Blog

My 3-Step Formula for Finding Work as a Freelancer

December 3, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 18 Comments

After enjoying My Top 10 Tips for Freelancers for this week’s Articulate challenge, an intrepid reader asked me how to actually get freelance work. A good question, and one I’m happy to address.

My Flavor of Work

Freelance work comes in a lot of flavors, but for me it means that an organization’s training department sets me up as a vendor and has me handle e-learning projects from stem to stern, including all design and development. Even if your desired freelance work looks a bit different, you can still benefit by using this approach.

My 3-Step Formula for Success

There’s a lot involved in each of these steps, but this is what it boils down to.

Step 1: Be Irresistible

As a baseline we’ll assume you know your field, have honed your skills to an outstanding level and continue to learn more all the time, conduct yourself as a consummate and highly-principled professional, understand the basics of being independent, and are so fantastic to work with – both personally and by producing an outstanding product that provides real value – that your clients can’t resist hiring you.

Having all of this together means that once you have their attention, they’ll never want to let you go.

Step 2: Be Discoverable

If your prospective clients can’t find you and your work, how will they discover that you’re irresistible? You need a website where you show off your fantastic skills in the form of jewel-like samples of your work, maintain an active blog where people can get to know how you think and solve problems, and essentially reveal exactly who you are in a professional and best-foot-forward sort of way – which includes using your own name and picture.

Step 3: Be Involved

Choose your community and start contributing. The Articulate community is the one I’ve chosen to be involved with. That’s where I’ve learned oodles of stuff, gotten to practice my design and software skills while simultaneously creating portfolio pieces in the weekly challenges, and gotten to know my peers in both the challenges and discussions. We’re also actively in touch on LinkedIn, where it’s only natural to get to know even more good people in the field. I also attend e-learning events and webinars and continue to learn as much as I can from all of my smarty-pants peers who are ridiculously generous in sharing their experience and knowledge.

How Does All of This Lead to Work?

It just does. Whether it comes from your peers who know of a project you might be right for – or from those silent watchers in the community, on your website, on Twitter, LinkedIn, or wherever else you’re active – the people with the work will find you.

So that’s my secret formula. No “networking” events, no mailing lists, no advertising, no sweat, and no hassle. Just hard, focused work doing exactly what you love – and voilà! – you’re a success. Well done.

My Top 10 Tips for Freelancers

December 1, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 13 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

This week’s challenge is to share your top tips for freelancers. I’ve been a freelancer for more than 11 years now, so figured I’d toss in a few. (And if you’d like to check out My 3-Step Formula for Finding Work as a Freelancer, that’s new too!)

Tip Number One

Why These?

Are these really my “top” tips? Some are. Others address things I see and hear fellow freelancers struggle with all the time.

I hadn’t expected to create a demo, but was lucky enough to find these pics from artist Emily Beeson on MorgueFile, started playing with them, and this is the result.

Select Image to Launch Demo

See it in Action!

If you’d like to get my freelancing words of wisdom, you can see them right here.

Learning to Spend Money the Yummy Way

November 17, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 12 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

This week’s Articulate challenge is to create a learning game for kids. What’s not to like about this one?

Grandma’s Got Some Money

The Idea

The only problem was coming up with an idea. I messed around with math and word games, then starting building a camping game, but wasn’t happy with any of it.

I finally realized that unless the game emulated a situation where a kid really needed to apply some knowledge, I wasn’t going to like it and neither would the kid. This scenario reminds me of my wonderful brother Bryan who was always finding treasures and wondering if he had enough money to buy them, but it applies to any kid – large or small.

Flat, Mobile-Friendly, Kid-Friendly Design

The Interaction

The Intro: I wanted to ease you into the situation rather than unceremoniously drop you at a cupcake shop. Grandma supplies the money and the mission. The rest is up to you.

The Design: I kept the design pretty flat. I also wanted it to be playable on a tablet, so kept it simple and clean. Using a drag-and-drop, avoiding hover states, and keeping images large enough to easily tap and move with fingers were also part of my mobile-friendly plan.

The Challenge: I didn’t want there to be an on-screen calculator that showed how much money would be left after each cupcake was chosen. Those don’t exist in real cupcake shops, so why supply one here?

My Wish List: What I would love to do is supply feedback that goes over the math of what they just spent and ask them how much change they have left. I’d also love to make it so that if they chose to spend a smaller amount – buying just one cupcake, for example – they could save that money and take it with them to the next challenge. I’d want them to go to the movies, a fast food restaurant, an arcade, etc., and be met with different challenges in each location.

Too Much to Mention: There’s lots more that went into this one – from the variables and conditional triggers to the images, fonts, and pictograms – but if I go into all that we’d just be burning daylight, and you need to go buy some cupcakes! (But feel free to ask me questions.)

Go Buy Cupcakes!

Have fun spending Grandma’s money on a little cake and frosting right here.

Select Image to Launch Demo

Digital Magazine: Can You Give a Better Speech Than a 12-Year-Old?

November 9, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 10 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

This week’s Articulate challenge is to create a demo of a digital learning magazine.

Inspiration

For approach, look, and feel I used Forma Magazine as my inspiration, using Charles Hamper’s suggestion to check out digital magazine samples at ReadyMag.

Content

I decided on the topic of presentations when I found this post by speech coach George Torok who was comparing his experience judging 12-year-olds in a speech contest versus high-level sales and marketing executives giving their own talks. For this demo I wanted simple-yet-interesting content that was easy to explore and browse, so this worked. To make it easier to compare the adults versus children, I organized it into six steps and compared their performance for each one.

Since digital magazines tend to make the most of stunning photography, I found large images that would render well at MorgueFile.

Jump-to-Screen Navigation

Navigation Options

I included two types of navigation to imitate Forma’s:
Screen-to-Screen: I used their approach of having on-screen right and left arrow icons. I also added hotspots on top of the arrows to make them easier to tap if you’re on a tablet. You could just add a trigger to the arrow image, rather than use a hotspot, but the target area would be too small to work well.
Jump-To: I might have been able to create a fabulous slider to imitate Forma’s jump-to navigation, but settled for the speedier option of a slide layer with thumbnails of each screen. It gives you an overview of the content, plus lets you jump around. You can access it via the menu icon in the upper right.

Check it Out!

Find out if a 12-year-old’s speech stands a chance against a high-level marketing executive’s right here!

Select Image to Launch Demo

Preventing Workplace Violence Holiday-Style!

November 4, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 12 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

Our Protagonist

This week David Anderson challenged us to create a scenario about preventing workplace violence.

The Idea

Addressing the topic of violence comes to me about as naturally as learning Hungarian, so I put this challenge aside for awhile.

While organizing files a bit later, I stumbled across these cute-as-a-button holiday images and decided to challenge myself to use them – exactly as they are – for the challenge. The snowman and gingerbread man would be my characters, and I wouldn’t let myself manipulate or change them.

The Scene of the Crime

The Scenario

Since Christmas trees were part of this set, I opted to have the snowman run a Christmas tree lot and have the gingerbread man pull a heist. The only weapon-like image I had was a hatchet, so it became a hatchet job.

You Make the Decisions

You, as the learner, choose how to respond. In both the positive and negative outcomes you’re given tips to help you successfully cope with the situation before trying it again with different choices, giving you a safe and effective way to learn and practice the concepts.

Try it Out!

Do you know how to handle tough times on a Christmas tree lot? Try it right here and find out! You might even have a little gingerbread-themed fun while you’re at it.