Archive for December, 2009

New Features for Buyers and Creatives

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Last week, after many months of development during 2009, we released 100% new software code for crowdspring.com. While rewriting the code that powers our site, we made a number of improvements – for both buyers and creatives. Here’s a list of those improvements and a brief description of each:

Improvements for Buyers

  • Ability to save and maintain drafts of projects before posting.
  • Tools to promote your project on Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other social networks.
  • Ability to view submitted designs in their original size.
  • Health tool that compares your project to other projects on crowdspring.com.
  • More powerful notifications system.
  • Improved browser filters to let you find similar projects.
  • Significant improvements in site performance.
  • Entry slider to allow for better navigation between entries.
  • Completely revised and improved entry zoom tool in project galleries.
  • Ability to add and/or increase awards in projects.
  • Ability to exclude projects from search engines.
  • Substantially improved search.
  • Powerful new help center with all the answers you need.
  • More efficient and easier to use project wrap-up.

Improvements for Creatives

  • More powerful notifications system.
  • More powerful RSS system.
  • To further help protect intellectual property rights, communications between clients and creatives about submitted work are now private and entry scores are not shown until a project ends.
  • Tools to promote any project on Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other social networks.
  • View your submitted design in its original size (client can also see original size).
  • Health tool that gives you important information about a project.
  • Significant improvements in site performance.
  • Entry slider to allow for better navigation between entries.
  • Completely revised and improved entry zoom tool in project galleries.
  • Substantially improved search.
  • Improved browse, including powerful filters that allow you to find new projects that might interest you.
  • Powerful new help center with all the answers you need.
  • More efficient and easier to use project wrap-up

We have many more great things ahead of us in 2010 and we can’t wait to share them with you…

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments »

An Update About Our Site Upgrade

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

We want to give you a few more details about our site upgrade and why it’s taken longer than we originally anticipated. We won’t try to explain all the technical details at this point but, if you’re curious, we’ll try to give you a quick low-down on where things stand in the video below.

We apologize again to our community for the outage, we’re spending our holiday weekends working 24 hours a day trying to fix it and, rest assured, we’ll come out of this stronger than ever.

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Posted in Site Updates | 10 Comments »

Site Maintenance on December 11, 2009

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

On Friday (December 11), to improve the speed and stability of our site, we’ll be upgrading both the hardware and software that powers crowdspring.com. During those upgrades, our site will be offline – but we’ll update you about our progress when you visit our homepage.

We will begin the maintenance at 9:30 am CST/ 3:30 pm GMT – at that time, we will bring the site offline. The maintenance could take up to 24 hours to complete (but we will make every effort to keep it as short as possible).

We truly, truly apologize for the inconvenience but we also truly, truly hope that you’ll find the site to be much more well behaved after this update. If you have a project that will be affected by this, or if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us – support@crowdspring.com or on Twitter: @crowdspring @rosskimbarovsky or @mike_samson – and we’ll do absolutely anything we can to help. We’ll be more than happy to extend any project affected by this outage or find other creative solutions to minimize the impact on you, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Thanks in advance for your understanding. We’ll keep you posted along the way on our homepage.

image credit: stargazer95050

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Posted in Site Updates | 31 Comments »

Small business and startup tip: managing bookkeepers, accountants, and the end-of-year mishegoss

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Ugh. Right? It’s December, so it must be time for those year-end activities so beloved by small business owners and managers. As much fun as it is (not), it is still necessary to go through the process of tying up the loose ends, making sure the books balance, and handing the entire package off to the tax accountant in time to get your returns back on time. Words that come to mind? Tiresome, boring, frustrating, annoying, essential, imperative, obligatory.

I guess it’s those last three words that have inspired me to put a few thoughts out on the topic. Here’s my approach: starting in October, I go through all of the reports with the bookkeeper (we have new one, by the way, and she’s awesome. Hi, Kona.) We look closely at our bank accounts, payables, receivables. I start with financial statements for the first 3 quarters: Does anything seem unusual? Do the actuals match up reasonably well to the budget and projections? If anything raises antennae, we drill down to look at detail together. Next we go through the quickbooks file. Spot checking as we go, we look for discrepancies in assigned accounts. Is everything properly categorized? Do transactions appear to fall in the correct budget categories? Typically we will identify a handful of mistakes made during the year and correct those in preparation for the next big step (which usually occurs in early December).

The phone call with the accounting firm. The bookkeeper and the accountants will usually start by discussing strategy and timeline, and reviewing some of the mistakes from last year that we might avoid this year. Dates are agreed upon, as are deliverables. We ship off the current reports to them, including the latest QB file. We still have a few weeks left in the year and will send the final QB file, which includes all of December transactions around January 4th or 5th. It is their goal to complete the year end work quickly, make any adjustments to the QB file and then “lock” it. They generate their own list of questions for us, among them might be:

  • Bank statements and reconciliations: are these done? For each account?
  • Credit card statements and reconciliations, too, don’t forget
  • Fixed asset purchases? Do we have a list of these?
  • 1099s? Have we a current list of any going out in January?
  • Insurance payments for employees and partners, etc.
  • Payroll records: are they complete and accurate?
If all goes well they will get the info they need and lock the accounts and create the “trial balance” or completed general ledger by mid-to-late-January. At this point, the tax accountant takes over. They use the year-end reports, QB file, bank reconciliations, etc, and get to work on the work that counts. Lots of questions here, too. She may want to know about:
  • Investor info for K1s (these will typically be ready by early-to-mid-March)
  • Meals and other “questionable” expenses
  • Independent contractors and 1099s
My goal this year is to have the QB file locked on January 10, trial balance to the tax attorney by January 20, K1s prepared and mailed out to investors by February 15, and tax returns signed off on March 15. Anyone wanna start a pool?

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Posted in business, How To, inspiration, Strategy | 3 Comments »

Pastasourcing? Buon appetite!

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Barilla is a prestigious Italian Pasta and Bakery Company, born in Italy more than a century ago (1877). They’ve decided to try a new form of pasta design – pastasourcing! (credit for that term to @LenKendall)

Nearly everyone around the world knows the shapes of spaghetti, rigatoni and fettuccine. Think you can do better? Think you can create a better shape than the masters? Here’s your chance – three $1000 awards for you to create a new pasta shape for Barilla.

Buona fortuna a tutti! E andiamo tutti mangiano un sacco di pasta!

image credit: 29cm

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Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, crowdsourcing, design | 2 Comments »

Twitter Link Roundup #22 – Design, Small Business, Social Media And More

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

Excellent 4500+ Free Fonts for download – http://bit.ly/5M3uxG

How To Create The Perfect Client Questionnaire – http://bit.ly/6Bmqg2

Questions to ask clients before designing their website – http://bit.ly/6coBZW

Artistic Expression: Logo Design from Start to Finish – http://bit.ly/4Dl1aT

All Photoshop tutorials on Abduzeedo – http://bit.ly/180QIB

75+ Amazing Music Logo Designs To Inspire You – http://bit.ly/4Dl1aT

Designing Websites for Kids: Trends and Best Practices – http://bit.ly/76xuHf

30 Brilliant Typefaces For Corporate Design – http://bit.ly/b1E55

30 Typographic Print ads – http://bit.ly/4Ea88Y

50+ Online CSS Tools for Web Developers and Designers – http://bit.ly/7Mtujv

How to Make Beautiful Gradient Typography with Photoshop – http://bit.ly/8U9LoZ

20 Elegant Web #Typography Resources – http://bit.ly/7OObVe

60 Absolutely Gorgeous Textured Logos With That Wow Factor – http://bit.ly/7KzLzf

Inspirational Web Design: 50+ Beautifully Designed Blogs – http://bit.ly/7m6a6s

Comic Sans: The Font Everyone Loves to Hate – http://bit.ly/8axTm3

31 Icon Design Tutorials – http://bit.ly/90Rm8U

10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit – http://bit.ly/5L1l4H

(more…)

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Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, crowdsourcing, design, How To, inspiration, Interviews, marketing, Reviews, social media, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology | No Comments »

The Soul Of A Creative Community

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Our community never ceases to amaze us. More than 47,000 designers from over 170 countries now work on crowdSPRING. We believe we have the best creative community in the world – and we constantly look for ways to make it even better.

Earlier today, crowdSPRING announced the winners of our SPRINGY awards. One of the winners, ArtbyAudree (Community Award) has done a wonderful job for clients, and has also been a huge help to us in the blog and in the forums. Choosing her for the Community Award reminder us how much we love and value Audree’s contributions. If you haven’t read it, take a look at our interview with Audree last year.

Some people have criticized us from the day we launched for not understanding the needs of designers. Because we must balance the needs of clients and designers, some of these criticisms have been misguided.

However, some criticisms have been spot on. While we employ designers on our team, they are focused on building crowdspring.com and directly on the community (although you’ll find them from time to time writing blog posts and participating in the forums). We’ve constantly looked for a way to build a stronger bridge to our community and we’re excited to announce today that we’ve found it!

Starting today, Audree will be working with us and actively contributing in the forums, looking at the scope of posted projects, and giving a helping hand to clients and creatives in projects. (Audree will not, during that time, work as a freelancer on crowdSPRING).

We believe in rewarding people for outstanding work – and we are so proud that we picked someone from our community for this role.

We’ll continue to actively participate and to listen to everyone’s feedback, suggestions, and criticisms. But now we’ll also benefit from Audree’s wisdom and insight – to help us better understand the soul of our community and to help us better understand the needs of creatives.

We’re excited! We hope you  are too.

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Posted in Awesomeness, community, inspiration, Site Updates | 8 Comments »

crowdSPRING’s Inaugural SPRINGY Awards Winners Announced!

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

And the winners are…

I know you all have been chomping at the bit to see who the top dogs of crowdSPRING are for 2009.  Without further adieu, I give you crowdSPRING’s SPRINGY Awards winners!

Most Winningest Designer of the Year – The word may be made up but it’s the only word that’s able to capture how much you do for us as designers. crowdSPRING will award the designer who won the most projects this year.
And the winner is – ninet6 a.k.a. Angus

The Community Award – This is awarded to the designer who contributes the most to our crowdSPRING community, whether it’s through the blog, our forum or feedback on projects themselves – we appreciate your mouthiness.
And the winner is – artbyaudree a.k.a. Audree R. who did such an outstanding job with our community that crowdSPRING scooped her up and made her part of our team!

Our People’s Choice Awards were a tough race.  The users with the most nominations were:

The Frenchie Award – named after our French customer service guru, Jerome. This is awarded to the designer that demonstrated their own customer service to their potential client – the designer that gave the most and best feedback.
And the winner is – Asher27 a.k.a. Ashley H.

Buyer of the Year Award - given to the buyer who you love working with the most.
And the winner is – earth2mars a.k.a. Mars H. with a special note for advancing the cause of outstanding buyer behavior by communicating through video.

crowdSPRING would like to extend a HUGE thank you to our entire community for your hard work and support.  Congratulations to our SPRINGY winners!

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Leadership Is Not Management (but you need both)

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” - Peter Drucker

Many confuse leadership and management. They are not the same. However, successful businesses must have strong leaders and strong managers (this is increasingly important as companies hire more people). Strong leadership without strong management can result in chaos and inefficiency. Strong management without strong leadership can result in tunnel vision and paralysis.

In the video below, I talk about the differences between leaders and managers. I’d love to hear what you think – please leave a comment and let me know if you find other, important differences between leaders and managers.

If you want to learn more about the differences between managers and leaders, I recommend you read Mark Suster’s excellent post – What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI.

And if you’re interested in other short videos on useful topics for startups and small businesses (fundraising, hiring, marketing, etc.), I invite you to take a look at my blog.

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Posted in business, start-up tips, Strategy | 7 Comments »