Have a great day everyone!

Beautiful Tiles

I came across these beautiful tiles at Susie Watson Designs. Aren't they just gorgeous!

Check out more lovely home accessories here

80 Followers!

WOW!!! Thanks guys, I can't believe that I now have 80 followers. I appreciate you all reading my blog and looking at the pretty pictures :-)

T H A N K Y O U ! ! !

Quote & Surface Pattern design

Happy Easter

I just wanted to wish all my lovely followers a very Happy Easter, lets hope that the Easter Bunny visits you all with mountains of chocolate :-)

x

Kids Teepee tents

How gorgeous are these teepee's from Moozle

You can also find loads of other lovely goodies on their website, I recommend a quick squiz when you get a chance. 

sneaky peek

Today I just thought I'd show you a tiny peek of a massive project I am working on at the moment. I can't go into detail, but all should be revealed by the end of the year.

Quote & Surface Pattern design

More nails

As there is a special day of my favourite nail polish company Nails Inc on QVC tomorrow I thought I'd show you some more of their gorgeous colours.

This lovely blue is Portobello Road, it could probably do with two coats, but I knew I was going to be removing it the following day so didn't bother.

Nude is very on trend at the moment with shoes and nail polish and the colour George Street is fab

As I said a few weeks back, I have a thing about orange at the moment so when I got Porchester Place I had to put it on straight away!

I recently purchased a really lovely glossy black called Black Taxi but got impatient and only had it on for one day, I then decided to do a space type look to my nails using different colours and glitters, it looks much better in real life.

Pin Cushion

Just a quick one today to show you a bit of fun by Charlotte at Sixes & Sevens on Folksy. You can see more of her products here

Ceramic Notepad

What a lovely idea this is for a notepad! Created by Helen Johannessen and available from Addject Ltd, you can find them here, you also have a choice of two other designs  - a Notepad & a Speech Bubble.

What to charge

Hi Guys

I've been doing quite a lot of reading up lately as I have had a few clients take advantage of me and don't want that to happen to me again. I came across this helpful post from Neil Tortorella about charging what you are worth, I found it very helpful, I hope that it is helpful to you too.

“If there’s one question I’m asked by designers more than any other, it’s how to figure out what to charge for a project. We have several ways. We can look it up in the Graphic Artist Guild’s Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidelines (PEG). We can charge the ‘going rate’. Or we can make a good guess at what the client is willing to pay and charge that. There are others, but these are the typical methods.

The Guild’s PEG is a good source and every designer should have a copy. You might find it a bit too general, though, in some areas. The ‘going rate’ is called that because if you’re not careful with it, you’re going out of business. Unless you happen to be clairvoyant, guessing what you think the client will pay is just plain bad business. The idea isn’t to figure out what the client will spend. It’s figuring out whether you can make any moolah on the project.

A better way to approach the problem is figuring out your bottomline: where you need to be to really make money. Go below this point and you’re paying your client for the honor of working for them. The more work you take on at the wrong rate, the deeper the hole you’ll dig for yourself. You can actually ’sell’ yourself right out of business with a rate that’s too low. Go too high and you’ll price yourself out of the market. Once you know your true costs of doing business, you can make sensible decisions.

You’re unique. Yup, just like every other designer out there. We all have different set ups and our costs vary. So we need to tap into some of that high school math you complained you’d never use. Actually, this is pretty elementary, so don’t sweat it.

The place to start is you. What’s your target salary? And let’s be realistic here. If you have employees, you’ll need to add up all the salaries. On top of that, you’ll need to figure in other associated costs like taxes, FICA, insurance, etc. A safe figure is 25-30%. I lean toward 30%. The math looks like this:

* Salary: $40,000
* Associated costs at 30% of salaries: $12,000
* Total: $52,000

Well, that’s a start. So how many hours are there in a year? Hmmm; let’s see. Eight hours each day. Five days in a work week. Fifty-two weeks in a year that’s . . . er . . . Hang on. I’ll save you the trouble of digging out that calculator. It’s 2,080 hours. Again, if you have employees, you’ll need to multiply that by the number of employees.

Now, if you’re like most people, you probably would like to spend a few holidays with the family and you may get a bad cold now and then and need to take a day off. Let’s factor those things into our equation (based on an solo practice):

* 7 legal holidays (US): 56 hours (8 x 7)
* 2 weeks vacation (you need some time off): 80 hours (8 x 10)
* 5 sick days (did you get a flu shot?): 40 hours (8 x 5)
* Total: 176 hours

Take that off the top of our total hours and we’re left with 1,904 billable hours. But, you probably do other things around the office like invoicing, sales calls, surfing the net and reading articles like this one. Well, you can’t bill for that time so we’ll need to ax those hours too. If you’ve been a good designer, you’ve kept time sheets. A review of a few weeks can give you a pretty good idea how much ‘down time’ you have. If you’ve been bad and haven’t kept time sheets, you’ll have to give it your best guess and make some adjustments later on . . . when you do keep time sheets. A typical target is 25%. If you’re new, it may be as much as 50%. Hopefully it’s not more than that. Let’s use the 25% for this example.

That brings our billable hours into the more realistic area of 1,428 per year. Now we’re getting somewhere! Now simply divide your billable hours into the cost of salaries and voila! You have a rate of $36.41 ($52,000/1428). Let’s round that down to 36 smackers. This is the amount to must charge to get your salary and its associated costs.

You’ve got stuff. Stuff is good. We all need stuff. Designer stuff includes things like office rent, utilities, phones, computers, software, paper, ink, marketing materials, yada, yada, yada. You get the idea. Now it’s time to start adding up all your stuff. The accountants like to call this overhead. I guess that’s because if you buy too much stuff, you’ll find yourself in way over your head. Let me pull a number out of the air. Say for our example your overhead costs $35,000 per year. We need find the percentage of salaries this overhead represents. Simple. Divide the overhead ($35,000) by the salary ($52,000) and you come up with a little better than 67%. Add this to the base rate we calculated earlier:

$36 X 67%= $24.12

36 bucks plus the $24.12 for overhead is a whopping $60.12. Again, we’ll round that out to a clean $60.

And there you have it. Now you know you need to charge at least $60 per hour if you want to eat and pay your rent. We also know that we need to contract at least 1428 hours per year, or 119 hours each month, to make this mark. Pretty neat, eh? Now we’re starting to act like a real live business! We not only solved our rate problem, we also set a sales goal.

Well, I guess that’s about it. What’s that the Accountant is saying? There’s one more thing? Hmmm . . . we took care of our salaries. Our overhead is nailed. What else could there be? Oh! A profit! We need to make a profit. Profit is that funny money that allows our business to grow and expand. It’s the leftover nest egg that gives us the ability keep employees on when things get slow. It’s what allows us to replace the old G-3 with a nifty new G-4 and a Titanium Powerbook to go. Yup, we need to make a profit.

How much profit do we need? I’d say not to go below 10%. 20% is better and that’s what we’ll use for our target. Time to pull out the calculator again. We’ve established our base rate at $60. 20% of 60 is 12, so we need to tack $12 on top. Our final rate, to recover salaries, overhead and a healthy profit, is $72.00. If you’re like me, you’ll round this amount up to a tidy $75. It just sounds better and adds a slight fudge factor.

Now that wasn’t too bad, was it? The final rate is the number you’ll use to do your estimating, whether you charge by the hour or by the job. It’s the number you can’t afford to go below. No more wondering if you can afford to take on this job or decline that one. You have facts to back up your decisions.

If you can’t find your calculator, you’re in luck. Being the nice guy that I am, I’ve posted a spreadsheet on my site that will do all this for you. You can find it in either Mac or Windows flavors at http://www.tortorelladesign.com/calc. Happy calculating!

About Neil Tortorella
Neil Tortorella has been calculating his hourly rate for over 25 years. He’s pretty sure he’s got it right this time. ”

– © Neil Tortorella, Tortorella Design

I'M BACK!!!!

Phew, hello everyone, what a nightmare I have had without internet access for so long, I luckily have a Blackberry for picking up my emails and (at the moment) live just down the road from my family so could go there to send large files to clients, but it really made me realise just how much I rely on internet access, even down to the little things like looking up a phone number etc. I am so glad to be back online and sorry for the lack of posts.

Today I thought I'd show you a logo I have worked on for a kids salon for Afro Caribbean hair. I hope that you like it.

:-(

Just a quick post to let you all know that my internet has been down since last Wednesday and is not due to be back for another week. So appologies for the lack of posts.

I'll be back soon!

A x

Nails

I have always loved nail varnish but just recently I have become obsessed, what with all the lovely shades available to buy at the moment. Here are a few piccies of what I have done to my nails just recently.

This is a mix of two Nails inc colours. The metallic blue/green is 'Symons Street' and then I have laid the darker colour 'Lexington Street' over the top on alternate nails, the photo doesn't really do it justice as it is a sparkly two tone purple/green colour

This is another Nail inc colour 'Fouberts Place' it is a limited edition, on the website it looks more green in colour but it actually comes out as a dark grey with a very slight tint of green, I have then painted a light glitter over half of the nail and then over half of that to create a sparkly gradient

I then went for some of the new crackle varnish 'Hoxton' which you paint over any colour varnish and within a few seconds it crackles to show the under colour through, I just tried it over my previous colour, but I'm sure I can have fun experimenting with other colours. 

You can find many more colours here

I have loads more colours to show you, so will be back on here with more very soon :-) 

Angela Petsis

I have just come across the most beautiful artwork on Etsy 'The Legend of Now'. Angela creates these gorgeous mixed media collages which I think would look great in my new house, I just LOVE the colours! I'll have to start saving my pennies :-)

This last one is my favourite!

Downloadable textures

I have just found this website where you can download textured images for free.

Here are a few lovely images you can get from there.

Lost & Taken textures are made freely available for use in both personal and commercial projects including web templates, designs, and other materials intended for distribution. Attribution is appreciated, but not required.
Read more: http://lostandtaken.com/gallery#ixzz1Gu1eMvuQ

Progressive Greetings

Just a quick post to let you know that I am very excited to be featured in Progressive Greetings this month :-)

Here is the article.

Have a good week x

Red Nose Day

Happy Red Nose Day everyone, I hope that in the current financial difficulties you can still manage to do your bit for such a worthy cause as Comic Relief.

Today is my last post about crochet I have found. Check out this garland of flowers by Emma Lamb on Folksy here

Aren't these colours just to die for! 

Have a good weekend everyone.

Malaikahummingbird

For more hand crafted crocheted loveliness pop over to visit Hannahs store here. I love the green and pink flower the best, it'd look great on a handbag or necklace don't you think!

Red Nose Day

What with Red Nose day coming up on 18th March, I thought you might like to know that T.K. Max are selling a Paisley & Floral Liberty print scarf for £12.99, £4.99 of which goes to Comic Relief.

The scarf features two classic Liberty prints - 'Bourton' and 'Wiltshire'.

To get yours click here

and to continue the theme of this week here are a few more crocheted beauties you can find on Folksy

These booties and the ickle mouse is created by Isamo Crochet along with loads of other creations, take a look here

and you can find these lovely flowers here at Crochet Flowers Garden

Orange

I am loving bright orange at the moment, I'm not really sure why as I usually go for darker autumnal colours, however I am not brave enough to wear it (apart from maybe a nail varnish) so how about these home accessories!

That said though, this one would go better with my current colour scheme, hopefully you guys are braver than me and invest in the orange!

Find more here on Folksy