Rob Barrett Design » Business

One Year Later… A New Design is Born

Rob Barrett — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:06:37 +0000

Well, almost. It’s pretty much a year since I scrapped my old ExpressionEngine site and put together a portfolio and blog in WordPress. Mine was the first WordPress site that I built, and, while the sticky tape’s held it all together pretty nicely, there’s so much that could be improved.

That’s why it’s been quiet here as of late — I’ve been working away behind the scenes in my spare time to create a new look and feel for my site. One that’s a lot more… me. I’m polishing it off and covering over the scuff marks at the moment, so it’ll be put in place very shortly.

How about a Nice Hot Cuppa?

Rob Barrett — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:52:37 +0000

Recently, I’ve been thinking that a change in branding would do my own freelance business some good — that having a ’studio’ name, rather than using my own, would help in gaining new custom. To that end, I’m happy to announce that Nice Hot Cuppa is now online.

OK, it’s just a holding page for the time being, until I build the site (and that probably won’t happen for at least a month or so — March is already filled up with holidaying and moving house), but it’s good to finally have something more substantial than just an idea in my head.

To reflect that I’m trying to involve myself in less web development, and more work involving graphic design and illustration, NHC will be geared towards generating clients requiring need print design, and digital design that doesn’t involve much in the way of back-end coding. I’ll still be working on web development for a number of existing clients, but I’m not going to be actively pushing this service.

This site, Rob Barrett Design, will remain in order to showcase my personal projects and to host my blog (I’m still undecided as to whether I should blog under RBD or NHC, so I’ll keep it here for the time being), and it will likely shift towards a role that supports my search for a full-time design job in London.

I’ve got a nice UPrinting giveaway planned to mark the unveiling of the finished NHC site, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

Gmail does it again — say hello to Tasks!

Rob Barrett — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:10:38 +0000

Just as I was heading to bed last night, I spotted a new link at the top of my Gmail page announcing the arrival of Google Mail Tasks under the Labs programme.

Obviously I couldn’t go straight to sleep without checking this out first, so I spent a few minutes having a play around with it. Wow — I was very impressed!

It appears to be a very basic add-on, but for me it’s perfectly timed — I was just about to be billed for another month of Basecamp, which I don’t use much (it doesn’t work well for me to have three or four different sites to go to just to keep up with my work), and I was wondering what I’d use as a possible replacement.

Google Mail Tasks does everything that I need it to:

Set different lists for seperate clients
Indent tasks, so that I can group sub-tasks under a main project check-box
Rearrange the order of tasks
Set a due date for a task
Write associated notes for the task
This is the cool one — from the ‘More Actions’ dropdown when viewing an email, you can ‘Add to Tasks’ — this creates a new task item linked back to this email

I’m not sure that I’ve come across all of the features so far, but these alone make this a fantastic free alternative to the many small project management tools that abound on the internet!

Thanks for dressing me, FreshBooks!

Rob Barrett — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:08:42 +0000

Just over two weeks ago, FreshBooks ran a little competition through Twitter. They’d published a new press release on their website and intentionally left a couple of spelling mistakes in.

The competition was this — first person to find and report the two mistakes wins a t-shirt. Simple!

I loaded the page, had a read through, and spotted a couple of words that I thought might be the culprit, so I shot off a reply. A few moment later, I was congratulated as the winner (wooo!) and was asked for my address so I could be sent the t-shirt.

The international shipping clearly took a while, but — true to their word — it arrived yesterday afternoon. Thanks, guys — here I am sporting it just for you!

Gotta admit, it’s a pretty cool and simple way to get people to read your press release, huh? It worked for me, at least!

In case you don’t know about FreshBooks, it’s a free (for basic level) and paid online invoicing and time tracking service. I’ve been using it about a month now, and it’s a vast improvement on my previous method of Excel and email. Keeping everything in one place just makes billing so much easier!

Now, straight up, the following is a referral link — if you’re interested and you think I deserve the recognition for pointing you onwards, click away, otherwise it’s easy enough to do a quick Google search.

Go take a look:
FreshBooks Online Invoicing, Time Tracking and Expense Service