I got a short, 2 to 3 week, contract job at Studio3 doing digital retouch on product shots for a consumer item that’s launching soon. Although I can’t really talk about the specifics, the one item I’ve seen looks like it might be pretty successful. I’m doing clipping paths, dust/cleanup, and color correction for proofs. I guess in the last round of proofs there will be some critical color work done, but I’m not sure how involved in that I’ll be.

It’s funny, I interviewed and did a Photoshop test at Studio3 on Thursday of last week and then one of the owners called me on Friday night, leaving a message about needing someone unexpectedly for the coming week through the end of May. He called me again Saturday at 9:30 in the morning. He said that they had been interviewing and testing people for future projects that would require help and that it just happened that this project came up. He was very kind and said that he felt I was a good candidate and he even said I was over qualified and that he’d understand if I turned it down, but it worked out: I needed some freelance work to pad my portfolio (plus I love retouching) and Gwynn and I needed a legitimate excuse to motivate us to get our own baby sitter, finally.

In other news, Gela broke the world record in the “Hanging onto the Shower Curtain Rod, After a Bath” event, this evening. The standing record was 4.5 seconds and tonight she held on for 7.47 seconds, thus beating the previous record by over 1.4 seconds. That record was set back in 1987 by one Daniel M. Jabowski, from Ellington, CT. Danny was 1 year and 5 months at the time.

Good night.

Today seemed really long, but not for any particular reason.

Gwynn (my wife), Gela (my daughter), and I ran some errands and we visited our friend Jeni, mostly to hang out and catch up and, a little, because Jeni wants me to re-redesign a logo for the plumbing business her and her husband, Brad, own.

I designed them a few logos a while back, then they decided to change the business name; which they ended up not doing, and finally they decided they’d like to go a different direction with the look and feel for the logo. Here are the rough logos we stopped at before the ‘almost’ name change back in September 2007:

It was cool hanging out, sketching ideas, and brainstorming. We ended up staying there almost 3 hours. When we got home I spent about an hour and a half or so doing some research and rough sketches of some of the ideas and themes we talked about. I’m not sure how it’s all going to turn out, but some of the concepts we all came up with have potential.

At 9:30pm or 10:00pm I decided I wanted tortillas, so I did what any self-respecting tortilla wanting person does: I made some tortillas. I used the recipe from “How To Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman. His recipe is:

• 1 1/2 cup flour (plus some for rolling the tortillas out)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons lard/butter/oil — I used Canola oil
• Water to make dough
• Profit!

They turned out alright, maybe a little too flour-y, but they didn’t take very long to make at all. My tortilla desires have been fulfilled.

Since I started my freelance business, I’ve been inundated with a vast array of business offers, credit cards, and various business to business services, all of which arrive weekly per the U.S. Postal Service. I’ve had offers to have “Nick Raimondi Designs” embroidered on sweaters and golf bags for all my employees and for myself, of course. I’ve even had design firms offer to help me with all my graphic design needs, which I’m sure would instill tons of confidence in my clients. I get a kick out of this kind of junk mail, because I’m the furthest thing from their demographic and, usually, the types of products these companies are pushing aren’t products I’m even close to needing.

Today I received a catalog from a company called Uline Shipping Supplies. As usual, I chuckled when I saw the large array of boxes listed on the front and at the strange collection of products inside, as I flipped through it. Later when I picked it back up and started actually looking at the kind of products they actually sell…holy friggin’ crap, this place is amazing. I’m being totally honest.

Anything you could possibly need that’s either shipping, warehouse, storage, food/beverage, office supply, or retail merchandising related, they have.

You need baggies? They got ‘em.

What’s that, you need a variety of rubber gloves to suit different purposes…oh yeah, they’ve got those.

Say, weren’t you just asking about expandable packing foam?? You were? They’ve got it.

Excuse me? Do I know where you can get Chinese food containers? Why, yes I do!

Do I know a place that sells a box cutting knife with a glow in the dark fish skeleton on it?? Actually, I do…seriously.

Like I’ve said before, it doesn’t take much to amaze or amuse me these days, but this place is awesome. I’m pissed that I don’t do more shipping, retailing, and merchandising. This place makes me want to find excuses to buy metallic silver sharpies and scales that not only weigh but also count parts. The fricking scale counts parts, ladies and gents.

I need to figure out how to buy a warehouse.

Being a freelancer can be an amazingly rewarding experience, while being an incredibly stress inducing and mind numbing experience. In addition to juggling clients, being your own IT support and customer service desk, and taking care of those little secondary things like completing projects and finding clients, you have to deal with billing…namely invoices.

I’ve used all sorts of time management and accounting software and from a design standpoint, all of their automated invoices suck. Yep, every single one. The layout of the invoices in those programs are rarely end user friendly: the ability to modify the invoice to match your company’s image and brand, especially fonts, is very limited and, generally speaking, the invoices aren’t nice to look at at all — which sometimes makes the difference between that invoice getting paid in a timely manner or whether it gets forgotten and ignored for weeks. The only real plus in using the invoices provided with software is that the programs do all the nasty calculations for you. Numbers can be evil for those on the arty side of things.

I wanted to find a way to make an invoice that I could customize with graphics, that would allow my choice of fonts, that would do any calculations for me, that could be easily adapted to both billing and quoting, and, most importantly, was as automated as possible.

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