Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

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Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

Preparing for Your First Day

Lesson: Freelancing as a Designer

8 minute read

First things first—freelancing doesn’t mean working for free! It simply means that you are free to choose the projects and contracts you work on, instead of being tied to a conventional “day job” with a company.

The life of a freelancer can be thrilling, rewarding, and exhausting. There are definite trade-offs to freelancing, and you have to determine if it’s a good fit for you and your goals.

Pros

On the one hand, freelancing can allows you to:

Choose your own hours

Have more flexibility in your own schedule

Work on a variety of projects with multiple clients

See some projects through from start to finish

Pick projects that match your skills

Learn new skills along the way

Cons

On the other hand, there are some drawbacks. You’ll have to:

Wear many hats, to handle client relationships and admin

Handle billing your clients

Save for your own taxes

Pay for an individual health insurance plan

Work long hours to make enough money

Shift gears when you need to work on more than one project at a time

Be your own salesperson to land new clients

Deal with bad clients, who are difficult to work with or exploit you

Plan for fluctuating income

Cope with the isolation of working alone

Am I fit to freelance?

In general, the expectations of freelancers are very high. This is perhaps because they tend to be regarded as experts, and also because upfront hourly rates and day rates and typically higher than salaried employees.

In order to survive as a freelancer in a competitive market, you'll need to deliver high-quality results quickly. The competition is always closing in, and in a globalized market, you can easily be undercut by other designers.

Freelancing can be a source of joy for many designers, but it can also be immensely stressful, for all the reasons listed above. To determine if you’re fit to freelance, you’ll need to understand the detail of what goes into being a freelancer.

Another option, of course, is just to freelance in your spare time after working your full-time job for a company. Before doing thing, check that freelancing or side-gigs aren’t prohibited by the contract you signed with your employer.

Freelancing in your spare time is a good way to test the water and find out if you enjoy working on multiple projects. If you enjoy it and produce happy clients, this could be a sign that you’re cut out for full-time freelancing!

Freelancing tips

When it comes to meetings and communication, make sure that expectations are always extremely clear, put in writing, and explicitly agreed upon by setting up a clear project timeline and plan. List the deliverables you agree to hand off, and include what would happen if the client requests further deliverables or other additions to the project scope.

For pricing, billing, and contracts, there’s a lot of advice out there. Check out the resources linked at the bottom of this post, but also do your own research to find a solution that works for you. Some freelancers require partial payment (often 50%) at the start of the project, before beginning work, with the balance paid upon completion. Others prefer to commit only to a few trial days before agreeing to take on the entire project.

If a client is difficult to deal with, you have the right to end the contract. Make sure that the contract you provide states the consequences for both parties if this happens, and ensure that it’s explicitly written into the contract that you can terminate it if necessary. You might need to hire a contract attorney to help with drafting the contract template you use for clients. If an individual contract is high-risk or high-value, you might also want to consult your attorney to check that the contract is sufficient for that project.

Landing contracts is much like searching for a job, but you can also reach out actively to your already established network, offer services that people can request, and join different freelancing platforms like Upwork and 99designs.

To help you manage your business and project needs, consider using a project management app, such as Basecamp, Asana, or Trello to keep track of tasks, progress, and milestones.

If you’re finding that working at home feels isolating or less productive, try working at a nearby co-working space, which can introduce you to new people—and potentially new clients.

If you’re truly considering going into freelancing, read

Design is a Job by Mike Monteiro⁠

. It’s a must-read, and will help you understand your value as a designer.

Further resources

⁠

Check out our tips for creating freelance design briefs⁠

over on Inside Design (Designlab with InVision)

Read

Don’t Get A Job, Make A Job⁠

by Gem Barton

Read

Design Is A Job⁠

by Mike Monteiro

Read

Hell To Pay 2⁠

, from the makers of Clients From Hell

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