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Last week, I made an impor­tant, life-changing deci­sion. One that I should have made years ago, but I’ve cow­towed to abuse for too long. From here on out, I will no longer be devel­oping web­sites that work in IE6.

I will, instead, be using the fab­u­lous IE6 Update script on all of my web­sites. (There’s even a Word­Press plugin. It’s going to be so simple, it’ll almost be auto­matic. In fact, if you run a Word­Press site, could you just run out an install it, right now? I just did. It feels good.) I won’t even bother trying to check what I’ve cre­ated in IE6 any more (though I’ll admit I didn’t often).

According to Net­mar­ket­share, almost 17% of the internet still uses IE6. That’s utterly insane, given that IE6 is nine years old, three ver­sions out-of-date, and famed for being the scourge of the internet. If you’re bored one day, sit a web designer/developer—or what­ever hybrid you prefer—down and men­tion IE6. I can almost guar­antee you’ll get a frus­trated or sick­ened face, and maybe a string of exple­tives, if you’re really lucky.

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Shit hap­pens. It may be trite, but it’s true. You can be the most orga­nized, thoughtful, and thor­oughly pre­pared busi­nessperson in the uni­verse, but even­tu­ally, some­where along the line, things will spiral out of con­trol. Sud­denly, your metic­u­lously planned project has turned into a beast: a mess of missed dead­lines, a slew of thwarted expec­ta­tions, or an end product that simply isn’t shaping up right.

I’m a con­trol freak, so of course I don’t let this happen too often. How­ever, last week, a big project I’ve been working on for some time got away from me. It had been slowly plod­ding along, months behind dead­line and mostly-stagnant, while I worked on other things and waited for the bits and pieces I needed to come in. I fig­ured nothing was wrong, really—sure, we were way behind dead­line, but the client knew that, since they missed their dead­lines, right? The design process tends to stall if the client isn’t coming up with their end of things (feed­back, con­tent, etc), so I’m used to projects that go into a bit of stasis for a while. I fig­ured it wasn’t a big deal.

Kabloo-ey!

Wow, was I ever wrong. Sud­denly, some­thing hap­pened with the client—I’m guessing that my con­tacts got chewed out by their boss—and they started emailing me three times a day, asking where things were. I was working on a team with a writer and a project man­ager, plus two client con­tacts, and there was sud­denly a mas­sive influx of emails flying around all over the place, each more aggres­sive and inflam­ma­tory than the last. I had been working with an illus­trator based out of [some­where far away], and I started to realize he just wasn’t deliv­ering in a timely manner, he’d go AWOL for days on end, and that I wasn’t able to prop­erly com­mu­ni­cate my client’s vague direc­tions to him. My stress levels spiked, and panic set in. I’m going to fail, I told myself. I’m going to fail, the project will tank, and I’ll never work again. It’s over for me. Might as well start handing out resumes to cof­feeshops now.

But appar­ently I’ve now got this big bad logical-calm-adult brain going on. It told the pan­icky screaming little kid inside my head to shush, and started fig­uring out how to fix things. Now, a week later, the project is nearly fin­ished (well, sort of), my stress levels are reduced sig­nif­i­cantly, and I’m working with a new illus­trator who’s turning stuff around at light speed and gets my client far better than I do.

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Well, appar­ently my busi­ness should be slowing down right about now as everyone runs off on summer hol­i­days, but it’s emu­lating a steamship more than any­thing else. (Which is nice, except that my house looks like it’s been hit by a hur­ri­cane.) I’ve been insanely busy but have been trying to keep bal­anced (rel­a­tively speaking): I’m still (sort of) taking Sat­ur­days off, I bought a pretty vin­tage bicycle that I’m riding around town, and I’ve learned how to go swim­ming with a cast (held over my head, of course), and I ran off a few weeks ago and glis­tened (ladies don’t sweat, of course) my way through the epic heatwave/monsoons that hit Ottawa and Mon­tréal. It doesn’t really count as trav­eling, which will need to happen in the near future, but I was able to catch up with all sorts of won­derful people I haven’t seen in ages, which is just as good—if not better—for the soul.

I’m glad I’ve finally fig­ured out how to keep things bal­anced, at least a little—I remember one summer when I was on an intern­ship, and I was so deep in worka­holi­cism I didn’t go out at all. Sum­mers here are so brief, it’s nice to be able to enjoy them! I actu­ally have a suntan (although very few people believe it—basically I’m just “less glow-in-the-dark white) and have been run­ning around doing sum­mery things in spite of having spent nearly the last three months with my arm in a fibre­glass cage. (It comes off in six days! I am keeping a count­down, written in Sharpies, on the cast itself.)
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Four years ago, when I started out my busi­ness (or when­ever it was—I always get fuzzy on the dates) I was charging all of $10 an hour (some­times less, as was the case in my first job). Looking back, it’s no sur­prise, really, that by the end of my first solo year I was so broke. Tech­ni­cally, it was more than min­imum wage, so I thought it would suf­fice. Of course, I forgot that around 50% of my time is unbill­able, which has a rather dra­matic effect, either on your “hourly” rate, or on the number of hours a week you need to work in order to be profitable.

There’s a maxim to pricing free­lance work that goes some­thing like this: you can have two of the fol­lowing three ele­ments: fast, cheap, and good. When I first started out, I tried to be all three. Nat­u­rally, there ended up being some com­pro­mise, most notably with respect to the “fast” and “good” ele­ments of the equa­tion. As I grew as a designer and a busi­nessperson (it still sounds funny calling myself that), the scales shifted: my prices increased as the quality of my work and process increased.

For some time, I strug­gled with the idea of offering clients their choice between fast and cheap, but I’m coming to realize that this, too, is imprac­tical on a larger scale—I’m so con­sis­tently busy that it simply doesn’t make sense for me to take on very many lower-paying gigs, regard­less of how spread out their time­lines may be. I really prefer working on projects with shorter time­lines, anyway: the work-to-reward cycle is so much shorter (and thereby more grat­i­fying), and a more rapid cycle of devel­op­ment means that the project remains fresher in my mind—I don’t forget details or need to re-learn any­thing as we progress. So, unless it’s a case ofhey-I-really-did-need-this-yesterday, in which case a pri­ority place­ment and rapid-turnaround can be secured with a rush fee (although I’ve found most clients with urgent projects sud­denly decide it can wait a little, after all, when they dis­cover that it’ll cost more), “fast” is non-negotiable. Quality, nat­u­rally, is even less negotiable

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I get asked ques­tions about my tat­toos a lot. It some­times strikes me as strange—I have seven of them, which I sup­pose is quite a few, but they’re all really tiny black symbols—so it’s hardly as though they’re at all surprising.

A few years ago, before I quit my job to launch a busi­ness, I had my logo tat­tooed to my shoulder blade. (And actu­ally, I haven’t been tat­tooed since—I’ve run out of strategic body space!) People thought I was insane. “What hap­pens if your busi­ness tanks?” was the pop­ular question.

Of all the tat­toos I’ve had done, I’m fur­thest from regret­ting this one. Admit­tedly, my busi­ness didn’t tank, but I don’t think it would have made much dif­fer­ence if it had. It’s impos­sible to start a busi­ness without having it become a major event in your life—to me, tat­tooing my logo to my shoulder was no cra­zier than the people who tattoo their kids’ names to them­selves. (And it’s cer­tainly less crazy than those who tattoo their lovers’ names on them­selves. As far as I can tell, my busi­ness will never leave me for a younger woman or run away with all my money. I hope.)

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Bad clients are noto­rious among designers. We com­plain about them con­stantly, we’ve devoted a hilarious-yet-heartbreaking web­site to them, and we swap horror sto­ries like badges of honour, rolling our eyes in empathy and disgust.

We spend so much time com­plaining about the bad clients that it’s some­times easy to over­look the good clients. Lately, I’ve been working with a few really great clients, and I’ve been so happy because of it. Where a bad client can make you feel as though you’re losing your soul, a good client reminds you of why you fell in love with design in the first place and makes you feel as though you’re doing a good job. It’s the sort of warm-fuzzy feeling I asso­ciate with boys who bring me flowers and strangers com­pli­menting me on my shoes.

Win­ning your designer’s love, regard­less of any other fac­tors, will mean that you will receive a level of ser­vice and quality that sur­passes that most Trou­ble­some Clients receive. When I love a client and feel that my client respects me as a pro­fes­sional, I invest more of my mental ener­gies into their project. A good client makes you want to do an amazing job, where a bad client expe­ri­ence will often just make you want to finish as fast as pos­sible and get the heck out.

So, how do you go about making sure you’re the greatest client ever, and ensuring your designer feels as pas­sionate about your project as you do? Here, a few tips culled directly from my Dream Clients:

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It’s super-important.

Seri­ously, though, I’ve spent the last five weeks with my dom­i­nant arm in a giant cast. (Although after week two, I regained the use of my elbow and some fin­gers and by week three was able to use an extra couple of fin­gers on my right hand while typing, which has helped. My draw­ings, how­ever, still look like they were done by a five-year-old, and I sign credit card receipts with a squiggle and/or lip­stick kisses.) Mean­while, the work has by no means slowed down, even though my working speed has, and it’s still chal­lenging to do simple things like make a sand­wich for lunch or empty the garbage.

Accord­ingly, I’ve been working rather long hours and have been becoming intensely stressed out. (Throw in the fact that I’ve quit smoking in sup­port of Bone Healing Power and the fact that I’m some­times still in a good deal of pain–breaking your bones stinks!) Luckily, I have the greatest clients and friends in the world who help me out and under­stand when things take a little longer than they ought, or I’d have gone entirely insane by now.

I am not going here, although I rather wish I were. It’s basi­cally my stress-free island par­adise. Unfor­tu­nately, Croatia is a long drive from here.

So, in the inter­ests of pre­serving that afore­men­tioned sanity, I’m run­ning away to a secret undis­closed island loca­tion this weekend, where I’m hoping I won’t be able to get cell-phone ser­vice, and I won’t have any way of leaving until a nice fish­erman comes to get me. My laptop, shock­ingly enough, is staying home (it’s very rarely far from me) and I’m excited by the prospect of no elec­tricity, no emails, and no pos­sible way for me to try to get any work done. I’ve noticed that as I get busier, it’s harder for me to actu­ally take a full day off, in spite of how impor­tant it is for my mental well-being.

If you border on the edge of worka­holi­cism, I rec­om­mend get­ting tough with your­self and forcing your­self into iso­la­tion. So long as you can return refreshed, and not dreading a mas­sive pile of new emails, it’ll make you so much more pro­duc­tive in the long run. And so on that note: ciao, amigos!

Please note: this week I’ve been totally swamped with work-work-work-work, and since I’m still in a cast and typing the four thou­sand emails a day that run my busi­ness often makes me frus­trated and dizzy, I am utterly exhausted. I wrote this article some time ago, and while it doesn’t have any­thing to do with design per se, it’s all about pretty things (shoes!) and we all know how I feel about that. We will return to your regularly-scheduled install­ments of rel­e­vant posts next week!

There’s some­thing about a pair of heels. They’re instantly classy. They work with every­thing, they make your legs look great, and they can turn the scrub­biest ensemble into a kick-ass outfit. A beau­tiful pair of shoes is a mag­ical crea­ture that will trans­form you into a sophis­ti­cated lady-about-town, even when you’re just run­ning out to the gro­cery store in your pyjamas and bedhead.

But when you live in a cli­mate that changes every hour, and the side­walks are almost always cov­ered in ice (or snow, or mud, or random bits of gravel, or some com­bi­na­tion thereof), wearing heels can be haz­ardous to your health. As a girl who never wears flats and rarely suf­fers for it, I’ve picked up a few tricks and tips along the way.

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I’ve really been focusing on trying to build my busi­ness these days, and I’m lucky in that it’s been working, for the most part. Of course, this means that I keep run­ning out of time for all those fancy things I like so much, like sleeping and drinking martinis.

It’s reached the point at which I’m so busy trying to stay on top of all my projects that I don’t have any time to do the busi­ness side of things, and I’ve totally stalled as far as growth is concerned.

So, it’s time, once again, for the con­trol freak in me to take a back­seat, and sit qui­etly by while I hire someone.

Tell your friends! Here’s what I’m looking for.
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Yes­terday, I received two emails from dif­ferent clients, both inquiring about building WordPress-based web­sites. I responded, as I usu­ally do: “Word­Press is awe­some! I love building sites with Word­Press! Let’s do it!” I’ve found that I’m using it as the back­bone for a lot of my web­sites these days (including the entirety of this one!), and I love it more and more the more time I spend with it.

Why?

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