Freelancer Tips 2 - Designer, Illustrators, Developers - Morale, money and clients

Well, I felt that as the other post about freelancer tips had some interest that I would write another post with some pointers that would make life just a bit more bearable when delving into the life as a freelance designer! I'm also sure that some of these pointers are transferable across other creative professions, so here we go.

** Manage Client Expectations **

That's almost all that needs to be said. Make sure that you and the client are on the same page in terms of what they expect at the end of the project. Be up front, discuss budgets and see that you are both heading towards same goal. Failing to manage their expectations in the initial stages can result in dissatisfaction and loss of a client. Avoid surprising them, be up front, see what they want, check that you can deliver on what that want and you may save yourself and them a whole load of hassle!

Clients to Avoid

In the early stages you will probably bump into many clients who may be trouble than their worth to your business. This isn't a personal criticism of these clients, nor are they strictly conscious of their actions but you need to build a viable business take some of these behaviours into account. A bit of fun below, Client types:

- The non-payer: yeah we have your number Non-payer and shame on you. I bet if the shoe were on the other foot you'd be among the first to complain about not being paid! The trouble is some of these people that have an adversity to honourable business practices is, they can be tricky to spot. They may vanish without a trace when it comes to payment (pppppoooohhhhfff – the sound of them vanishing from the phone, emails, post code). What do you do? It's best to ask for a deposit at the start of a project to see if they are fare dodgers, if they wince at the thought of paying you a starter fee (even a small one) be very very careful! You could find yourself out of pocket.

- The Cheapskate: And you! Stopping asking students to produce work for nothing whilst in the process of cheapening the design industry! Stop! I don't care. In all honestly you can spot these clients quite early, and in fairness they are just trying to use a bit of business sense. But remember fellow designers… you are a businessperson too and you need to make a living before making a profit. Stand strong and admit that you need to make money, eat, pay rent/mortgage keep a family and that the client hiring you are doing so for you skills and expertise. Have respect for your skills, if you don't they certainly wont. And don't do spec work for free, sometimes this is rewarding but more often that not this is company or client looking to explore insecurity and gain something for nothing. Again… they probably wouldn't offer their services for free – unless they are charity, then that is a whole different kettle of fish. One small exception to this rule is when you are student – getting real commercial work is like gold dust in the early days. Even then, when I was a student doing a HND in design we a great lecturer that would find us clients and live worth that work give all the students a bit of money, not a lot but a bit.

- The Disrespectful One: trust me , these guys can put real sour taste in your mouth avoid them if possible. Sometimes the general lack of respect (sometimes combined with ignorance) can take a little while to manifest and no matter how much you try to win someone round, educate, inspire they just see your skills as an superfluous aspect to their business, “you just make things look pretty”you are skills are never an investment, to them they wander if they can do a better job, whether their cats or dogs can do your job and they don't even have thumbs “ah anyone can do that” or quote - “The computer did that!”. This type of client alone can be the underpinning for statements above. Be warned and be ready. To tell the truth, this can be tricky to draw out its ugly head. Engage in conversation, and maybe ask some questions about the business. What do they need from a designer, is there anything else they like on the market etc. You are contending with an attitude towards you professional skills and in the films you can almost always win these people round... these is probably not the case in the real world. You will just start to get a gut feeling from this sort of client from odd little quips and remarks, this can also be especially prevalent if you work in-house. – Show yourself a little self-respect even if the client won't move on! Onward and upward... if you can afford to.

Selling Yourself Short

Or the design industry in general. “I'm new so I won't charge anymore that bag of peanuts and a pat on the back!”Why? Have confidence! If you have trained as a Graphic designer, artist, or any other profession be creative or technical, have faith in you skills. If you don't have faith in your skills how do you expect your client to faith in you? Not only that, if you go in for a low ball number it just says to the client that they may be dealing with someone who lacks confidence knowledge, and also you draw out the wolves – and you will be the wounded animal – and like wolves, they will smell vulnerability. You will probably want to avoid working hard and getting very little pay in return, it gets old trust me on that. You also cheapen the industry, stop.

Don't be Desperate

This one is also tricky to avoid as a graduate or newbie. Companies and recruiters will know that you will be probably be desperate for a job as you will have 0 years experience. If you really want a job, desperation can lead you to making bad decisions early on with selecting employers and clients that will want to take advantage of you. If a position or a job smells fishy, don’t ignore that gut feeling. If someone is taking advantage of you be prepared to say 'no' and walk away. That willingness to say no will save you hassle, be prepared to walk away if it feels like the right thing to do... and make sure you complete what was required if things got that far.

Well I hope that gives you something to consider. Its not all terror out there in wilds of design but there are pitfalls you should avoid. I have run into these on a couple of occasions but they are much less frequent these days. If you are new I would advise taking some of the above on board. If you a season professional you can look back and laugh (or cry) at some of the points above. Have a good one all!

“I ain’t paying £5 for a business card!” – this was said in response to offering them a branding make over!

Feel free to post any mini stories or rude comments.

Consider The Brief : some short tips on writing a design brief

Consider The Brief

Designer to Client!

This post has been written up to offer information with regards to setting up rough guidelines for setting a brief. Imagine answering the following...

Purpose & Plan

What is the purpose of the project? Is it to expand the business, launch new products or promote something that you are already offering to an exiting customer? In other words, you will need to have some sort of a plan and end goal in mind for the project. If you don't know what it is that you business needs it will be trickier for a designer help. With out a plan, even a loose one, you will end up going around in circles. Maybe ask yourself some of these questions :-

• What do I want to get out of it? 
• What will my return on investment be? 
• Can this be achieved? 
• Should I do this now? 
• What is the competition doing? 
• How can do it differently/better?

Those are a couple of suggestions.

Budget

Budget is important to consider as this will affect the amount of time that will need to be allocated to your project - factoring in deployment, build/design, concept and whether anything else needs to be considered.

If you have a larger budget for your project(s) then you may want to consider a cascading approach. This method, is far more open ended financially but allows for plenty of creative and innovative freedom, a designers dream. A draw back with this free flowing approach is that money and keep on going into a project, regular checks on the amount spent so far are a good approach and ball park figure should be offered in the beginning, especially with smaller business with tighter purse strings. The other method is a fixed price, this method for spending usually suits both parties, or so I have found, a draw back with this is that sometime contracts and prices need to sometimes be re-evaluated should there be substantial changes to a project specification. Favourite approach – Fixed prices discussed in the beginning. Factoring changes (or tweaks) requests will increase price as more time will be required.

Time Frame

Please take into account when you need a project to be completed, things can take time to finish in addition with other projects. Also, waiting to hand over all relevant information at the last minute will end in disappointment eg, sending all the photo's over for flyer an hour before a production deadline or as the designer needs to leave will not make the best of it... Get the relevant information such as, text, photo’s, FTP details etc over in decent time. The earlier, the better! Trust me on this one.

Target Market

If this is a design project that is yet to have a brand established have you considered who the target market will be? Is this for children, adults, professionals, tourist, artists, trade and so on.

Branding

Do you have an existing brand guidelines for your company? If you have any existing logo, colours, fonts, do’s and don’ts this may be required for the project to be completed.

Deployment

Depending on the desired project, how do you intend to deploy the project? Will this be a small web banner, a flyer, will you be using a printer, will this be a for screen, will it be for print? It is worth considering how this may evolve in the future be it for print or screen. It is easier to scale a large file down or resize a vector than it is to resize a 60 px 60 px logo onto a bricks and mortar shop.

Limitations

Is there anything in the that a designer can't do? Will it be for a certain target demographic, politically sensitive, have to fit on some something small, needs fit x y z etc etc

So, you have written a brief....

Dear Designer,

I want you to create something that brings value to the company, here includes the specification and the brief to expand my business! Thank you for offering your time and experience!

Hope this helps a bit!

Should you require any design services feel free to have a look >

Creative Design Services >

Working With PHP Include : First Baby Steps For Designers - Making A Low Maintenance Website

Experiment With “Include” PHP

Maintaining a large website such as Satzuma can become time consuming.  Using “include” can take the website to the next stage of modular design. Imagine having to write 1 line of code into a php file instead of having to copy & paste the same piece of code across 70 pages, worse still… imagine that piece of code had a typo – across all 70 pages! You start to get the idea – the horror. Using PHP include can reduce the time consuming method of copy and paste, shorten time, and take your website to that next stage of design (Or look at a CMS system). With this Include method, the information you amend in one file can change across multiple webpages, just to name a couple of ideas you can use this for navigation, footers, banner adverts and much more. I cannot emphasise how much easier this will make your life when working on larger projects. Change once to  update many!

How To Go About It


As a rough example we are going to make a footer module. We also have the main document that will  “include” pull in, integrate, import a file from your website.

This tutorial/experiment will assume you already have prior knowledge of setting your website up with root folders etc, if you need some more help with this please follow these tutorials.

https://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/how-to/first-website-part1.html 

Or PHP



http://php.net/manual/en/tutorial.php

You Will Need: 

 - The main file (The parent/master)
 - An external footer file (why not add some styling to your html?) 
 
 - one line of code, which you will embed into the parent folder. 
 
 - A space to upload/test your experiment. (domain and hosting)

Stage 1 - Parent File

We will treat this file as the master file, the parent which pulls in the external modules to construct the page. Remembering that if you are using this modular method for constructing your website it will make life much more efficient.

Why not call your parent file ‘master.php’ 



This image shows (with straying CSS, bleurgh! ) the master.php and Product-footer-test.html working together... or popping out of the bottom. 

Stage 2 - Footer File


I have used the footer in the example, as this area of the website has frequent updates with new products and information constantly being change and added, and it is spread across the entire website… As you can see, all styling is added to this queasy example with the accursed table! Any changes or modifications will be included in the master file once you add the “include” piece of code to the master file. So what you change here (the footer file) will be visible once you come to uploading all of the files and testing the file. So... Design and build your footer file and add you styling to it.

Stage 3 - The Simple Piece of Code to Paste Into Your Master PHP file. 

The image below shows in red where the piece of "include" code sits. So, imagine you have made a hollow space on your webpage, in the hollow space you are going to add this code to the bottom. As shown. 





Product-footer-test.html"); ?>


This will call on the footer module and all of its elements.  Once you upload your files you can see whether the footer has worked.

This visual diagram will show how the principle will work leaving aside how the coding works for the PHP include.

Hope this helps, I plan to use this much more in the future.

Happy designing...

Beginner Freelancer Hints & Tips - Book keeping and Clients (UK)

Hello there, I decided to add a post related to general tips for creative freelancing.
I have been asked questions on a couple of occasions about topics aside from being a creative thinker. I have worked with a couple of clients from all shapes and sizes and I am now going to offer some points from my own experiences. So I hope this helps.. (please excuse my poor spelling)

1) Agreement / Plan - Before you jump into a project make sure to get some form of written agreement to the client declaring what it is they will get for their budget in concise - detailed - bullet points, this will prove to be invaluable to you later on. A written agreement in the early stages lays down a project plan and what the client will get for their money and time. You don't want to surprise the client at last stage with over spending their budget and ignoring their needs.

Agreements will also protect you as the designer from "feature packing", feature packing is when a client would ask you to produce one poster for the same budget and then somewhere in the middle they try to slip a business card design or and extra webpage without wanting to pay for the extra time. Be careful about verbal agreements too, I have agreed to a project with a vague specification from a client only for it to back fire at a later date, make sure to talk it through in some detail first without dropping the final price into the conversation.

Don't : "Hello Jeff could you design a booklet for me" and of course you'd jump at the opportunity and say "yes, great will do for £20". Great, done and dusted....that quick, you'd be lucky. You will find yourself in probable situation whereby the client keeps changing there mind, adding elements to the project and continuous criticism about the the project. You don't wont to hear the words "that's not what we have agreed", because that's what you said on the phone, remember? That's an example of being too quick to take the project and not talking it through. Do : "Could you design a poster for me?" "yes, what size, when, who, colours, time scale, budget in mind"? that is a rough example.

In the event you don't talk it through, you may get these freelance symptoms : Loss of trust from your client, time consumption, delayed payments, loss of future projects, a headache, foul language, muttering under your breathe, morale.
So : Get the written spec if possible> Discuss > Plan Declare > Agree > Begin


2) Deposits - There are many valid reasons for asking for deposits, make sure to tie this into your agreement.
A deposit can act as confirmation for a project, this will guarantee your client is serious about investing into your time and skill. It will also confirm the start date for a project and you will find the project moves quickly. If a client starts to foam at the mouth about paying you a deposit I'd be weary, It could mean they don't have the money, or don't want invest in your time and effort. (Please only use this part as a guide, some companies may have a policy where they only pay on completion, use your instinct. I find this works for me.)How much is down to you.

Perks of the deposit are as follows : Acts confirmation for you and the client, pays for you to work through the project, protects you if the project is canceled, could keep you going until the far off completion date.

3) Price - Take into consideration what your price could be saying about your service, although many clients may want something for cheap this can also work against you (the designer). Could knocking the price down to %20 (or cheap by the current market) mean you are desperate, inexperienced or easy pickings? possibly from experience, by all means don't be greedy, but don't be too be cheap either. Being too cheap can say you lack confidence in your workmanship and will work for anything.
(If you are a graduate have the take it where you can get it attitude, if its good for the folio.)
Type into Google "salary calculator" or sign up to designweek.co.uk, better still, buy a design week and feel the printy paperness between your finger tips!

4) Book keeping - Always keep hold of your receipts, bank statements etc. As a freelancer you will need to fill out a self (assessment) form ether digitally or printed stating your earnings at the end of the tax year (April - to - April). Please take into account if you a you have a paye job, this will also add to your total earnings. Take into consideration at an early stages of freelancing and store some money to to pay your taxes and national insurance contributions, even better save your self some hassle and get an accountant.(I really should do that)
Type in self assessment in the revenue and customs website all call their hotline to talk to someone who knows more about the accounting side of things.

5) Communicate - This may sound like a cop out, but the "communication is the key" (or what ever) cliche really is the key. Talk to the client and respond to their needs. Take pride and joy in the project and this will really help you shine. The client will also be more will be more inclined to give future projects as you are enthusiastic about what you do .
Think it all through and every body 'should' be happy.

I hope you can extract some juiciness from this little article and helps you to avoid bulging temple veins!

Kind Regards,

Jimm