Clients
I’ve had a pretty busy week! On Monday, the redesign of MyGreenlake.com was launched. This blog is a news site for one of Seattle’s most charming neighborhoods and the woman who runs this blog (Amy Duncan) is just awesome!
Amy contacted me a long time ago and expressed interest in having me redo her website. We chatted about her wish list for the site, her community and some of her concerns about the existing layout, I quoted her on the project and immediately got a response telling me that she could not afford me, BUT that she was going to save up and would be in touch again. Well… I don’t want to sound snotty, but I had heard that before and never once had someone actually came back. Well… Amy was the first! A few months later there was a new message from her in my inbox saying she was ready to lay down her deposit and begin work! :)
This was actually a pretty large project, the site has a loyal following, a hefty archive of posts and a number of paying local advertisers. This was truly a project where I worked hard to not only pay attention to the details, but also the BIG PICTURE. I look forward to watching how the site’s re-vamp will help it’s community to better utilize all of the great content Amy provides!
Business & Freelance
This week I met with a fellow designer who I have done some Illustration and production work for. She has been a print designer in Seattle for over 20 years. After the last few years of slowly downsizing her business more and more, she is closing up shop and had one client left that she had decided to pass off to me. She gave the a run down of the type of work they’ve done together, gave the owners a sparkling review and clued me in on that billings she’s done with them over the last 3 years. I feel honored that she thought of me as someone to hand-down her prized client to! Forming relationships with other designers is so invaluable! Aside from awesome things like this happening, you can learn so much from them!
Podcast
This week Niki and I released the first Pagebreak Snippet! Basically, we realized that having 3 weeks between each Pagebreak episode was a long stretch, so these snippets are short-format episodes where we take about 10 minutes to discuss a blog post related to design, development, business or marketing. We plan to release snippets at least once a week throughout the month and of course we will continue to do our long-format book review episodes!
Our book for October is “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug, which is a all about website usability. I just received my copy in the mail yesterday and already am on page 35. I can already tell this will be a great benefit to my design work and I think Niki and I will be able to have a good discussion about it!