You can buy these titles on Amazon and read along with me!

Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us by Seth Godin | This book is all about community!

The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara | This one’s about community, personal branding and social media marketing.

Wildly Sophisticated: A Bold New Attitude for Career Success by Nicole Williams | A unique womans perspctive on marketing yourself in a competitive business world. I chose this cause I was intrigued by her interview on Obsessed.tv – check that out here.

Cash: The Autobiography by Johnny Cash | The title should explain this one… :)

The Lucky Reader Drawing…

I wrote down everyones Twitter handle and did a drawing from a hat (old-school style!) Thank you to everyone who participated and those who shared the link on Twitter! Of course a BIG Thank you to Bidsketch.com. (If you don’t want the suspense of the video, scroll down to see the winner – or click where I tagged the name announcement!)

So what is Bidsketch? It’s proposal software made for designers. It provides a way to easily manage clients and the proposal process. More importantly, it lets designers present their services in a completely new way.

Features they’ll get in the Premium Account

• Client landing pages designed to help you win more projects. Clients can export to PDF or accept a proposal with a single click.
• Several professional looking proposal templates and designs to choose from.
• Ability to embed images, and Flash video. Anything you can do with HTML/CSS, you can have in your proposal.
• Unlimited number of proposals, clients, and user accounts.
• Customize templates for reusing content, and create fee items to quickly price proposals.

Congrats to @corinspired on receiving a full year FREE premium account from Bidsketch!

The folks over at Overnight Prints have offered the readers of CMD+Shift Design blog a chance to win 500 free business cards. Free printing, free shipping!

The Lucky Reader Drawing…

Yesterday I wrote down everyones Twitter handle and did a drawing from a hat (old-school style!) Thank you to everyone who participated and those who shared the link on Twitter! Of course a BIG Thank you to OvernightPrints.com. (If you don’t want the suspense of the video, scroll down to see the winner.)

Congratulations to @aaroni268, hope you enjoy your cards — I will be contacting you shortly with more info!!!

Join in the discussion!

Leave a comment below or at one of the other posts I mentioned! OR make your own video response on this subject and post it to your blog, then share the link with us! :)

How You Use It

You can group your followed friends into categories like “Designers”, “Blogs”, “Celebrities” and then view you lists to get a more targeted look at what people are talking about.

How Your Followers Use It

When you are looking at a Twitter profile, in addition to seeing who they follow you can also check out the groups they have created or the groups other people have listed them in! This can be helpful if you are looking for a certain group of people like designers or freelancers to add to your stream.

What do you think of this new feature? Do you see it as something valuable? How will you use it?

If you’re a freelancer looking to go on a vacation, here are a few things you will want to take into consideration before packing those bags!

Alert Your Clients Ahead of Time

Send out a simple email announcement to all of your clients alerting them of the dates you will be unavailable. Weather you have an open project with the client or not, I suggest sending the message to all your clients about 2 months before your departure date. If you will be gone for an extended time (a month or longer) you may want to consider even more notice.

Alerting my clients early allowed everyone to think ahead to what they need from me and even ended up jump starting a few projects!

Even if you are expecting to work a bit while you are away, it is smart to prepare ahead so that a spotty hotel Wi-Fi or a last minute change in plans won’t cause a catastrophic client communication meltdown.

Alert New Clients

In the time leading up to your departure, make new clients aware of your office closure early on. You may anticipate their project to be wrapped up before you leave, but it is best to let them know anyway — That way, if circumstances cause the project to run longer than expected the client will not be caught off guard when things are put on hold while you’re gone.

Call out closure days in contracts and/or emails.With any projects you have that will overlap with your office closure, make sure it is clear that these days you are gone will not be counted as business days and therefor will effect the projects turn around time. If your project agreement states that the turnaround is “10 business days” you will want to make your client aware that this turnaround does not include the 4 business days that your office will be closed.

Outsource Open Projects

If you want to keep things moving while you enjoy some time off, you can outsource work to another freelancer. If you’d like to do this, it is a good idea to work with this person on a few projects ahead of time so that you get a feel for how they work and you can be sure you will feel comfortable with them taking on your projects.

If you plan to have this colleague communicating with your clients make sure your clients have been introduced to them (email, Skype, 3-way call, or face-to-face,) and feel comfortable with them taking on the job while you are away. I would suggest giving your client the choice. “We can put the project on hold until I return or I can have my colleague James finish things up with you while I am away” This way they have the option to wait if they prefer working exclusively with you.

Work Like You’re Leaving Tomorrow

You don’t want to leave loose ends and you don’t want to be pushing to finish a project from the airport (or airplane) Wi-Fi!

Set your due dates a day or 2 before you go so that your last day in the office can be as low stress as possible. This will also give you a smaller chance of forgetting to do something important!

Plan For Your Return

In addition to planning for your departure, It is also a good idea to think ahead to your return! If you will be traveling outside of your time-zone you will most likely return jet-lagged. Consider adding an extra day to your away schedule (if you return on the 20th, tell your clients you will be back on the 21st.) This gives you some lead way if you are not ready to jump back into work the day your plane lands! If you arrive home and feel like jumping right into what you missed however, our clients will get a pleasant surprise! It’s always best to under promise and over deliver.

Updates, Replies & Deliveries

Even with alerting your clients and vendors of your office closure, be aware that time will march on while you are away. Emails will still come in, blog readers will visit your site, people will Google your name and the postman will bring you deliveries. Try to prepare for all of these things with automated services as much as you can.

Most all internet based services can be set to an automated mode. Turn on your E-mail Vacation Responder stating that your office is closed and the dates of the closure. Also reassure the correspondent that your normal business hours will resume on the date specified and that you will respond to them at your next earliest convenience.

It could take a little bit of extra time to set up, but using custom email Filters you could create custom messages for each of your clients. This could be helpful if you have a few clients whose projects are being outsourced while you are away. Your auto-response can remind them of the dates you are unavailable and give them the contact information for the freelancer handling their project.

Blog posts can be scheduled to post even when you are away from the computer and you can use services like SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater)  if you want to schedule periodic tweets to go out.

Lastly, don’t forget real world services as well. Record a outgoing voicemail message and Set up a mail hold at your local post office. Cancel any deliveries that may be scheduled during your time off and if you have any office pets or plants, make sure they will be cared for until you return!

Pay Bills & Send Invoices

It’s smart to double check the due dates on any pending bills and make sure to send off your payment before you leave if the due date fall during your vacation. In addition to thinking about the money going out, what about the money coming in? Take a moment to go over any billable hours you can invoice before your trip, you may have the payment waiting for you when you return! :)

Back Up

If you’re planning on traveling with your work laptop, do a full back up before you go. In the horrifying event that your laptop is lost, stolen or damaged during your travel, knowing your data is safe at home will be of some comfort.

Enjoy It!

As I prepare for my time away, I am feeling a little overwhelmed — trying to get as much stuff finished as I can before I go and making sure that my clients are tended to. One thing I need to remember is that once I set out on my adventure, I need to enjoy myself.

Vacations seem a little different since I started my own business, it’s not really about escaping my day-to-day, it’s more about enjoying life and recharging for the exciting work ahead. I will surely be talking about business while I am away because it is such a large part of me, but I will return excited to get moving on new things in the new year to come!

Being included on this list of some KICK ASS designers is pretty awesome!

A while back I set up a Facebook Fan Page to stay connected on Facebook with some of you from the design/dev community, fellow freelancers, clients, internet nerd friends… but I just couldn’t get into the groove with the Fan page thing. All that is so fun about Facebook is the give and take of it and my Fan page only really allowed me to push stuff out without really participating with all of YOU.

Let’s be honest, you’re not Fans – you’re Friends. So I just abandoned the whole Fan Page idea and set up facebook.com/cmdshiftdesign, come be my FBF (Facebook Friend!) :)

So then, what is my process?

Step One: Listening to your client

I start all of my projects with a consultation. I meet with my client, usually for about 2 hours. The purpose of this meeting is to get the client talking about their goals for the design, the business and it’s needs, the audience or customer who will be using the site, the clients aesthetic tastes and preferences, the brand and how these aesthetic tastes relate to the established look of the brand, etc. I don’t give out many ideas in this meeting, its more about asking questions and encouraging my client to open up. Being a Designer is a lot like being a therapist, I spend a good amount of time just listening to my clients to hone in on what they are really looking to achieve.

Step Two: Research

After meeting with my client and getting an overall view of what they are looking to accomplish, I spend some time digging deeper into the information they have supplied me about their business, audience and goals. I check out their competitors sites and also look at other industries websites and the strategies they use to solve similar problems. I study the aesthetic elements that they client highlighted in our talk about their tastes and figure out how those can relate to the brand or if they don’t fit – I find alternatives that may also appeal to the clients sensibility while staying in vein with the brands look and feel. All of this gives me the clear calls to action, the information that needs to be included and it’s hierarchy.

From here I start sketching, whether it be on the computer or on some graph paper, I do some very rough wireframing of the main page layouts. I block how the elements will layout on the pages and how they relate to one another.

With these rough sketches and my refined analysis of our consultation, I go back to my client with my assessment of our talk. We go over the key points I pulled out and then we review my wireframes and I go over how I plan to set about addressing the issues at hand. Sometimes, at this stage there is something that a client then recalls that they feel is important that we hadn’t yet discussed – this is our time to make any directional changes on the sites overall message and adjust accordingly.

If the adjustments and/or additions are fairly minimal and we feel as if we are on the “same page” with each other, things move into the next phase….

Step Three: Design

Design to me is a very methodical process, the part where I am listening to my client or where I am researching their user base is just as important to me as when I choose that background HEX color. Once the preliminary steps are taken and I am clear on the direction to move, the design work begins. This is, my favorite part!

Step Four: Refine & Polish – Rinse & Repeat

Once I’ve completed a design mock-up I upload it to my web server, so that I am able to present the design to the client in a way that is very close to how it will appear in its final form. I simply save out a flattened image from my PSD and put in onto an HTML page. If there are multiple layouts within the site I will use image map linking to simulate functional navigation for the client, and they can click from page to page to see the various layouts. After the clients review we go over the design again and tie up any loose ends before I move on to development.

It is important to make sure that all of your design decisions are settled in this stage before you start slicing and coding. Include in your PSD all of the text elements that may be a part of the site including numbered lists, h1 – h5 tags, blockquotes, Wordpress image captions, etc. Talk with your client about how the navigation and other interactive elements will function – if you’re planning to use any jquery functions, send them an example of your plan or mock something up for them.

Taking the time to settle all these details now will make development a faster process, plus you’re client will feel more at ease talking to you about text color in the stage. Many clients feel a sense of panic when they get a functioning site back and it isn’t exactly what they expected, (even if you have explained revisions can be done.) It’s best to set clear expectations early on, so there won’t be any surprises!

I work a little different than some, putting my emphasis early on into communication with my client, research and experimentation to find the proper solution for their needs. I’m also a little different in that I don’t offer a specific number of revision rounds. I want my client to walk away thrilled, not just happy, ecstatic!

Why this Works

I’m sure many of your are reading this and thinking that offering unlimited revisions would set you up to be walked all over and worked to the bone, but this isn’t the case. Sure you could end up regretting this approach if not executed properly… it’s all about the approach.

For starters, you have to present yourself to the client as an expert in what you do. Show your enthusiasm and knowledge, make them feel secure with giving you the reigns. This part is tricky, because it can’t be faked. Appose to what some freelancers would spout on their blogs, clients are not stupid. Demanding, Unreasonable at times, but not stupid. If you don’t really believe you know how to take charge of this project and give their business the best solution, they will sense this – and that’s going to make then nervous.

It’s important to set boundaries early on and let your client know what they can expect. I really do believe that the great majority of nightmare client situations happen when the client gets nervous about your capability to deliver  what they need. It’s in situations like that where they may feel the need to micro-manage. Before you kick off the project talk to them about your process, and what will be expected from them. Outline in your contract the specifics of what you are including in your project price (number of layout designs, functionality, features, browser support etc.)

Care. This is a big one in my eyes. Once you start looking at your client as just another paycheck, it is obvious. Remember why you are in this industry! You love design, right? Designs not fine art, it’s not about free range on personal expression. Its about lending your unique experience and skills to a client and helping them to grow their business through smart solutions. It’s creative, but it is also strategic! Part of a successful design process and creating an ongoing relationship with your client is to really care about their business and how your design solution is going to contribute to the future of that business.

What is Your Process?

Do you do multiple designs or focus on one? How do you handle revisions? Leave a comment and let me know about your process or your thoughts on all that I’ve wrote here about mine. Thanks for reading! :)