Working from home comes with several advantages after all – no overhead, free range of the kitchen, no dress code and the ability to sleep as late as we want and stroll from the bedroom to our computer.

However, there are also several disadvantages we should be aware of. Distractions from family, children or pets being the biggest issue we come across. Also, walking two feet from our bedroom to our office means we don’t get the exercise we should – and we’re increasingly becoming an unhealthy industry. It also means you lead a distinctly lonely work day  - and without a boss breathing down your neck you’re more apt to goof off on the internet.

Even with all of these disadvantages – I still wouldn’t trade it for any other job in the world, nor would I bother with paying the high costs of renting an office space. Instead, I’ve aimed to become more productive and turn these into non-issues. How can you do it?

Distractions From Family & Pets

Our biggest issues normally stem from the distractions caused by loved ones. While it’s true that freelancers have a more flexible schedule and can often take more breaks, that doesn’t mean we don’t have strict deadlines of our own. I’ve found myself stopping work in order to play with my dogs or hang spend time with my husband, only to see the whole day go by without any work getting done.

While it may seem rude or inconsiderate to shut out the loved ones, it’s a necessary evil in order to get stuff done. Here are a few tricks that have worked for me (and some my hubby has used against me!):

• Shut the door. If you’re lucky enough to have a whole room dedicated as an office, sometimes it works best to just shut the door and drown out the noise.
• Leave the animals outside. Sometimes my doggies can get a little restless and drive me up the wall when I’m trying to concentrate, so if it’s a nice day out (and you have a fenced in yard), I’d leave them outside a little longer than normal so they can run off the energy and let me work.
• Put on headphones. Nikita uses this trick on me. When he’s trying to concentrate on work and I’m babbling on about nothing, he’ll put on his headphones. Eventually I realize he’s not listening and get tired of having him take off his headphones and repeat myself. Eventually I leave him alone. Not the nicest, but it works!

Pudgy Developers

Nobody likes a fat developer, and since I’ve gone freelance, I’ve notice a huge weight gain. So what have I done to remedy this? I moved across the world to London, where every day I’ve had to walk at least two miles to get anything accomplished.

Of course, that’s not going to work for the majority, or probably anyone else. But it’s important to make some life changes now before you get to the age where you end up having health problems. I like you guys and fully expect all of us to be coding together well into our triple digits!

Of of the main issues of working from home is grazing – I’ve noticed personally that I tend to stray into the cupboards for snack food quite often. If you do this to, go ahead and get rid of the junk food and stock up on healthy snacks and fruits. That why you’re at least eating healthy.

If you’ve got pets, now’s the time to give them some attention. Take a longer lunch and use it to walk them around the block, or play some sports with your kids. Relocate to the city if you can. I know personally that I could never stick to going to the gym or an exercise plan – I had to force myself to work out but working it into my daily routine. I currently live in the city about a mile from any public transport – so even if I decide to be lazy one day and take the subway, I still get 2 miles of exercise. I’ve already noticed a decrease in appetite, weight and general pudgyness since I got here 3 weeks ago.

Lonely – I’m so Lonely

Another difficult disadvantage of working from home is the loneliness. I tend to be a loner anyways so this didn’t bother me too much until I realized I worked so much and so alone, that I didn’t have many friends! I also lived in the middle of nowhere so it was hard to meet up with the friends I had and even harder to find fellow devs and designers to hang with.

Now, I’m finding I have a ton of friends and contacts in the area and am meeting up with one of them almost every day for lunch or dinner. This forces me to get out of the house AND get some exercise. It also helps networking wise, as we can talk about work much easier. Plus, it’s fun to finally get to put faces to twitter avatars, voices or emails.

If you live in an area with a lot of people, you can also try meeting clients in person. I used to be pretty firmly against this, as I felt it wasted too much of my day for little payoff, but I’ve started looking forward to these outings. I get to be social and get out of the house; plus see parts of the city I’ve never been to.I also often get a free lunch (yum!) and I feel better connected to my clients.

If you’re not in an area with a lot of people or clients, try working some place public, like a library or coffeeshop. Just be careful that you’re not in someplace distracting or you won’t get anything done.

Coworking

Coworking spaces are large offices that allow you to rent a desk, or even a whole space. They’re cheaper than actually renting your own office, plus you get to share space with like-minded individuals. Some of these places let you rent by the hour or day; others let you have an actual short lease.

I’ve never done this personally, but have been contemplating doing it once or twice a week here – just got to find a place close enough to be worth it.

What do you do to stay productive at home?

A collection of icons I made for a secret project I’m working on, free for you to use! Use as you like, the only thing I ask in return is a nice tweet or share someplace for others to find.
Download the PSD

PSD includes 100x100px icons of:

• Codesnippit
• Dribbble
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Github
• GoodReads
• Instagram
• Lanyrd
• LinkedIn
• Meetup
• Pinterest
• Ravelry
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• WordPress
• Youtube

Want to see other icons or formats? Just leave a comment below and I’ll place some time aside each week to make some

This also gives me the opportunity to see behind the scenes – I don’t deal directly with normal clients, but instead I interact with the designer who then interacts with the client. Sometimes I even interactive with the project manager, who deals with the designer, who deals with the client. Needless to say sometimes things can get quite messy. We developers love you designers, but things aren’t always rosy.

While we devs aren’t perfect when it comes to dealing with the “other side”, there are several things I’d like to point out that would really help us help you better – and ways you can avoid being that stereotypical annoying nerd type.

Be Upfront About The Project

One of the most annoying things that a designer can do is to not be upfront about a particular project. It’s really annoying – and almost a deal breaker – to deal with you as a designer at the beginning of the project, and then all of a sudden you disappear and some project manager from some company you’ve never heard of and never agreed to work with suddenly steps in to be your liaison. If you’re working with other agencies, that’s cool, just let us know up front that’s who we’ll be dealing with.

Your Mockups Look Like A Massacre

Your designs are your babies and we developers want to make sure we take care of them well – but it’s impossible to correctly code a site if we can’t get the resources we need. Handing us over a mockup that takes up half our HD, with hundreds of layers that aren’t named, grouped or in any logical order isn’t going to cut it. And please, don’t get angry if we end up missing all of your rollover states because of this.

Temper Tantrums

Nobody likes it when they can’t get their way – but sometimes the web is going to do what the web is going to do. Yes we’d like get everything pixel perfect, the unicorn animations smooth, parallax working behind jQuery flying wizards…but sometimes it’s just not possible. We’re not here to sabotage your design. We’re here to help you and sometimes you need to trust our judgement when something can’t, or shouldn’t, work.

You Stood Me Up!

Web projects are never precise in any category, and much less so in schedule. What you think is a quick and dirty project really ends up taking months, and something that looks long and daunting is finished in days. So we understand that you can’t always get the project start dates correct. But please, please, if you ask us to schedule you in for a date and realize you’re not going to be ready – please let us know so we can fit someone else in in that time slot. I often have 4-5 projects scheduled in for one week and normally only 2 come through. I end up turning down projects when I could’ve ending up doing them! I’ve contemplating require deposits before I put clients on the schedule, although this isn’t very convenient to you, the designer.

Developers Are Annoying Too

We developers are not without our own shortcomings and I know that it can be difficult dealing with us sometimes. A list of things I think we developers could work on as a whole:

• Communication – we tend to drift off into our own world!
• Pay Attention – especially the backend programmers who tend to skirt the details
• Respect – just because you don’t touch the backend, doesn’t make you any less important or smart in the web world
• Learn – I believe the web would be a prettier place if developers took some time to learn basic design principles and kept up with the trends and new techniques.

Your Thoughts

What are some of your pet peeves when working with designers? How can both sides better communicate?

The conference, put on by Aral Balkan, was fantastic. I finally got to meet Sarah Parmenter, Jeremy Keith, Geri Coady and Remy Sharp. I also made some new friends, Laura Kalbag and Scott Coello. I also enjoyed seeing the Clearleft office in person and having a long tea break discussing politics and religion with Aral.

I do admit that I missed the first set of talks due to the airline “forgetting” to put some luggage on the plane and the hubby not having anything to wear. Luckily, we made it there by the first break.

Let’s get started on the talks, shall we?

One Web by Jeremy Keith

I’ve read a lot of books by Jeremy, but never heard him speak until this conference. The man is as stubborn and loud as me and I loved it. His talk was very passionate and I was able to follow along. At one point, he even called iOS developers “fucking peasants”. It was fantastic.

Jeremy stated that the web was created to be open, and unlike anything else, you didn’t need permission from anyone to create content on it and that anything could be published. The links were open and you could link from one site to another without asking anyone for permission. The internet’s primary design was universality and was meant to be used on any device or with any handicap.

The problem with native app design is that it takes us back 20 years before the web was born. Native apps may be great, but how long will those resources lasts? When you create content on the web, it lasts for forever, as long as you pay for hosting, but it’s harder to keep content alive when it’s tied to a specific device. All a web needs is HTML, HTTP and a URL.

Back when the web was new, it’s competition came from CD-ROMs like Microsoft Incarta, but the web was able to succeed because of the links and it’s updatability. Today’s competition comes from apps, but it can be argued that because of links, web is really the “killer app”.

The internet is real time communication and it threatens publishers and content controllers like magazines, news providers, music and film makers because it allows anyone to publish. These outlets are excited about the popularity of native apps because it brings back control and exclusivity.

What is the web for? For for fun? For users? Merely to make money (which Jeremy argued, is no better than a prostitute)? The web is meant for humans in order to contribute to a better world.

Steve Jobs once said that you don’t need to be permission to be awesome – but you do with native apps.

Geek Ninja Battle – or Jeremy Keith vs. Everyone Else

This WAS the best talk of all, which was more like a debate between Jeremy Keith and everyone else on the panel. The other members were Aral, Kevin, Martin, Matt and Seb. Basically, the battle was about which is better, native or web apps. Jeremy being a hardcore web-only kind of guy, basically ended up arguing with everyone, especially Aral, and there was seriously a part where I though punches were about to be thrown. It truly was a battle and quite entertaining (and informative of course). It’s interesting to see how we all geek out over little stuff like this that the rest of the world never thinks or cares about.

Aral asked Martin, who works at Microsoft, why we should use their new Windows phone. Honestly, I thought the guy gave a pretty weak answer, which basically boiled down to “you can build apps quickly and we’re a big company”…riiiight…..

Matt, and iOS developer, thought it was important to just make the commitment to get something out and that it was more about delivery than the type of platform you used. He cited the example about how when you subscribe to a newspaper on the Kindle, it’s automatically delivered every morning.

Kevin, a Titanium developer, suggested that native was better, because in web it’s difficult to integrate with the phone’s system and all of its features. He suggested using something like Titanium, which is a cross-platform tool and allows you to be more productive by creating one app for all platforms.

Jeremy Keith said it was important to not focus on one platform and limit your user base, but to create a progressive website that can be accessed by everyone, even crappy browsers (at this, he pointed to Martin, the Microsoft guy). Jeremy said that by creating a baseline that worked for all devices and browsers and then enhancing it for a few, it gave you a competitive advantage against those that created an app for only a select few. He also stated that what you’re getting natively on apps now, is what will soon be the future of the web. He also stated that we need to stop trying to make web apps look native, in order to avoid confusion.

Seb agreed with Jeremy Keith’s view that progressive enhancement was a great tool for mobile, but that it’s limited and not for interactive apps.

At this point, it was less about questions from Aral, and more about a huge debate between Jeremy and everyone else. Aral and Jeremy debated about optimising for features, not devices, to which Jeremy disagreed with both. Aral brought up the issue of making money from web apps, which is not as easy to do as native apps are. Jeremy stated that making money this way is outdated. Not sure how I feel about that!

Angry Exorcist – Seb Ly Delisle

This talk was a step-by-step on how to make an Angry Birds clone in under 30 minutes using the Corona SDK. You can find the source code at Seb’s website and follow Seb on Twitter to find out more about this hilarious project. Hopefully, he’ll post a video of how he did it, it was fantastic!

Design Challenges – Sarah Parmenter

Sarah Parmenter laid out 10 design challenges that you’ll face as an iOS designer.

1. Fluid design – She stated how important it was to make sure your designs are able to be stretched and to watch out for gradients and the slicing of buttons and background elements.
2. Use familiar behaviors – A great touch reference can be found at Luke W’s website.
3. Clean up your environment – Properly name your groups and layers, keep folders neat and keep a scratch folder for all the elements developer’s will need, like buttons.
4. Progressive disclosure – Hide actions that don’t need to be shown. Clients often don’t like this, but users do. For example, the pull down to refresh action.
5. Tap targets – Make sure they’re big enough for fingers to push without accidentally hitting something else. The minimum hit target is 44×22 pixels.
6. Orientations – Users have a preference for using either landscape or portrait, so don’t force them to use one or another. Make sure your app is flexible and can adapt. A popular layout technique is using 3 columns in landscape mode and 2 in portrait.
7. Keep designs relevant to its OS.
8. Beyond human interface guides – Know the limits of the OS, even the smallest actions and gestures matter.
9. Retina display – Don’t ignore the retina display, it only takes basic math to do. A trick is to use shapes in Photoshop, as this allows you to resize the PSD easily without distorting it.
10. Automator – There’s an add on you can find online for adding the suffix to the file for the retina display to work.

Arse Over Tit or “How designers/developers have perfected the art of making things backwards” – Relly

I wasn’t too big a fan of this talk, I’m not really interested too much in content myself and Relly talked much too quickly so it was really hard to understand her.

Relly noted that content strategists normally don’t come into a project until the end. She asked, “What if books were made like apps?” You would first decide to make a book, choose a format, design a cover, pick out fonts, figure out the type of paper you’d want to use, pick a title….and then come up with the subject and content of the actual book??

You can’t make a hit app, but you can think up a plan for one. You’re only as good as the components you make and writing doesn’t scale. Relly suggested breaking up the large content projects into smaller pieces in order to get through them. She reminded us that the plan is not the work.

Ronald Wayne

Apparently there’s a third founder of Apple–I didn’t know that, did you? He met Steve Jobs while working at Atari (and Steve wrote my favorite game, Breakout). Ronald has never owned any Apple product, so he was present with an iPad 2 by the Update crew.

“We are designing for humans and they are central to what we do”

Beyond Delicious – Joachim Bondo

Delicious apps are those that devs put extra work into the UI. They’re the apps that users recommend, love and purchase.

1. Make code more beautiful than the UI. Delicious apps go beyond skin deep and into the code.
2. Under-state, Over-deliver.  Move focus from the user interface to the user experience.
3. Quality takes time. Respect users by taking your time in development.

The Digital Nature – Anna Debenham

Studies show that students who use tech are better with their studies. Unfortunately, schools are more likely to over-monitor the students. For example, a teacher couldn’t show his students the “view source” feature in the student library  because it had been blocked by the school for “security risks”. Over monitoring of students pushes them to hack their way around the systems.

Computer science isn’t taught as a standard in the UK, instead they teach how to use the software, but not how it’s made. Interest in software development is lower than ever. Today’s software and hardware focuses on hiding its design, because it’s thought to be too scary for users.

You can view the slides of this talk at maban.co.uk/dn

Geek Ninja Battle 2 – Design Challenges

Consisted of Joachim, Cennydd, Relly, Sarah, Remy and Aral.

Aral asked, “What are some of the unique design challenges to mobile?” Sarah answered that less is more and you should try to strip out the process to only three or four screens to make it easier for the user. Cennydd asked, “What do you mean by mobile? It could be the property of the device or user. Is the person using his iPhone at home mobile, or is the person using his laptop on a train mobile?”

Aral then asked, “What about ergonomics then?” Cennydd replied that ergonomics are limited, there’s a big difference between touch screen and using a keyboard and mouse. Anything more than one touch on a real mobile user is difficult to do. Joachim said to always strive for simplicity. Only put five buttons or less in the toolbar (which is in the Apple user guide).

“What are some copy restrictions?”, Aral asked. Relly said that the “people don’t read” belief actually depends on the context. Consider what the main task of what they’re doing is and how to let them get to that chunk of information. Mobile is “not what we can cut out, but what makes the most sense” to show.

Aral turned to Remy and asked him what some of the development challenges were? Remy said that if the app isn’t designed to be on the desktop, then it’s designed to be mobile. He recommended using libraries like jQuery mobile for quicker developer, although he also suggested using barebones development. If he can use a library to accomplish what he’s doing quickly though, he’ll use that. Apps should be as small and lean as possible. Cennydd said context is king in theory, but difficult to figure out in reality. Only way to figure out is by extensive researching.

The Things of the Future – Cennydd  Bowles

Many of the things of today don’t do anything. We plan for obsolesce now and we create a lot of crap and artificial demand. We;ve become complacent and allow advertisers to talk to us like idiots, making a dilution of value.

The audience is changing, however, only 12% of consumers have high opinions of big business. People are now more connected and can find out the truth about your products easily. They’re no longer satisfied with the consumer role. The web builds societies, educates and frees us.

The things of the future will:

• Be human and consider how products talk with the user.
• Mobile phones will have sensory input
• More clues for designers to interact with
• Tackle wicked problems like energy consumption, health and financial management.
• Disrupt by uprooting existing way of doing things

Sites are now cross-channel where media, form and function are now separated. Users don’t see why they should be different from being in-store to on the web or in an app.

Designers should now forced to think about the entire lifestyle of an item and create fewer, better things.

Photos from the Update Conference & Royal Dinner

I again want to thank all of you who made it possible for me to come here! It was fantastic!

I’ve never been a big fan of video on the web either, since I’m never at my computer unless I’m working so I never have time to watch. However, upon learning that Think Vitamin created a new membership service, called Think Vitamin Membership, I was immediately interested.

Read the rest of my post on FreelanceFolder

It’s interesting to see how many freelancers just work wherever they can, be it the local Starbucks, a spare bedroom or even the kitchen table. From my experience though, it’s extremely important to have a nice dedicated space, preferably filled with your favorite things.

While I don’t do any sort of graphic design, interior design is one of my favorite hobbies so I thought I’d share some tips and inspiration with you.

Read the rest of my post on FreelanceFolder »