Blog your portfolio? It’s free, easy, and, smart.

Craig Swanson, founder of CreativeTechs, the Seattle-based technology support service for design firms, ad agencies, in-house departments, and freelancers, frequently gives talks and workshops at the School of Visual Concepts. This fall, Craig shared some compelling reasons why the aforementioned creative firms should consider using a blog to show off their portfolios to the world.

The problems with most portfolio sites.
If you don’t have one, you already know this problem: It can be difficult to get a site off the ground if you don’t have the technical skill, the money, or the mojo.

If you do have a portfolio site, then this hang-up probably rings a bell: If your site is hard to maintain (as most are) then your online portfolio tends to grow a little stale.

The big shootout: Font management software for Mac.

It’s not an especially scintillating topic, unless you’re a designer or art director who spends too many hours of every day frustrated by fonts and font management software that aren’t working.

At SVC, we’ve touched on the topic of font management for design through a series of free talks presented by our very good friends and neighbors at CreativeTechs, Seattle’s provider of left brain support for right brain professionals.

At these free talks, Craig Swanson, CreativeTechs’ founder, felt that he could never do justice to the topic of font management software in the 60 minutes alloted. So, he took it upon himself to do some testing and write an authoritative piece on this vital subject.

Don’t backup and archive your hard drive and you could lose important…

Craig Swanson, founder of CreativeTechs, a Seattle-based firm dedicated to providing technical support for design professionals, frequently speaks at the School of Visual Concepts. One of his most popular presentations is on the need for getting serious about backing up and archiving your computer’s hard drive. Here’s a brief recap of Craig’s talk, but you’ll find countless other useful tips for professionals who rely on their computers at CreativeTechs’ QuickTips site–an archive of free weekly emails the company offers for the asking.

What to do before your hard drive dies.

If you’re fortunate enough to be reading this before the hard drive on one of your team members’ computers crashes, you now have a choice to make: Do you want to be known for your colorful language and unfashionable armpit stains when (not “if”) said hard drive fails? Or would you rather be known for your cool demeanor and clever preparation when the bomb hits?

If you’re opting for Plan B, there are some relatively simple and inexpensive strategies that can keep you out of harm’s way:

Buy two external hard drives.
With 300 gigabyte drives selling for under $250, it’s not a bank-breaker to get a couple. You can then set up the free backup software that comes with most of them, or download some reputable backup shareware (CreativeTechs recommends either Retrospect or Deja Vu for simpler systems. Almost all software packages let you schedule daily backups and let you decide what kinds of files you want to back up.