Here are your jumps for the month of July:

• The Do’s and Don’ts of Modern Webdesign - This is a wonderfully designed site that has an amazing collection of tips (both personal and industry recognized) and rules that every web designer should know and implement (or not implement for that matter). This is a great resource for both beginners and experts.
• Win Without Pitching - I stumbled accross this site last week while perusing Undrln.com. This is a pretty interesting site that delves into the business theory of creative agencies. I definately like the ideas here and thought they might be useful for others.
• SlickMap CSS - my buddy Matt over at astuteo.com has come out with another amazing and free resource to be used within any website. SlickMap CSS is a SEO friendly and beautifully designed way to display a website sitemap. Great for use during a site’s development, and for after.
• We Love Icons - I have a confession, I have been on a little bit of an icon-binge recently. Forgive me… anyways… this is a great site with a good collection of free and super high-quality icons. Stock up and fill that local library of goodies to the brim! Seriously… these things are super slick!

City of Joplin Farmers Market Rejected Logo Designs:

Main Street Joplin Discover Downtown and Third Thursday Logos:

Christ In Youth Rapha House Screen Print:

Shirt Design and Sticker for Carter Hulsey:

I most appreciate Aaron’s appointment to “anything but proofreader” in round eight. The ninth round is by far my favorite and the logo mark that comes as a result of this battle is not only inspiring, but truly timeless. I am ready to join the IDWF. Where do I buy the shirt?

In celebration of their new look they are going to giving away from sweet gear for those who sign up in their “devot:ed” membership level. Head on over the Devot:ee and check out the new digs!

• IE6 Upgrade - The folks over at Done 21 have finally figured out how to get all those pesky IE6 users to upgrade: Fraud. They have devised a nice little info bar that mimicks the PC’s native info bar and tells the user it’s time to upgrade. If you can’t beat ‘em. Join ‘em.
• The Grid System Generator - This is a handy liitle offshoot of the 960 grid systems framework developed a few years back. The nice thing about it is it allows you to customize your grid and break out of the 960 if you want to. I currently try to develop all my sites under this framework because it speeds up build times (and it’s uber cool right now. kthxby.).
• How to Extract the Facts with a Web Design Client Questionnaire - This is a top notch article for anyone still struggling with how to get the goods from a potential client. I currently use a questionare I hi-jacked from a studio on the east coat (with their permission of course!) But, I will definately be implementing few of these. Their intentionality is spot on.
• Creattica - The new Creattica is the old Favup! And the Envato Network is officially taking over the interwebs. This great gallery based website does more than just CSS. They offer some awesome posters, photoshop, flash, logo and business card galleries as well.

Yewknee.com is the personal website of Nashville resident Michael Eades. Micheal designs for KNI (kicking firm), has been know to do some great screen prints, and beyond that curates We Own This Town. His most notable achievement (i my opinion at least) is his involvement with the Whiskerino movement. Something I plan on participating this year.

Go check out the blog and make sure you put him in the ol’ feed reader.

• Campaign Monitor Case Study - Great article, from an even better web start-up in Australia. If you want to get a good inside scoop about how EE’s templating system works… click it.
• Fixed-Fee Billing Is the Devil - I could not agree more. I have been doing almost all of my bidding in some hybrid form of fixed-fee. I think I am going to follow these guys’ lead and move to all hourly. “But you won’t make as much money!” Yeah, but I won’t feel like a greasy, slime ball, salesman anymore either...
• Light and Shadows - Great tutorial on using feathered gradients in photoshop
• Beast Pieces - this is one of the greatest collections of print work, business cards, letter heads and logo design work I have seen. This blog could easily be turned into an awesome book.
• 8 Ways to Improve Your Typography - This is a great article by Aisle One with some extremely useful and practical tips on improving how type displays on the web. Definately wortht he read and worth implementing the tips into new projects.

The 60% Percent Factor
One of the theories I came across recently states that a design firm should be able to bill 60% of all the hours it works. This is just over half, and while I am not sure how precisely this applies to freelancing, I think it is a good number to have and work towards.

I have never tracked my hours in terms of “billable vs. non-billable” but I am going to begin. I have a feeling I am not going to be able meet that mark right away since I am wearing so many different hats as a freelancer.

So what Is Billable?
This can bring up a moral question about what qualifies as a “billable” hour. I have met guys who don’t bill for meetings, I have also met guys who not only bill for meetings, but have a clause in their contracts that states there is a fee for “too many meetings.” I tend to tackle this one on a project to project basis. And it truly does depend on the client.

I think that for the most part, billing a client for the time it takes to process a large InDesign file, or push files to a website is a little bit much. However, there are plenty of people in the world who get paid to press one button… just not at the same rate as a graphic designer.

I tend to operate under the premise that anything that is core to the project and/or mentally or creatively intensive qualifies as billable. Wireframes, site maps, working up a IA, all of these things are crucial to a project and important keys to a successful project, so I have no problem including them in my process and asking to be paid for it and I think that is pretty standard across the board.

Moving Forward
I am currently tracking how many total hours I work in a week. I am also going to track two other things, how many hours I can bill a week and how many hours I spend wasting time on the internet (or other clearly non billable activities). I think that this last factor (how much time I spend wasting doing other stuff) is going to play a bigger factor than I want it to. I have a theory that one of the reasons I only averaged 9 billable hours a week is because I spent a lot of my time in the day doing other things besides billable work.

Anyone know of any good tools for tracking this type of information? Anyone feeling like setting up a cool/slick web app for doing this?

• www.LostandTaken.com - This is an amazing collection of free, high res textures. This site is the best I have ever found. Hands down, no other site has this many top notch textures in one place. The film textures are my favorite so far. So much character.
• www.free3dstextures.com - This is another amazing and extremely comprehensive collection of Creative Commons textures. This was a site that I stumbled upon through one of my twitter feeds. The site is run by Dustin Senos who is a very talented programmer from BC, Canada.  Oh and did I mention it is supplied via flickr? Seriously… this kid aint messing around. Rumor has it, the site is going to get a face lift soon… stay tuned
• www.chracterencoder.com - This is another great site that Dustin Senos has put together. A must use for quickly preparing content taken from a local computer for the web.
• Web Development Project Estimator - There are a few of these bad boys available on the internet for free, but this one is special because I have had some email correspondance with one of it’s creators and I am all about helping out friends. So, use it, digg it, and get your quotes all clean and polished (with the correct math!) for you next six figure project.
• AIGA Standard Form of Agreement for Design Services - We all know that AIGA is an amazing collection of designers and graphic artists. But they are also an amazing resource to those who work in the industry. This is a very comprehensive contract that covers just about every base their possibly is when getting terms set for a potential job. The best part, is it explains itself and how it is best used. All the legal mumbo jumbo with a layman’s explanation.