One of the things you probably won’t be ready for when you make a step up to freelance is the thickness of the skin you have to develop. Often you will end up in the middle of a poo throwing competition and doing a swan impression through the mucky water (calm on top, kicking for life underneath). Couple with that the releasing your design into the wild or wild clients and having them judged; you quickly learn a more fluid approach to stress and criticism. It’s not just being freelance though, having a thicker skin can help in a lot of instances and so long as you don’t become a rhino learning to cope better helps keep you off the window ledge.

I was listening to the ambient radio channel Groove Salad tonight (I still think there should be a law making people play ambient music after a certain time of night) and it hit me how important my own sanctuary is. I am talking about the way I’ve created my own island space where I see out most of my day. Having a home and office combined means I’m lucky enough to be able to decide my own space in this way.

In the society we live in it’s often easy to assume money is the only thing that matters. We all have things we need to pay for and the system in place is financial. Whilst I don”t deny this, I also see the value in other non-money things. I also think these things are possibly far more worth than cold hard cash.

One of the things with design is that everyone has their own perception of a particular style. Along with actually making designs as a skill set you need to have a bit of the magic 8 ball psychic ability going on. The key is to understand the concepts that are likely to get asked for in a broad sense and use the design consultation to drill down what exactly they are meaning by that term.

Some people seem to be under various misunderstandings regarding online business. A lot of these things have been said time and time again. Many of them are like bad pennies to anyone that works in the web industry - you get a huge here we go feeling every time one of these comes up. I would like to look at a few that recently again came up in my own experiences:

I recently was brought World of warcraft as a Christmas present from my parents in law (time to loose my life to it I guess then and finally give in), however upon trying to install my powerbook decided that disk 4 was a reject. I looked at the disk and noticed that despite the shrink wrap pointing to a not damaged disk ever before seen by anyone, the disk itself was marked and scratched. A few of the other disks looked like some small rodent had been doing an ice dance on them but this disk was the worst.