Oddly enough, I'd say go elsewhere to build your dribbble following. Be active on other sites, forums, events, etc... to get your name spread out there. Give away free stuff in exchange for an email with landing pages, then later target those emails with more free/premium stuff. After a few successful rounds of that, you have built trust in people who admire what you are doing. That trust is everything and why some folks are perceived as industry experts even though their work isn't the best there is.

I compare our industry to the music industry. Talent really doesn't get you to the top anymore. It's all about who you know...and who knows you.

Appreciate the response! I agree with a lot of what you said. I'll check out the book!

I definitely agree about the labels. For me, it's mostly trying to stay "available" in case I need a new employer someday. I see so many requirements for a design role these days that it's overwhelming. Very cut throat!

I have a similar mentality. Sometimes though...it just gets overwhelming. I realize you can't be the best at everything and never will. So it's best to focus on your craft, especially if it's something you enjoy doing.

What worries me most are the job descriptions I've seen as of late for designer roles. You have to know so much to even get a foot in the door simply because it is what is "hot" right now.

I remember when you needed to be a Photoshop wizard less than 5 years ago, but today if you use Photoshop you're a dinosaur ( at least that's the perception I get reading the job descriptions). The same is even more true for code, frameworks, JavaScript and more. You coded your website with only CSS and HTML? Blasphemy!

Rainbows and crappy type y'all

The real question is if you even need a dropdown menu at all?

I'm a nerd and made an automator script to build an Mac OS application to generate a project file scruture. Check out this video about it if you're interested. Cheers!

I had this same problem. I ultimately chose to do it myself with Ruby on Rails but plan to later get on the JS bandwagon. Ruby on Rails probably the easiest point of entry to frontend and backend combined. The syntax is cleaner than PHP which makes me happy. It's certainly older but after learning it I realized it's the same thing as Laravel but with Ruby and you guessed it....Rails. More people are going the JavaScript route today which is perfectly fine as well, my only issue with that is it's still new and JavaScript is a loosely typed language. This is both great and discouraging at the same time because you may find 100 different ways to do one thing and the next person will tell you it's all wrong. It's getting better with ES6 though.

With JS you have to also typically define your own stack, which for a newbie is daunting. There are frameworks out there but many are still new to the game. With Ruby on Rails, the stack is very opinionated and often ready to roll as soon as you run rails new myapp.

If you break something along the way, chances are you can google the error you get and someone else has already encountered the same thing. I'd say while learning RoR is a great way to go about it. I learned by submersing myself in anything to do with it. There aren't as many tutorials out there but some are worthwhile to watch/read. gorails.com is also a good resource.

Depending on how much time you have, RoR has a ton of gems to help with many use cases. Devise for instance saves loads of time by integrating a full user account system on any Ruby on Rails app that's customizable and extendable. There is a ton more. I'm sure there is also an equivalent for most things in any language/framework of course.

I think it really boils down to who you know. Having freelanced the majority of my career, your network is everything. People want to work with people they know/trust or have been told to know/trust.