Tales of a Designer

Freelance Switch

When starting off with freelancing, I constantly scoured the web for good resources and tips to help me out in freelancing. I was so naive to the business that I needed all the help that I could get. Of course, now that I feel fairly established, I find one of the best resources I’ve ever seen.

Freelance Switch has only been around for a handful of weeks, but the amount of good content and resources that they’ve put out since they launched is really amazing. It only took reading one post of theirs to become a subscriber. And most feeds that I subscribe to, I don’t read every single post, but for this site, I find myself visiting almost daily.

a Community & Resource for freelancers of all varieties - designers, writers, programmers, illustrators, photographers …

I normally bookmark links that I find useful, but I was bookmarking so many of their posts that I figured I might as well do a quick write up about them. So if you’re a freelancer of any sort, it would be worth your time to go visit Freelance Switch. It might be one of the best resources on the web for freelancers, and being so new, there is a ton of potential for growth. You might even find a job there!

If You Don’t Believe In It, Why Should I?

Last week I wrote about having passion for your work, but in addition to that, I think that whatever clients us designers’ have, it makes projects a lot more meaningful when the client believes in their own business and/or products. Most clients that I’ve had in the past, they seemed to show quite a bit of interest in the work that they produce………in other words, they really do think that they have something good to offer.

Because of the fact that Tridea is a side company of mine, along with two others, we are in a position to pick and choose who we want to work with. Through initial client meetings and stuff, I like to feel out clients to be sure they actually believe in their company enough to think that it has a good chance to grow. I want to know that when we’re contracted to do a job, we’re investing our time into something that our client believes will be something of value to it’s customers.

On the flip-side, I believe in us. If someone asks “why should we choose you?” then I 100% know that I can answer that question well enough for the interested party to realize that we believe in the services we are offering. I am confident that we can provide a great service to further help out in advancing the clients to where they want to go.

I think it’s pretty important for designers to believe in the type of work that they produce. Otherwise, how would you expect to wow clients? Why should a client want to choose you over other designers if you don’t believe that you can do good work? Even if you get that chance to work with clients, I’d think that it would be a bit awkward presenting a design to a client if you don’t even believe in your own work. It would make explaining design decisions pretty hard.

Passion Shows in Your Work

I never understood why some designers could work in the design industry and not have passion about their work. Why put the effort into something so important if you don’t care about how the end product will be. Within the past year, I’ve been around quite a few other designers who’s work I look at, and wonder why in the world they are choosing to design websites. It’s not that they don’t have the skill, because I’ve actually seen the good work they’ve done, but they just don’t put effort into anything.

Just recently, I had a good friend tell me that he is loosing his passion for design. I told him that it’s not worth his time and the company’s money to invest into someone who has no passion. It will easily show through his work, and that will not be beneficial at all to the users who visit the site.

I feel that it is a designers responsibility to not only care about the work that they produce, but to satisfy the client as well as make the user experience of that site worth the visit. Otherwise, what is the point? For a paycheck? Is that really worth a paycheck to produce mediocre work that don’t have a good influence on the people that see it? Unfortunately, some people just don’t care.

To me, passion about my work means everything, and I love explaining to people what I do. Most people can see that passion when I begin to ramble on about what I do. So, when I meet other designers who aren’t passionate, it boggles my mind to think designers just don’t care about being in one of the coolest, high-demand industries we have now.

And from a personal standpoint, I wouldn’t want to hire anyone who doesn’t have a passion for what they do. If that passion and commitment isn’t there, then how can I ensure that the service I’m paying for will be of quality?