I wrote about building our design studio in Toronto in 2014, from zero, to freelancing, to a real live company with some pretty incredible clients. It's been a pretty incredible 12 month adventure.

Feel free to ask any questions.

I'd recommend Hack to Start: http://www.hacktostart.com/. It's the #2 recommended business/design podcast on iTunes run by @TylerCopeland.

It's interesting to judge blocks of time and rates. Even if you sell time. Does working 40 hours = selling exactly 40 hours? What if you finish earlier? What if you need to take more time?

We sell resources by the week, and it's all results oriented, but based on projects. So we do estimate for a project, and then sell the projects by the week, and pre-sell 2-6 months at a time.

During the project, we can provide any changes to estimates based on progress, or updated requirements.

At the end of the day, you're really charging hourly if you count the hours. If you work full time, you only really work about 25-30 hours a week. So how can you sell 40 hours per week?

Sell weeks, and give an appropriate amount of work that can be completed in that week, then move on.

The reasons I ask is that the % increase are all relative. If you're looking at a UX Designer topping 120k, it's good to ask why a senior designer would make $110k on the low end.

It would make sense that a UX Designer goes from 80k - 120k, and then a senior designer goes anything above 120k, yeah?

What we do at DC is define set salary increases per year that adjust for both inflation + as a raise based on experience, as well as increase of caps to salaries depending on seniority within the organization. In that way there's no guessing.

Living costs per city are definitely a factor when you look at salaries between a lot of cities in the States. Here's a good gauge other than Indeed: Angel List

I'd recommend looking past SF. Good Luck!

+1 for Gmail in Chrome.

The short cuts are great, and it's accessible from any browser. It's also really great that it's integrated well across other Google services.

Hey Ryan, just jumping into Designer News for the first time today. This is a great question!

Are you involved in your local design community, and are there meetups to learn or meet folks at? Are there any startups that really need help you can do side work with, maybe at accelerators, or incubators?

Reading and classes are great, but doing real work (more of it) is even better.

Hey Jess, where are you located? How much does a UX Designer make, and how much do you expect a senior designer make? What's the % of a raise based on? That could help with good criteria, happy to help!