Category: Business

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Still Here

Hello!

Wow! It’s been a long time. I haven’t posted here since October 2016, where does life get away from us?

I post on a more regular basis through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter so you can follow those links through this site. I do need to work on posting from here more often. That being said, life has been busy, not just in the world of Freelance and 9 to 5-ing but also in my personal life. I have 3 large projects each year at this time for 3 different towns but should have them all wrapped up in a couple of weeks. I have also been continuing on with reworking my self-published children’s books, so keep your eyes peeled for those as well (not really soon, but soon).

Motivation and perseverance are the words and goals for 2017.

Stay tuned!

Tim

 

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Update

A hearty hello to you all.

It seems my habit of trying to do at least a weekly blog post has not developed into a “habit” yet. My last post having been made back in May, is a good indicator of that I must say. I really need to get better at this. It isn’t that I have a lot to say, more that it would be a “creative journal” of sorts, showcasing things I’ve been working on or wanting to work on.

Over the summer I had a few jobs come up here and there, just small ones, but they were fun to work on. I have two rather large jobs coming up in a couple of months that will keep me quite busy for a few weeks. In the meantime I’m still working full-time as a Prepress Supervisor and enjoying my time at the company I work for.

Well, that’s it for now, as always you can contact me anytime and follow me on my social media pages.

Until next time, see you in the funny papers…

Tim

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Freelancing

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One of the definitive boons of being a Graphic Designer is the opportunity to work outside of your current job, if you have one. Freelancing allows, at times, an alternate means of creative freedom, the chance to grow your talents and abilities while being able to control the projects you work on. It is a beneficial release that not all designers are able to take advantage of depending on their contracts.

I have had the opportunity the last couple of years to work on a number of different freelance projects that have helped me as a creator and a manager of my own personal studio. The hardest part that I have found is actually finding and landing the jobs. I don’t know if others in my field have an easier time of it or perhaps I just don’t look hard enough, or in the right places for them. I am hoping to increase my productivity this year and next, with an end-goal of becoming full-time independent in the next couple of years. Building a clientele list must be the hardest part of this field.

Tim

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I’m Back!

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Hello again! Welcome back! If you didn’t notice I was gone, then you need to stop by more often. Here’s the skinny on what I’ve been up to.

The past month found me in search of a new web host as my previous host has moved out of the business of hosting. I was referred to another provider but they ended up being a little pricey for what my current site needs and so the research began. I finally settled on a host here in Edmonton and found the price and process relatively painless… well sort of. Buying the webspace from the host was easy enough and they provided me with my login information quite quickly. I wasn’t as informed as I thought I had been though and shortly found out that I would have to do all the transferring from old host to new host on my own. This is not something I’ve had a lot of experience doing. I started the process trying to use their system (which wasn’t CPanel that I was used to), to try and upload my files but it refused to pull folders as well as files,which left a great deal of my website still residing on my hard drive where I had backed it up to. This brought me to the idea of using an FTP program which I should have started with as this is the most effective means to upload to a website. By this time you would think I’m ready to go right? Wrong. The next thing I learned was that but switching providers you don’t automatically move, or have to move, your domain name, this is optional. Once everything was transferred and registered I was still having problems getting my page to load. This new problem ended up being a reloading error that caused browsers to point back and forth between URL’s and basically loc
king it up. I found a fix online and edited my wp-config file to correct the error, and voila my site is up again.

All of this is to say that it has been a good experience for me because with every problem I encountered I had to research and find a solution which then adds to my knowledge base. Hopefully I don’t have to do it again for awhile…

Thanks for reading!


Tim

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Work in Progress 1

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Saturday! I absolutely love Saturday mornings. Sitting at my desk in my living room, in front of our bay windows while working on Freelance projects, to me, is fantastic! This morning I’m continuing on a 40 page Hockey Tournament Guide. First time I’ve done one of these but I’m quite satisfied with my results so far (cover image above). I hope your day is as fun as mine.

Tim

 

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Saturday Design

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Every season of life is different, sometimes lingering, sometimes fleeting, but always changing. Seven years as a Graphic Designer  have shown me that as with anything else, there are also seasons within the design field. Months can go by without any Freelance work and then suddenly many projects flow in keeping me busy for a few months. Some of them are paid and some are not but all help keep my skills honed. The trick is to prioritize and manage your time well, avoiding becoming overwhelmed, always keeping your deadlines in sight. The more projects you can bring in the more experience you gain and the more your name will hopefully circulate, bringing in more business. Ultimately my goal is to become self-employed and have my own mini studio. Until then, the balance continues.

 

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Infographic Fun

Working on an Infographic. First time I’ve put my hand to one of these. Definitely takes a different way of thinking. Creating just the right graphic to compliment the information being passed along. Size is also challenging, the graphic can’t be too detailed or you lose them with the smaller size (working at 8.5×11). I’ll upload photos to my portfolio section at a later date.

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More Productivity…

Not sure why I didn’t look into this years ago, but I just turned my iPad into a secondary monitor for my MacbookPro. This should make me much more productive right? Well okay maybe not, but it will at least let me stream content from my laptop to watch while I work on my laptop’s screen 🙂 I did it… well I didn’t actually do it, I found a nice little app called Duet that does all the hard work, for a small fee that is. Well, time to get back to website planning.

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P.S. Yes, I do know I should have done that first, but I wanted to get WordPress up and running on my server. Now I can tinker and tweak while it’s active.

As I ended my last post, so I say again, stick around and watch it unfold.

Thanks for reading.

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Checking Connections

Just wanted to do a quick check that my posts are going out to all my social sites. If it’s connected properly then this post will hit Facebook, Twitter (via my Facebook), Tumblr, google+ and LinkedIn.