I’ve had tons of clients ask for email newsletters and ads, which can be a little tricky. HTML emails are finicky beasts – and mailing lists are even stranger. I’m not overly “techy” and any tool that can cut off hours and still allow for billing is a good (great) thing.

I found a couple recently – MailBuild and CampaignMonitor. They’re very similar – and they’re made by the same company.

MailBuild allows you to build a brandable sub-site that you sent clients to and allow them to build their own emails. Tons of templates, and a lot of customizability. The cool this is that you set the price, the client pays the bill through MailBuild and you reap the profits. The actual rates are pretty low, so you can mark them up and make a little dough on each recipient and each time they send an email. Your client thinks it’s great because they are “doing the work,” and you’re off the hook – you just sit back and wait for the money to come in.

CampaignMonitor is similar – but you get all the control. You design the email, set the …

One of the banes of my existence as a freelance graphic artist has been trying to track down weird fonts. You routinely get logos or layouts that have the fonts converted, and they’re invariably something obscure or tacky or from a strange foundry.

If you’re like me, you’ve got thousands upon thousands of fonts from every manufacturer out there, and rolling through them all can take a long, long time – and make you crazy because of the subtle variations.

But – a great tool has come to the resuce: What the Font from MyFonts.com.

You scan the offending font and upload it to their server, answer a few questions and it gives you several fonts that it most likely is. The better your input is, the more precise the answer is. Plus, once you’ve got your answer, it gives you links to the font manufacturer so you can buy the font if you need to.

Best of all, it’s free and it’s fast. It’s not always dead-on, but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to the perfect tool. Very nice, very slick.

Now, if it would just revoke the design license of folks that use Comic Sans, …

I’m really not a huge fan of building websites. I do like designing them – but the building can be a bit of a drag. Over the years, I’ve figured out how to design around the limitations of browsers and users, but it’s a fine art (not literally,) and it can be very tedious.

I also know there are a lot of designers out there that either don’t know how to code, or just don’t have the time to code. I’m hoping to move into the latter by having too much illustration and design work to never have the time to do the coding. One day!

But – I’ve found a place that takes the drudgery out of site design. PSD2HTML.com You send a PSD of your page design, they send you back the W3C valid XHTML site. Sweet!

They’re not all that cheap, at $153 for a single page – but if you think about the time that’ll save in the building and coding, it’s well worth it. You can always duplicate the page and tinker with the code on your own dime, too. They’ve got a lot of options (like WordPress/Blogger/Joomla integration) and it’s …