so, i’m really, really starting to get tired of the xx things you should ____ blog posts.  like, really f’ing tired.  usually they’re things like 22 ways to make twitter work for you or 18 tricks to monetize your blog or, if you’re a designer, 43 grunge textures or 29 photoshop brushes and vectors.  the last straw for me came tonight as i was reading fudgegraphics‘ latest post recommending you subscribe to fudgegraphics via rss (which i read via rss).

at the end of his explanation of rss and what it can do for you and how he implements it on his site — and i have to give him props because a lot of bloggers force you to go to the site for full content, especially when there’s art and graphics or at least extended articles — he has a link to a blog post on colorburned  for 127 rss feeds that all designers should subscribe to.

127?  really?

seriously.  i check twitter, i glance at rss, i read my email, and somewhere in the middle of that and working a part-time job working in cheese, i get some design done.  when the frack am i going to have time to read 127 feeds?  i mean, really.  and that’s the thing i have against these posts.  53 grunge themes?  how about giving me the 5 best, because i guarantee there’s 48 that suck, and there’s not enough hours in the day to check every single one of these links.  127 rss feeds that all designers should subscribe to?  and in keeping up on those 127 feeds, when exactly am i going to have time to, i don’t know, do any design work?

see, i get the thing that these lists are good for seo and people who are searching for the best whatever, but here’s the catch 22: for most of the x number of tips posts, they’re the same tips you see everywhere.  for the x best blogs to read, ditto, you get the same links. upstart blogger posted a while ago his lament for not being able to find a legitamite list of influential female bloggers.  every once in a while i see a list on tips for twitter and think it might offer something vaguely enlightening and am sorely disappointed.

that leaves the similar posts for designers.  these are tools, plugins, textures, stock photography, or graphics that can be used in our work.  and honestly, if you are a designer, there’s a need, a hole to fill for really good sources for this stuff.  especially if you want to stay on the cutting edge and have new and interesting designs.  every once in a while i see the same old price tag i’ve used or the same cracked paint that i found on stock exchange and i wonder just how many times these things have been used on other sites.  so there is a definite need, but half, if not most of the things that get on these lists are really worthless, unusable or incomplete or so highly specialized you’d use it for one client in a hundred.  so give me 5, 10 at the most.  don’t give me the 53 that answered your tweet when you posted a call on twitter.  i don’t have time to sort through all the crap to find the rare diamonds in the rough.  i have work to do and kids to feed and not enough hours in the day to spend wasting on these huge ridiculous lists.  there’s something to be said about being concise, and if you, the poster of 100+ of anything can’t break that down into smaller chunks and weed out the less useful or lower quality entries, really, what are you doing for the design community?  what’s the last rule of the rules of design?  good design is as little design as possible?  yeah, that.

i’ve been hard at work working on a new look for this site.

okay, actually not, i’ve been slacking, but i did finally come up with a design that i am going to start building.  here’s a peek at the new design.

the new look for jazzsequence.com

so last week, erin and i decided to cut off iFreelance for good.  we’ve gotten a good run on Elance and we’ve only really gotten 1 fix-it job on iFreelance, the interface isn’t as good, the support and payment isn’t as easy (for either party) or well developed, and the jobs are fewer and tend to be less money.  so we closed down shop on iFreelance.

similarly, we’ve been talking about dropping heritage as a source for freelance work, as well.  we don’t make as much money, the projects are more work, the customers are often frustrated and upset by the time they get to us, they didn’t pick us as designers, but the company, and therefore the projects are typically less the types of things we really want to be doing. additionally, it’s been months since we had a project that wasn’t a pain and actually was something we enjoyed doing.  on the contrary, pretty much every single project we’ve had lately has been completely horrible, including the one i’m working on right now in which the customer doesn’t pick up the phone when i call, and responds to my emails in one sentence that does not answer what i’m trying to find out.  it’s a joke and it’s been a week and i haven’t gotten any information yet.

which has made us step up our exit strategy a bit.

the original plan was to wait and see how the off-season/winter treated us as freelancers and evaluate heritage after january and maybe drop them then.  at this point, the amount of stress and hassle and time wasted dealing with their stupid and non-functional bueracracy makes me think that we’d be making more money if we were not taking anything from them and just doing stuff on our own through our site and Elance.  more money, because we get more out of working for ourselves (since we set the prices and it all goes to us, so we make more from doing less), and because we’re not wasting time dealing with people who don’t respond to us and stressing out about it.  and time, in this business, really is money.

so.  the new plan is to drop heritage after this project.

i won’t say anything bad about heritage (well, not more so than i have already, i guess).  the experience wasn’t all bad.  on the contrary, we learned a lot, and have done really well.  but the system is flawed, the outsource department is often left hanging and seemingly ignored, with very little support from in-house staff or training material to go off of.  increasingly, and especially since we’ve been able to make money doing this outside of heritage, the inefficiencies and pain points of working with them are made more obvious and it makes the experience more abrasive.  it’s hard to be an advocate for the company as a designer dealing with customers when i’m so frustrated with the situation.  the projects have slowed to a crawl as the number of outsourcers has expanded and the amount of projects being moved to the design phase are hung up in the gathering content stage, and even those that do get moved to design are woefully incomplete.  at least when we’re dealing with our own customers, they know what they want, they have their content, or not, and know that they’re responsible to.  if they want a specific feature, we can give it to them, if they don’t, we don’t.  we don’t spend time and patience haggling about enhancements the customer doesn’t really need or charging them a gross amount for things that should have been included.  it makes dealing with customers, and the project, even more painful than it should be and takes time away from doing what we should be doing which is, designing their site.  in my mind, i’m much more able to ensure good customer service if i’ve been with them directly from the beginning.  coming into the story at the end, after they’ve already been pissed off for 3 months about nothing happening on their site does not a good customer service experience make.

but it has been a learning experience and a good jumping off point.  but it’s a lot like tech support — no one with any actual talent stays with it forever; if they knew their stuff, they’d be doing something else.  it’s a good intro job, but it’s time to move on.

after a month of being frustrated and writing bids on projects we wouldn’t get, erin and i re-evaluated what we were doing, how we were approaching the business, and what we should be doing.  since then, in a little over a week, we’ve scored 7 new projects on Elance and completed 4 of them.

saying we’re excited would be an understatement.  sure, we’ve had to cut our prices to be more competitive because many buyers are wary of new providers, but now, while we still have the new provider tag next to our name on our bids, we have positive reviews and a history of completed projects — we end up looking better than the other new providers.  and we’ve only had to stop bidding on things we didn’t really want anyway, and take projects we’re more interested in.  the ultimate decision was to play to our strengths — we don’t like making professional, corporate websites nearly as much as we like making fun, artistic websites.  and anyone who wouldn’t want to hire us because we’re not professional enough is someone we wouldn’t want to work for anyway.  so we’ve changed some of the language on the thinktank site and changed how we word our bids to be much more honest, and conversational, and less canned.  and it seems to be working — we think we’re really the only ones who talk like human beings in our bids and it seems to be attracting a positive response (oddly people seem to feel more comfortable with that…).

and this is working for ourselves, not through a third party.  which means that when we do work for someone they can say we did a great job, not the company we’re working through, which all just reflects better on us.  we’re really just excited we’re doing so well.  and it means we can cut down the number of projects we need to take from that other freelancing job.  it may be a while, yet, before we feel comfortable cutting them off entirely, but since doing these Elance jobs, we’ve had to chase down our customers much, much less, and they’ve been much easier to work with, and we don’t need to worry about calling them during business hours or really talking on the phone at all.  And oddly enough — although hws says that their customers are the type that want their site up cheaply and asap — the projects we’ve been working on outside of hws have gotten done faster than those for hws.

it’s all just so much more satisfying and rewarding and we’re really starting to feel like we know what we’re doing.  and, you know, i’m excited, too, because we’re expecting our business cards to arrive tomorrow.

verily it was decided that it was time for a makeover of the thinktank site.  this came down from on high because we went to some other web designers’ sites and realized most, if not all, our contemporaries tended to be a lot more conservative in their presentation on their own website.  now, this seems counter-intuitive to me — i mean, it’s your site — you should show off how insanely badass you are.  but no, most of them are fairly boring, professional-looking sites.

well we didn’t want to do that.  but we did want to make it a bit more like what other people were doing.

so i had a brilliant idea to try to find a script or something that would allow for a dropdown menu that would choose the theme for the thinktank site.  so you could pick which one you were looking at.  not only would it be cool just for the cool gadget factor, but it would showcase our skillz and make us look more badass and give a lot of variety to the site.  it would (in theory) be as good a representation of what we can and do…do…as the portfolio itself!

BEHOLD!  thinktank-studio.com and the glorious dropdown of awesomeness!

(as a sidenote, we’ve been watching way too much how i met your mother recently…..)

i’ve got a couple more themes for the thinktank site in the works and erin’s gonna make some so it should be pretty sweet.

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in other news, it’s not quite done yet, but i’ve created a kickapps community for jazzsequence.  you might remember me talking about kickapps a couple weeks ago in this post.  mostly this was an experiment to set it up, get it working, and know what it’s about so i can start building it for other people.  but it’s also cool in its own right and i think could take the place of the now-dead forums and such if, you know, i still *have* a community….if you have a login on the jazzsequence.com blog, you should already be able to log into the members area with the same info.  if not, make one, and be awesome.  there’s blogs and message boards and stuff (at least when i set it all up).  you can see what i’m talking about at members.jazzsequence.com.

it’s been a long time coming, i finally updated the blog design. i’ve done a couple custom wordpress themes for thinktank clients now, and it was about time i did one for myself. it’s not really anything new, although the banner is totally new. but the css was recoded by hand. the overall design is keeping in line with the thinktank site — i really like that look.

so, if you haven’t heard, firefox 3 is coming soon. the mozilla organization is trying to set a guiness world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period. so head on over to Spread Firefox headquarters and pledge to download on Download Day (date to be announced).

personally i like the idea of a wordwide “download day” — but i think it shouldn’t necessarily be focussed on one software. so my pledge and what i propose to you — all 5 of you, dear, dear readers — is to download AS MUCH AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE on whatever day mozilla decides to be “download day.” let’s put so much pressure on the servers that we clog the internets tubes, knock down a couple servers, piss off the riaa, whatever. let’s celebrate download day with some good old fashioned destruction.

oh, and if you were curious, trent reznor compiled a mix that features the artists he’s touring with this summer. you can download it for free — it’s got full art and stuff. pretty neat.

and in completely other news that’s pretty much interesting only to me — i noticed from my google analytics report that i got some bumps in hits and search referrals when i talked about gaeta and bsg. and it made me think, huh, so if i actually talk about stuff that people like — they’ll go to the site? weird. so i think i’m going to start dropping BATTLESTAR names to STAR TREK get some extra FREE PORN hits ENLARGE YOUR MEMBER. we’ll see how it VIAGRA goes.