Tales of a Designer

The Business Side of Things

When I first started doing freelance work on the side, it was was all fun. I’d get small projects, with a verbal agreement stating how much would be paid, and then I’d have at it. Then only design was the name of the game. A young, naive, thought I had was, I could do this all day, no problem. If only it were that easy.

Now that I’m going through the motions of having my own company, I’ve come to realize that actual design work is a very small percentage in the overall scheme of things. To make it that much harder, I don’t have a business background at all, so all of the aspects of business that I’ve learned up to this point have been through trial and error.

But once things get professional, it’s almost all business, whether it’s chasing down leads for new projects, negotiating project budgets with clients, contracts/proposals, meetings, overall communicating through emails, etc., it never stops. After going through all of the business aspects to get the project rolling, design seems to be the easy, less exhausting part.

Not all of the business stuff is bad. I will always enjoy the designing, but I’ve also come to like some of business stuff and I’ve learned a ton within the last few months. I especially like chasing down leads. That is by far the most interesting aspect, to me, because you find out whether you’re a good fit with a client or not. I also take lots of pride in being able to explain to others what we and how someone would benefit from the services we provide.

Meeting new people is always interesting to me, so I guess that is why I enjoy chasing down leads and learning what other people do. Whether you get along with new client leads or not, you always learn something about them and/or how to do things differently for the next time.

The aspect that I’ve come to like the least is paper……….unless it’s a check! I just don’t deal well with the legal/paper stuff. It gives me a headache, and I always feel like I leave little loopholes for something to go wrong. It’s just a tedious process having to write up proposals and contracts and nothing really excites me about it, however, they are extremely important to every project, and I’d never start a project without one.

Since my company is so new, there is still tons to be learned about the business side of dealing with clients as well as running a small design shop. I am in the process of wrapping up a great book called The Business Side of Creativity, and I would highly recommend checking it out. It packed with useful information on how to get started, and running your own business.

A question for other freelancers/designers……..how do you cope with the business aspect of this industry?

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.