*** From the Archives ***

This article is from February 16, 2009, and is no longer current.

Free For All: Great Gratis Goodies

Freelancer’s Estimation Assistance Tool
“How much should I charge?”
It’s the most bedeviling question faced by every designer when she first decides to go freelance, to subcontract to other designers, or to open a studio of her own. You can’t take on a client without knowing what to charge. Should your hourly rate be just a little bit less than what other designers in the same market charge? That could lead to a slippery slope of price wars. It’s also a dangerous game that might net you a lot of work that doesn’t cover your bills.
Before you can answer the rate question, you must first answer another: “How much do I have to spend?” That’s where FEAT — the Freelancer’s Estimation Assistance Tool — comes in. FEAT presents you with a simple form in which you list estimated costs for typical expenses (rent, utilities, taxes, software hardware, Web site hosting, etc.) and then estimates your monthly and weekly operating expenses. Fill in the number of billable hours per week you expect, adjust the profit margin, and FEAT will compute the hourly rate you should charge to meet your expenses and financial goals. It even includes a pricing wizard to help you produce project estimates!

FEAT is a lightweight Adobe AIR application that runs on either Windows or Mac OSX. Download it here.
Aller Font Family
[Editor’s Note: Thanks to a head’s up from the sharp-eyed Jay Nelson, Pariah discovered in March 2009 that the Aller font family is in fact a commissioned typeface licensed for the exclusive use of a particular organization and its employees. It is not free for any other use. We regret the error.]
Designed by Dalton Maag, Ltd., Aller is a sharp, humanist sans serif type family comprised of seven styles. It includes light, regular, and bold Roman and italic typefaces, as well as a heavy Display Regular style.

Photoshop Plug-in to Create Website Favicons
Wish you could figure out how to create an icon that appears in tabs and bookmarks for a Web site you’ve designed? They’re called “favicons,” and they’re simply a Windows format .ICO icon file saved on, and served from, your Web site like any other image. All modern graphical browsers on Mac, Windows, and Linux recognize and display Windows .ICO format images and favicons. So once you have a favicon, it’s a snap to upload it to your server, then insert a single line of code into your HTML or PHP pages to tell browsers where to find it.
Creating favicons, though, can be problematic for first timers. Neither Windows nor Mac OS X comes with built-in utilities to create or edit Windows .ICO icons. There are plenty of applications you can purchase for that purpose, as well as a few open-source icon editors and even Web-based Java utilities that let you do it in your browser, but that’s yet more software to learn. Wouldn’t it be great if Photoshop could create and edit .ICO icons? Thanks to Toby Thain’s free Photoshop plug-in, it can.
Here you can find Toby’s Photoshop plug-ins for Windows and Mac, as well as detailed installation instructions and lots of information about creating favicons.

Backup and Synchronize Files
Take it from someone who once paid $12,000 to recover data from a corrupted hard drive: Establish and use a data backup strategy.
The cold hard fact of computing is that you will lose data at some point. Files get deleted, either through user error or program misbehavior. No matter how careful you are, viruses, Trojans, and worms can hit your computer. Hard drives fail. If any of these happen, and you don’t have a sound backup strategy already running, you could lose everything — e-mail, contacts, portfolio, financial records, client work, assets.
There are many utilities that back up your data. Bonkey, the Backup Monkey, is a pretty good one — and it’s open source. With versions for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, Bonkey can backup and synchronize files from or across those platforms to an impressive selection of locations. Through either on-demand or scheduled actions, Bonkey can backup all or only recently modified files to local internal, external, or network drives; to Windows shares; to Amazon S3, or; via FTP or SFTP to any remote server. It can even backup the same data simultaneously to multiple locations. For added safety and speed, Bonkey can even encrypt and compress data prior to sending.
Give it a try from the official site.
Click the image to see a larger version.

Halftone and Spiral Photoshop Brushes
Timothy Blake creates funky yet useful brushes for Photoshop. His latest set, Spirals and Half-tone Brush Set Edition 2, includes the ten high-resolution brushes you see below. Half the set creates halftones in various densities and depths that are better used for spot painting rather than area painting. The rest are spiral designs at their funkiest when you’re filling or overlaying an area of color.

Download the brushes from Timothy’s “Freebies” page
Please note: Free for All will often link to resources hosted on external Web sites outside of the control of CreativePro.com. At any time those Web sites may close down, change their site or permalink structures, remove content, or take other actions that may render one or more of the above links invalid. As such neither Pariah S. Burke nor CreativePro.com can guarantee the availability of the third-party resources linked to in Free for All.

Pariah S. Burke is the author of many books and articles that empower, inform, and connect creative professionals.
  • Jay J Nelson says:

    I read the license agreement included with Aller, and it appears to have been developed for exclusive use by the Danish School of Media and Journalism, with rights reverting to the designer (Dalton Maag Ltd) after 1 September 2010. I’m no expert, but it sounds to me like only the DMSJ can use it until then.

  • Anonymous says:

    BEST

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