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More Professional Collateral for Free

This article was written by in Software. 1 comment.


Many of us who want to earn more money have side jobs, or a flourishing freelance business or two. We want our customers and clients to take us seriously, but first impressions are often ruined by amateur—or even bad—graphic design. Unless you hire a designer, you’ll never get the constructive criticism you need in order to improve your collateral, but designers are expensive. The good ones are, anyway.

I’m not a designer, either. I have some basic knowledge of what works well on, say, a flyer, but I’m always forgetting how to take advantage of the golden ratio, how line spacing differs between lines and paragraphs, etc. If I could afford it, I’d hire a professional designer to do all my promotional materials all the time, but of course, I can’t afford it.

I work with graphic designers every day, and I can attest that their jobs are quite difficult. They spend years studying and practicing a craft that the rest of us take for granted, but you and I don’t have the time or the inclination. We just need a business card or a website or a flyer that looks good.

Colors

If nothing else, make sure you use colors that play nicely together.

A graphic designer friend turned me on to an online resource by Adobe called kuler, which is a free place to go for professionally-crafted color schemes. I don’t know anything about color theory, except that some colors complement each other, some don’t, and I can usually tell when a design doesn’t work because the colors are clashing. None of that helps me to pick good colors, though, and kuler does exactly that.

Look for themes by popularity, or rating, or search with a keyword, then just pick one and use those colors — and only those colors, in addition to black and white—in your new brochure, or a poster for your band’s upcoming gig, or even just a reminder for the fridge about not eating co-workers’ food.

You can register for free at the site and save your favorites, get RGB, CMYK and hex values for each color, and create your own themes based on either a color or a photo that you can upload or find on flickr.

Nobody likes long lines

Good design isn’t just pretty colors and pictures. Some of it is trendy, yes, but there are other aspects which are based on science that won’t change until the human form changes. From maxdesign:

The ideal line length for text layout is based on the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches – about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line.

That’s all you need to know: keep it to about 12 words per line. If you’ve got a website with words on it, send this link to your web people and they can take care of the rest.

Try new things all the time

Google has an amazing free tool called Google Website Optimizer which lets you try different combinations of links, pictures, paragraphs, anything at all, and lets you know which combinations perform the best based on your goals, such as getting people to click “Buy now”. Check out this intro video:

Some words about fonts

Above all else, make sure the thing you produce is legible. It’s tempting to try to be fancy or fun, but often people end up with this:

or this:

In general:

  • Use as few words as possible to get your point across. If you have information that you think should be small and out of the way, maybe it doesn’t need to be there at all.
  • Use dark gray instead of black.
  • Start with a 13 point font and go up from there.
  • There should be plenty of white space (AKA negative space).
  • The most important information should take up the most space, and that’s almost never your logo.

These are just some basics to keep in your back pocket. If you can afford it, I always recommend hiring a professional, but at least with these tips you’ll be able to make more good first impressions.

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Dollar-Cost Averaging

This article was written by in Investing. 4 comments.

Is dollar-cost averaging (DCA) a sound investing strategy?

In theory, dollar-cost averaging allows you to invest smaller portions of your money over a longer period of time, reducing the chance that you pay a price too high for any individual investment. If your ideal allocation calls for $50,000 to be invested in the stock market through an index fund like VTSMX, rather than buying $50,000 worth of the fund in one day in a lump sum, dollar-cost averaging spreads that purchase in equal amounts out over days, weeks, months, or even years to reduce your exposure to daily fluctuations of the market. By investing the same dollar amount each time, you buy more shares when the price is lower and fewer shares when the price is higher.

In other words, if you buy $50,000 of VTSMX on January 1 and the stock market crashes on January 2 without recovering for six months, you might kick yourself for not having the cash available to buy when the price of the fund was more favorable in the months your investment on January 1.

Many brokers allow you to dollar-cost average or invest in a lump sum. Here are a few current special offers.

The only good reason for dollar-cost averaging is you may not have that $50,000 ready at one time. If you rely on investing only from money left over from your paycheck every two weeks, you don’t have a lump sum available. Those who do have funds available might have already missed out by not investing earlier.

Investing in the stock market as soon as possible with whatever money you have available, in order to form your ideal asset allocation, beats dollar-cost averaging in the long run. Dollar-cost averaging would leave your ideal allocation unfulfilled by leaving a larger percentage of your total assets in cash, uninvested.

Overall, the stock market trends upward, even at the company level if that company is healthy. If you buy individual stocks of a healthy company, the price should move in an upward trend over the long term. Dollar-cost averaging will never be able to make up lost ground compared to investing an available lump sum because you will, on average, dollar-cost average your way into higher prices.

While there may be exceptions when looking at your investment performance in the short term, especially in an environment where stocks are stagnant or declining, but as a long term investing strategy, dollar-cost averaging fails. Small instances of luck will eventually give way to major trends. So far, almost every experiment I’ve personally attempted has shown that I cannot reliably time the market as well as I want to. I almost always would have done better by just investing as soon as possible rather than sitting with cash.

Psychologically, however, dollar-cost average has a more important role. Spreading out the short-term exposure to any specific day’s stock price can make an investment in the stock market feel less risky. If you’d otherwise be concerned about your investments that might fall 1%, 5%, 10%, or more in one day, dollar-cost averaging can help allay those fears. If you have those fears, you may want to reassess whether you’re comfortable with the risk of the stock market in the first place.

Here are some links for thought:

Please share your dollar-cost averaging experiences, concerns, and thoughts.

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$400 Stimulus Payment Dumbness Update

This article was written by in Economy. 30 comments.

A few weeks ago I wrote a short piece explaining that while even if you think the “Making Work Pay” tax credit of $400 is a bad idea, at least we’re saving money this time by not sending out two letters and a check to every household in America. In short: the stimulus process could’ve been dumber.

In the comments of that article, Laura said:

Yes but now the government will have to reprint and mail out the employee withholding schedules that small employers use to figure up those weekly paychecks. This is why it will take a few months to see that $13. It goes both ways.

I wasn’t sure if Laura was correct about that. I work for a small company, so I figured I’d wait and see.

This morning, my co-workers and I saw our Federal Withholding decrease for the first time as a result of the “Making Work Pay” tax credit. My personal take-home pay is $33 more (we get paid twice a month).

So I asked our Accounting department about the process, and I got this in reply:

It’s actually a change in the Withholding Table. The Table is downloaded from the IRS electronically and then based on your W4 elections and pay scale, the amount will automatically adjust.

Granted, there are probably some companies who don’t do everything electronically, and as a result might need a paper form to be sent, but in our case, and I suspect most other companies, this process didn’t cost anything.

So, in short: the stimulus process could’ve been even yet still dumber.

(More about the Tax Credit from the IRS.)

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W-4 and Your Working Spouse

This article was written by in Taxes. 18 comments.

It’s possible that this advice might be considered common knowledge, but I just learned it at age 32, so feel free to forward it to your friends who recently became part of a working couple.

The first time I saw a W-4 form at age 16, I had to take it home and ask my parents to help me with it, because the design of the thing was so oppressively boring that I could barely read it, not to mention that I had no idea what a “dependent” was. I remember my father walking over and saying, “just put zero.” Not that he was wrong, but, you know, teach a man to fish, and all that…

In the last 16 years, the design of the W-4 hasn’t improved. It’s not unique among Government documents for lacking proper hierarchy. For example, see this article about how better information design might have helped President Bush pay more attention to the memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”.

Here’s a snapshot of the current W-4, with an arrow pointing at the part that looks important:

the important part of the W-4

And, once you’re married, here’s where the important part starts:

the other important part of the W-4

Of course, blaming others is hardly ever a good way to retroactively avoid making mistakes. And my mistake was not closely re-reading the W-4 after I was married. Had I ever spoken with an accountant or financial adviser before I was married, I might have avoided this mistake, but taxes had always been so easy. All marriage was supposed to do was maybe provide a tax break or two.

In 2007 I answered the W-4 questions honestly, as I had done ever since I started working full-time (enter 1 for yourself, enter 1 if you are married, and I ended up with a “2″), and my wife entered a total of “1″, because she’s just more conservative than me. All year long we, as a working couple, were not having enough taxes withheld. Not that we were living like kings, and we just didn’t notice it… we weren’t awash in cash. It just felt like we were doing okay for ourselves.

As it turns out, we bought stuff, and went out to dinner, more often than we should have.

The summary version is this: if you are filing jointly, and both of you have an income, only one of you is supposed to answer the W-4 questions “honestly”. More specifically, there’s a formula you can use to determine the individual settings that both of you should be putting on your W-4. Other important factors, like a mortgage payment, will also come into play when determining these settings.

Theoretically, there is a withholding calculator operated by the IRS, but every time I go to look at it, it’s “undergoing maintenance.”

There are other options out there, but it’s hard to gauge the official-ness of calculators created by companies that don’t have as much information as the IRS does.

If you’re part of a working couple, your W-4 almost certainly needs some finessing. Comment below if you have additional advice or questions for me and the rest of the readers here.

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