Humor me for a moment as I give a glimpse of my non-professional life. I promise it has something to do with design and development. Last Saturday, I joined the GCF Youth L.I.V.E. Missions team on an outreach to an urban poor area in Quezon City. For one thing, I did not work a lot during the past week so I thought I might as well do something extremely productive with my time.

For one day I served as a driver for the youth as well as handling a group of children from that area. It was a very fulfilling experience seeing how very little things can make a difference in the lives of children, even if it was only for a single day. This was my first time to help in one an outreach so it was surprisingly very fun talking to the kids and playing around with them.

So, what does this have to do with professional designers and developers? Well, I’d like to say that in any profession, I believe there is no excuse not to give back with the God-given talents you have. If you’re a web designer or developer, consider building a website for one non-profit organization a year. If your a print designer, how about designing posters for non-profit events this year for free.

More importantly, if you’re a designer or developer of any medium, without that many portfolio items, giving back pro bono style can provide a win-win situation for both parties involved. The organization get’s free design and more importantly, you get work to display in your portfolio, get to hone your budding skills, make a mark with your style and if you do a decent enough job, may obtain a stream of referrals from that non-profit. As an added bonus, pro bono clients will probably be some of the best clients you’ll ever have. They’re happy most of the time with anything you can give (which means you can experiment a lot) and most of the time, don’t hassle you at any angle.

When I look back at my very short life so far, I’ve always found a recurring theme when it comes to giving back. I’ve found that you always get more in return than what you give. When I was starting out with design, I chose to help out in my local church. Because I could experiment and make mistakes, I was able to grow into the profession I am in right now. Even if you’re an established professional, sometimes you have to believe that work isn’t always about the money or how bigger your pockets will be getting in return. Sometimes it’s about the intangibles in life and getting things of greater value.

As human beings, no matter what the profession, I believe that everyone can make the time to give back to their community, even if just once a year, and they’ll more often than not be pleasantly surprised to find that they get more out of it than they expected.

Spicy Web Designers interviewed me for their website. If you want to know how my beginnings as a web designer and developer happened and a lot more information, you can read the article here. Mysteriously, there are a lot of other Philippine-based designers featured there. Hmm, I’ll have to ask the owner about that one when I get the chance.

I’ll be out of town for the next 3 days so I won’t be online. Clients and friends, you can get in touch with me via text message. I may not have my phone at all times so might not answer calls. :)

We’ve all seen them and admired them, or for many, are annoyed by them. Yes, I’m talking about those HTML e-mails which look like a website has been torn and brought right into your inbox. For many of us we will recognize them as the newsletter we get from our favorite online shops or the nice looking alerts we get from our social sites. Unfortunately, sometimes they take the form of unsolicited mail we get offering us a new product we don’t need.

Albeit annoying, no one can deny that the impact of an HTML powered e-mail can bring to mail we do want to have. If your a  freelance worker or a small to enterprise business operation and have not considered sending out HTML powered e-mails for official business, I give you two important reasons why they should be considered.

1. Your Brand and Image

For most business and one-man shops, the brand and image your project is invaluable to your operation. Having a consistent image is one tip that you’ll here over and over again about your brand. Consistent branding and image through the use of graphics, colors and fonts helps boost your image of professionalism and says that your not just simply a fly-by-night, anything goes, chop-shop.

A typical Twitter HTML powered e-mail

Take the Twitter message alerts via HTML e-mails as an example. They use the same colors, fonts, graphics and layout scheme that you’ll find on a typical twitter website. This helps build recognition to their brand as well as looking professional. When I see the e-mail I instantly recognize it as coming from Twitter and design cues help me remember the type of branding and image Twitter stands for.

2. Readability

Whether or not the e-mails you send out are HTML powered or not, they should at the very least serve the purpose of communicating a certain message. That being the fact, HTML powered e-mails have the potential of making your messages more readable through the use of design cues and layout techniques. Take a look of two examples that I’m sure you’re familiar with:

Facebook notification in Plain Text

Twitter notification in HTML

Both notify you of important events in your social networks. The difference is that Facebook’s is simply a plain message while Twitter’s is HTML powered. With the Facebook e-mail, it’s hard to initially discover what’s important and what’s not. There’s a lot of links, a lot of text that’s all jumbled together in a plain environment.

With the Twitter HTML powered e-mail, we instantly recognize what the most important piece of text is within the e-mail through font-sizes and font-weights. We also are able to quickly recognize who sent the message via an image. Through the layout, we are able to determine what information we can safely ignore such as those undersized elements and those at the footer.

Final Note

I’m sure there are more reasons why HTML powered e-mails are important but these are two of the more important ones that made me decide to use them in my own freelance business. In my next post, I’ll discuss how to design and develop your own HTML powered e-mails and show you some of the ones I use for my freelance business.

What do you think about the importance of HTML powered e-mails for any type of business?

With my twitter account, I have one simple rule: If people follow me, unless they’re outright spammers, I follow back. I’ll let Tweetdeck filter the stream of information later. Admittedly, I don’t follow nor am I followed by that many people but managing your twitter list, even if its just in the hundreds like mines, can be a bit too tedious.

One day I wanted to find out who I was following yet who wasn’t following me so I could distinguish those who follow you then unfollow you once you’ve followed them and those that I initiated a follow because I valued the information in their tweets such as freelance boards and web trends that almost never follow back.

That was a lot of follow for one sentence.

Anyways, I searched online for a tool and found a website called Your Twitter Karma. It will tell you who you only follow, who you have a mutual relationship with, and who is only following you. Combined, they are dubbed your Twitter Karma. Additionally, the website allows you to bulk follow and unfollow to save time.

An interesting and neat tool for the next time you decide to cut the fat from your Twitter account or simply want to know some interesting statistics about your list. What are some other neat Twitter tools you use?

Hello and welcome! Let me introduce myself. I am Robin James Yu but my friends call me “RJ”. I’m a freelance web designer and developer based in Manila, Philippines and I have a passion for creating modern and beautiful websites that work as good as they look.

It’s been about 2 weeks since I left my day job, a day before my 22^nd birthday, and started this freelance thing. To say the least, I’m loving every minute. You can learn more about me and my work at my portfolio page and my about page. If you wish to hire me for a project, you may use the contact form on the right to get a hold of me.

So what is this?

Now enough about me. What is this thing? Well, this website is going to serve as my personal portfolio so potential clients can get in touch and scout me out. At the same time I’ll be writing my personal blog here focusing on Web and print design, Web-based development, and life in general (that is if and when I feel the urge for sharing something about it.) I’ll also be sharing some tips I come across as a freelance professional.

If you like me and want to be updated on new posts, you can follow me via RSS, by email (use the sidebar on the right to susbscribe) and via Twitter.

Thought process

Well I’m no marketing or branding guru but I did do some “identity” exploration on myself. One month before I left my day job, I planned out my freelance self-branding and asked myself what certain adjectives would I liked to be known for. I’d like to be known for a lot of things (don’t we all) but I decided to choose at the most three.

First off, I thought about “professional.” Many people, especially here in the Philippines, when they hear the word “freelance” they often stereotype it to bum looking guys who never shave. Well, I do shave (at least to a decent point) and I’m no bum. So I chose a clean look to the website and to my other marketing paraphanalia utilizing whitespace and simple lines as separators. Whenever I hand out quotes and other documents, I’ll usually use the same branding everywhere, just so its professional and all.

Secondly, I wanted to be considered to have an “edge.” Clean design usually in most cases means minimalism. Minimalistic design is great, I’m a big fan, but I didn’t think that was for me. I wanted there to be an edge to the things I did so I added splashes of color here and there to the website and those abstract “swishy” things in the background. That added some creativity to the design which relieves the website of some boredom.

Lastly, I wanted to be considered “modern.” Web design and development is a very competitive sector. With any market with a lot of sellers, there is going to be a very small percentage of good to average ones, and an overwhelming number of bad ones. Many “web design and development” groups look like their websites are from the 90s and badly need a redesign. I wanted to look more modern and stylish so I used some nice 2.0 icons that make the website look modern along with some modern technologies like AJAX. I wanted to be forward-moving, not backward-thinking.

Now what?

If you like my work and wish to work with me, just use the contact form on the right (you’ll have to click the giant envelope if your in the blog area) and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. I also offer referral fees for successful referrals or if you’re a friend, you know you could just refer me haha.

All right I think I’ve talked enough. Oh yah go easy on the site, its new so don’t break the bubble wrap haha. Until next time.