Colour for Web Design

A few quick links for anyone looking for a few tips on developing effective colour schemes for web sites.

Over at Smashing Magazine we have a 3 part article on Colour Theory:

• Part 1 looks at the meaning of colour.
• Part 2 will start to unravel some Colour Theory terminology.
• Part 3 will guide you towards creating your own effective colour palettes

Setting up a Freelance Business

Further to the Blogs below, here are a few links that will help you setting up your freelance business within Australia.

Although not essential, you probably should visit an accountant. It really just depends on how time you want to invest in getting to know the Ins & Outs of setting up a business. Having a certain degree of know-how is essential, but certainly seeking the advice of an accountant will take a lot of the pain out of this part of the process.

One of the things you can discuss with your accountant is what structure you should take for your business, ie. Individual, Sole Trader, Partnership, Company etc. Alternately you can learn more about these structures by visiting the business.gov.au website.

You may need a Company or Registered Business number, and will most likely need an Australian Business Number (ABN) . Again an accountant can help you with these, but the above link will also provide information on this.

If you would like to see if a business or company name has been registered, or wish to look up the ABN or business/company number of an existing organisation, the try the ABN lookup site and the ASIC website .

Unity Game Development Tool now available Free

Unity - the 3D Game Development Tool that includes a simple visual editor is now available directly from the unity3D website . Have played with this briefly and looks really good. It is supports the importing of your Blender models, so is a viable alternative to using the Blender Game Engine. In fact with the Unity web player, and a license available for iphone develpment, it may just have the edge on the BGE ???

Tutorials for Blender

If you are looking for some good tutorials for Blender then Tutorials for Blender 3D is a good place to start. Excellent tutorials on the Blender Game Engine, especially on creating textures.

2D Character Animation in Flash

Here are a couple of tutorials in character Design & animation, written specifically for flash. The first one is not written for CS4, so uses the Classic motion tween system, but the knowledge is easily adaptable.

Over at kruipa there is a tutorial that will work fine for simple animations,

And at the Adobe Flash Support Site, Chris Georgenes has provided a very useful tutorial on Designing and Animating Characters in Flash.

In Fact if you perform a search on Chris Georgenes name you will find a number of very useful tutorials on Animation.

Setting up your contract

No sane person likes doing this, but as a freelance operator, you must have your own standard contract in place, which you & your client sign prior to work starting. Often the contract may vary slightly depending on the varying work condititions you will encounter, however having a standard contract template ready to go will save you a lot of time. Some information that you should include in your contract are a description of the services you provide, the hourly rate by which you will charge, dates & duration of the job, Copyright and Intellectual property (who owns what at the end of the job) and payment terms.

Have a look at these pages over at freelanceuk.com are:

For some basic information about contracts

And then in a little more detail.

7 Tips about Quoting

Over at Wakeuplater, there is some useful advice about quoting. From experience I would definately advise on using the hourly rate method and then indicating an estimated timeframe.