Welcome to BoDo:
The Business of Design online launch

Who is BoDo?

The BoDo Team consists of three designers coming from various backgrounds in the communication design industry:

Catherine (cat) Morley, designer, project manager of Creative Latitude and the NO!SPEC campaign. Feisty and fiery, her speciality is creating teams and steering projects.

Neil (nt) Tortorella, designer, writer, marketing consultant, right-hand man at Creative Latitude and owner of Tortorella Design. His strengths are in marketing and the ins and outs of running a design business.

Jeannette (jay) Wickham, designer, web developer, business administrator, backup for NO!SPEC and Fastcoconut. Having come into the graphic design business via studio administration, Jay’s talents also lean towards the left hand side of the brain. Her major jobs these days (other than keeping cat calm) involve site and application development for both the Internet and company Intranets.

Who’s BoDo? We are BoDo. And we plan on helping out those new to the business of design, however we can.

Don’t be a stranger,
The BoDo Team
cat - nt - jay

Welcome to BoDo:
The Business of Design online launch

Why BoDo?

In September 2002, a group of designers banded together to form Creative Latitude, a worldwide community that unites various creative disciplines for collective promotion, education and ethical business practice. Creative Latitude grew into something we didn’t envision at the outset, a great resource site for all types of creatives.

Creative Latitude is a fine site for those with a few years experience running a business (a criteria for becoming a member). But if our full in-boxes are anything to go by, lacking is strong support for those starting out.

That’s right. Over the years we’ve been contacted by those who had just taken the leap, were thinking about jumping, or got the nudge to jump. Some went from a weekly paycheck to hanging out their shingle. Still others nailed their sheepskin, couldn’t find a job, then decided to go out on their own. Blind.

So a few of us started thinking … what if there was a site … or better, a blog … sistered to Creative Latitude, where people could come to get the low down on how to start up? What if this site offered the tools needed to run a design business? What if this site also had a group of vets (some blogging full time, some visiting) share their personal experiences on running a business?

So BoDo was born - The Business of Design online.
Think of BoDo as Creative Latitude … on steroids.

Glad you could make it,
The BoDo Team
cat - nt - jay

Welcome to BoDo: Business of Design online!

What is BoDo?

BoDo is the place to come when …

• you need practical business advice,
• you’re trying to avoid costly mistakes,
• or you’ve already made a range of mistakes.

BoDo isn’t the place to come if you are looking for …

• deep theoretical conversations on the whys and wherefores of design,
• the how-tos of design software (although we’ll point you in the general direction).

The ins and outs of BoDo

BoDo is the missing owner’s manual for running a design business.

If you’re like most designers, while you were learning the design process you probably didn’t learn much about the business of design. It’s often one of the failings of a designer’s education.

Odds are (if you attended design or art school) you studied layout, design history and how to create picture-perfect pixels with PhotoShop, html and css. Even if you didn’t go the school route, you probably poured over a range of books and websites to hone your skills.

Taking this into account (been there, done that) our goal at BoDo is to provide information to help run a design business in a professional, profitable manner.

On BoDo you’ll find continuously updated resources, including select e-books, business forms and more.

We’ll scour the web for the best articles on running a design business. Such as Mark Boulton’s Going it alone: Putting the pieces in place, Andy Budd’s 7 Habits of a Highly Successful Freelance Web Designer and Kevin Potts’ Starting a Business: Advice from the Trenches.

BoDo will also search out weekly resources to help trim your work flow, manage projects, find and communicate with clients, choose billing software, network, write business plans and proposals, de-stress, and not least, wade through the quagmire of business taxes.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our feed as the BoDo Team and visiting authors will post regularly. If you don’t know how feeds and RSS work, here’s a link to help you understand.

Finally, we encourage you to contact the team to share thoughts on topics you’d like us to cover. Let us know via our contact form and we’ll do our best to help out.

Welcome to Bodo,
The BoDo Team
cat - nt - jay