Of course, the floor is still open for discussion on our formspring, so feel free to ask us any related questions if you are inclined.
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Happy Friday friends! Here’s a special edition of Howdy for you in honor of my birthday today. It’s a mini mix! Why so small you ask? The idea is that the 28-minute mix gives you a short period of total concentration on one task. It’s loosely based off the Pomodoro Technique, which is all about breaking up your time with short bursts of intense focus. So far I’ve been finding it especially helpful at the end of the day when I’m running on fumes, or when I find myself procrastinating on a task, like email, that can suck a whole day away if I’m not careful. Plus I like that this system doesn’t expect you to be on task all day long so I am allowed to balance in my own time here and there.

Typically for Howdy mixes (previously posted here) I favor a more up-tempo feel, something that’s pretty energetic. I’ve been on a hip-hop/soul/electronic kick these days so this particular mix reflects that.

1. 1969 / Boards Of Canada
2. Walk In The Sky (Feat. Bajka) / Bonobo
3. Weapon Of Choice / Fatboy Slim
4. Kaili / Caribou
5. Cellphone’s Dead / Beck
6 . Don’t Gotta Work It Out / Fitz & The Tantrums

Download Directions:
It’s a .zip file (virus free, I promise) which contains a folder of the songs and an import playlist file. First drag the songs to your music library and then import the playlist (File>Library>Import Playlist). It will make you a nice little list in your iTunes and you should be good to go.

That’s it from me today, I’m going to go celebrate! Chad got me a super cute purse from this chick and it’s got convertible straps for biking so we’re going to test it out.

Of course, the floor is still open for discussion on our formspring, so feel free to ask us any related questions if you are inclined.
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Last week I tagged along with my friend Ben on a trip to Best Buy. I was in the mood for a little retail therapy and I figured I might as well look over their external hard drive selection because I still hadn’t managed to replace the faulty one I’d gotten off Amazon a few months ago. Yes, months. (Confession time: at this point I hadn’t backed up my work life in…oh, EVER). So this, my friends, was terribly overdue. I’d read enough reviews to have a rough idea what I wanted, but I clearly was having trouble pulling the trigger so I was thinking going in person would inspire me to actually come home with one. So after accosting Best Buy Dude and peppering him with way more hard drive-related questions than he expected, we settled on a Western Digital Mac-formatted 500gig drive.* I was happy enough to pay the listed price of $139, but Ben pulled out his phone (a Droid, in case anyone cares) and scanned the box’s bar code because we’re nerds and wanted to see if it was cheaper elsewhere.

That’s when things got more interesting. Turns out the hard drive was listed at $99 on BestBuy.com. Best Buy doesn’t price match their website, we were informed, but they have a pickup in-store option so technically I could buy it online and walk out of the store with it right there. What?! It’s a perfectly acceptable loophole that saved me 40 bones! Definitely made shopping way more fun as I gleefully tapped in my credit card number and walked out of the store 15 minutes later with the very same drive I’d bought with the phone. No lines, no shipping, no fuss.

Ben used Barcode Scanner on his Droid, but RedLaser is a similar app for the iPhone and it’s currently 50% off at ¢99. I’m totally playing this game now anytime I can. It’s like the modern-day equivalent of clipping coupons! Woohoo!

*Now that I’ve had a chance to break in and use the new hard drive, I will say I like it very much. The only caveat is the stupid additional software which I will never use that comes with the drive and it takes up 45gigs of space, making the advertised 500gigs is really only 456.98. And it’s written into the firmware of the drive which means there’s no amount of hacking will remove it entirely. So, so unnecessary. I only bought it because there are fewer hard drive options that play nice with Macs and I have yet to hear of one that doesn’t come with some type of additional software like this. I just didn’t realize how much space it would hog until I got home and used it, which is kind of a bummer. BUT! At least I have one now, thank goodness. And it is small, not ugly, fast, reliable. I sliced it into two partitions as well, one for archiving old stuff that I don’t need on my laptop anymore, but want to keep around, and the other for use with Time Machine so if my computer DOES crash I have everything else saved in at least one location. Phew! Next on my list is working on getting another back-up location sorted for extra safe measures, but of course that’s a Howdy Do It for another day.

{Photo Credits: Emma Ferguson’s hilarious embroidery}

Of course, the floor is still open for discussion on our formspring, so feel free to ask us any related questions if you are inclined.
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So you may have caught word that Ellie’s taking a little break from Howdy Do It for awhile (read more here). I completely support and agree with her decision for myself too. Pretty sure neither one of us knew what a time commitment it would become at the beginning we we launched! However, I don’t have particular plans to shelve the whole project for eternity. As it turns out, I kind of missed sitting down and gathering my thoughts on my work habits, reflecting on the work week and actively trying to teach myself improvement in a more formal way. Plus, it’s helped me connect a lot more with you guys, not to mention the spike in traffic each Monday from Mint, for which I’m hugely grateful too. So I’m going to do my best to continue, though I know it more tricky as a solo effort. And who knows, maybe there will be more from both of us sooner rather than later!

So appropriately enough, here’s an encouraging 5-min Etsy film about animal photographer Sharon Montrose, spied on Darling Dexter a while back. It’s basically how Sharon was able to re-invent her career and take it in a new, better direction. Sure, it’s the same narrative we’ve all heard about being passionate and following your heart, but something about actually watching a person talk through their unique process and how they got to where they are is what I find affecting about this sort of thing. Plus Sharon’s work is pretty cool too! Enjoy.

If you have any questions for Margot or Ellie, you can ask them on formspring.
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There are a ton of great online resources for designers, freelancers, and small business owners. Here are a few that have been helpful to me personally:

• Tax info for small businesses & the self-employed
The IRS website isn’t really that scary. In addition to tax info, you can find information on business workshops in your area, get a new business checklist, and find out if what you’re doing is considered a small business or a hobby.

• Printable Forms from Leo on the Loose
Erin Vale has made some forms for you to download and print (for a limited time only, so visit today!). They include a print production checklist, measurement conversion sheet, a MAC quick key reference guide for special characters, and a business mileage tracking sheet.

• Modish Biz Tips
Although the site is no longer being updated, there is a lot of information here on topics like business plans, finding your niche, branding, marketing, plus some interviews with pros.

• Biz Ladies
The Design*Sponge Biz Ladies posts are archived here, and even though I (and probably you) read these posts as they come out, the archives is a great place to check in as you enter new phases with your business.

• Small Business Administration
Online training in topics like finance and accounting, help finding a business mentor, guides for writing your business plan, and info on current events that affect small business owners, like Health Care Reform. Tons of information.

• SCORE
Find a mentor or read articles online for starting, managing, growing, marketing, and financing your business.

• HOW: freelancing
HOW Magazine’s articles for managing your freelance design career.

• Action Method
Behance and Print Magazine created Action Method to help you organize your projects (both personal and business). Right now it’s under $11/month.

• Teux Deux
Online to-do list organized by date.

• AIGA
AIGA is the professional association for design, and on their site you can find average salaries in your area, read the standards for professional practice and ethics, find advice for the emerging designer, inspiration and more.

• Skype
Many freelancers work with clients all over the country, if not the globe. Instead of racking up huge phone bills, I use skype with all my non-local clients. If you both have accounts, the calls are completely free. And the video cam is completely optional.

• Gmail
Seriously. I couldn’t live without gmail, and if you’re not on it I think you should be. Organize documents and spreadsheets (and access them from anywhere) with Google Docs, organize your emails by having specific folders for each client, access your calendar from anywhere, create task (to-do) lists, and send/respond to emails with different email addresses (perfect for people like me who are running 2+ operations).

• Pro Blogger
OK, so this one is actually new to me and I haven’t explored it much yet. From what I can tell, it’s a great resource on becoming a better blogger, and learning how to monetize your site. I’ve got some reading to do!

photo by wonderlane

If you have any questions for Margot or Ellie, you can ask them on formspring.
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Last week I walked into the mail shop near my house to ship some orders. It’s a small, family owned business, and I much prefer it to the Post Office. There are rarely any lines and when I walk in the door, they say, “Hey Ellie!” My favorite mail shop guy was the only one working, and since I was the only one in the shop, I thought I’d ask the owner how he got into the business. Cause if you think about it, owning a mail shop is sort of… different. I mean, you don’t grow up wanting to deal with packages, right?

Turns out the owner of this little mail shop is an industrial engineer, who was laid off about 6 or 7 years ago. He bought the business because it was for sale, and he needed work. Although he had applied and been accepted to great jobs all over the country, he decided that the most important thing to him was not a good salary, or a prestigious job. He had a couple of teenagers in the house, and he knew that moving them across the country for one of these great jobs would be devastating to them. He decided his family was way more important than any job.

And so for the past 6 years, he’s been running this mail shop. He makes just enough for his family to live on, and never has to work more than 30-40 hours, which means he gets to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids. Since he knew I had recently been laid off (and may or may not be able to read minds), he wanted me to understand that work is just work. At the end of the day, it’s really not all that important. His exact words were, “This stuff is just crap, I mean, excuse me, but work is just… it’s just crap. You can’t worry about it.” He wasn’t saying it in a disgruntled way, but more like it just doesn’t matter, not the way other things matter. He said, “you know Ellie, you’ve just got to figure out how to be happy, because happiness, and your family… that’s really all that matters.”

You know how you can hear something from the people you love, and know it, but not know it? And then, you hear it from a stranger, and it’s like… OH. I spent the last week thinking about what the mail man said, and wondering why I worry so much about my job. Of course, it’s important to care about your work, but how much stress and worry is really necessary?

images by Lars Tunbjörks via johanna wallin

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Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a weekly column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track. Ellie will be here each Monday, and Margot will be over on Mint at the same time.

If you have any questions for Margot or Ellie, you can ask them on formspring.
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One of the most frequent questions I get asked is how one should go about pricing their work. I’m going to start this off with a big fat disclaimer: I am not an expert on this. I have only been freelancing for a couple of years, and have only been doing it full time for 6 months. I am constantly thinking about my pricing, evaluating it, and nudging things around. There is also a very informative article on Design Sponge, which is more scientific and expert-like than what you’re going to hear from me.

I do two different kinds of design work, and I price them differently. The first is my freelance design work (non-wedding). To come up with an hourly rate, I did not use the handy, informative
FreelanceSwitch calculator I found via the d*s article. I just asked around. I asked probably 6-8 freelancers what their hourly rate was, and that combined with working in a design firm who occasionally hired freelancers, gave me a good idea of the range. In my area, it seemed to be between $35-$75/hour. A big note: I live in an area that is pretty affordable, and so you need to ask freelancers in your region to get an accurate idea for hourly rates. I guarantee there are 0 freelancers in New York City charging $35/hour. You never want to be the cheapest freelancer, because if you underprice your work, people will undervalue your work. You’re also effectively telling clients “design is cheap!” So, when figuring out where you land on the scale, you want to think about your experience, skill level, cost of living, and your expenses. Your expenses will include rent, insurance, your computer, software, office supplies, advertising, etc. You’ll need to remember that while $75/hour (or whatever) may sound like a number you can get rich off of, you can’t bill 40 hours of every week because you have administrative work, marketing efforts, etc.

Another tip: If you’re doing print design, you’re going to be managing the printing of your project. You can markup printing costs by 10-20% to cover the time print management takes and the expertise you have in print management. Remember that if you’re a designer and frequently use certain printing companies, they’re probably giving you print quotes that are much lower than what they give the average guy off the street.

The second kind of design work I do is invitation design. Pricing an actual product seems a lot more straight-forward to me than when you’re pricing something intangible like design hours for a website. So, the first thing you’ll need to do is figure out your materials cost. If paper is $35 for 250 sheets and you can fit 2 invitations per page, that’s $.07 cents per invitation for paper. Figure out your materials cost for everything—envelopes, printing cost/ink, cutting, etc. You’ll also need to figure out your assembly cost. Say you’re putting in envelope liners, and you used that handy rate calculator to find out that your break-even hourly rate is $25/hour. (Since assembling envelope liners takes very little skill, this is a good place to put your break-even rate to work). Say you need to do 100 envelope liners, and that will take you one hour. $25 divided by 100 liners is $.25. Alright. So now you’ve added everything up and you should have a materials cost, and let’s say it comes out to $1.75 per invitation suite.

The next step is to do some market research. Find companies who offer products similar to yours, keeping in mind whether you’re talking about custom or non-custom work, and the type of printing method used. Let’s say the going rate for invitations like yours is $6/suite. That means if you stick with that price scale, then after cost you’ll have $4.25. Finally, you need to figure out if that’s something you can live on, which of course depends not on that $4.25 figure but how many invitations you can actually sell per month, and I can’t help you there.

Someone on formspring yesterday asked, “How can I simplify & structure custom invitation pricing? With all the various elements, paper type, envelope type & size, etc, it takes me forever to price out an invite. How do you factor in design time?” I think if you’ve calculated your basic invitation cost using the steps above, calculating the extras should be fairly easy. Let’s say you spend $.04 cents per basic white envelope, and $.14 cents per fancy envelope. That just brought your cost up by $.10, plus the extra time for a special order. So, I’d come up with a standard rate sheet that said something basic invitation suites (white envelope) are $6 each and invitation suites with fancy envelopes are $6.20 each.

To keep things simple, I’d try not to offer a million options to your customers. Find a vendor who sells fancy envelopes at a good price, and stick with them. So if a customer wants to know what colors your fancy envelopes come in, don’t say “what color would you like?” Show them the list of colors that are available with your vendor. That way, you have a set price for plain envelopes and a set price for fancy envelopes, and you don’t have to change that price if they want a certain shade of blush pink. Keep things simple for both you and your customer.

For design time, you need to refer to the hourly design rate I talked about above. If it takes you about 8 hours to design a custom invitation and your design rate is $50/hour, then maybe you add a flat $400 custom fee on to the “pre-designed” invitation price of $6/suite. Again, I don’t think there is a single right answer for how you price completely custom work. It’s going to depend on whether people will pay that flat custom fee at the rate of $50/hour, or if it makes more sense to just bump up your per suite price by a dollar or two. If there’s anyone out there who has an opinion on this, I would love to hear it!

Another thing to think about when coming up with a rate sheet for invitations is whether you want to charge the same “per suite” price for 50 invitations as 300. Keep in mind that you will spend less on materials with the smaller order, but you’ll spend as much time on the client who needs 50 invitations as the client who needs 300.

All that said, it’s not always about the formula and research. As Meg Mateo Ilasco says in her book Craft, Inc., “it’s about creating a perceived value for your goods. If your [product] is as special as you think it is, it should have a price tag to match.”

{images by elizabeth sarah}

To read Margot’s Howdy Do It posts, click here.

If you have any questions for Margot or Ellie, you can ask them on formspring.
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Last week I talked about my latest self-employment hurdle, the freelancing blues, and this week I thought I’d touch on a few more things that helped me get over it. If you’re feeling the same way, I hope these will get the wheels turning.

• I realized that my home office, the room I sit in for probably 10-12 hours a day, is also my least favorite room in the house! It’s the room that we put zero thought into, and where we dumped all of the “what should we do with this?” stuff when we moved in last year. Major bummer. So, I’ve been brainstorming ways to rearrange furniture, cut down on clutter, and have been scouring craigslist, thrift stores, and yard sales for furniture bargains to replace the pieces I hate. I’m also working on finding better lighting and purchasing some plants. If it’s going to be cold and dreary outside, at least I can have some green inside! I can’t wait to have a yard sale of our own to get rid of all the extras.

• I haven’t actually told anyone this yet… but why not. I started a little etsy vintage shop called west + plum. I realized that I’d turned all my former hobbies into a full time job—awesome, but I hadn’t replaced them! Visiting lots of thrift stores and flea markets gets me out of the house, and it’s so exciting to have a new project that doesn’t involve designing or blogging. Plus, my indoor photography skills are way improving and the past couple Saturdays I’ve jumped out of bed to find new treasures. I’ve promised myself that this project is just for fun and the moment it becomes a chore, I’m done.

• Redesign! A couple weeks ago, during the worst of my slump, I sat down and just redesigned Mint. I was actually pretty afraid to do it, and thought I had no idea what I wanted. I even begged my husband to do it for me but then I got impatient. Since my redesign budget was slim, I kept the structure basically the same, and was able to hire a programmer to make my design functional without breaking the bank.

• Another way I’ve been forcing myself out of the house is to use my car less and walk more. There are coffee shops, a mail shop, book store, and grocery store all within walking distance of my house, but for some reason I used to always take the car to run errands. The 30-40 minutes of extra walking every day or so has been a great way to clear my head, get some fresh air, and cut down on gas expenses all at the same time.

So how about you, what tricks do you have for beating the freelancing blues?

photo credits: 60/365 by perminna / west + plum / sandra juto

In a couple weeks, it will have been six months since my last full time, salaried job. If I’m feeling brave, I can say I’ve been self employed for six months. But in all honesty, the last six months have been an emotional roller coaster. The first few months I was completely overwhelmed with all the “should do” things on my list. I made the mistake of starting to read a couple business books right off the bat, which made me feel frozen with the long list of things they said I need to do in order to be successful. A few months in I put the books down, and started focusing on the “must do” lists instead. Life became a whole lot less stressful. But in the past few months, my stresses have come from other places. Although I’ve got lots of great clients, all of whom feel like good fits for me (something I wasn’t used to when I worked for a firm), I want more. Although I love not having a boss or coworkers, I miss having people in the same room to vent with, brainstorm with, and take a coffee break with. Although I feel like all of my projects are going really well, I want to do better.

A few weeks ago, all this culminated into a total lack of motivation, which has been the hardest hurdle for me yet. I keep wondering, “if I’m really doing what I love, why aren’t I working harder? longer?” The truth is, I’ve come to a point with my business where I’m going to have to do things that are really hard for me and… well, hello procrastination. Networking, for one. Spending some money on advertising, and maybe even renting a studio space to garner some of the montly art walk traffic and get out of the house (eek! lease!). Loosening my vice grip on my blog.

I think I’ve moved past the frozen/lack of motivation feeling. For now. It took me leaving my house, notebook in hand, and doing a few hours of brainstorming. A friend suggested I do some journaling, which I didn’t, but that probably would have helped too. The most helpful thing was making a list of all the things I love about my new job. Then, I made a list of all the big picture to-do items, like researching advertising options, meeting with a friend of a friend who has lots of wedding world connections, finding someone to help me with Mint, and talking to some local shops about my work—all things that will help me reach my big picture goals, and got me excited again about what I’m doing. I also took a good hard look at how much things have grown and changed over the past year, and gave myself a much needed pat on the back. It’s hard to remember to do that, sometimes!

images by pope saint victor, a nice and generous guy with a good sense of humor.

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We touched on this last week but in case you missed it—Ellie and I have set up a Howdy Do It formspring account so that you can ask us questions (anonymously or not) and we’ll answer them as best we can. Originally we thought we’d answer questions in our posts, but a week can be a long time to wait, and it kind of defeats the conversation atmosphere formspring allows. So, hop on over and ask away!”

This week:
• My write-up on the POST 27 site re-launch on Mint.

• Ellie & I set up a formspring and we answered a bunch of Howdy Do It related questions this week.

•These awesome specs that Ms. Kate Miss posted on for me, for you. Cute vintage-inspired frames, with lenses for $95. For each frame sold, one is donated to someone in need in developing country too.

• Had a chance to checkout the Thinking for a Living redesign? In a word: wow. You can key-command your way through the content. I definitely see that functionality being implemented into more blogs soon.