In the past, I’ve gotten into discussions with people over what makes someone a web designer. In one case, the other person did Photoshop mock-ups and didn’t even know HTML – he used WYSIWYG editors to code sites for him. In another case, the person knows CSS really well and we were talking about how that’s something I need to get a lot better at (which is true). However, every time I’ve had discussions like this, they seem to revolve a lot around the tools you need to know in order to do the job and not about what design elements make a site that’s appealing to the eye.

This link has probably been around a lot already, but I think this site by Miranda July puts an interesting spin on the issue raised above. She doesn’t know HTML or CSS herself, but yet she’s definitely the designer of the site because the layout is in the way she framed the photos. The result is a site that’s far more creative than most, either because or in spite of the fact that she was using non-traditional web design tools.

Despite doing freelance web work for 9 years, I’ve never been confronted with a situation where I needed to have a client sign a contract. A lot of my clients have been smaller-scale businesses that highly value flexibility, so contracts tend to freak them out a little. Plus, not having attorney fees as part of my overhead allows me to keep my prices more reasonable. It didn’t really bother me because I’d found the perfect way around this… I would upload the work I did for them to a password-protected test area to show them the work was complete and I uploaded it to their web space when they paid me. I was basically holding their site hostage but it worked well for all involved.

I’ve done small-scale photo shoots for a couple of clients as well, but it wasn’t until recently that I did a shoot with the whole studio lighting set-up. I did headshots for an actor who I had met recently while shooting photos stills for a friend’s short movie, so I thought it would be a great way to get some new experience and make a little extra beer money. We agreed upon a set hourly amount (part of which I was going to give to the friend who had brought over his studio lights) and the actor asked if he could pay me when he got back from a small trip, which I agreed to.

After he returned, I gave him the CD with proofs on it and this is the point where I should have collected what he owed me. He e-mailed me later to tell me how much he loved the photos and that he hadn’t picked one out yet for me to edit, but that he would in the next few days. Sure enough, I get another e-mail from him telling me which one he selected, but then a couple days after that he e-mails me to say he decided to go with someone else. I was really surprised by this because he’d been completely happy with the way everything went up until this point. Even worse was that he was offering to pay me 1/4th of what we had previously agreed on, which was just insulting at the low rate I had given him to begin.

I went back to check old e-mails and txt msgs to make sure I hadn’t been mistaken about our agreement, but he was clearly trying to weasel his way out of paying me. As we went back and forth disputing this, he started bringing up all these problems he had with the way the shoot went down. Since this was the first I’d heard of these complaints, it was obvious he was trying to justify not paying me. Finally, he did end up paying half of what he owed me, but the whole experience really made me wonder if I need to re-evaluate this whole “no contract” thing I’ve been doing so far.

Awhile back, I got a couple of phone calls from someone at Portfolios.com trying to get me to purchase an account on their site. It was almost always during the day while I was at work and couldn’t talk, but the woman on the phone was very persistent. When I finally asked her over e-mail for some real data on the success rates freelancers had getting work through the site, she left me a condescending 5-minute-long voicemail and treated me like I didn’t know what marketing was instead of actually answering the question. Here’s a recording of that message.

I suspected this site was shady to begin with, but the voicemail sealed it. In browsing the site, I didn’t see listings for anyone I recognized and none of my friends who were designers had ever heard of it. Sorry for the poor sound quality, but I thought it was important to get it out there and warn others.

I recently read a few articles that touted Facebook as a good networking tool and with nothing to lose except my dignity, I tried to sign up for an account. I say “tried” because apparently they don’t accept anything starting with info@ as a valid e-mail address. This is a problem because that’s the only address that I use on public sites and any others you might see for me actually get forwarded to that account.

I’ve only encountered this once before and that was when I tried to change my Borders rewards registration address from an old one that was getting too much spam. In both cases, I contacted support and the guy I got at Borders seemed just as bewildered as I was, but eventually he had to ask someone who simple told him that the address wasn’t allowed. No reason was given in either case, but I have the feeling this is a lazy attempt to prevent spam on their end at the expense of usability.

I thought about simply boycotting both places, but realized that would probably only hurt me in the long run. So I created special aliases for both place that forward to my info@ e-mail address:

• facebookisretarded@
• bordersisretarded@

Surprisingly, both sites allowed me to register with those addresses.

There are a lot of things in my past that have contributed to my becoming a web designer and I thought I’d share them in case you want to breed your children to become web designers too. To start with, we always had a computer in the house because my dad worked at IBM during the 1970s and saw the future of home computing. The first desktop we had that I remember by name was the IBM PC Jr. and it didn’t even have Windows on it. Then when I turned 10 years old, I was given a Timex Sinclair 1000 to play with for my birthday. It didn’t have a hard drive, so you could only store programs with a cassette player. My dad would buy magazines for me that had BASIC programs in them, so I would usually just type them out every time since I rarely played the same game repeatedly.

Now that I’ve explained how I got into computers, I’ll go into the things that I think contributed on the design side. I played around with cameras when I was a kid and the first one that was all mine was a Kodak disc camera. (Again, my dad was an influence there because he’s a total shutterbug.) The first time I really got to take one around on my own was when I went to Girl Scout camp for a week when I was 9. I don’t know what happened to the negatives, but I still have some of the pictures and it’s funny to see what I thought was important to capture on film as a kid. Aside from the fact that I’m still into photography today, I think where it influenced me is in the composing of photos. I guess I see capturing the right things at the right angle as a type of design.

The other creative influence on me when I was a kid was sewing crafts. When I went to my grandparents’ farm to visit, I would be the one kid inside quilting with my grandma while my sister and cousins played outside. I was also a big fan of cross-stitching and both of these made me realize how much I like making things by working with my hands.

Next up: the teenage years…

Even though I’ve been designing for a long time, I haven’t done a lot with vector graphics. Illustrator and Flash are definitely weaknesses of mine and I’ve set out to learn more. The new Threadless store will be offering design training classes with Digital Bootcamp, but I’m also looking into resources for learning on my own. The biggest barrier so far has been software.

I totally understand why software is so expensive and that there’s a lot that goes into creating the product. What I don’t understand is the lack of reasonably-priced options in this area. From what I understand, Photoshop Elements has been pretty successful because the stuff they’ve left out is for truly advanced users. However, there is no such product for Illustrator and I’m not about to buy it new when I’m not sure how much use I’ll get out of it.

You used to be able to buy older versions of software on eBay for fairly reasonable prices, but listings these days are few and far between. I really hope that this isn’t due to pressure by Adobe, because that was about the only option I have left for getting a legitimate license.

I have 2 clients for whom I mainly do maintenance updates. In one case, I just designed their site last year and they are already open to making some tweaks to update the look. However, the other one is still using the original design I did for them… 10 YEARS AGO.

So far, I’ve just been giving the latter client some advance notice when I’m going to raise my rates and nudging them with “If you want me to redesign your site, now’s the time to do it before my rates go up!” but they aren’t biting. At the time the design wasn’t bad, however now it really looks dated. Even though it would be nice to have another live site in my portfolio, I don’t dare link to it because by today’s standards it looks really terrible.

I’m pretty sure this client isn’t going to go for anything sounding remotely like a sales pitch, so I’m looking for ways to approach the subject. Any ideas?

A few years ago, I had a freelance client who was one of the cheapest individuals I have ever met in my life despite the fact that he did well enough to afford a $1 million house in the city. Every time I updated his site, he wanted an estimate and he tried to haggle with me over my rates whenever I gave him an invoice. I have always charged hourly for freelance work and I’d told him what that would be from the beginning, so after awhile I said that I would have to charge him for the time to do estimates because it took away from the time I had to work on stuff for other clients. He always paid me in a reasonable amount of time, but getting him to accept the final charge on an invoice was like pulling teeth.

During one of the last conversations we had where he tried to get me to re-evaluate what I charged him, he asked me to justify why I charged so much. I first started by telling him that my rates are actually on the low side for the amount of experience I have because I didn’t like getting lawyers involved (which would raise my overhead). This answer not satisfying him, he replied by telling me that the building contractor who worked on his house only charged $10/hr and asked why my rates couldn’t be that reasonable. My reply:

“The computer I use to do my job cost a helluva lot more than his hammer.”

Surprisingly, he still wanted me to do work for him after that, but I’d had enough. A few weeks later, I gave him a final invoice and told him that I wouldn’t be able to do his site anymore because I’d gotten too busy. That wasn’t actually the case… working for him had just become more trouble than it was worth.