Why would an international client want to use a South African freelancer?

One of the most attractive reasons why customers in America and Europe prefer to use South African freelancers is that we're cost effective due to our favourable exchange rate. The Rand to US Dollar rate is almost 8:1 and the Rand to Euro rate is about 12:1 (as of 26 June 2008). This makes us an extremely economical out-sourcing solution should you wish to keep your design costs down.

To a large extent we're culturally westernised and speak English, so language barriers are usually not a problem. South Africa also has all the facilities of a first world country - with broadband and wireless networking it's easy to communicate via Skype, online messaging and email as well as transfer large files via FTP.

We're accommodating and reliable. Should you be in a different time zone, it usually isn't a problem for us to stay online late at night to discuss a project brief at a prearranged time. You also have the added benefit of having your work completed overnight and find it ready in your inbox in the morning. South Africans also have an international reputation for being hard working. We take pride in our work and strive to deliver the only the best for our clients.

Bearing this in mind, you may still be anxious about utilising the services of someone in a far off country that you've never met. How do you know you can trust this person? And how can you tell if the quality of work will be up to your standards? Two things can put your mind at ease: firstly have a look through the designer's portfolio - this will give you a good indication of the quality of work you can expect. Secondly, any good designer will have references on their website or at least be able to provide you with contact details of references who will be able to vouch for their talent and dependability.

If you have any questions or comments about this article - contact me - I'd love to hear from you...

Advanced Photoshop (one of my all time favorite design magazines) has voted the Niyo design "Pic of the Week" for the 23rd June 2008. You can view the Advanced Photoshop website here and my Advanced Photoshop portfolio here. Much thanks to AP for the vote of confidence.

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The next edition of Photoshop CS4 will be available a 64-bit version - but initially only for Windows Vista users and not Mac users, Adobe said. The reason Adobe gave is that many of the applications that make up CS4 are written in Carbon (development language) rather than Cocoa and Apple had said last year it would not support 64-bit in Carbon any longer.

Product manager of Adobe Photoshop, John Nack, reportedly said that Photoshop would have to be rewritten from scratch for Apple. This is bad news for Mac users as initial testing revealed that the 64-bit version offers around 8% - 12% increased performance over the 32-bit version. This is especially useful for those working with large files and images, or moving around a lot of data. However, in order to take full advantage of 64-bit, you need over 4GB of RAM allocated to Photoshop. Read more about it here.