a blogroll, make sure to keep the amount of links in check. Too many will decrease their value and make it hard for the reader to follow.

10. Clean Up Useless Code.

Again, the purpose of optimization is to make your site and its content as available and readable as possible for search engine spiders AND for the visitor. This goes for the code as well. By validating your code in the XHTML validator at http://validator.w3.org, you will ensure that code is readable.

As WordPress put it so finely, Code is Poetry.

Well, I promised you a big roundup coming today, so here it is.

CINEMA 4D is a commercial, cross-platform, high-end 3-D graphics application, produced by MAXON Computer GmbH. Noted for its flexible interface and ease of use, it is capable of procedural and polygonal/subd modelling, animating, lighting, texturing and rendering.

Today we have 50 tutorials that will teach you to be a Cinema 4D master, covering all aspects of the program from modeling to animation to shaders.

Please submit this post to your favorite social network if you find it useful, and don’t forget to subscribe so you can be alerted to more posts like this one!

Cinema 4D Interface - Basic Walkthrough

C4D Crash Burn Tutorial

Making of Super-Snail in Cinema 4D

Cinema4D Illustrative Typography Tutorial

3D Abstract Tentacle Tutorial

Abstract Render Tutorial

Cinema 4D City Tutorial

iPod Modelling Tutorial

3D Text Tutorial in Cinema4D

Glass In Cinema4D

Creature Head Tutorial

3D Objects from Vectors in Cinema4D

Giving Depths to Your Renders

Cinema 4D Video Tutorial

Materials in Cinema4D

Ball Bearing Gear Tutorial

Animation in Cinema 4D - 3D Toys Animation

Smoke and Fire Animation in Cinema4D

Abstract Render Tutorial

Simple UFO Tutorial

Modelling in Cinema 4D

Depth of Field in Cinema4D Tutorial

Frozen Cells Tutorial

Modelling a Car from Blueprints in Cinema4D

Creating a Sky using Shaders

Array Lighting in Cinema4D

Hourglass Tutorial

Armor Plates in Cinema4D

Golf Ball Tutorial

Fuel Cap Tutorial

Tech Interface in Cinema4D

C4D Plug Tutorial and Full Guide

Switch Tutorial

Boolean Objects in Cinema4D

Glass Balls in Cinema4D

Red Plastic Matieral Tutorial

Zebra in Cinema4D

Hair Geometrics in Cinema4D

Cinema4D Poser Tutorial

UV Mapping in Cinema 4D

3D Grass in Cinema 4D

Car Tire Tutorial

Make a Picture 3D

Simple Cinema 4D Tutorial

DVD Player Tutorial

Creating a Line Object Render

Wedding Rings in Cinema 4D

Structural Rendering in Cinema 4D

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Good typography is an essential part of quality graphic design.  Oftentimes, images alone aren’t enough to convey a message, but plain text just won’t cut it.  Typography is the art and techniques of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs.

Today, we have a list of 10 great tutorials for achieving beautiful typographic effects.  Hopefully they will give you a few ideas or inspiration for your next piece.

If you enjoyed this post, please let me know in the comments, and as always, share this  post with your friends, whether directly, or by your favorite social network.

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