One aspect of The American Dream is owning one’s own business. People fantasize about becoming their own boss rather than working for The Man while making their own hours and doing something they love. But just because you love design doesn’t mean you’d be a good business owner. On the flip side, just because you have an MFA and not an MBA doesn’t mean you can’t open up your own design company.

Here are elements to consider when weighing the possibility of starting your own small business. Full article after jump.

Education

So you went to school and got a degree, a certificate or at least a lot of training in design. And you’ve become really good at what you do and have a portfolio of fantastic promotional pieces for a variety of mediums. But as a large number of people responded on graphic artist David Airey’s blog, school doesn’t necessarily prepare designers for real life. Respondents stated that future designers could use a lot more – heck, any! – business training, including:

• More varied coursework in subjects such as calculus, economics, history and public speaking.
• Legal issues such as drawing up contracts.
• How to start a design firm or just survive in a big or small one.
• Marketing to gain clients.
• Customer service to gain and keep clients.

If you’re a current design student, then look into business courses, perhaps getting a minor or double major. But if you’re out of school:

• Explore what your local community college offers in the way of business courses.
• Contact your chamber of commerce for upcoming seminars that might include business advice or at least offer a networking opportunity.

Human Resources

When you’re a boss – even a self-employed one – you still have to take care of people, whether it’s one or 10 folks. FreelanceFolder noted that successful business owners wear many hats, including that of accountant, HR manager, customer service rep, sales manager, social media marketer and even janitor. Most brand-new business owners won’t have the capital to hire a person for each of those positions, but there are work-arounds.

Hire a freelancer: Lots of bookkeepers work a few hours each at numerous businesses to handle payroll, file taxes and keep track of benefits.

Outsource human resources: Advertisements for outsourced HR are popping up more and more. Indeed, you can save money twofold: by paying a person or firm by the hour and not even close to full time as well as by not having to pay them benefits.

Marketing

The bright side in this down economy is industrious businesspeople have found ways to promote themselves by spending a lot less than in years past. Gone are the days when you needed to hit every expensive media outlet with your advertisement. With social media thriving, making your company known is actually free! And despite claims that computers have made people less social face to face, good ol’ fashioned networking still has a place, too.

Social networking: Facebook and Twitter profiles take moments to build. That’s not to say you shouldn’t spend any time on them, but it’s not a daunting task. For Facebook, make sure you include all your company’s contact information, including links to your website and Twitter page. Upload photos of your products, location and employees to give a sense of personality. Status updates and tweets can include contests, sales, events and general news.

Don’t get too formal – this is "social", after all – but be professional. And always check your grammar and spelling before you hit the return button – trust me.

Networking: A personal referral can do a lot more than a Yellow Pages ad. With people watching their money more closely these days, they’re looking for recommendations. And the more people you know, the more likely your name will come up. I chatted with a designer recently who said she went to a lot of events, in the industry and not, and always kept business cards on hand. She’d introduce herself to people and hand out her card – not necessarily schmoozing but definitely being friendly. People then recommended her to others whether they’d actually used her graphic design services or not – her name simply stayed with them. In addition to attending events, patronize your local services.

Chat up your neighborhood barista, shop along your retail boulevards and strike up a conversation with your postal worker. Buying local doesn’t have to be a fleeting trend – it’s a way to keep the circle of business alive and thriving.

Location

It’s a scary world out there, but one thing that’s come out of the crashing economy and thousands of layoffs is a newfound entrepreneurial spirit. With major companies cutting employees left and right, starting your own business might be less intimidating than going to work for another boss.

It’s pretty amazing how piles of colorful plastic bricks can build wonders when they are attached together. Lego was first introduced by Lego Group in 1949 and have been everyone’s favorite ever since.

What we are going to show you today are some Lego models you don’t get to see often, not available for purchase in the neighborhood stores for sure. They are complex, massive and definitely jaw-dropping. If you are a Lego fan, this is something you would not want to miss.

Here’s a collection of 35 incredible Lego Mega Construction, large in scale but built to its finest details. Full list after jump.

Kennedy Space Center
Occupying 1,506 square feet and made up of 750,000 lego bricks. This massive construction took more than 2,500 hours to build.

Church of Christ
A view from the balcony looking toward the chancel. There’s seating for an 80-member choir under the mosaics. The roof over the chancel and mosaic alcoves is glass.

Aircraft Carrier
Aircraft carrier lego model in minifig size by Harry S. Truman.

Starship: OSS Pontbriand
Created by Jeff Pelletier, this flagship of Omicron Space center is created down to the every little bit of details; 270 stud ship, 105 crews each with a bunk, 4 levels of fully finished interior.

LEGO Table
The table consists of 22,742 pieces clicked together with traditional lego construction techniques (no glue), a 136mm grommet is located in its centre. It sits on a polished Stainless Steel square hollow section structure built by B.A. Engineering of Prussia St and is topped with a 10mm sheet of toughened glass manufactured by Action Glass.

London Eye

Legoland Deutschland
Legoland park located in Gunzburg, Germany.

Crawler Town
This machine has several playable features include functional powered treads for movement , full suspension and front and rear steering. A true masterpiece.

LEGO Sport City
The LEGO Sport City display was built by the Hong Kong LEGO Users Group (HKLUG) to help promote the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

Lego Allianz
An amazing replica of Allianz Arena in Berlin using just Lego.

Mona Lego Mosaic
Mona Lego Mosaic, created with 30,000+ bricks. It’s 45+ pounds and 6 feet by 8 feet.

Full-Size Lego House
The world’s first full-size Lego house – including a working toilet, hot shower and a very uncomfortable bed – using 3.3million plastic bricks built by James May.

Lego Montmartre
Montmartre in London Legoland.

Lego Airport
This amazing Lego airport was showcased in LegoCity, at Senayan City, Indonesia.

Lego Airbus A380
Made at a 1:25 scale-9.5-foot long, 10.5-foot wingspan, 3.2-foot tall—the Lego A380 uses 220 pounds (100kg) of bricks.

Giant T-rex
Giant T-rex created with little Lego pieces in Lego Imagination World 3.

Lego Dragon
Lego dragon outside the Lego store at disneyworld in Florida.

Lego Obama Presidential Inauguration
A display depicting Barack Obama’s inauguration in Legoland California.

Mt. Rushmore Replica
Nathan Sawaya created my rendition of the Gutzon Borglum’s most famous sculpture, otherwise known as Mt. Rushmore.

Christ Statue
A 6-foot-tall statue of Jesus that had built out of 30,000 Lego blocks at a church in Vasteras, Sweden.

Queen Mary 2
The Queen Mary 2 in Legos.

Nintendo DSi
This LEGO sculpture of the Nintendo DSi was on display at the Nintendo World Store at Rockefeller Center in New York City

Engagement Portrait
A couple decided to commission a LEGO portrait based on an engagement photo that they had taken prior to their wedding.

Yankee Stadium
Using over 45,000 LEGO bricks for a sculpture of Yankee Stadium. It is 6 feet wide and 5 feet long, built to an approximate scale of 1:150.

Polar Bear
This Lego bear sculpture contains over 95,000 LEGO pieces and took over 1100 hours to construct together.

Times Square
This model of Times Square is over 5 feet wide, 4 feet tall, and contains over 20,000 LEGO pieces. It took about 300 hours to build.

Lego 2004 Volvo XC90
A replica of Volvo’s award-winning SUV, the Volvo XC90, was constructed of LEGO’s famous modeling bricks.

World’s tallest Lego Tower
The 94.3ft-high pirate ship mast was made with 465,000 bricks, breaking a previous record of 93.43ft set.

Lego Pharoah
The 16-foot (4.9-meter) replica of an Egyptian king is the biggest Lego structure ever created, with 200,000 individual pieces and a weight of more than one ton.

Micro Mythicos Micropolis
A Mmicro Mythicos Micropolis was in a display case at Legoland, San Diego.

Legotown 2010

Lego Eiffel Tower
Lego Eiffel Tower in Legoland.

Lego Statute of Liberty

Lego Panda

Lego Octopus Stained Glass
This project killed most of 1×1 black brick, 1×2 trans blue brick, and all of 1×1 neon-green cylinders.

Internet users have wider choice of browsers when it comes to surfing the net. It is our responsibility as designers and developers to ensure that websites we’ve created are compatible for most of the commonly used browsers these days.

That leads to a simple yet critical question – what browsers are our visitors using? According to w3school, commonly used browsers are Internet Explorer 7 & 8 and Firefox with Safari and Google Chrome gradually picking up. But the figures might vary from site to site, depending on its niche. It’s best to get the demographics from your site metrics, Google Analytics for instance.

Once you’ve identified common browsers your visitors use, then it’s time to make sure website displays the same in these browsers. It’s almost impossible to install all different browsers in one machine. But thanks to some tools and web services out there, finding out how your website looks like in other browsers is possible.

In this article, we want to bring to your attention some of the solutions you can depend on to do cross-browser compatibility testing. Full list after jump.

Test Compatibility Online

Browsershots

Browsershots is a free and most popular cross-platform multiple browsers compatibility test utility for web designers. Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. In Browsershots database are included all most popular browsers and you easily can check how your website looks in all browsers and OS platforms.

Browser Sandbox

Created by Spoon.net, this page allows you run different browsers including IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera right from your browser. Simple as that.

Netrenderer

IE NetRenderer is free browsers compatibility tester. With IE NetRenderer you can check how a website is rendered by different versions of Internet Explorer. After beta testing, very soon in IE NetRenderer will be integrated newest version of IE – IE9 and you will be able to see does your website shows errors in this browser.

Browsrcamp

Browsrcamp allows you to test the compatibility of your design with Mac OS X browsers. If you dont want spend money you can check compatibility of your design with Safari 3.1.2. Simply add your website url and you will get your website screenshot. But if you want check compatibility with others Mac browsers, you can subscribe for 3$.

Adobe Browserlab

Adobe Browserlab is a web hosted service which allows designers to test designs on multiple browsers and operating systems. In this system are included a zoom function and measurement tools like rulers and guides, and the ability to move quickly to specific areas of a screenshot. Browser sets allow designers to customize, edit, and save a combination of browsers to test.

Litmusapp

Litmus shows you screenshots of your websites as they look across all major web browsers. After you finished testing, you can get a full compatibility report ready for review by your clients. Litmus have 4 price plans. You can register for free and use only Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 browsers testings or you can choose charge plans.

Anybrowser siteviewer

Anybrowser Site Viewer lets you see HTML pages as other browsers would, or in different screen sizes. You can move from link to link viewing pages as they’d appear in a variety of browsers and check for text-only purity. Also, the Anybrowser Site Viewer allows you to select specific page elements.

Fundisom

Fundisom is Mac screenshot generator that lets you see your site on a Macintosh G5 in Safari, MacIE or Mozilla. For now the lixlpixel web development Safari Screenshot Generator is temporarily offline, but you can check it later.

Delorie lynxview

Delorie lynxview is service that allows web authors to see what their pages will look like when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser.

Browsera

Browsera is meant to be used as a testing tool, not just a screenshot tool, and works at the site-level instead of the page level. Browsera crawl the pages on your site and actually test them for layout inconsistencies and scripting errors.

IE Tab

IE Tab is Firefox addon that enables you to load webpages in Internet Explorer, without having to open another browser window. Just click a button on the Firefox toolbar and it will open the current page in a new tab that uses the Internet Explorer engine instead of Firefox.

Plugin and Tools

IETester

IETester is a free Web browser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP. It’s useful for web developers to test that their sites work properly in all the most common Internet Explorer versions.

IECapt

IECapt is a small command-line utility to capture Internet Explorer’s rendering of a web page into a BMP, JPEG or PNG image file.

Multi-Safari

Multi-Safari is a free browser compatibility testing tool that allows you to check the rendering of your web site using different versions of Safari. Multi-Safari does not allow screen resolution testing.

Expression Web SuperPreview

Expression Web SuperPreview is free tool that help users to test their websites on different versions of Internet explorer. Expression Web SuperPreview is a stand-alone visual debugging tool that makes it easier to migrate your sites from IE6 to IE7 or 8.

Iphoney

iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment, that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. iPhoney is not an iPhone simulator but instead is designed for web developers who want to create 320 by 480 websites for use with iPhone.

MultipleIEs

With MultipleIEs you can test your webpage in Internet Explorer 3, 4, 5 and 6. These are old browsers, but if you can that your website will be available for all browsers, check also for oldest IE versions with MultipleIEs.

Multiple IE

Multiple IE is similar tool like MultipleIEs. Multiple IE is little package that allows you to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine, from IE 6.0 all the way back to IE 3.0

SortSite Professional

SortSite Professional allows web site builders, owners and consultants to check entire sites for standards compliance and quality issues. SortSite check each page it finds, then produces a report listing every problem. SortSite check more than 300 quality checkpoints.

Lunascape

Lunascape is the world’s first and only triple engine browser. In are included main browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari. With Lunascape, you can choose the right engine to use at the right time, realizing a dramatic decrease in web-browser compatibility issues, long loading times, and improper display of websites.

Premium Services

Browsercam

BrowserCam is a paid online service that allows you to view your web pages across different platforms and browsers, either by automatically taking the screenshots of your choice or by accessing computers remotely.

Crossbrowsertesting

With the site, you’ll be able to test your website (or anyone else’s for that matter), on any operating system and browser. This should save you a lot of time when you’re trying to get things done. Subscriptions cost start from $19.95.

Browser Photo

Browser Photo helps avoid display differences by showing you actual photos of your pages taken on 12 different browser and computer configuration combination. Browser Photo prize is $15 one time use.

Url2image

Using Url2image web server farm, and as a logged-in user, you are able to request screenshots of your web page design, using various browser / OS combination. Url2image offer prize for screenshots. 2 screenshots cost $1.

SortSite

SortSite Professional checks pages for an array of features that don’t work correctly, or behave differently, on different browsers. Standard license prize is $149.

Multi Browser Viewer

Multi Browser Viewer includes 17 pre-packaged, virtualized standalone browsers. Aside from 17 standalone browsers, Multi-Browser Viewer also has the ability to test your site in 50 browsers across three operating systems (Mac, Windows and Linux). Single user license prize is $99.95.

Cloud Testing

The Cross Browser Testing feature of Cloud Testing allows you to verify both the look and feel and the functionality of your e-commerce and transactional websites using IE 6,7,8, Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Opera browsers. Price per one test is £0.10.