Size DOES matter (in print) – the resolution wars

Print designers these days have a problem we never used to have before the Internet came along: being given teeny little photos someone’s copied off their (or *gasp* someone else’s) website to be used in a document that will eventually be reproduced in print. I won’t go into the issue of copyright in this post, except to say: don’t copy stuff off other people’s sites without their permission!

What I do want to talk about… and boy, do I want to talk about it!… is the issue of screen resolution versus print resolution. Hey…I saw that yawn. Come on now, this is important.

If you don’t feel like reading a lot of technical stuff, here it is in a nutshell: You cannot copy images off a website and expect them to reproduce well in print. Do not ask your designer to go to your website for a copy of your logo or a photo to use in your flyer, your brochure, your catalogue or anything else that will be reproduced on anything besides a computer screen. The resolution is too low, the size is too small. It just ain’t gonna work, my friend.

Here’s why…

It’s simple math. To look good on screen, images only need to be 72 DPI. DPI stands for “dots per inch.” Also known as PPI, or pixels per inch. So, if you took a square inch of a photograph from a website, you’d have 72×72 dots/pixels (5,184 pixels on the screen). For a newspaper photo, you need 200 DPI, which equals 40,000 pixels in a square inch. For a magazine photo, you need 300 DPI, which is 90,000 pixels in a square inch.

If you take an image you copied from a website and try to use it on a print project, the image is going to look blurry or “pixelated.” Here’s what happens when you try to force a low-res photograph into a high-res print project:

This is my dearly departed cat, Bugsy Moran.

 

Now, imagine what would happen if you took that 1″ 72 DPI photo from your website and tried to run it at 300 DPI in your glossy brochure. It’s going to look blurry. And even worse, if you try to make it bigger than 1″ it’s going to look worse and worse the bigger you make it.

So, do yourself and your graphic designer a favour and keep an archive of all your photos in the highest resolution you can. When you take photos with your digital camera, unless you’re absolutely sure you’ll never need them for a print project, always use the highest resolution settings your camera can give you and do NOT edit the originals. Always keep a raw copy right off the camera that you never touch. That’s the one you should give your designer. You’ll get fewer photos on a card by shooting highres, but memory is cheap these days. The bad image you’ll get from using low-res pics in print jobs may just end up costing you a lot more than a few dollars. It’s your company’s image you’re talking about.

The deep well of creativity

Was watching Bill Maher's comedy special this evening and drew this caricature right from the TV.

This was the first long pose during my first life-drawing class, Sept. 19, 2010

A friend of mine from my writers’ group recently inspired me to join a weekly life-drawing session with her at the Nepean Sportsplex. It’s been more than thirty years since I did any life drawing. Back in high school, you could have found me, on any given day, huddled over a large sheet of pastel paper, drawing from a live nude model in my life-drawing classroom. We life-drawing students had a bit of a mystique about us among the other students in the school. We got to sit and look at naked people as part of our education! Well, to be honest, the male models wore jock-straps. But most of the models were female, and they were totally nude. I can attest to the fact that women were much more hirsute in the late 70s, which is one of the reasons they didn’t need to wear any kind of covering for modesty’s sake.

There’s something absolutely glorious about drawing the nude human form. When you get it right you feel like a god! Every muscle where it should be. The bone structure evident in the proper lines and angles of the body. When someone…anyone…looks at a drawing of a person, they can instantly tell if it’s even just a little bit off. They might not always be able to identify exactly what is wrong, but they just know in their bones that something is wrong. That’s why life drawing is such a challenge. You can draw a pot of flowers sitting next to a bowl of fruit and no one’s going to know (or care) if the pot’s too big in proportion to the bowl, or if the apples aren’t shaped just as they should be. Life drawing is completely unforgiving that way.

I did a lot of life drawing in high school. I got pretty good at it too, after three years of almost daily practice. But, since graduating in 1977, I’ve only occasionally pulled out my pastels and done a drawing. You could probably count on one hand the number of times that happened.

And I know why. It was because, after high school, and every work day since then, I get up every morning and proceed to be creative on demand. I was just too damned burned out every day to come home and start drawing, to be creative some more, even in a way that I chose. And for the most part, I did very little freelance graphics too. Same reason. The most consistently creative thing I’ve done since high school, besides my jobs, has been creative writing. Even that practically dried up overnight ten years ago when I was hired on as the production manager at the Ottawa Business Journal.  Not to diss OBJ…it was an awesome place to work, and I loved my job. But it was So. Intense. I’d get home after work and feel like an empty husk. I guess I just gave it all to my job.

Happily, now that I’m working for myself, there is much less stress and I’m finding the writing urge has come back and I’m actually more than a third of the way through the first draft of my first novel… The Bog.

And, thanks to my friend, Phoebe, I’m now drawing again too! And you know what’s amazing? It’s coming back to me. Even after more than thirty years of almost complete abstinence, when I pick up a pencil or a stick of conté in that odd way that artists use, holding it between the thumb and forefinger like you’re passing it to someone, something clicks back into place and…oh my goodness…I can still do it!

I can’t tell you what a thrill that is for me.

I’m quite rusty, of course. Not nearly as confident or skilled as I was when I graduated from high school. But it’s still in there. And it’s coming back. I surprise myself every time I pick up the tools and start to draw. Things actually look kinda right! It makes me so happy to see it.

I’m not saying this to brag. I’m saying it to make the point that creativity doesn’t die inside you if you let it go, even for a long time. It’s like riding that proverbial bike. You get back on after even a long hiatus, and you may be a little shaky, but you stay upright and after little bit you’re whizzing along just like you used to. It’s quite astonishing, really. And so, so gratifying.

The new world of downtime

Now that the main part of summer is behind us, my very first summer as a self-employed person, I’ve had some time to reflect on how downtime is different for me now.

As an employee, I could pretty much count on going home every Friday evening and not coming back till Monday morning. I’d have that entire time to myself and didn’t really have to think about work stuff at all unless I wanted to. Every now and then it would be extra busy and I’d go in on a Saturday or Sunday to do a bit of catch-up, but that was the exception rather than the rule.

Not so nowadays. It’s unusual for me to not do at least a little bit of work every day. And if I don’t, I feel guilty, or just a little uneasy, thinking I’ll get behind  in reaching my “quota” for that week.

I had a funny experience a few weeks ago when I went into the Ottawa Business Journal office late on a Friday afternoon to speak to a few people. They used to be my employers…now they’re my clients. As I left the office, everyone was telling me to have a good weekend. It felt weird! I’ve hardly heard that at all since got laid off last fall! Weekend? What’s that?

Actually, I don’t mind this pace at all. In fact, I enjoy it. Living alone as I do, if I get bored, I just go into my home office and do some work. Plus I get a feeling of satisfaction when I look at my timesheet at the end of every day and see that I’ve been productive and moved toward my goal for the week. Conversely, if I don’t really feel like working now and then, no one’s going to look at me funny if I slack off for a day. I deserve it, after all…I only take an entire day off occasionally.

When I first went solo, someone told me about something she called “water cooler syndrome.” That’s what happens when newly self-employed people find themselves yearning for the camaraderie of having lots of other people around them at the office. She said it usually sets in around the 3-month mark, and she was pretty confident that I’d begin to feel it after a while.

So far, I haven’t, and it’s been ten months. I still love working at home, on my own, being my own boss.

Vacation time is another matter entirely, however. Last winter, I made arrangements with my Dad and step-mom to visit family in Newfoundland for a week in the summer. As the date approached, I found myself getting more and anxious about leaving my business behind for such a long time. A whole week! What would my customers do without me!

I sent out two rounds of reminders to all my clients letting them know I’d be away and to make sure to get anything in to me beforehand if they needed it during my absence. I told them I’d be available by phone and email if I was needed. But there was no chance that I’d be able to work on stuff while I was away.

As the day approached,  I started considering cancelling the trip, worried about leaving my clients hanging, and especially about doing only spending and no earning for nine whole days.

Even worse, once I reached Newfoundland, I was in such a remote area that I couldn’t even use my cell phone to keep up with any messages or emails that came in while I was away. Luckily, my hosts had wireless Internet in their home, so I was able to check in now and then. But it was far less connectivity than I’d been anticipating.

When you rely on yourself and no one else to generate your income, the idea of taking time off becomes one of those issues you lie awake at night fretting about. Will I be able to make up for the downtime later? Will I find myself with a big blank spot where cash flow should be somewhere down the road? Do I really need to take this time off??

Yes. I do. We all do. No one should work six or seven days a week indefinitely without a break. It’s not healthy. It’s not fun. And it’s not good for your business. You can become worn down and start thinking of work as a chore, rather than a pleasure. That’s a situation I hope to avoid.

As it turned out, everything worked out perfectly for me during and after my vacation. I went away and had a wonderful time, and when I came back I felt refreshed and eager to get back to work. There was even a bunch more unplanned downtime after the vacation because clients were also taking time off during the summer.

But that’s okay. June and July were slow, but August was a banner month. The one thing you can count on about summer is that it’s followed by fall. And, as anyone who’s been in the workforce for any length of time knows, that means that customers slowly begin to wake up and realize they have a bunch of stuff to get done now that it’s September again.

So…giddy-up!!

Searching for time

When was the last time you were looking for a file on your computer that you absolutely knew was there, but just couldn’t find it? Last month? Last week? Today? Three times today?

How much time do you think you spend every year searching for files you know are there? Judging from the regularity with which I sit around waiting in people’s homes and offices while they try to find things on their computers, it has to add up to a lot of time. Not only their time, but my time too, and the time of any other person who gets caught in that file-searching limbo with them.

How much is an hour of your time worth to you? Even if file-searching limbo only happens once a day, and you spend about five minutes searching, that adds up to a whopping thirty hours a year. I know! Shocking, eh? I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of better things to do than sit there trying to find files that seem to be deliberately hiding themselves from me.

So I have a system. It’s a very easy system, but like all systems, it only works if you use it. So, if you want to save yourself a lot of wasted time, follow me won’t you?

1. The first and most important rule of file management is to religiously use a file-naming convention. You can’t find it if you don’t remember what it’s called. At best, you’ll be forced to search on other criteria, like file type, which is only just barely better than randomly clicking on folders and visually scanning the files they contain. At worst, you won’t find the file till Aunt Milly comes to visit three years later and you’re trying to show her the pictures you filed away when little Johnny graduated from kindergarten. “Oh my…how did that get in there??”

Come up with a system for how you name your files and use that system on every file you save. For instance, I name all photos of individuals by lastname, firstname (ex: Moran, Patti) , and if I know the date the photo was taken, I tag that on the end (more about dates in a bit). The beauty of putting the last name first is that when you have pictures of people with the same last name, they’ll all sort themselves together in family groups when you display your window by NAME. How nice.

Same goes for events. If the photo was taken at an event, I use the event name (and again, the date on the end) as the main part of the name. Any time there’s more than one photo of the same person or event, use numbers to distinguish them from one another. For instance: Bob’s Birthday 1 100809, Bob’s Birthday 2 100809…etc. It’s also good too keep in mind that if you might ever use these photos online, you should refrain from using word spaces or weird characters in the filename. So the above files would be named bobs_birthday_1_100809.jpg (only letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores are allowed on many online systems. Punctuation and word spaces are verboten.)

When we go beyond image files… Word documents, Spreadsheets, movies, etc., a similar system can be used. But for these types of files, which are often business-related and for which you may or may not be at liberty to change the names, the file’s name becomes secondary to the name and location of the folder it’s in. (But still use a logical, consistent file-naming convention wherever possible.)

2. Naming folders that contain sets of similarly purposed files is the second most critical point. Group like-purposed files together. Take advantage of the hierarchical file system, which is just a fancy way of saying nested folders, one inside the other. All files related to a particular client should go together in one folder, named after the client, of course. Within the client folder, there should be a subfolder for each different project. On my computer, each client also has a “Miscellaneous” folder inside their main client folder, in which I keep their odds and ends (there are surprisingly few odds and ends usually, as everything else is so well organized). All client folders should go into a main folder named “Clients.” Files related to your own business should be grouped together in folders named for their purpose (ie: invoices in, invoices out, logos, Promotions, etc).

3. Dates. When’s the last time you couldn’t figure out if 07/08/2010 was July 8, 2010 or August 7, 2010? Impossible to know, isn’t it? There’s never been any kind of societal agreement about which one comes first, the month or the day (I hate that). So, it’s up to you to decide, and I strongly recommend that you follow my system for expressing dates…

Whenever at all possible, tag the date onto the end of filenames. All dates in filenames, and as much as possible everywhere else too, should be expressed as a set of six digits, representing two digits each for the year, the month and the day — in that order. Year, month, day — largest value to smallest. So today’s date (August 9, 2010) would be 100809.

I know that doesn’t seem very easy to read at first,  but you’ll get used to it, and there are a few reasons why I recommend this format for dates so strongly. 1) It’s consistent. You always know which number is the month and which is the day. 2) It sorts properly chronologically when you view by name in the file explorer/Finder of your computer. 3) It’s only six characters…very short. 4) It’s easy to remember the order because it’s always biggest to smallest…year, month, day.

So, let’s say you do a newsletter for your client, Zippity-Doo-Dogs Pet Grooming,  every two weeks. How are you going to tell one newsletter from the other in a sea of files? Easy. You have a folder called “Zippity-doo-Dogs”, and inside that folder you have a second folder called “Newsletters.” Inside the newletters folder are all those lovely newsletters you’ve made over the past two years. You can go immediately to any given newsletter (as long as you know the approximate date it ran…(no system is perfect!) by sorting the folder by Name, and then looking at the date tags. (If you require multiple files to support each newsletter, then each newsletter and collateral files would go into another nested folder named the same as the newsletter’s filename.

Like so:

Documents > Business Files > Clients > Zippity-Doo-Dogs > Newsletters > Newsletter 100809 (folder) > Newsletter 100908 (file)

Because you’ve used the six-digit year, month, day system, the newsletter folders will sort themselves in chronological order when you view by Name. Sweet.

Note: You may think it’s efficient to view files chronologically in your windows by Modification Date. Think again. If you make even a tiny change to a file and then save it, that file now becomes the newest file on your computer and will jump to the top of any list displayed by Modification Date. If you NAME the file by the date it represents, and view by Name in the window, you’ll always see things listed in their proper chronological order.

There are probably several other pointers I could share for keeping your files organized on your computer, but these are the main ones that I use every day. And if I do say so myself, I spend hardly any time searching for files. Perhaps I’ll do a “Part II” post sometime if I think of more compelling ways to help you save time and money when using your computer!

Would love to hear from you about your system for keeping things organized in your computer. Please share with us in the comments below!

The Gonk as destiny-changer

We all like to think we’re in control of our own destinies. We make decisions based on where we think we want to be in the future. We do what we have to do to get what we want. But sometimes life doesn’t cooperate and we find ourselves somewhere we never expected.

A journalist friend of mine had enrolled in the e-publishing for journalists course at Algonquin and was really looking forward to it. It sounded so great I was even thinking about taking it myself! But yesterday she found out that the course has been cancelled after a “strategic review,” and now she’s left hanging, trying to find some other course to take.

The exact same thing happened to me more than thirty years ago, but in my case the repercussions were far greater than they probably will be for my friend…then again, maybe not, you never know.

In June of 1977, as I was about to graduate from high school, I was secure in the knowledge of what I would be doing in the fall…riding the bus to Algonquin’s Woodroofe campus every morning from my parent’s home in the nearby Tanglewood subdivision. Well, at least I thought that’s what I would be doing. As it turned out, I wasn’t. A letter came one day that June from Algonquin informing me that the three-year graphic design programme I’d been accepted into for the fall had been cancelled because of low enrollment…after one of their “strategic reviews.”

As you can imagine, this was a big deal for me. You can’t just pull the rug out from under people like that. It takes time to find a new school, if you can even get accepted into another school and programme you want in time for the beginning of the school year. And there didn’t happen to be another college near Ottawa in those days with the same kind of program. So the only choice I had, other than not going to college, which wasn’t a choice at all, was to move away from home for school.

Luckily, we learned, there was still room in the 3-year graphics programme at Sheridan College in Oakville. Also luckily, because I came from the vocational art programme at the High School of Commerce, I was automatically accepted without having to present a portfolio, as most people would have been expected to do.

So, on a gorgeous early-September morning in 1977, before I’d even turned 18, my parents kissed me good-bye and left me in my tiny room at the Sheridan nurses’ residence on Hwy #10 in Mississauga, where I would live for the next ten months. A five-hour drive from home. I was terrified. I didn’t leave my room for two days, and even then all I did was rush across the street to the convenience store for some food, and right back again.

It took a while, but eventually I made some friends, even got a boyfriend, and became comfortable with my surroundings. You adapt, right? What choice do you have?

Nowadays, every once in a while, I remember that cancelled Algonquin programme and think about the far-reaching changes it created in my life. Moving away from home, meeting people I’d never have met otherwise, including my now-ex husband, graduating from one of the best schools and graphic design programmes in the country. How different would my life be today had The Gonk not made that decision and sent me on such a different path than the one I’d planned to take?

Unexpected changes. We may think of the big ones as being the important ones, but really, every moment of every day changes our future. Every decision, from the most mundane to the most critical, can send our futures spinning into oblivion while a new one forms instantly in its place…and then vanishes as the next future takes hold.

A concept like that may make some people feel uneasy, as if there’s no stability in life, nothing you can rely on. Well…there isn’t. And I don’t say that in a negative way. Indeed, it’s a joyous thing, a wonder and a miracle that every second we rebuild our possible future, both individually and collectively. It’s like swimming in raging rapids, every current and every drop of water constantly changing direction,  down a river that, ironically, has only one final destination for us all.

Is that exciting, or what!

But still, Algonquin, you really shouldn’t do that to people. I understand the need to do strategic reviews and make sure you’re on track with your budget and your goals. But peoples’ lives…very young peoples’ lives…are swinging in the balance of your decisions. The least you could do is make your decisions earlier in the year, when there’s still enough time to do a proper search for another suitable school or program. You shouldn’t be allowed to make such changes after January 31 for the coming September school semester. And if you must make these cancellations in June, you should be required to run that program anyway, for at least one more semester, so enrollees will have time to find a suitable place for the following January.

I was lucky. Things worked out really well for me, in spite of your playing with my fate the way you did. But I’m sure the same can’t be said for everyone you’ve screwed out of a college programme this fall.

Image: Navaro Rapids, by Ando Hiroshige, c.1885

The magic of referrals

The last seven months have been very educational for me. Before I got downsized, I’d been an employee for thirty years. After all that time working for someone else, you develop certain habits and attitudes that don’t really fit with the entrepreneurial mindset.

One of those attitudes is “just wait…the work will come…it always does.” Another is the BTO mindset: get up every morning at the alarm clock’s warning, take the eight-fifteen into the city… you know the rest. That one comes with the dangerous “work hours are from nine-to-five and anything else is overtime” attitude.

But during my time as an employee, particularly the last ten years while I worked for the Ottawa Business Journal, I often overheard things from the sales reps like “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” and “network, network, network.”

And my attitude to such platitudes? Bah! Sounds like a bunch of  hooey. A bunch of Tony Robbins junkies pumping themselves up for the next sale.

Well, I’m here to say I was wrong. Referrals are everything. Networking is pretty important too, though recluse that I am, I find that part extremely challenging.

I was very lucky to have worked at the Ottawa Business Journal. Almost every single client I have today is due in some way, however small, to the connections I made while working there (though, at the time, I had no idea I was forming a network). My first customer is OBJ itself — I do the research for The List that they run in every issue. My second, is an author who was referred to me in a casual remark made by OBJ’s editor.  Almost all the others are similarly connected in some way to OBJ. Those few clients I have who are not have come to me through referrals, and that has only started to happen in the last month or so, now that I’m a little more established and have some non-OBJ work under my belt finally.

What would have become of me had I happened to be working somewhere else when I lost my job? I don’t think I ever could have had a hope of starting my own business so suddenly without those referrals and connections. I would have been forced to find another full-time job and probably would have been content with that, and Patti Moran Graphic Design would never have happened.

I guess my point in all of this is that the lot of the self-employed depends intimately on the number and quality of referrals they receive. So, if you know anyone who runs their own business, do them a favour and send some customers their way. Because if you’re self-employed yourself, you may just find that this referral thing works both ways.

Oh, and because they made all this possible, I’d like to publicly thank Michael Curran, Jim Donnelly, Wendy Baily and all the other managers and staff at the Ottawa Business Journal and Transcontinental Media Ottawa for the opportunities I’ve received because of you. I’m loving my new life, and in a huge way that’s because of all of you.

Got any stories to share about referrals given or received? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

To praise or not to praise

I’ve been listening to a podcast by Chris over at the Nachos at Midnight blog. In the first half of episode 002, he talks about how good it felt when WordPress featured his blog on their front page recently. It was a real pat on the back, a much-appreciated “good on ya.” He goes on to say how important it is to give praise where praise is due, because not doing so can be demoralizing to those around you.

I totally agree with that sentiment. I’ve often said that praise is so important to me that I’d almost be willing to work for praise rather than money.

Almost. While praise is important, they don’t accept it as payment down at the rental office.

But, when dealing with graphic designers and other creative types, there are situations where it might be prudent to think before you praise. That may sound strange, coming from a praise-junky such as myself, but let me explain.

There’s often a brief honeymoon period after a client sees the first draft of a new project. They open up the email with the first proof and double-click on the attached file and WOW…it’s beautiful! Look at those colours! Great photos! Did you see how she put that little touch in there…so cheeky…I love it! So you dash off a quick email to tell your designer you love her and she’s just made your day. And your designer reads that and feels all good and phones her mother to tell her what a nice thing her client just said. This is only a slight exaggeration of true events.

In the meantime, you’ve had a little more time to look at the mockup. Hmmm. Those colours are nice, but they aren’t really appropriate to our market. That photo…well, it’s nice too, but it’s not quite the message we wanted to send. And now you have to write back to your beloved designer and tell her that the design you really loved an hour ago needs some major changes. And what sometimes happens is that it eventually ends up looking completely different from the first draft. and your designer is left thinking “wait…what??” and you’re feeling awkward because, even though you said you loved it, now you have to ask for changes to it.

This is no fun for anyone.

So how do you avoid that? Resist the temptation to dash off that effusive email within moments of viewing the first draft. As much as we designers love effusive praise, we can wait a little while for it if it’s deserved. Live with the mockup for a while before sending your feedback. Praise is always welcome, but after considering the design for an hour or so, you may have more perspective and will be able to phrase your feedback in such a way that you can praise and critique in the same email without sounding like you’ve done a 180.

Even more important is to give your designer lots of information before she even sits down to start working on your project. Make sure she understands your business. Who is your audience? What are you trying to accomplish with this piece? Are there corporate colours she needs to stick with? Is there a “mood” you’re trying to express? Tell her if you want the piece to be businesslike or funky, bright or sombre, humorous or laid-back. Do you have a vision in your head of what you think it might look like in general terms? Share all this with your designer before she begins her work so she will have a good sense of the approach to take that will please you. This way, you can also avoid the time and expense of several stabs in the dark before the designer hits on the right combination of elements for your job.

…and that always makes everyone happy.

I’d love to hear your feedback (after you’ve thought about it for a while!) or your stories of those moments when praise was perfect or not-so-perfect. Please share in the comments!

(T-shirt image from Varietees and More CafePress gift shop)

Hey, I can fly!

Do you remember those old Claude the Cat cartoons? The ones where something would scare Claude and he’d shoot up to the ceiling and hang there by his claws, clinging on for dear life, shivering so badly his teeth would clatter? That was me seven months ago. The thing that scared me was the economy and what it was doing to the company I worked for. And the thing I was holding on to for dear life was my job.

No disrespect to my former employer…it was an excellent company to work for, I loved the people, my boss was fantastic and I was being fairly compensated for my work. But you know how it goes after you’ve been doing the same job for a long time. You get bored, right? Little things start to get under your skin. You start idly browsing the job sites to see if there’s anything interesting out there.

But the economy was so bad, there was no way I was taking the chance of moving to a new company, where I’d have none of the security that (we think) comes from being a long-term employee. So there I was, rather miserable in my job, but not willing to make a change. A bad combination.

And then one day I was called into the boardroom, and there was a strange woman in there with my boss. The strange woman, I was told, was from the HR department in Montreal, and she was there to — very gently and nicely — take my job away. I was being downsized.

So, I guess that would be the moment in the cartoon when the ceiling plaster breaks loose and Claude plummets to the floor with his claws still embedded it, and lies there thinking “wha’ happen??”

There’s a lot of that going around these days.

But, it’s said that more new businesses get started during a bad economy than at any other time. That’s because many laid-off employees, instead of taking new jobs (which may not be out there anyway), are starting new businesses and becoming self-employed — maybe even employing other people in the process. You might say it could be partly due to all these new businesses starting up after layoffs that the economy starts to recover.

But venturing out on your own, becoming self-employed, is really a terrifying prospect. So terrifying, in fact, that many people, even though they dream about it, would never really do it. It’s often only when you’re forced out, like a fledgling being tossed from the nest, that you suddenly discover that, wow…you can fly!

Sometimes. The bottoms of trees can be graveyards for fledglings that don’t make it. Not everyone can just pick up and become self-employed after losing a job. Maybe they hadn’t worked for the company very long and didn’t get much of a severance package. Maybe they didn’t have much money saved up, so they’re forced to take another job as quickly as possible. Maybe they don’t have someone at home whose income can help cushion the blow for a while. Maybe they don’t have a skill that can easily, quickly and cheaply translate into a home business.

But when the conditions are right, as they were for me, being laid off presents a huge opportunity. And now that I’ve been doing it for seven months, I realize just how lucky I was — how my own perfect storm of circumstances came together to allow me to get off the corporate merry-go-round and start controlling my own destiny.

Now I realize what a blessing being laid off really was for me. I’ve spoken before of the reasons I love being self-employed. But it wasn’t until yesterday that something coalesced in my brain so that I understood just how fortunate I really am (I’m kind of slow that way). I think of it as the eggs in a basket theory of employment.

When you’re employed, all your income comes from one source. If that one source should hit hard times, you may find yourself out looking for a new job, usually with very little warning. Being self-employed, on the other hand, usually means you have several streams of income. Even if your biggest client suddenly pulls the plug, you still have money coming in from your other clients, which will hopefully be enough to help you manage until you can replace that big client with one or more new clients. It’s a built-in protection that you just don’t have as an employee.

Mind you, when you’re self employed, you have a lot of other things to think about that you didn’t when you were getting a regular paycheque, not least of which is benefits. But that’s what happens when you’re an independent human being. Unless you’re still living in your mother’s basement at age forty, you’ve been through the process of learning how to take care of yourself. It’s the same when you become self-employed. You learn, you adapt and, because it’s almost impossible not to, you grow as a human being.

Self-employment is not for everyone. Who knows, there may come a day when I decide it’s not for me anymore. But, right now, even though I often lie awake at night and wonder if I can really do this, if I’m going to be able to support myself without a corporate safety net, I feel like I’ve found the holy grail and the thought of going back to being an employee doesn’t appeal to me one little bit.

The Patti Principles of Twitter

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…. wait… well… it was Powell River, BC in the mid-nineties actually. Anyway, back then sometime, I came up with the concept of “The Patti Principles.”

Patti Principles are lists of basic rules I follow in my own life which I’ve found useful and successful. Sometimes they’re just opinions about things that are important to me. I thought I would start to share these here, because now and then they’re actually useful to someone other than myself!

Of course, as always, I’ll be delighted to hear from you in the comments if you have any principles of your own to add to the list, or if you take issue with any that I’ve presented. Note that I do not consider myself an expert on anything, except for maybe the best way to dice an onion, so I don’t hold these principles forth as the final word on whatever topic they happen to be about.

So, now, onward!

Twitter can be a powerful ally in your marketing and public relations efforts. Here are a few of the principles I follow when using my @PatMoranGraphic Twitter account, which is the one I reserve for my business tweets.

1. Tweet every day, at least once, but…
2. Don’t tweet too much. Five times per day is plenty. More than ten is overtweeting.
3. Check out every new follower and follow back if interested, or…
4. Block spammers, bots and sales pitchers.
5. To find great new tweeters to follow, watch the @ references and retweets coming through your feed.
6. Develop a “target tweeter profile” and use that to decide who you should follow and who you can ignore.
7. When someone new follows you, if you’re following them back, send a friendly welcome message to them in a public tweet. Include their Twitter handle, a precis of their Twitter bio and the link they use on their profile page.
8. Create a separate Twitter account to follow friends and family. Uncle Hal may be a great guy, but your followers don’t need to find out all about his hip replacement on your Twitter page.
9. Even so, it’s okay to post something a little more personal here and there on your business account. Your followers will enjoy getting to know the real you a little bit.
10. Let people into your world. Post photos, book excerpts, updates on the exciting stuff you’re doing in your business.
11. Retweet cool stuff. People like being retweeted and it’s an easy way to add interesting content to your own stream.
12. Remember: once it’s online, it’s always online. Don’t tweet in anger or revenge…you will regret it.
13. Create a custom Twitter background to show you take this seriously
14. Finally, and most importantly… engage with your followers and those you follow. Form relationships, be real, do business and have fun!

This is the life

There are many typical reasons why being self-employed is so great: working in your jammies, being your own boss, being able to choose who you want to (and don’t want to) work for.

While those things are certainly great, especially the working in your jammies part, I thought I’d list a few of the less-mentioned things that I find wonderful about being self-employed. In no particular order:

• Stress: Sure it’s stressful being self-employed, but it’s a good stress. I like this kind of stress. It’s the kind of stress that has me bounding out of bed in the morning to get to my desk, rather than rolling over hitting the snooze button five or six times before I drag my ass out of bed.
• No alarm clock: And speaking of getting out of bed, the only time I even set my alarm clock these days is on those Thursday mornings when I drive a friend to work in Merrickville. My natural body rhythms really, really like this business of being self-employed. I go to bed when I’m tired and I get up when I’m rested, and the result is a much happier Patti.
• Recluse-friendly workplace: I won’t deny it…I’m a bit of a recluse. Well, a lot of a recluse, actually. I love being at home by myself – it’s where I’m happiest. Working out of my home suits me right down to the ground. It’s not that I don’t like people. I love people. But working in an office where you’re surrounded by people you may or may not like, who may or may not like you, and who sometimes have annoying habits that you can’t get away from…well, let’s just say, I’m far, far happier working by myself. And the surprising thing is, now that I’m working on my own, I actually meet a lot more new people than I did when I was stuck in a gloomy little windowless office all day, and never seeing anyone other than fellow staff members.
• I do it my way: The phone is to my left and the printer is beside my desk and I can go anywhere I want online without Big Brother possibly watching over my virtual shoulder. I’ve got everything set up just the way I want it and I can change it any time I like.
• The blessed quiet: I like it quiet. Softly playing radios sound like wasps in a tin can to me. People talking in the next room distract me (unless they’re speaking French, in which case I can easily ignore them because I haven’t got a clue what they’re saying). Noisy photocopiers and laser printers irritate me. Phones and email alerts and all the other random sound effects we’re subjected to constantly these days just make my blood pressure rise. It’s okay when it’s just the noise of one person working quietly by herself. But when you have an office full of such noise it becomes very unpleasant.
• Coming and going: Okay, this one is probably on most lists of why being self-employed is so great. But it’s one of the most important factors for me, so I’m including it. So there. You see…I’m over 50 now. A big girl. I don’t like having to get permission to be away from my office for half a day if I need to do a personal errand or have a doctor’s appointment. If I get frustrated in the middle of the day and just need to stop working for a little while, I can do that now. I can take as long a lunch as I like. I get out and about a lot more now because I have business errands to run, where before I was stuck in the office all day and then came home and collapsed on the couch all evening.

Yes, I like being in charge of my own destiny, and all those things are part of that. There are probably plenty of others I’ll kick myself for forgetting to mention.

I’d like to know about of the uncommon things that you like about being self-employed, or dream about enjoying someday when you’re your own boss. Share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.