As such I’m going to give it a makeover with a lick of paint, some wall shelves, a white painted pine desk and a few indoor plants. Ikea, here I come!

I’ve been dying to use a salmon pink and apple colour scheme ever since I saw it on Cougartown.

A lot of the doodles are eCommerce related since that is what I mainly design, but feel free to comment with suggestions for further doodles. Also, if you use them, I’d be interested to see where!

Download the file (1.2mb)

Handdrawn web design elements, 1.2mb

Freelance Pros

• Setting my own schedule. I often worked long hours throughout the week so that I could have one or two ’sleep-in’ days.
• Bragging rights. I used to love saying “I work for myself,” at 22 years old!
• Wearing pajamas to work. Casual Friday was every day! You should have seen my hair…
• Being picky. I didn’t always have the luxury, but when things were busy, I could pick and choose which projects most interested me.
• Travel! This was a huge deal for me as I was flying to the UK every couple of months. Working remotely gives you the freedom to work from anywhere!
• Writing off things. When tax season rolls around, you’ll have a lot of expenses. Phone, cable, computer costs, and even a portion of your rent!
• Meeting new people. Freelance designers have a ’secret club’ in which they share project ideas, inspirational sites, CSS tricks, fonts, and more.  When a fellow freelancer contacts you, RESPOND!
• Personal projects. When things are slow, you’ll have spare time to work on personal things which will help keep you motivated and interested.

Freelance Cons

• Not knowing when work is coming in. It’s a little stressful worrying about not getting enough work in to support yourself.  It got hectic at times
• Not knowing when money is coming in. This makes life ultra complicated when you have to spend a weekend eating Kraft Dinner and not going out just in case that client’s cheque doesn’t arrive.
• Being unable to trust clients. I learned this the hard way! Be wary of in-betweeners: the ones who outsource client work to you.  Some you can trust, some you can’t.
• Instant messaging. When your clients know you’re a click away, they’ll waste so much of your time by interrupting you with Skype messages and not letting you get properly ‘in the zone’.
• Lack of holidays. As a freelancer, most of my holidays turned into working holidays.  I didn’t work I didn’t get paid, and my work would pile up.
• No benefits. You better get used to paying for dental, meds and whatever else an extended healthcare plan would cover!

Full-time Pros

• Steady pay. It’s nice to be able to budget accurately with a salary you can rely on.
• Better pay. I spent too many freelance hours doing things I wasn’t getting paid for, which meant that I was working less than full-time and quite often invoiced clients for less time than I spent.
• Holidays. It’s nice to get away on long weekends and relax!  I feel a lot more relaxed now.
• Steady work. In an agency you don’t have to reel in your own clients!
• No more invoicing! It’s such a relief not to have to do the administrative side of things anymore.
• Social interaction. It’s nice to have people to talk to during the day!

Full-time Cons

• Answering to a boss. This is particularly a difficult thing for me as my boss is also my boyfriend.  But he forgives my occasional attitude and we make it work.
• Work you’re not interested in. You can’t be picky in an agency; you sometimes have to do things you don’t want to do.
• Set hours. I’m not a morning person, and thankfully blubolt is flexible with this one because I’m generally more productive after 10am.
• Planning meals gets a bit trickier. You have to plan your lunch (or buy it) and prep dinner if you want to eat right when you get home.
• Teamwork. As a freelancer YOU call the shots – it’s a lot more difficults to work as part of a team.  But also a lot more rewarding.

For me, freelance was the right thing to do at the time and working for an agency feels right now. It all depends on your place in life, I guess. Despite all the ups and downs, I’ll always think fondly of my freelance days!

I bought my Macbook Pro (a refurb because I was broke) in September of last year. My original warranty had nearly worn out when I started having problems with my graphics card, the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. First the screen started to go funny blocks of colour. Then I occasionally had trouble getting the display working from sleep.

Then one day it stopped working. Bummer. But these things happen, right?

My colleague, Max, pointed me towards online forums where other MacBook Pro users were having the exact same problems. We* were able to diagnose the problem fairly easily, and I took it to the Apple shop.

The problem is with the graphics card being crappy and overheating. We were able to connect remotely and discover that my beloved laptop wasn’t recognizing the graphics card for what it was, but as an integrated Intel chip.

Because the graphics card is soldered to the logic board, the whole dang thing needs replacing which is essentially a new laptop, right?

Wrong. Two weeks later the exact same thing started happening again, which we half-expected based on customer complaints in the forums.

So now my laptop is in getting fixed again and I am trying to work on a Dell, which would be alright if I didn’t keep trying to use Apple shortcuts and having random things happen…

* by ‘we’ I mean Max. I just stood around.