First Merchant Services homepage design

About a week later I took my existing Elance account and brushed it up a bit to start bidding. It took a day and a dozen emails to land a job. In 2 days I made  almost twice the salary I used to earn in a month. In a month almost 3 times that. I am not that naive and I do not believe that I will constantly have clients like that so I’m still looking for a full time job that I can mix with freelancing.

I have a few friends that are established in the freelancing field and earn thousands of $. We form an informal team and I hope I can start having a steady client flow and never have to be employed again. All I can say now it’s that things are looking up and I might just get there.

What I’m actually trying to infer here is that you never know when fate will bring you in that “this will never happen to me” moment.

I just realized that theres more than a year since I started learning web design. I didn’t even celebrate

I’ve started with the “Total Learning” DVD and continued with the tutsplus network. Mostly psd.tutsplus and vector.tutsplus.com. I did a lot of tutorials and learned a lot from the community. I have to say that smashingmagazine.com and psd.tutsplus.com are the most valuable resources in my development as a web designer.

When I bought the smashing book it was like injecting nanites full of information into my bloodstream. I still use it as a guide whenever I start a new project.
It thought me  about user interface, color schemes, typography, project management and a lot more.

I’d like to think that I’ve passed the beginner stage and I’m going towards medium-advanced web design.

I have a few projects that I’m looking forward to release. In the span of a few months I’ve been: web designer, UI desiner, UX designer, concept designer, software UI and UX designer and finally Project Manager.

I think I will be able to release design related content on the project that I’ve done concept design for. But that will probably happen in about a month or so.

In the meanwhile I’m doing UI/UX design and Project management.

Will update more info next week.

Creativity is the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

This quote belongs to Sir Ken Robinson. At first sight it’s pretty abstract and that’s because it is taken out of context.
I recently saw a couple of short, 20 minutes each, videos where Sir Ken Robinson talks about a revolution in the education system, creativity and intelligence. He says that in order to be creative, first, you have to allow yourself to make mistakes.

If you are not prepared to be wrong then you will not be creative.

I am 100% with his point of view. Lately I’ve been pretty busy creating 2 different brands at work and one for a personal client.
In all of these 3 projects I trashed so many drafts and sketches. Ideas come when you stop thinking strictly at the project at hand. I thought: “man, I have to think at this project and do all this research in order to finish it” and I was wrong.

Creativity hit me when I was looking at totally non related things.

For one of the projects I had to design a shopping registration form. While I was browsing for what other people did, I stopped to take a brake. I looked at the things I had on my desk and the stuff my co-workers had lying around and it finally hit me. I used graphic content that had nothing to do with the project at hand. But when I put the idea in photoshop, it took perfect shape for my project.

The same thing happened with all 3 of my projects.

Here are the links I talked about above:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html

Today I’m about to finish work for a personal client. It was quick work that brought in some much needed cash. Both me and the client were happy with the work done and how it turned out.
This is the second time the client asked work from me. In both cases I finished the work quickly and solved his problems. I am proud to say that I even made him save money with one of my ideas. Saved him a few hundred bucks.

In a few weeks I think I will finally be able to show what I’ve been working on these past few months.
To surprise you I even designed an application. This is a first and I am happy with how it looks.

I’ll post back soon.