Steven Kovar - Interactive Designer

Five Things I’ve learned About Freelancing

September 14, 2009

Here are five things that I have learned over the years that are important to me, and might help other freelancers that are just starting out.

1. Get an office. If you don’t have a quiet place away from home, even an inexpensive shared office space, or at the minimum a door you can close on the office, you might create a problem separating work and free time. If there are other people in your house, they may not understand that you aren’t always available to chat or “hang out”. Set your boundaries by defining a space for yourself, and make it clear that when you are in that space, you’re at work. Blending work and free time causes anxiety, lowered productivity, stress, and depression.

2. If the work just isn’t there, pretend like it is. Make projects for yourself. Fill in your unbooked hours with your own projects. You’re a one-person business, and you’ll need to support it with the same types of structures that other businesses employ: marketing, research and development, and employee improvement programs. Make a website for yourself, learn a new technology, study typography, look at the work of other artists. Improve Improve Improve. In the process of constantly exploring your field, learning new technologies and generally paying close attention to the market and market trends, you’ll begin to define the direction of your business and your personal interests. You will find new sources of potential customers and you’ll also be able to offer new services.

3. Make a website for yourself. Keeping a public “storefront” is very important. Have a portfolio. Show your portfolio and new projects regularly. Look busy. If you are a print designer, you may still carry around a portfolio, but i you are primarily involved in electronic design, your site will be your work showcase. If you are web designer, you have the additional benefit of having a sandbox in which to explore different technologies.

4. Define your own style. Don’t get caught up in every new design trend. Many aren’t that long-lived, or attractive. Of course, staying contemporary is important, but I think it’s just as important to work towards doing what you do better. Refine the legibility of your design, create more context, work on the visual flow, rhythm and sculpting of subtle details that make a design look great. The principles of design never go out of style.

5. Build long standing relationships, and maintain them. Service your existing customers first. Having long-standing work relationships with firms makes you more money as it increases your workload, and reduces your overhead. You’ll need less marketing time if you have at least half or even all of your time booked by a handful of customers. Administrative time in gerneral will decrease as you improve your relationship with your clients. You’ll get a better sense of their company and what they like, more opportunities to do “packages” and campaigns that will form an attractive and cohesive unit in your portfolio, and you’ll develop a streamlined and direct method of communication with them. If you base your workflow on too few customers, however, you can really be hurt when something happens to one of them… budget changes, they’re out of business, etc.

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