Craig Soup Web Design Blog

While watching the Red River Shootout this weekend, I decided to exercise my creative muscles a little bit and play around with Photoshop. This is what I came up with:

The design is just a compilation of images I downloaded, sliced apart, threw together, and added some color changes to. It was actually inspired by a similar piece that I had seen on the internet, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to find the image again.

Anyways, the moral of the story here is that it’s good for the creative mind to take a break from “work” every now and then in order to create something just for the sake of creating something! It reminds us that we love our jobs, that even though we may get bogged down in the business side of things every now and then, we’re still designers, and we love what we do!!

My wife and I recently had a discussion about our budget and why it was that even with a cash budget, we were still spending more than we should each month. After careful consideration, we discovered that we needed a small shift in mindset in order to make a significant improvement in our spending habits.

Unfortunately, I’ve always operated under the mindset that a few little splurges here and there wouldn’t hurt anything. And for the most part, I was right. None of the aforementioned splurges in and of themselves were significant enough to make a big impact on my budget. The problem was with the mindset.

Simply convincing myself that little indulgences didn’t make a difference always ends up biting me from behind, because all the little indulgences eventually add up to an exorbitant amount of money that was supposed to go towards paying off debt.

So with the help of my wife, I’m changing my mindset. I am now totally convinced that little indulgences DO make a difference, and even if I see that something I want will only cost me a nickel, I refuse to buy it unless I can do so with the money left over from my weekly cash budget allowance.

I’ve also discovered that this mindset can be applied in any area of life. Take freelancing, for example. If I’ve got an extra thirty minutes on my hands, I have to make a decision on how I’m going to spend that time. I could either spend it watching TV, or I could use the time a little more wisely and jump on Guru.com to make bids on some freelance projects. Sure, the TV may be a little more relaxing, but what if I’ve missed a really great bidding opportunity just because I decided I wanted to watch a rerun of Arrested Development?

So take the time to examine your own life. Are there areas you’re struggling with where this concept of “every little bit makes a difference” could apply? If so, change your mindset. You won’t regret it, I promise!

The fear of not knowing enough has often hindered me from doing the things I love to do. For example, four years ago, I was working for a small web design firm that consisted of my brother, my boss, and me. Unfortunately, my boss was a self-centered jerk who preached good works and then cheated me and my brother out of thousands of dollars in taxes that I’m still trying to pay back to this day, but that’s another story for another day. The point is that my boss’s inability to run an honest business resulted in the downfall of the business, and I was left with no a job (and a $6,000 tax bill).

While unemployed, I was often tempted to start up my own web design business, but all I had done for my previous employer was web design. I would design the sites and then hand them over to my brother to do all the hardcore back-end programming. So for fear of what I didn’t know how to do, I never did start that business. Instead I started studying web development in more depth, which was a good move, but I never got to the point where I felt confident enough to find clients and get busy.

Only recently have I realized that I don’t have to know everything there is to know about web development in order to create killer websites! Instead of dwelling on my weaknesses, I’ve started focusing on my strengths, and I’ve been able to create some great stuff.

This morning, I stumbled across a post by one of my favorite bloggers, Josh Mullineaux, where he talked about ‘Why It’s Okay to Suck Sometimes’. This post reminded me of how I got where I am today by overcoming this feeling that I wasn’t good enough. Thanks, Josh!