In his latest essay, respected Texas-based designer Andy Rutledge takes a look at the full-time-plus-freelance workforce (of which I’d guess a large proportion of our audience are members), and decides that it is “ill-conceived and unprofessional” behaviour, and demonstrates a “lack of professional commitment and integrity”.

His basic point is that if you have a job as a designer and also operate a freelance design business, both you and your employer are “naive” and “flaky”, behaving unprofessionally, and doing a disservice to your clients.

Speaking as one of those designers who holds down a full-time job and also freelances, I’d say the only disservice being done here is by Andy to his fellow designers. His sweeping generalization – that anyone working on the side is only likely to be giving 50% of their attention to any given job, can’t be trusted to stick around, and is certain to be unmotivated – is insulting to all those people working hard at evenings and weekends to expand their skills, further their understanding of the industry, and support their families with an additional income.

But what do you think? Do you agree with Andy that commitment can only be assured if you work one job only? Or are you successfully filling both roles while remaining “professional”?

Comments are open.

In his latest essay, respected Texas-based designer Andy Rutledge takes a look at the full-time-plus-freelance workforce (of which I’d guess a large proportion of our audience are members), and decides that it is “ill-conceived and unprofessional” behaviour, and demonstrates a “lack of professional commitment and integrity”.

His basic point is that if you have a job as a designer and also operate a freelance design business, you and your employer are “naive” and “flaky”, behaving unprofessionally, and doing a disservice to your clients.

Speaking as one of those designers who holds down a full-time job and also freelances, I’d say the only disservice being done here is by Andy to his fellow designers. His sweeping generalization – that anyone working both a ‘proper’ job and running their own design shop is only likely to be giving 50% of their attention to any given job, can’t be trusted to stick around, and is certain to be unmotivated – is insulting to all those people working hard at evenings and weekends to expand their skills, further their understanding of the industry, and support their families with an additional income.

But what do you think? Do you agree with Andy that commitment can only be assured if you work one job only? Or are you successfully filling both roles while remaining “professional”?

Comments are open.

MailChimp’s Ben Chestnut is this week’s newest contributor to Digital Web. Ben offers his e-marketing expertise with 10 Tips For Your First Email Campaign. Web marketing and web standards are finally starting to converge, but that hardly means there are long established best practices and guidelines for people new to e-mail campaigns. Ben’s tips are geared for newcomers to e-mail marketing, but are also handy reminders for anyone running campaigns (like Digital Web’s own Nick Finck, who will send ours out shortly!)

Lastly and a bit overdue, I’d like to announce our Beanstalk contest winners!

1. Tom
2. James Beard
3. miklb

We asked Digital Web readers to answer Why do you need a reliable source control system the most? Our winners receive FREE Beanstalk accounts for one year! Winners, please send me you contact information, so we can get you your prizes? E-mail tiff dot fehr at digital dash web dot com. And thank you again to all our participants!

Digital Web columnist Nathan Smith has just announced the release of his new CSS framework, 960.gs. It’s similar in concept to the popular Blueprint framework, but it comes bundled with a collection of useful PDF files for sketching your design, and template files for the most common graphics and IA apps, helping you to maintain a consistent approach to your design from paper to the screen.

First, many thanks to all our participants in our contest for free accounts with Beanstalk! The contest is now closed. We will be judging the comment entries tomorrow, and posting the winners shortly!

Secondly, we have a special post-SXSW treat for our readers. Designer Mike Rohde shares his unique South by South West Sketchnotes made during some of the best panels of Southby. We put together a small collection of his work, panel descriptions, podcasts, slides, micro-sites and a short interview with Mike about his style. Take a short foray into SXSW’s panels with Mike’s sketchnotes as your guide.

If you work on the web, the SXSW Interactive festival last week was pretty hard to avoid (particularly if you’re a Twitter user), and this week there will be the inevitable avalanche of blog posts from attendees — who they met, where they partied, and whether it was better or worse than last year.

But is it, as they say, “all that”? If you didn’t attend, did the fuss and excitement have you turning green with envy — or is SXSW simply a week-long party for A-listers and wannabe blogerati, desperately flickring each other to somehow validate their pitiful obsession with what is essentially simply yet another tech conference?

Comments are open, so let us know — does South By South West actually matter?

You might have noticed Digital Web did not publish an issue this week. Due to the supreme distraction of SXSW and the fact a large portion of our staff (well, four of nine) was in attendence, we took a short break. We’ll be back next week in our usual fashion! In the meantime, we exended our contest for free Beanstalk accounts for another week. The new deadline for your comment-submission is next Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at midnight (Pacific Daylight time). Reminder! The contest entry question is:

Why do you need a reliable source control system the most?

Head on over to our post detailing the contest and enter!

You might have noticed Digital Web did not publish an issue this week. Due to the supreme distraction of SXSW and the fact a large portion of our staff (well, four of nine) was in attendance, we took a short break. We’ll be back next week in our usual fashion! In the meantime, we have extended our contest for free Beanstalk accounts for another week. The new deadline for your comment-submission is next Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at midnight (Pacific Daylight time). Reminder! The contest entry question is:

Why do you need a reliable source control system the most?

Head on over to our post detailing the contest and enter!

I got to a slow start for the last day of SXSW due in no small part to the Great British Booze-up and SXNW I missed the early morning panels, but caught some of Peas in a Pod: Advertising, Monetization and Social Media. After lunch we caught the keynote with game designer Jane McGonigal, speaking on the future and unique engagement benefits of ARGs. It was a really good keynote that caused me to rethink my attitude toward gaming. (I’m glad a female attendee asked Ms. McGonigal on her thoughts about ARG participation versus stereotypes about gamers and general gender differences in gaming habits and styles.)

Currently I’m in Considerations for Scalabale Web Ventures, which is still (thankfully) mostly above my head. I’m simply not the type of developer to want to get into server loads, scalability hardware issues, I/O issues or the like, but it is good to know where the conversation and technologies are headed. The panel is casual but extremely competent with the best scalability advice from flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg, WordPress and Media Temple. For those looking at scalability issues and the best open-source way to put together a hardware framework for web apps, the podcast might be very helpful.