Essential Tools for Freelance Designer by Adrian
Hey folks, I recently read an Interview With Adrian Diaconescu of Rubiqube. I would like to share part of the interview which talked about essential tools that Adrian used for his freelance work. If you don’t know who is Adrian, here is a short introduction on him:-
My name is Adrian Diaconescu and I’m a freelance designer based in Bucharest, Romania.
Professionally speaking, I tried pretty much everything: the 9 to 5 job, the entrepreneurship,the corporate world. I took the plunge and quit my last day job in March 2007. Since then, I made a lot of new friends and worked on many cool projects.
Freelance design is an exciting form of freelance work, which can be of great fun, creativeness and challenging . However, to successful, modern day designers must use various kinds of available tools. Here is the essential tools to help you success :-
It is a product from Adobe, which is widely in use for creating and optimising images for the web and rapidly prototyping websites. The primary advantages the software renders are its ability to integrate between Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, improved layer organisation, improved scaling, integrating Adobe Bridge, customisable asset, integration between Flash and Dreamweaver and multi-page support. I guess most of the freelance designers should know about this tool. Personally, I am using Adobe Photoshop to edit some simple images on this blog. Perhaps, I should try out Fireworks as well.
Well-known application to make phone calls over Internet. It is actually free when the called person is also using Skype, while calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a pretty low affordable cost. All in all it’s a one-stop shop when it comes to communication with your clients. Personally, I’ve been using it to call my customers from oversea in a very low rate. I guess, the rate is cheaper than the rate offered by any of the local telco such as Maxis, Celcom or Digi.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. It has number of features that makes it arguably one of the most efficient products in its field. Personally, I would recommend you to Add-On the FireBug to help on website designing. Another good add-on is the color picker which you simply capture a color from any nice website.
It is a web portal aimed at the freelancer and managers who are looking for solution to manage, schedule time allocation and adjustments for the involved projects. It has a central database with all employee timesheets in one place, generate the detailed timesheet reports for each employee (in fact reports on employee performance can also be generated). It is ideal for geographically distributed teams. Use this tool to keep track on your project management.
Software that furnishes a way to manage your website is commonly called a CMS or "Content Management System". Wordpress is such kind of web based blogging tool. It has various useful and necessary features. Now, blogging is part of the lifestyle for Freelance Designer. Most of them use blog as the platform to showcase their freelance portfolio just like what Adrian did. Perhaps, you should have a good showcase to show off your previous works. It helps in gaining confident from your client.
These were few of the most reputed and useful tools for freelance Designers. Effective use of these tools can really make your freelance life a lot easier.
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Tags: blog, blogging, essential tools, freelance designers, freelance life, Freelance Tips, freelance work, freelancerComments
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