25 Awesome & Unique Gift Ideas for Designers & Developers

Christmas is around the corner and I actually thought, “how boring! there is nothing creative and unique for gifts”. Then I randomly came across this article on Six Revisions, with a long list of goodies!

If you know a designer or a developer or just an all round creative person, def take a gander at this list!

Giving and getting gifts are great, but I want to take time this Christmas to help those who aren’t that fortunate to give or get. Here are a list of Charities that might be useful to you this holiday season!

The Toronto Santa Claus Fund

The birth of The Toronto Star Santa Claus Fund charity in 1906 relates back to a vivid memory from former Toronto Star publisher Joseph Atkinson’s youth. One day, young Joseph was watching other children skate on a pond. A lady approached and asked him why he wasn’t skating. When  she heard his sad tale of being too poor to afford skates, she bought him his frst pair    for Christmas. Atkinson never forgot the warmth and generosity of that stranger. Years later, he  told the stories of other needy children in the pages of the Toronto Star and asked readers to contribute money to help buy Christmas gifts for them. The gifts of fruit, candy, socks and mitts were distributed through Toronto’s Little Trinity Church. Today, bright gift boxes are flled with a warm shirt, socks, mitts and hat, a book, small toy, candy and dental hygiene items. The gifts are still delivered to children’s homes by volunteers, just as they were in 1906.

Toronto Christmas Events CP24/CHUM Christmas Wish

The CP24/CHUM Christmas Wish was established in 1966 as a charitable foundation called CHUM’s Kid’s Crusade Foundation, for the purpose of assisting children in need, and children’s charities

Toys for Tots

Donate a new toy or give a donation to help make Christmas a little brighter for a needy child in your community.

Angel Tree

Angel Tree is a ministry of Prison Fellowship, delivering love in the form of Christmas gifts and a message of hope to children of prisoners. Angel Tree Christmas connects the parents in prison with their children through the delivery of Christmas gifts by local church volunteers who purchase and deliver these gifts and the Gospel to children. Often times the local church will host a Christmas party for the children, their caretakers and family. Learn more now about getting your church involved with Angel Tree projects:

Make a Wish Foundation

Make this holiday season special by helping a child’s dream come true. Make a Wish’s unique holiday donation options will help grant the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions.

6 sites with really interesting header graphics!

Some really cool motion going on in the image. Excellent graphics.

I really like this toaster idea, especially the ornamental design. Love it!!!

Extremely different, needle in a teddybear. Neat background.

Very nice side bar. Inspirational.

The wood texture has been done quite a bit, but not quite like this...

Fantastic use of graphics. A little too much even...maybe, but still really good!

Macro Photography (Truly Inspirational)

Things I managed to accomplish…
I have passed my courses (database courses I was taking to enhance my web skilllzzzz) with ‘flying’ colours and couldn’t be happier. And to think I thought I might’ve failed, that’s a big leap. Thank God . Next step, start putting that to practice.

I managed to run for 30 mins straight! That’s right, I’m a brick house!

I also finally got around to finalizing my name change, before our one year anniversary!

So things are flowing, pretty well. Good motion happening here .

Anyways, more inspiration coming from Smashing Magazine’s latest (one of them) article. The colours and details were just too gorgeous to pass by. I can only hope to get a camera that can capture detail like this, one day.To learn more about the photographers, click on the images. Except the bubbly one by Sophie, I couldn’t find any link to that one. If anyone knows a link, please let me know and I would be happy to add in in.

by Chan Chen

by Lux Tenebra

by Sophie (Don't really have a link for this one, but would love to have one, if any of you know of one for this artist)

by Kristina Buceatchi

by Justin Dotson

by Kristina Buceatchi

One Exam Done & Some Cool Findings

So one exam is done! I feel sort of free. Writing code on a piece of paper so much harder than typing it out on a computer screen…takes serious coding skill!

So, during one of my many adventures on the web, I came across these everyday items designed in a unique and intriguing way.

A strange canapé designed by Lila Jang

USB Buddies

Mus2, designed by Artemy Lebedev

For Cool Photoshop, Illustrator or Css Ideas Go Here

This is a rave. A rave about Veerle’s blog. For cool photoshop, illustrator or css ideas go here.

I’ve been frequenting her blog on many a occasion and I always come away with a new trick or lesson learnt. A little background on Veerle…

Veerle is a graphic/web designer living in Belgium. Her career began in 1992 as a freelance graphic designer under the name of Duoh!. The first 3 years were mainly filled with print orientated work such as logos, stationery and brochures.

From 1995 she broadened her horizons and started designing websites and user interfaces for intranets together with multimedia development. In 2003 she discovered CSS and since then has been promoting it through her blog.

There are quite a few neat tutorials and articles even on various topics and artists. Veerle, is a true inspiration to me and I really like her flair for design.

What Designers Can Do #2

Featuring…

Yukio Miyamoto “Master of the Gradient Mesh” (Adobe Illustrator)
Absolutely brilliant and 100% Illustrator

Fundamentals for a good website

A website is like having a business card. Only difference is it’s online, with a lot more information than a business card and no expensive printing involved(yay to that).

Websites are very important in todays marketing strategies. Before getting your business card, people ‘google’ for a website (atleast, thats what I know when I am looking up a new restaurant or someone’s choice recommendations). Your online presence (website) is the first impression you make on potential clients. What kind of impression are you making online?

The following text on what makes a good site, is ofcourse, my opinion and is not written in stone (its been tried and true in my experience).

1. When designing a site, first comes the site map. After this, comes the design (GUI). Design the site keeping in mind one day or the next hour you might have to make some changes or additions to it. Your webpage should consist of the header(with logo), content and footer (somewhere in there should be your navigational buttons).

2. Most people are very visual and like to look at images. Have a good balance between text and images (I strongly recommend hiring a photographer for ‘your’ own shots or open up a stock image account online). If thats still not an option, use colour, just don’t be tacky about it.

3. Once you have text and images which is the meat of the site, make sure you have a good enough whitespace. You need whitespace or some of it so the reader or viewer’s eye isn’t jumping all over the screen.

4. Flash is really nice. My first website was done all flash. I am a fan of it. However, lets not have a million moving things on the website, you might think it’s ‘cool’ but it might just be too distracting and take away from the content on your site. Personally, when I see a lot of moving elements on a site, I think to myself, the company must not be confident about their product and need fancy things to keep the viewers interested.

If you MUST have moving elements or music, minimize as much as you can, otherwise just walk away from it.

5. Make your site accessible. Try some ‘meta-tags‘. Can’t hurt to get yourself some google adwords or those facebook ads. Heck couldn’t hurt to start a blog, visit other blogs and make sure to participate in comments and leave a link to your site.

Brooke Fraser of Hillsongs LIVE at El Mocambo July 2nd 2008!

I would like to take some time to shed some light on this amazing talent from New Zealand, Brooke Fraser.
Brooke Gabrielle Fraser (born December 15, 1983 in Wellington, New Zealand) is an award-winning New Zealand singer-songwriter. She is also one of the principle worship leaders of the Christian worship band Hillsong United.

Brooke started taking piano lessons at seven years of age, continuing until seventeen. She started writing songs at age twelve and taught herself the acoustic guitar at fifteen. Notably, she has never taken any singing lessons. She has been on tour with John Mayer and David Bowie, on different occasions. She is currently on tour in Canada and the US.

The humanitarian side of her is revealed through her sponsoring children (World Vision). She clearly has a heart for children because during one of her trips to Rawanda she wrote the song “Albertine” about a young child (named Albertine), whom she met while there. This song later became the album’s title track, which also landed #4 in the New Zealand single charts. Her album Albertine is commercially released in North America on May 27 on 2008.

Fraser attends Hillsong Church. She is a worship leader and collaborator on the Hillsong United series of worship albums.

Looking forward to seeing her in action July 2nd 2008!

What Designers Can Do #1

Experimental Design Piece featured on istock.com by designer, Karen Mc Dade

Original Image by Iconogenic

Steps to becoming a Successful Freelancer

Are you serious about your life as a freelancer? Then you might be interested in reading this post below. This is taken from “The Five Most Common Mistakes of Female Freelancers” by Marie Baca, featured on Freelance Switch. Maria makes some excellent points that really should be considered and taken seriously, not just for women but even men who are serious about moving forth. I’m sure these can be applied to almost anyone trying to take their business to the next level, and be successful.

1. Being afraid of self-promotion. What is it about self-promotion that freaks out so many of my female colleagues? You are your business, and you’ve got to market yourself just like any business would market its flagship product. Hand out business cards, attend networking events, create a personal website yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

Top-notch clients aren’t going to come knocking on your door, begging for your services. Landing an assignment is a competition, and you’ve got to treat it as such, using every marketing tool you have in your favor.

2. Not separating work life and home life. The freelancers I know who make this mistake make it in one of two ways: either they work way too much and end up burning out, or they allow their home responsibilities to get in the way of their business obligations. Boundaries between one’s career and personal life are important in any business situation, but when you work at home they become even more essential.

Be realistic about how much work you can do in a given day and don’t take on projects that will require more than that amount. Conversely, once you agree to an assignment, you’ve got to meet your deadlines or risk ruining your reputation. Non-emergency excuses about kids, husbands, or pets just make you look unprofessional.

3. Getting bullied into a lower rate. I hate negotiating. I wish I was one of those people who could just put on their game face and haggle until I got what I wanted. But I am not one of those people, and on a number of occasions my good nature has been taken advantage of and I have been bullied into working for peanuts (or, and I hate to admit this, even for free with the promise of some reward that never materialized).

Now, there are plenty of female freelancers out there who are incredible negotiators, but if you aren’t one of them, it is imperative that you set a minimum rate and NEVER EVER allow a client to talk you down. As a freelance writer, I find that a minimum hourly rate has worked best for me; that way, I can take per-article and per-word rates, divide them by the hours of work they will require, and easily compare projects.

4. Not re-investing in you and your business. As freelancers, our paychecks often don’t arrive in a timely manner, and when you do finally get that envelope in the mail it’s tempting to run to the bank to save the money for a rainy day.

Although saving for the slow times is an important activity, it’s equally important to re-invest some of your income back into your business.

Although saving for the slow times is an important activity, it’s equally important to re-invest some of your income back into your business. The trick is to spend that money on things that will have the greatest impact on your work.

One of my freelancer friends used the money from a big assignment to hire an intern to take care of invoicing, looking for gigs on Craigslist, and keeping track of expenses—all the things that she hates to do herself and can now delegate to the intern while she focuses on her writing.

I, on the other hand, am going to use my next paycheck to buy an enormous computer monitor, which I hope will reduce eyestrain and allow me to work more efficiently. These expenditures can be as “practical” as a new desk chair, or a little more untraditional, like my friend who bought a Nintendo Wii to use during her breaks. She claims her stress has never been lower!

5. Being intimidated. The meek may inherit the earth, but they aren’t going to become successful business owners. If you want to maximize your earning potential while being your own boss, you can’t be intimidated by anyone or anything. If that sounds a little beyond what you can handle right now, just do what I did when I was first starting out: fake it.

No, don’t lie—that will come back to bite you in the butt. I’m talking about pretending that you are more confident than you actually are. Create a work persona you can easily slip into once you close the office door. Eventually, that confidence won’t feel so fake anymore and it will become one of your most valuable assets. What have you got to lose?

Marie is a San Francisco Bay Area-based freelance writer and editor. Visit her website at www.mariecbaca.com.