Well – I’ve finally cut ties with Elance. I got kind of tired of paying monthly for something that was an afterthought and really not bringing in any sincere income. It’s not that it isn’t a good service, and there is certainly a place for it – but at this point in my career, I feel like my energies are best spent elsewhere.
Elance is a good place to find work, if you’re willing to work über-cheap. Being an American with 4 children and a wife to support, I can’t afford to give away logo design for $25 a pop. I’m a huge believer in ‘you get what you pay for’, and I think that Elance kind of bore that out. I would bid, get rejected, and have to move on to the next thing. And usually, the folks would go with the guy that has 45,000 “gigs” landed, and he’s made just slightly over $30,000 for those finished gigs. His stuff would be clipart, bad fonts, and strange effects.
That’s just not what I’m about, and I would wager that’s really just not what most freelance designers are about. Or, at least, not what they …
Being stuck behind my monitors, I can often forget that there is a whole big, green, nice world out there. Leaves and grass and bugs and all that kind of stuff. I live in a beautiful part of the USA, and spring has sprung.
And that started me thinking about going green.
No – I don’t mean recycling my email printouts and cycling down the monitors to a lower brightness (although I do a little bit of that anyway.) I mean going green OUTSIDE. I know – scary thought for some of us…
So: Get outside. Get some fresh air. Open the windows and let the sun shine in.
Going green is good for the soul, and it’s a good way to kind of press the reset button in your brain. If you sit too long in one place, you have a tendency to get into this kind of circular thinking – doing the same thing over and over. You have a tendency to kind of melt into your chair and get loopy. Work can suffer – and your demeanor along with it.
If you get out, you can make friends with the animals and bugs, …
When I first started as a freelance designer, I really thought that I should be able to please everyone. I would work extra, unbilled time on projects and put in far more hours than I should have. My number one aim was pleasing the client – and I’ve found out that I was wrong.
I want all my clients to be happy – and by and large, they are – but I’ve come to discover that dedication to the design has to be my number one priority. If you’re just looking to make the client happy, you have a tendency to let things out the door that are not of the quality that you want to display, or that the project deserves.
Clients are fickle, and they all approach their projects with something in mind. Many will say “I’ll leave it all up to you,” but far, far fewer actually mean that. They have a notion of what their project should look like when it’s finalized. It’s up to you to pick that information out of their brain, shape it, polish it and give it back to them in a form that meets their needs and expectations – but is also a …
There are so many ways to promote yourself as a freelance designer.
Advertising, both online and in analog, is great – but it can get expensive. A simple newspaper ad can run you $1200. That’s a lot of logo work.
Link exchanges, are – at best a crap shoot. You never really know how effective they are or how targeted they get.
Traditional media (TV, radio, billboards, direct mail) can be really, really effective – but again, you’ve got to lay out big bucks to make a splash.
But there are plenty of free things you can do to promote yourself and your business. They all take a little footwork, but they’re effective – and every little bit helps out. Check out some of these:
1. Free Work
When I started out as a freelancer, I would give work away. There are so many charities staging events who are looking for cheap or free design work – and you can often trade out some advertising or logo placement in return for your time. And the best part? These places remember you and could become a valued client a little down the line. If nothing else, they WILL recommend you. Do …
I’ve had plenty of folks ask me what it takes to start a freelance design business – and I’ve seen all sorts of tips and pages and responses about that question.
“Get 2 years of salary in the bank before you start.” Yeah. That’s easy to do, right?
“Build your client base before you leave your full time job.” A little more realistic – but also difficult if you’re working full time.
“Build a name for yourself in the industry before you start out on your own.” Again, do-able, but hardly probable. If you build a name for yourself before you go out on your own, you’re really only building a name for yourself as a proxy for the company you’re leaving.
So – my advice? Easy.
Step 1: JUST DO IT.
If you’re passionate about great design and you really want to have control over your career and your opportunities as an artist* just step out on faith.
When I started (oh, so many moons ago) I had 2 consistent clients within the first 2 weeks of my decision to be a freelancer. 1 was production work (with very little creativity) and the other was for a client that strung me along for way, way less …
I’m in the process of setting up a free blogging community built specifically for freelance designers. It’ll be a simple WordPress-style setup, and it’ll be fully searchable and tied into a HUGE community of artists. Free blogs and websites (set up as subdomains) and a lot of great features that will help us all have a little bit of connectivity and another way of generating some passive income.
Which brings me to my point today. If you’re a freelance designer and you’re not blogging – WHY? It’s a great way to boost your visibility, and it’s a helluva lot more fun than message boards.
Plus, while the blog community might be a little saturated with weird and worthless sites, the opportunity to network with the few, the proud, the freelancers is real and really cool. I’ve gathered a lot of inspiration and some great tools that I use every day from blogs. There’s a tremendous amout of great content out there waiting to be discovered – and I know that there is even more out there just waiting to be published.
So – get out and do it!
As soon as the front end is ready, I’ll release …
Well, I’m finally getting around to putting up some free downloads for designers. Joy!
First up is a general contract. If you’re not using an online service that offers built-in contract protection(Guru, Elance, etc,) you MUST have a contract before you start any work. It not only protects you, but it gives your clients peace of mind that they will get precisely what they pay for.
The more detailed you can be (and you can get as minute with the project details as you want – just add more paper) the better off you’ll be, and it’ll be less likely that you run into the dreaded doing-more-than-I-agreed-to syndrome that seems to haunt us all.
The contract that’s here is, by no means, iron clad and leakproof – but it’s been good enough to get me out of more than one pinch, and usually, the signing of a contract is enough to guarantee that your client isn’t going to bail on you.
One word of advice for all freelancers – and I’ve learned this the hard way: If your client won’t sign a contract, DO NOT DO WORK FOR THEM. It’s not worth it. You might not get burned, …
Software is expensive, and as a freelance graphic designer, the latest version of the big name software might be a little out of reach at times. So, I present you with a real – and FREE – alternative to some of the really expensive stuff.
ArtRage 2.5 is a really cool program. Very natural, nice tools, pressure sensitive if you have a tablet, and it works on all platforms. And it runs smoothly without a ton of ram or the latest processor. Works on laptops and little machines. Sweet! Free!
Well – the started edition is free. The full version is $25. But the starter edition is really pretty stinking cool. It’s not Photoshop – but then again, what is? It’s got lots of tools and feels pretty natural. If you’re into painting and illustration (like I am) you’ll appreciate the ability to be fluid. I think I’m going to pony up and get the full version – just to have a little bit of fun. It’s cheaper than canvas.
Here’s a screen grab of a self-portrait in progress – click for full resolution:
And here’s a little detail. There’s almost as many brush strokes as wrinkles:
…
There are a lot of great services for freelance graphic designers out there – and a lot of junk. I’ve worked with some of the best, and I’ve even dipped my toe into the pool of piranhas. Be careful of the services you align with, as you can spend a lot of dough on something that just won’t work – or worse yet – take up a lot of your time and actuall cost you more money than you make.
I’ll outline a couple here, and when I get the rest of this little site actually done, I’ll have a page with many. I’ve done a lot of footwork on a lot of sites, and I’ve fallen flat on my face on some of them. Now, you can learn from my bumps and bruises.
By the way – I don’t make a penny from endorsing or slamming any of these.
First up – my favorite – Guru.com. Really nice system that’s not over-saturated like some of the big boys. They’ve got it broken down into nice categories like graphic design, illustration, web design, copy writing, etc, and they break those categories down even further, so you …
I am, by admission, a little hard-hearted. Generally, I don’t see much outside my world and my client list. But, I was doing some research on Wolfgang Weingart, and I ran across this site – and it got me to thinking…
Check out “Design for the Other 90%.” Food for thought.
“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”
—Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises
The vast majority of what I do is done for the high-brows of the world – and that’s kind of sad. Why should the rich be the only ones who live with objects and products with thought and soul? Why must the poor be saddled with the purely utilitarian?
I don’t know. I’m not sure where I was going with this – but I know that we all deserve a little design in our lives. Something nice to look at. It doesn’t help all that much, but every little bit helps, right?
