Can you believe it? We've made it to Episode 4! Join us as we talk about Borrow Lenses, New Adventures in Web Design Conference, the HTML5 Boilerplate, EECI2010 in Leiden, how to scale Nate's incredibly tall hair if you're a tiny person and our DesignersMusic picks of the week.

Once you've laid the groundwork for your freelancing website, it's time to make it produce some income! Read on for a few tips on how to make it awesome.
I can't count the number of times I've come across a designer's site and couldn't find any information about them. No picture, no bio. Maybe a twitter account with some non descript avatar. Your clients want to know if you're …
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The third times a charm...literally. After moving shooting locations 3 times we finally finished shooting Episode 3 of the Kick Awesome Show. Join us as we talk about iPad textbooks that are too cool for school, Storm Troopers with 'staches, MojoMotor, our favorite shades of gray (with ninja battles!) and our DesignersMusic picks of the week.
Welcome back to the Kick Awesome Show! This week Nate and I talk about Happy Story Time, our immaculate beards, a cool trick from the freshly designed CSS Tricks, our top picks from DesignersMusic and a bonus rant about crappy servers.

We have a lot of designers email us and ask for advice. One common thread lately seems to be "How do I get my freelancing career going?" Well, thanks to the Internet there's lots of ways! First let's talk about your website. Are you getting traffic? What happens when users get there? Do you even know? If you're having trouble making your website work for you then read ahead:
Obviously, if you want people to actually …
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Welcome to The Kick Awesome Show! That's right, Nate and I have decided we need to hang out more, so why not in front of a camera? We're going to attempt to talk about cool and interesting things every week so go hit that subscribe button now.
Being that this is our first shot the format's still up in the air a bit. But that's ok, we know you'll tell us what you love and don't love …
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During the process of coding a web app we've been working on for a client, I decided that was time to go CSS3 with their buttons. After using the accessible CSS button technique for a while, it still felt really complicated and maintaining all those images was a pain if you had different sized buttons throughout your site.
So I started coding them up and realized that all the examples I had run across didn't …
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Hello everyone! You might have noticed that it has been a little quiet around here the past few months. Despite the fact that I have alerts telling me “Post To the FortySeven Media Weblog!” every Tuesday around lunch time, I have not managed to compose even one post in ages due to a crazy amount of projects we have running. I reflected on this for a moment just now and I realized something. When you don’t give up on your dream, you will most likely succeed. But the even bigger thought …
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Our doorbell rang at 10:00 last night. Ashley and I looked at each other. “That’s weird, who in the world would be at our door this late?” I said. We’re not the type to have people over at all hours of the night. Since most of our friends have kids now, everyone packs up at 8 or so to get home before the tantrums begin. But either way, no one shows up on our doorstep this time of night.
I went …
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Greetings from San Francisco! Nate and I are having a great time meeting up with old friends and making new ones at this year’s ExpressionEngine and CodeIgnitor conference.
I had the pleasure of doing a MasterClass on “The Power of EE’s Dynamic Templates” yesterday and wanted to get the slides up for everyone to check out. It was 4 hours long, so there’s quite a few
. Several people asked for the slides with the …
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I was talking to a client this afternoon and realized we hadn’t given much of an update on DesignHope in the last month. So here it goes!
It’s kinda sorta done. The site has actually been finished for several weeks; we’re just waiting for Scott’s iPhone app to go live in the AppStore before we launch. As soon as we get the go ahead from him we’ll be officially launching.
In the meantime, Newism is ramping up production on …
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Hey Everyone! How’s it’s going? It’s been a while since we’ve posted as things have been silly crazy awesome busy, but we wanted to let you know about some of the super sweet conferences we are speaking at and/or just going to. Check the video:
We are very excited to be speaking/attending these events and we would absolutely love to meet you there. Let us know in the comments if …
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We're happy to report that the majority of the code and design is done for the Underdog Solutions site! We'll give you a link to check it out soon, but in the meantime we need help with what to put in the sidebars of the secondary pages. Here's the ideas we have so far:
We obviously won't have all these all the time, but would like a set of modules to choose from …
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I’ll admit it. I’m not really a social person. We’ve lived in our neighborhood almost 6 years and I can count the number of times we’ve talked to our neighbors on my hand. And by talk I mean had a full conversation. So yeah, not a lot.
Several weeks ago we put our house on the market. Too many kids, not enough rooms; you know the drill. We’ve outgrown this place, unfortunately. And in preparation to sell it, we needed to finish replacing all the doors and trim we had started …
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I’ll just come out and say it. DesignHope has taken way too long. What started as a great idea with support from some of the coolest companies out there turned into a long drawn out process that still isn’t finished. Scott, we’re sorry, man. I hope you haven’t minded being the guinea pig. We still have big plans for DesignHope, but obviously we need to get …
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After a long wait; we're excited to be able to show you a really cool project we worked on several months ago. Visual Recipes is a site with a great idea: Take pictures for each step of your process when making a delicious dish and post it online. Great for visual learners (like myself) and great for the users who get to share their recipes.
The site already got quite a bit of traffic, but it's age was starting to show. They were ready to overhaul it inside …
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I still remember the day I found the ImageSizer plugin from Lumis. "Holy crap, I can upload any file and this thing will crop it and resize it on the fly in multiple places throughout my whole ExpressionEngine site?" To say I was psyched would be an understatement.
We often use ImageSizer in conjunction with the FF Matrix FieldFrame field type to let users add as many images as they want with captions. Then we pull at the first one and give a link to …
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I have often heard people say, “She’s got a case of the Mondays.” Meaning of course that that person might be a touch grumpy because the work week has come around again. Today, I find myself with a case of “The Thank You’s.”
I woke up this morning nearly in a panic because I wanted to make sure that one of our client’s new campaigns launched successfully. I exchanged a few emails and made sure things were running smoothly, which they were. And as I settled into my morning routine, …
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I have used Photoshop for years. I mean, a long flippin’ time. While I am always learning something new, I’ve grown quite familiar with it’s tools and feel comfortable working with it. As such, I’ve found myself wanting to use PS’s tools in the world around me to fix something. Then I laugh at myself and say something like, “Man, you’ve been at the computer too much lately” and go about my business.
This thought stuck with me and I’ve decided to take a look at a few of the main …
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First off, let me say that we're psyched to finally be able to share this project with you. We believe that side projects don't work unless you're passionate about them. Well, guess what? We love music and we love design. They go hand in hand, really. So we decided that there should be a place where designers can find new music recommended by other designers: DesignersMusic
Go play with it now …
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BestChristianDesign is helping give churches inspiration for their next project. Good call, guys.
Seth Godin reminds us to enjoy and take advantage of the uphills.
Stop announcing your new project. Just do it.
Rock and Roll people, Rock and Roll.
To all you staff designers out there, here’s a link for you. (via @ryanlascano)
Fascinating look into the music business.
Derek Sivers posts some great advice about balancing your life.
@ryanirelan Hate that, too. Was hoping it would grow on me but too many panes all over the place. Too much like my desktop :D
I've noticed I'm not noticing my spelling errors. I need more sleep.
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