I started a blog called “Outbox Online” in the year 2000 almost immediately after moving to San Francisco. My plan was never to move to San Francisco, but when the opportunity came up to have a job here, I jumped at the chance, and drove across the country with my houseplants in the back seat. Having just left the UK, and with friends there and all over the east coast of the States, I needed a way to keep in touch, and this new “blog” thing seemed like it might be just the thing.

Since I was starting a career as a designer, I used my then-blog as a playground for new ideas. I changed the design and layout sometimes as often as once a week, and pretty soon other people were asking me to design layouts for them. Then I met Catie. Catie had a greeting card business, and she wanted an online storefront, and she wanted me to design and code it for her. I had never done anything beyond html with a little CSS and javascript, but I jumped into the project and taught myself how to make a shopping cart. Thankfully, there are wonderful (and cheap) outsourcing solutions for that now, as my biggest lesson was that the kind of work involved in creating a shopping cart wasn’t really my cup of tea.

Catie was my first official (wonderful) paid client, and since then I’ve taken on more and more projects, and am working towards doing freelance design fulltime. I still work on Catie’s site, and am thankful to call her a great friend.

Transitioning from the regularity of a well-paid fulltime gig, to the uncertainty and irregularity of a freelance career is a huge undertaking. One that requires lots of planning and preparation, courage, organization, and smarts. This blog will be about that transition (and beyond). Beyond doing various web design projects, I plan to create and market print, ceramic and multimedia art items, and so it will also be about balancing my creativity, and creating a working life.

I’m married to *the* Graeme McMillan, my best friend & the sexiest man in the whole world. We live in San Francisco with our cat, Luna — but to make our freelance life more affordable, we may move to Portland, OR or Portland, ME. Stay tuned.