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Avoiding Freelancing Scams
Sad to say, some freelancing opportunities, won't be opportunities at all. They'll be scams designed to steal your time, money, or reputation. I can't give a canonical list of scams floating around out there because the criminal nature is to develop new techniques as people get wise to the old ones. But here are some warning signs the prospective job just isn't worth taking. The first kind of scam is one that makes the rounds a lot.
You get offered a job but with a non-specific amount of pay. For example, let's say they offer you a share of profits. Well, how will you know how much their profits are? Are their books publically audited? Probably not, which means they could offer you any amount or nothing at all, and you'd have no real recourse.
Tied to that one, is the offer to pay you in something other than money, most often in the company's products. Now that's great if you really want their products and they're being offered to you at a higher rate than cash would otherwise buy. But here again, the control is mostly in their hands. What if they stop offering the product you want, what if they go out of business, do the products even exist yet, what's mechanism for delivering them to you?
A variation on this is the promise that you'll get exposure or a great portfolio piece in exchange for your work. This isn't a scam per se. It's just that in my experience, jobs that pay well make much better portfolio pieces. Having said that, you might actually decide to take such work when you're first building your portfolio. Just be sure to appropriately value what they're offering. Now personally, I can't remember ever finding the value of such exposure to be high enough for the work required.
The third warning sign arises if your client asks you to do something illegal or immoral. As an architectural illustrator, a client will sometimes try to accompany my work with videos or graphics that they snagged online, and that they don't have the rights to. They've already shown they're dishonest or immoral. What makes you think they'll be honest and moral with you?
Another warning sign crops up when you get an offer out of the blue, but you can't really determine the name, location, or contact information for the source. The issue here is one of enforcement. If they mistreat you, you'll have no way to go after them.
Finally, we get to the classic work-at- home scam, where you're required to put in some amount of money to make the deal happen. Let's get something straight. You're going to have business expenses as a freelancer. But none of that money, and I mean zero dollars and zero pennies should go towards someone who is allegedly offering you work or to any other source that you don't choose. This can be tricky. Maybe the client requires that you get some sort of special kind of equipment, or certification but that it's only available from one source. Check it out. There's a chance that, the source is connected to your so-called employer and that you'll never see a penny of work in return.
It is possible that you'll take a job that has one or more of these warning signs, and it will turn out just fine. For example, start-ups sometimes offer equity or stock instead of payment. That stock sometimes ends up being valuable. But this list is based on the likelihood that something is a scam.
These warnings aren't absolutes. When you're deciding which jobs to take, you'll be playing the percentages. Just realize that jobs that have these warning signs carry a higher risk than those that don't.
"Young Frank, Architect"
This whimsical children’s book by award-winning author and illustrator Frank Viva explores MoMA's collection through the adventures of Young Frank, an aspiring architect, who lives in New York City with his grandfather, Old Frank, also an architect. Young Frank likes to use anything he finds—macaroni, pillows, toilet paper, shoes—to make buildings that twist, chairs with zigzag legs, and even entire cities. But Old Frank disapproves, saying architects only create buildings.
One day they visit The Museum of Modern Art, where they see work by architects Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many others, and Old Frank learns that architects can do more than he thought. The Franks go home and create structures of every shape and size, using whatever they can get their hands on, even cookies. At the end of the day, Young Frank feels a little older, and Old Frank feels a little younger—and a little wiser.
To download a sample PDF of Young Frank, Architect click here.
3D Augmented Reality for Architects
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Preparing your Portfolio
Every time you talk to prospective clients, they'll want to know why they should trust you.
Remember, it's not just money. If someone does a bad job for them, they might not have the time to get it done right. So, the stakes are high. Your past work is one of the strongest ways to show that you're right for the job. Collecting it in a portfolio is one way to convey this information.
Once you have all the pieces in one place, you need a way to display them. Nowadays, the usual place is a portfolio website. If your potential clients live more in the off-line world, or if you expect to meet a lot of them face to face, you might also want to have a printed version of your portfolio. I've assumed that you have work to show.
What if you're trying to freelance in an area where you don't yet? Frankly, I'd recommend you reconsider your choice because the lack of a portfolio is really going to hamper your efforts. One other option isto plan to start with forms of marketing that don't require a portfolio. For example, advertising.
Another is to do some jobs for low pay or even for no pay to build up your portfolio. This is a good opportunity to do favors for family, friends and non-profit organizations that you support.
Finally, it's a good idea to create two other pieces to complement your portfolio. The first is a brief text that summarizes your experience, maybe a hundred words or so. You'll use that in e-mails, applications and marketing materials. Eventually, you'll have several versions of it for various purposes. I personally keep a plain text file on my computer so that they're always at hand. You'll also want to create a resume. It'd be nice if others could intuitively sense that you're right for a job, but they can't. They need to be shown and nothing convinces as well as a clearly presented record of success.
That's what a well- prepared portfolio does for you.
The key to success? Grit
In her late 20s, Angela Lee Duckworth left a demanding job as a management consultant at McKinsey to teach math in public schools in San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York.
After five years of teaching seventh graders, she went back to grad school to complete her Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is now an assistant professor in the psychology department. Her research subjects include students, West Point cadets, and corporate salespeople, all of whom she studies to determine how "grit" is a better indicator of success than factors such as IQ or family income.
How to create layers from Photoshop Layer Styles
Augmented Reality Designs Your House With IKEA Furniture
You think about changing the decor of your house and the first thing that comes to your mind is IKEA.
You sit down with that big IKEA catalog at night after work, flip through the pages and try to imagine how the pieces you're eyeing would actually fit in your home. You even start measuring with a ruler, doing calculations hoping your favorite piece of decor would fit into your space.
You love the armchairs and bookcases but somehow they never look as perfect in your cramped apartment as they do in the aptly decorated showrooms.
This demotivates you to even take a look at the catalog leave alone visiting the store.
But now you’ll look forward to pick up that decor book and re-design your house.
IKEA's 2014 catalog aims to ease some of that angst by letting you plan ahead with its augmented reality feature.
This new feature, which will be available on August 25 and uses an augmented reality technology, allows you to see what the furniture would really look like in your own home.
How to go about it.
All you have to do is scan the pages of catalog with the augmented reality app on your mobile device, place the printed catalog wherever you'd like in the spot where you're considering adding a new piece of furniture.With the camera on the phone or tablet, the app captures an image of the room, using the catalog as a size guide, for the virtual furniture that you can place in the room. After this step you can select the desired item with a 3-D model view of the piece in your room on your phone or tablet.
Since the app uses the front cover of the catalog as a reference, it is likely you can use a printed copy of the Ikea catalog cover instead of having to bring along an entire book.
Ikea is actually transporting its products into your house, associating your living room with its showroom through a sort of digital test drive. So you needn’t visit the store, of course.
The 2014 catalog will be available in print, as well as on iPhone, iPad and Android.
You can also look forward to several highly anticipated new releases, such as the Lövbacken table, a revival of the company's original flat-pack table produced in 1956.
Watch the video above to see how it works:
A Plea to Photographers
It's long been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Other sources say put the worth at ten thousand.
A character in Ivan S.Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons said: ""The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book.""
(Unfortunately we're not sure whether the character is referring to 10 pages in a university post graduate textbook or "Green Eggs and Ham" so it's hard to map on the ""picture worth x"" continuum) No matter; it's clear to everyone that pictures are worth a lot of words...more so as GenX, GenY and Millenials are eclipsed by ""GenA.D.D.""
But what about words AND pictures? Might the worth be exponentially greater? Alan Shapiro believes their value together goes far beyond either individually and will share his point of view on why photographers should seriously consider evolving their written storytelling ability especially now as social media experiences like Google+ are more important than ever.
Bio:
Alan Shapiro has been a creative storyteller his entire life. He took up photography a few years back to relieve the stress of his day job as an advertising Chief Creative Officer and to give himself a bit of a daily ""creative exercise regimen"". It took off beyond his wildest dreams and he is now published, shooting assignments for clients (including Scholastic, Lockheed Martin and General Motors) and his work is in galleries and private collections. He is currently the 4th most followed photographer in the world (with huge thanks to Google+) with 2 careers that he loves (both of which involve his passion for storytelling).
Website:
AlanShapiroPhotography.com