My life as a freelancer: 1 month after

Today I celebrate 1 month as a freelancer with this amazing “office” view. And the reason I say “celebrate” it’s because that’s what it really is: a celebration of life.

I’m having the fortune (or whatever you want to call it) of being working with awesome clients this past month wich is the base of what I consider a happy freelancer must be. And I’m happy, so thanks to them also

Through out this month I learned some valuable lessons. Some surprised me, others were a real revelation. None of them desapointed me. The everyday battle is to keep things like those. If you manage to do it, you’ll be fine.

Search your own happiness

That was my first lesson. I knew I’ll be happier, but not that much Although I was really happy in my last job (Active Media), it surprised me the ammount of income happiness you can achieve as a freelancer.
Everyday (or whenever I want) I lunch with my family, I spend a lot more time with my daughter and I see friends more often. And I’ve been working. A lot. So yeah, you can manage it.

Everyone should have an experience like this one

I now understand a lot more my former bosses. Running a businness it’s not easy. And that’s what you are: a businness.

No one will do the work for you, so you force yourself to say bye bye procastination. And that feels so good… The reason I say that everyone should have an experience like this one is simple. You face some things in your profession with another perspective. You have to. If you’re beeing lazy, you don’t get the job done. If you don’t get the job done, you disapoint clients. If you disapont clients, they’ll never work with you. If they’ll never work with you, you start to loose clients. And if you don’t have clients, you businness is over. That’s the hard truth.

So if you’re working in an agency, don’t forget: your laziness is your worst enemy, not your bosses. If the company looses clients, they will loose you.

If you don’t love your clients, you’ll not succeed

I never though I would like so much of the client management part of the job. I learn a lot with my my former boss to manage expectations and some client management tips. And I’m applying them.
Fact is, if you’re not good managing clients you will not be a good freelancer. So if that is not your thing, learn. There are a lot of resources on the web to help you with that, but my basic “secrets” are:

• Be nice. No one wants to work with an arrogant bastard.
• Don’t promisse what you can’t do. You’ll end up loosing your client.
• Don’t charge too little. Your price is your value. Remember that.
• Be a partner, not a monkey. You should see yourself as a partner of your client. Show new ideas, talk with him. If you’re just a monkey who codes or design, you’ll become disposable. And you don’t want that to happen.
• Break barriers. Try to loose the formal relationship with your client. When you start to be known by your name instead of your profession designation, your relation will last longer

I try to do it all. Not as a scam, but because I really believe in it. I will not work with a client that I don’t like. That’s not arrogance, it’s just a search for a happier life.

Life is good

Yeah, you can make your life good. As I read once, it’s really easy to be a sad person. You just have to do nothing. On the other side, it gives a lot of work to be happy. So it’s your choice and only yours. No one should be running your life, except you.

New year, new life: my start as a freelancer

Afters 7,5 years working at Active Media, I’ve decided to change my life. I have so much to thank them, specially to Jorge Oliveira who has been a reference since my early start in the business.

But the time has come. I’m going to be a full time freelancer.

Projects for the future? Tons of them. But let’s take one step at a time. I’m available for hiring from now on.

Now, lets rock & roll!

5 content strategy guidelines to follow

Although I’m not the author, I must share and record in this blog 5 topics that Brad talks in his article on Smashing Magazine:

I’ll be speaking at Flash Camp Portugal 2011

It’s with an extreme honor that I’ll be in this years Flash Camp Portugal as a speaker.

I’ll be speaking at HTML5 portuguese community

This was a great surprise. I was invited to speak next Thursday (3 November) on the second portuguese HTML5 community event.

I’ll be speaking at gotoAndSki(‘Switzerland’);

It’s with great pleasure that I announce that in January 2012 I’ll be at gotoAndSki(‘Switzerland’); as a speaker

After spending some amazing days in last year conference, like I told in this post, it was with great joy that I got Fernando invitation to present the “non-geek” talk of the event. I called the talk “Hello Ideas” and it will be like this:

UXLx – A truly User Experience

Photo by UXLx

To much has been said about UXLx for the last days. You just need to do a search on Twitter to see that. So what can I add? Nothing special, really… “Awesome”, “amazing”, “perfect”, “mind blowing” are not new adjectives to characterize the conference. They were used last year and abused on this one.

UXLx is the world’s User Experience and Interaction Design best conference. Simple as that. It’s a 3 days event where the first 2 are workshops and some short talks and the last day is where the big names talk.

I had the fortune to work as a Partner while at Active Media. Actually what you see in this photo was developed by me (and designed by a colleague). Working with Bruno, the head master behind UXLx, was nothing but great. Fast decision maker, know what he wants, a dream of a client…

I’l try to resume what the conference was to me with some quotes and thoughts of who I liked the most. So, let the game begin.

read the rest of this entry

Internet Explorer 6 on Mac OSX

I never thought I would say this, but I finally have Internet Explorer 6 on my Mac!

No, I wont use it to browse the web casually, I’ll do it for development testing only. I promise.

You may ask why the hell am I going to do that. IE6 is dead, so it’s kind of stupid. I know. But tell that to the corporate company that has IE6 installed in all Windows PC’s and can’t upgrade because the IT department won’t do it because… well, just because.

SWITCH – The future belongs to them

Let me to tell you a story.

nce upon a time, a little boy borned in Portugal. This happened in 1992 and their parents called him Ricardo. It still is his name.

One day, in 2010, Ricardo brings us SWITCH for the first time, a conference about “technology, science, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation in a network-friendly environment”. In 2011, one year later, the second SWITCH happens with 28 speakers and more than 200 attendees. It was last weekend. I couldn’t make it to the first one, but this one me and some Active Media folks (also one of the sponsors) didn’t miss it.

You might be thinking now:

“Wait, but 1992… we’re in 2011… that means that Ricardo is 18 years old? And he organized the first conference with only 17? Yeah, right…”

Well, you better think twice. It’s true.

Invisible Cities – a designer’s review

After reading the article “7 non-UX books you should read” on Johnny Holland Magazine, I decided to buy some. The first  I read was “Invisible Cities”, by Italo Calvino. According to Jeroen van Geel and Vicky Teinaki, the article’s authors:

Invisible Cities is a book that is experienced, rather than read. Not in an expansive, descriptive way – the novel is a mere 166 pages – rather, as if Mozart had been a writer. Taking place as a series of conversations between the explorer Marco Polo and emperor Kublai Kahn, the book has the feeling of the state of mind between dreams and reality – evocing deeper meanings without ever being too clever about it  (though apparently the structure of the novel is very clever indeed, employing such techniques as the Fibonacci sequence and sine waves). We’re never entirely sure if the cities that are talked about – the titular Invisible Cities, Cities and the Dead, Hidden Cities – are ones that Polo believes he has visited, or fables for the grumpy emperor. If I had to suggest a book that captured what magic was, it’d be this one.

If I wasn’t a designer, I would thought that it was a boring book. Why? Because I don’t like descriptive literature.