Unit 24

When becoming a free lance designer you must be able to try and advertise yourself and your services to try and find work. A cheap and easy way to do this to sign up for any freelance designing sites you can find such as 'designcrowd.com' as well as creating a logo for your self and place on a business card, and then hand them out either through doors, or other design companies. A business card is just a small piece of card with your logo on it and some of your contact information on the back, so if anyone needs some design work done, they can just look at your business card and get in touch with you. A great way to show people what kind of work you can do is by creating a portfolio, this is normally done in the form of a small website containg information about you and your past experience as a desginer as well as some example of your work, possible with links to more of your work or as proof of work that other clients are using today.

You should distribute these postcards and business cards in a strategic way. Start off with all the people on your database who have heard of you before then maybe they will give them to other people. Once you have done that start distributing them to people on your email addresses and so on and so forth. Don't just hand them all out in bulk at once. Finally you should be very persistent. If you don't get many replies the first time you send out business cards and everything then don't give up! Keep at it and people will eventually come to you and see that you are someone who doesn't give up, as someone who will go that extra mile to reach your goal. A key component when creating your portfolio is to think about what type of clients you want to attract, if you prefer designs that are more modern and sleek looking for example, then you will want your portfolio to show this, weather it be through your choice of font, background designs or your logo, or maybe all of these ideas. Ofcourse with any kind of design you create there will always be differnent opinions, some may really like your work, and other may not, as a designer you have to learn how to accept other people opinions and feedback and use it to help you create ne designs that meet there needs as well which will only help you improve as a designer as opposed to taking the feedback negatively and not taking any thing from it.

Now you need to realise how to deal with feedback. Don't get upset if someone doesn't like all the work you have done, people are different and are entitled to their own opinions. some people will like your work and others won't at the end of the day its no big deal. There are 12 ways to manage feedback and I will go through these now for you.

Also as a freelance desinger you need to be able to manage your own contracts and keep records of anywork you have been paid to do. This way you know exactly how much you  are spending on average to get each job done and how much profit you are making in the process. Most clients will make up a brief when looking for a designer, explainging what they want done, any colour schemes or ideas they might have in mind as well as explaining the time limit for each project and how they are willing to pay. It is always a good idea to have multiple contractors, that way you will have a good amount of work coming in and therefore more money making opportunity. By building a good reputation and a good working relationship with a contractor/client they will generally return to you in the future with work because they know they get what they want when working with you.

Continued Development:

I have really enjoyed my time on this course learning how to become a graphics designer, and i would like to continue to learn and develop my skills and possibly get a job as a designer in the future. I would like to have either a full time job at a design company and work my way up somewhere higher up in the company or have a job doing something else and doing free lance design work in my spare time, this way i can earn some extra money on the side of what i get already and still develop my skills through design work.
At the moment i am still just a beginner learning all the neat little tricks with deign software like inkscape and photoshop, although i think i have made some quite nice designs and have some really good ideas in my head i still don't think know enough yet to start designing properly yet, but i think if i keep designing in my spare time and practice with new techniques and tools i will slowly get better and better.
To reach my goal of becoming a full time designer i think i will have to do what i was just talking about and keep designing in my spare time and keep practicing till i think i am ready to try and get a job doing design work and then i can keep practicing as I'm working.