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 :-

Adobe Fireworks CS3

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.

Skype

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.

Thunderbird/FireFox

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.

Pymo

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.

Wordpress

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.

Photo by FreshPeel.com.

Freelancing business has many forms and shapes. Each has its own dimension and each individual freelancer find different issues to be their main obstacle in their way of success. This article will illustrate some of the common challenges that the freelance designers of these days have to tackle with:-

Looking for Client

Initially, it is a challenge for many freelancers as they are new and naive in this field. The effective way to tackle this problem is an aggressive self-promotion.

Networking

To get a really good client base, the freelancers often has to have a strong network of people who can both be taken as client and people who can hire clients. This network of people will grow steadily as the freelancer goes through his job with success. Always keep your portfolio shine.

Marketing

Marketing is another big hurdle for newbies. The knowledge of marketing is as essential as the ability in doing the work. Without effective marketing, no one will figure out your service and you will not be able to grow your client base.

Managing Clients

It is really challenging to manage all types of clients in design projects as clients will ask for basically anything that comes into their mind regarding project at any point of time. But for the freelancer, it may become very difficult to effectively handle all the requests. Failing to do so brings the profit margin down and also offends the clients.

Pricing

Pricing is of great confusion to many freelancers. How to evaluate the project or how to set the price standard are something that puts many freelancers into a state of total ambivalence. However, the best to set the price according to your skill level.

Maintaining Workload

Sometimes the pressure of work can be too much to handle and easily the freelancers can lose their time track, which may affect their other jobs in hand and personal affairs. The effective solution is to draw a plan of time-frame and stick to that plan at any cost. Read more about How to Balance Your Freelance Life?

These are some of the obstacles that a freelance designers have to face in a consistence basis. But it differs person to person which one is their biggest nemesis for them. For example, one designer can find the ‘Pricing’ to be the foremost problem, but for a newbie designer, ‘Getting the clients’ can be the hardest challenge. All in all, with effective plan and execution, all these can be neutralized.

This is the third and penultimate part of our review of some useful freelance resources:

ProFreelancing

A web site completely dedicated to freelancers. Though the design is not really a very attractive one, but it starts up right-away with some extremely useful articles. In the ‘About’ section you can get a nice background of the web-sites overall development. The resource section contains a huge number of resources on every possible topic such as ebooks, Blogs, Job Postings, Online Publishers, Recent Press Releases, Photos, payment Issues, etc. All in all it’s a great site on many kinds of freelance information.

Bootstrapper

It comes with a nice start page and without any specific home page. It houses a lot of articles on some unconventional divisions of freelancing and delineates them with commendable effectualness. The articles are arranged in monthly order as well as category wise. You can be a subscriber through it’s RSS feed feature.

Jarkkolaine.com

Well, this site is also like the previous one, but it has a bit messy design, and also the categorization is done based on category and monthly basis. This we portal has resources that targeted at programmers and software designers. All in all if the design is modified a bit then the whole site becomes a really good one.

CreativeBehavior

As the name suggests, it’s a site mainly dedicated to the freelance designers. In fact, the design of the site is pretty clean,neat and unconventional. However, the web lacks of any depth in article repository. The news section is also quite outdated. All in all it seems that the site maintenance issues has gone adrift for the time being.

PartcleTree

It’s also a pretty straightforward site for mainly people who is looking to start a business around any freelance theories. Also got some good articles on design issues and general Internet activities. The good thing is the articles are quite extended covering many sides of the title. You can subscribe to it’s RSS feeder if you decide.

If you miss out the previous parts, check out the Part 1 and Part 2. We will be coming out the Final Part in two days times. Just Sign up with our Auto-Feed Manager to deliver the next part to your Inbox automatically.