While the task of finding clients can seem overwhelming to a new freelancer, clients are actually all around you if you know where to look.

In this post we’ll share five easy tactics that you can use regularly to build your client base.

Great post; and one that any and all freelancers should read.  Especially the ‘keeping organized’ one.  It’s easy to lose a business card or that slip of paper with a referral on it.  Imagine it’s a few hundred dollars sitting there and it gets a whole lot harder to misplace.

• Freebie Friday: 5 High Resolution Abstract… –
• Tame Clutter by Asking "How Much Is Enough?" [Clutter] – When you can't see the floor. That may be a time to cut some. I know because this happened to me last weekend.
• Curves Like These Inspire Poetry [Car Porn] – One of these days, cars will be considered art. One of these days….
• iPhone Touchscreen Accuracy Bests the Competition According to Robot-Driven Analysis [Buying Guide] – My text messages that end abruptly because I hit 'send' instead of 'p' say otherwise.
• The Off-Road Roomba [Robot Cars] –
• Add Context to Business Cards to Help Remember the Person [Mind Hacks] –
• If Ikea Built A Soapbox Derby Car [Car Toys] –
• Ferrari World Abu Dhabi Is Really A Cylon Ship [Car Culture] – …..this is awesome…and frightening….but also awesome
• Google Calendar's New Smart Rescheduler Finds a Time that Works for Everyone [Scheduling] – FINALLY!!!!
• Electronics Whiz Controls '69 Pontiac GTO With iPod Touch [Car Tech] – I can't wait for the day I can do this. The iPod thing, not the GTO.
• Are You My Daddy? [Car Porn] – I want one. Of each. Keep your Lambos, Red Prancing Ponies and Mustangs; I'll take the original super car, thank you very much.
• Plan for Interruptions to Minimize Their Impact [Interruption Management] –
• Are You My Daddy? [Car Porn] –
• Rob Wienk: Nice Reel! –
• What It Feels Like To Drift With Tanner Foust [Hoon Of The Day] –
• ExtensionFM Is a Very Cool Browser-Based Music Library, and We’ve Got Invites [Downloads] –
• Video: Dropkick Murphys – “I’m Shipping Up To Boston (Live)” – Love this song
• New at Reason: Steve Chapman on Giving the $50 Bill A Facelift – Our currency is incredibly boring. Sure, they've jazzed it up recently, but still… just boring.
• How the CIA Gave LSD to an 11-Year-Old Boy – The CIA just fell in love with LSD in the 50's…. So many weird things
• Create a Digital Camera With Wooden Accents Using… –
• What Every Designer Should Do Right Now
  “While trying to… –
• A font that looks just like you: a typographic photobooth –
• New PlayStation Move Commercial Makes Fun of Wiimote, Project Natal –
• Starting a Project With the End in Mind –
• Encourage Bottom-Up Redevelopment: Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey, Ep. 5 –
• America, This Is How Slow Your Drivers Are [Speed Limits] –
• AT&T Fail – I pity the designer who didn't catch this one. We're supposed to be more savvy than that.
• 5 Tips For Filing Your Taxes Easily –
• Which Fish Are Cubicle-Friendly? [Ask Lifehacker] –

• Paris 26 Gigapixels – Knowing my luck, a 26 gigapixel camera will come out right after I buy the 24 gigapixel.
• Open Thread: What Municipal Services Should Be Privatized? Contracted Out? Kept in The Public Sector? – This kind of question isn’t asked enough, honestly.
• Viento for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App… – I do work for Envato, I’d like to be able to manage my freelance account with them some day. But it’s amazing how much my iPhone is turning into a digital swiss army knife.
• Why Chuck Norris Drives A Nissan GT-R [LOLCars] – I would have figured a Ford Raptor.
• Desktop Wallpaper: 80+ Most Breathtaking Places on Earth – I totally need to build a house at some of these places to retire. At 30.
• James May Helps Define Handling [Car Tech] – I think my favorite James May moment was when he hit top speed in a Veyron and said, “I feel almost sad because I know this will be the fastest I’ll ever go in a car.”
• “Most of our photos are all white people, but we need to show more diversity, and we don’t have the…” – Stupidity + Vaguely racist = Facepalm
• Get Mac-Like Scrolling and Gestures on a Windows Laptop [Windows] – Why not just buy a Mac?

I walked into Wholefoods this past week with a list of things to buy. I walked out of the store with more than my groceries. I had three new business cards in my pocket. Each with hastily-scrawled notes on the back. I grinned as I packed my groceries into the car and headed home.

I had just generated three great leads.

This is something I find many web developers and designers tend to forget; that there is a whole world of interaction out there outside of twitter, chat, and blogs.  This world uses paper to pass information, and thusly, you need business cards.  They’re not ‘outdated’ if everyone outside your work circle still uses them.  Do you want to attract other web designers, or do you want to attract people who hire web designers?

So instead, there’s a much better option called a ‘Layer Mask’. And you get get to it by a few ways. First, have the layer you want selected, then go to menu: Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All. Another way is on the layer window, at the bottom is a little button that looks like this:

Same deal; select the layer, and click this button. What you find is added to the preview window on the layer is a white box and a little ‘link’ between them. This is your layer mask.  Think of it like an alpha channel for this layer.  In case you don’t know, an alpha channel is added to the broadcast color channels (R,G,B) as a grayscale layer signifying transparency.  The easiest way to think of it is “White is What you see”.  So with the layer mask completely white, the entire layer can be seen.  The way you edit this is by selecting the layer mask (as you can see here, there’s 4 bracketed lines on the corners of the layer, meaning I have it selected instead of the text layer), and whipping out your Brush tool.  The only colors you need are white or black, since it’s a grayscale function we’re dealing with here.  Then, you merely paint on what you want transparent or opaque.

The first benefit you see is obvious; you’re not actually destroying the layer.  If you had used the erase tool, then gone back and done some more actions, then realized you needed some of that layer back, you’d have to hope that your history wasn’t filled up, and you could back up to before you erased it.  And even then, you still lose whatever else you had done to the design in the meantime.  With this, you can ‘paint away’ the layer, and it’s saved allowing you to then bring out the white brush tool, and paint back anything you need.

The next benefit is that now you can make transparent things you couldn’t before; namely vector images and text layers.  Using the erase tool (because it manipulates the actual pixels of the image), you would have to rasterize (or convert vector into pixelated/raster images) the layer before you could erase a portion of it.  But now, you are manipulating the layer, not what’s contained within it.  So you can erase sections of a text layer, and still be able to go back and edit that text layer to do whatever it is you want.

Quick note on vector layers brought in from a program like Illustrator: The layer and the layer mask are not linked in this case, so moving the vector image inside the layer does not also move the layer mask.  You can put the vector layer in a folder and put a layer mask on that folder, or you can simply repaint the mask after you moved the vector file.

Now, suppose you want to see your layer mask?  Go into Channels, then look under the Red, Green and Blue: you’ll find your Layer Mask waiting for you there.

Toggling the ‘eye’ to make the layer mask visible.  In this case, since I haven’t drawn anything in the layer mask, nothing is going to change.  Go back to the layer and if you draw a real quick layer mask with the black brush, you’ll see that it in fact comes out as a semi-transparent red (pink in this case, because of the white background).

The pink isn’t on the document, it’s the visualization of the layer mask.  This is the same if you have an alpha channel on the project, it’ll also show up red.  If you go back to the channels, toggle the ‘eye’ on the layer mask again to hide it, then look at your image you’ll see something like this:

The text layer is transparent near the edges.  And since I didn’t use the erase tool, I can edit that text to say whatever I want.  I can even decide later (say, after I’ve closed the project and open it back up) to go back and make it completely opaque, deleting the layer mask all together (right-click on the layer mask in the layer and select, ‘delete layer mask’).  Even better, since the layer mask uses the brush tool to build it, any saved brushes you have you can also use on your text.  Want to make a quick, custom grunge effect on some text?  Easy, pull up a grunge brush make a layer mask, and throw it on the text (and it’s all still editable):

So seriously, ditch the erase tool.  There isn’t a single thing that it can do that a layer mask can’t do better.

I’m thinking about printing that and mounting it to wood to pass down to my kids. “Here, son,” I will say proudly, “this is a haiku about font I came up with in five minutes while writing a blog post.” He’ll look up at me confused as he introduces me to his prom date. Timing is everything.

Okay, font. Seriously; it’s awesome. Good font work can make or break any design. Sure, color, composition, style, these are all important, but font is what the eye is going to be spending most of its time on. It needs to be legible, fit in the design, and have character all on its own. Font as a concept is very much like food; varied, consumed, and used the world over by everyone. And like food, I’m obsessed with it.

I have an app on my phone that lets me look up typefaces I find on the street. I hit up websites for the latest and greatest from foundries all over the world. Names like Helvetica, Futura and Medio carry the same emotional baggage as Steak, Pizza and Rissotto. They all have unique flavors, stories, sources and uses. Font is so powerful it can even redeem a bad design.

So for every designer out there, you need to leave your comfort zone. You need to constantly fidget when it comes to your design. Look at different typefaces; how they make you feel about the text being shown, how they can fit in a greater design and if they inspire you.

Hey, how about I help with that?
20 Great fonts from Smashing Magazine (bookmark that site now)
Font Squirrel
T.26 Digital Type Foundry

FYI: there will be many more odes to font in the future. You have been warned.

We had an opening, and like usual, there was an influx of kids straight out of college.  They had this degree and that degree, but all of their stuff tended to blend together after a while.  These kids were learning how to mimic design they see in the world, as opposed to coming up with something on their own.  And it drove me absolutely nuts.  Personally, from a manager point of view, I’d much rather have this creative whiz who has no idea what he or she is doing with Photoshop, than some technical dynamo that knows more about the program than Thomas Knoll.  See, I can teach someone to use Photoshop; it’s much harder to teach someone to be creative.

And that’s what I was getting walking in the door, kids who have spent their time in class doing assignments that parroted stuff you’ve seen in the world.  It stressed me out trying to figure out why, until I began to ask them about it.  Then it hit me like a sack of bricks; they were learning ‘how’ not ‘why’.  All of these portfolios had examples containing things that were technically brilliant, and obviously done before.  They had no sense of creativity because that wasn’t what they were taught; they were taught that this is how you add an overlay layer, this is how you manipulate a 3-D camera, this is how, how, how, how.

So I looked online at the massive tide of tutorials dotting the web, and noticed that they were all like that.  It was a rare thing when someone said, ‘this is a 3-D camera rig; here’s how you use it – and here’s why’.  So I wanted to change that.  I found a great tutorial site – CGTuts+, and they had no problem with my way of doing things.  It was about the ‘why’ of the technique, not the pretty ‘how’.  In fact, the stuff I produced on there was really ugly to see; definitely never going to see the light of my reel.  But I wanted to show people why to use depth of field (for example), what it can do, not just pushing buttons.  And the response was great; people didn’t seem to care that they weren’t being shown how to make something look good, but rather why use it in the first place.

So my advice to anyone looking to break into the business; learn to be creative.  Rules exist to be challenged.  Make something that you like.  If you apply for a job, and they care more about your technical ability, they just want you to be a cog in a machine.

First thing you realize working from home is it’s quiet.  Really, really, quiet.  I don’t have kids, just a wife and a dog, so my day can be completely silent save for the sounds coming out of my keyboard and mouse (in reality, it isn’t; I have iTunes for this).  Many people look at this as a great thing; no distractions, no useless meetings, on and on.  But think about all the great social interaction you have – talking about the Browns game on Monday, sharing jokes over lunch, discussing projects with words coming from your mouth instead of your hands – that’s all gone now.  Now you’re in your house, sequestered from all of that social interaction, and man, it can get lonely.

Second thing you’ll notice is that the urge – no, the unbelievable desire – to slack off is everywhere.  This is your house; your place of zen.  Work here is called ‘chores’ – not…well, ‘work’.  To all of a sudden have to treat 8 hours in your day with the same martial discipline that you have at that office-place, it’s difficult.  But, at the same time, the opposite is true.  A project is like water, it will take up whatever space you give it.  So if you’re home all day, and your work is home all day, then there is a great self-flagellating urge to keep working even if you shouldn’t.  Hard to imagine, but it’s true.

The list goes on and on.  If you’ve never spent an extended period (more than 2-3 months) working a real job for a company from home, then it’s hard to describe.  At times it’s awesome – it snowed like crazy in Vermilion a few weeks ago, I didn’t have to drive in that.  At other times, it isn’t – I had a deadline from a client get moved for more money, spent 4 days working 16 hours each day, because “you’re home, it’ll be easier for you”.

But to answer the question, ‘what’s it like working from home?’; it’s hard to find a golden answer.  It’s like asking someone ‘what’s it like to work for X company?’ – the answer has so many caveats and nuances involved.  But in general, it’s just different.  It requires more work in areas you didn’t think about, and less work in others.  If you can be comfortable changing habits and making sure you stay on task, then it’s great for both you and your employer.  If you can’t; then you’re going to find it hard to separate home and work.  My best advice is if you can, try it.

And yes, I’m sitting here in my socks, wearing a comfy fleece sweater, and petting my dog.  If you can make it work, it’s pretty sweet.