Freelance designer

(republished from 2006)

I have decided to retire from freelancing and re-enter the industry as a full time permanent designer back in to a design studio. I officially start my new job next Monday, details of new job released soon! I freelanced for two years, and it was something I had always wanted to try. So I will share my experience for those who are thinking about it, or those who are trying to find opinions on it. I have been contacted by a number of students researching different methods of working over the past few years so perhaps this will help them too. I freelanced in Australia, Japan and the UK.

I initially took the plunge in to freelancing 6 months in to my Masters in Melbourne, Australia. Studying part time and working full time was getting difficult and I wanted to devote more time to study. I took a 6 week contract in an advertising studio working 3-4 days a week and quit my full time job, this ended up being extended to 3 months. After that I picked up a few of my own clients through previous business contacts and contacts I had made at university. These projects were all for small businesses that needed a new identity or a new website. The budgets were tight but as a sole trader you don’t have high overhead costs and you get tax benefits so you can (and often have to) accept work for small budget projects. They can get frustrating and you do need to manage the client’s expectations as well as make sure you get quotes signed off. I wasn’t paid for one project where the client just disappeared. In most cases I would ask for a deposit before work commenced to avoid these problems.

I soon discovered as a contractor in a design studio you were given the jobs no one else wanted. Occasionally there were options to fill roles where specialised skills were required or in areas where the studio lacked certain skills and didn’t have time to learn them. This is why you need to keep up to date with production/consulting skills, so you don’t get stuck with just the roles that no one else wants. If you are lucky you will get a role where the studio simply doesn’t have enough resources to complete the project on time. In these cases you are given interesting work where you have more responsibility and direction over design. I got this sort of position mostly from small studios, which were often understaffed, though the smaller studios usually have small budgets.

I continued to freelance for a year in Melbourne while studying, and made contacts in several studios who would feed work to me on a project basis as well as picking up projects from my own clients who had been recommended to me through word of mouth or just happened to find my website.
I then moved to Japan, and with the move actually took a lot of my existing work with me. From Japan I was able to continue working for the studios I had established relationships with and still managed to pick up my own clients in Australia. I did investigate the local industry but without speaking fluent Japanese and living outside of the big cities it was nearly impossible to find work. I ended up taking a job teaching English just to get out of the house. I was studying, but as that was by correspondence it was mostly from home. The problem with having your own clients is you are mainly working from your home/office on your own which does become quite isolating. When I worked for studios, most of the time it was on site and with other designers, which I much prefer. I left Japan after 6 months, mainly because I wasn’t getting my design fix and working/studying at home had become too isolating.

This lead to the decision to move to London, I still had the travel bug and wanted to explore the European design industry, plus I was confident I could find work in an English speaking country! One week after I got here I was thrown in to a freelance role at Framfab, which used to be Oyster and one of the design studios I had always admired. Initially a 2 week contract, it has been extended to 3 months now and looks like it would continue to be extended if I decided to remain as a freelancer. There is a lot more work here compared to Australian and especially Japan, for freelancers. Even if Framfab ran out of work for me I’m quite confident I could pick up design work elsewhere relatively quickly. Summer seems the best time, as a lot of people are away so you can fill in for them. I have worked in different capacities on different projects and in different teams since starting at Famfrab. The advantage of working in a large company (300 employees) is that projects have decent budgets and you are given time to research, as well as working for well known brands like Orange, Microsoft and SABMiller. The disadvantage is that they also have a lot of staff so you are often given the jobs no one wants to do, although there are lots of freelancers here so it is usually split between us.

Freelancing has ended up getting to the point where I can’t go any further in terms of the design process, and can’t really practise a lot of the theory I studied in my Masters. Freelancers are brought on to projects for a certain roles then they leave. They are rarely given decision making or art directing roles and although I have had my say in brainstorming and strategy sessions, they never seem to be valued as highly as full time staff. The up side is you get paid better, get to work with different people and get to view different design processes. While you can rule out the disadvantages of freelancing in a studio if you run your own business you then get a different set of disadvantages. Working for your own clients you have to sacrifice money (compared to freelancing in a studio) and can’t afford to choose your projects, plus the headaches of having to take on many different roles like accountant and invoice-chaser! It also leads back to the isolation problem, if you like to work with other designers. I may realise all the disadvantages of working full time in the coming months, but for now I’m quite excited about the possibilities and change of scenery.