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[luke-porter]

Three Things I've Learnt From Five Years Freelancing

Having developed a creative freelancing business over the past five years, using a breadth of different skills with many different clients, I have learnt a few things along the way that may help other aspiring freelancers in their work and practice. If you're interested in how you can improve the way you think and work to ultimately bring in more clients and stay on top of your business, then read on and discover how these three tips can help you out! Being organised is crucial Effective organisation can significantly reduce the stresses that inevitably come when juggling many different client projects all at the same time. Knowing where to find that client email or that important file you saved last week enables you to work faster and more efficiently. Here are a few tools I use to keep on top of my work: Trello Trello is a fantastic (and free) tool to organise any kind of information. It uses the format of boards, lists and cards to categorise information and set it out in a visual way that is very easy to understand. I have a board simply called 'Freelance', and on that board are several lists such as 'Prospective', 'Coming Up', 'Current' and 'Invoiced'. When a potential job comes in I add it as a card to the 'Prospective' list. If terms are agreed with the client then I move it to 'Coming Up'. When work begins on the project the card is moved to 'Current', and once work is complete and a final invoice has been sent to the client it is moved to 'Invoiced'. When I have received payment the card is archived. Trello features such as due dates, colour labels and checklists are particularly helpful. Having a way to keep track of all your projects and what stage each of them are at is invaluable. Digital Filing System Having a desktop scattered with files from dozens of different projects is illogical and frustrating. Set up a logical filing system to organise your files and keep things tidy. I use a very simple system. I have a folder called 'Freelance' stored on an external hard drive, and in that folder three more folders called 'Projects', 'Resources' and 'Invoices'. Inside the 'Projects' folder I have a folder for each month. Inside each month is a folder for each project. It's all about folders inside folders inside folders. It may not be a perfect system for everyone but it works great for me. Every time a month passes I back up that month's folder to a second external hard drive. Always make back ups - you'll thank yourself when the inevitable happens. As well as storing my invoices on my hard drive I also keep a copy on Google Drive. It's always useful to have an easy-access copy on the cloud in case there is a dispute with a client regarding payment and you're away from your hard drive. Establish a system that works for you and stick to it, so you can access whatever you need in just a few clicks. Spreadsheet (Excel or Google Sheets) Working with spreadsheets may sound dull, but it will save you a big headache in the long run. You should always keep track of your income, not least for tax purposes. Useful columns to have on your spreadsheet may include: Client, Project Description, Amount, Invoice Number, Date Invoiced and Date Received. Setting up an automatic total income sum is very handy, and using colours makes it easy to see at a glance which payments are outstanding. I simply use green for paid, red for outstanding. Having all your income data in one place means you can look back on your earnings, discover trends in your income and keep an eye on which clients are quick to pay up and which clients are not! Work from the inside out Probably the single biggest struggle for people starting out as freelancers is finding clients. But you can't expect them to come to you. Not at first anyway. You have to put the effort in to actively seek out individuals and businesses that you believe would benefit from your services. You won't immediately find hundreds of potential clients by magic, so you have to start with the people you see day-to-day. The people that you trust and that trust you. Friends and family. Begin working from your inner circle, outwards. Then you start to establish connections with friends of friends. Acquaintances. The benefit of working from the inside out is that you are trusted by the people around you and those people you already have a relationship with can put in a good word for you. A good word can sometimes be the key to securing work. People want to work with those they can trust. My first design jobs were for my parents, my friends, my church. For family friends and my brother's friends and friends of friends of friends. I soon became known as 'the guy who did design'. A lot of people weren't looking for the best designer in the world. Especially if they were on a tight budget. They were simply looking for someone who had the skills to do something they couldn't. If you can become known in your circle as 'the guy (or girl) who does [insert creative skill here]' then that will slowly expand outwards and paid jobs will come your way. Of course you can use an alternative method of finding work and approach outsider individuals and businesses as a stranger, offering your creative services to them. That can work, but if they know nothing about you as a person they are much less likely to want to work with you. Working from the inside out is a slow process to begin with but, in my opinion, it's the best way to get work. You establish your business on a personal basis of trust. Being ambitious pays off If you want to be constantly improving your work, getting more clients and increasing your income, you need to be ambitious. It seems fairly obvious that if you only ever work at a risk-free level, remaining inside your comfort zone, that is where you will stay and growth will be non-existent. As I mentioned in my previous post, I never expected to get the design job at RotaCloud when I applied. It was an ambitious move. I was an 18-year-old with no formal training and little proper design experience. But I knew I had to try, and it paid off. As a result I've now obtained a whole host of new skills, developed connections with some great people and gained five months of genuine design experience that I can put on my CV for potential future employment. I've always been interested in motion graphics and animation. I learnt my way around Adobe After Effects at a very basic level a few years ago, but I never produced anything that I was particularly proud of. When my brother Ben, a filmmaker in York, asked if I would be up for producing some motion graphics for a film he was making for one of his clients, I was unconfident in my own abilities. I believed myself to be a fine designer and illustrator, but motion graphics was still largely unexplored territory for me. Ben explained what kind of graphics they were looking for and I eventually agreed. Now I'm not saying that you should agree to work if you know you don't have the skills to deliver what the client needs. But sometimes it's good to push yourself to learn and develop new skills that you would otherwise ignore. I admittedly followed quite a few YouTube tutorials on how to do certain things in After Effects whilst working on that project, but I delivered what the client wanted and I was actually very proud of what I produced. Thereafter I agreed to producing more and more motion graphics work and with each project my skills improved. Now a very large portion of my work and income is motion graphics-based. I was ambitious and it paid off. Hopefully these tips have given some insight into what it's like to run a creative freelance business and may have inspired you to think differently about how to start or adapt your own freelance practice.

[luke-porter]

My Freelance Journey

So I began my journey as a designer roughly five years ago. I was a 14-year-old school kid interested in making music, creating short films and taking photos, so my creativity was already flowing in other areas. Looking into the design/illustration world seemed like a logical step to see how I could apply my creative thinking and express my ideas through a new and exciting medium.

My interest in design, and particularly illustration, bloomed through my fixation with the program Adobe Illustrator more than anything else (I owned a torrented version of Illustrator, which I hadn’t paid for because I was a kid with no money. I was naughty. Sorry. Of course I now pay for the full Adobe Creative Cloud subscription). Simply learning how that program could make things look a certain way and figuring out what the hundreds of tools and buttons did was thrilling. Nerdy, I know, but I would come home from school each day and look up Adobe Illustrator tutorials on YouTube to teach me how to use a specific tool or how to achieve a certain illustrative style. Will Paterson & Chris Spooner were particularly helpful with their excellent tutorials. Each time I followed a tutorial I would end up with a design or an illustration, which I would save to my hard drive whether I thought it was good or not. I was unknowingly starting to build a portfolio of work.

Through my school years I would tell people I didn’t watch much TV (I do like a good Netflix series, but I was never one to just sit down in front of the TV and watch whatever was on). Most people would seem pretty shocked and ask ‘what do you do then?’ I found it quite hard to answer that question. My general reply would be 'I don’t really know. I guess I go on my computer a lot’. Only now I’m looking back do I realise that I spent the majority of my time (other than being in school, doing homework and seeing my friends) designing and learning about design. I find it pretty cool that I was almost subconsciously training myself in the theory and skills of design. It’s just what I enjoyed. I enjoyed a lot of things, but I always found it hard to stick at one thing for a long period of time. After a few months of being gripped by design and the endless possibilities it offered, I knew this wasn’t just going to be something I’d lose interest in over time.

It got to a point where I had created a good amount of what I thought was decent(ish) looking design and illustration work, but it was all sitting unseen on my hard drive, so I decided to start a Tumblr blog and I posted various pieces I had designed on there. It was a quick and easy way to show people the kind of work I was creating. Having a website of any kind is really useful, whether it’s a full portfolio website or just a simple blog of work, so you at least have something to show if anyone asks! As time went on more and more friends and family saw the stuff I was creating. I wasn’t making any money from designing at this point, but at least people were beginning to hear that I was interested in this design thing.

I started to do free design jobs for friends and family members. My skills steadily grew with each job I did. Then I began getting the odd £10 for this and £15 for that. It would be sparse to start with, but I was excited to be making any money at all from doing the thing I loved! I eventually moved away from using the Tumblr blog as my portfolio and used some of the money I had earned designing to pay for a proper portfolio website. The work on there slowly evolved from solely work I had made for fun into a mixture of personal projects and paid design pieces.

A perk of having creative brothers is that you get to meet a lot of their creative friends. I went to a portfolio review/creative meet up that my older brother helped organise, and there I met a guy who owned a design and branding agency in the city. I quickly showed him my stuff and he invited me for a proper sit down portfolio review at his office. We arranged a time and I went along. Although it was rather scary it was really worthwhile having a professional designer look at my work and give me feedback. The input you get from someone who really knows what they’re talking about is invaluable. From this meeting he invited me to do a week-long internship at his agency. The week I spent there was the first proper glimpse I got of how a design career would feel. It was a really great experience.

Rather luckily the creative department of my church The Belfrey was growing in size and skill at the same time I was developing my own creative skills. I began to work quite closely with them, mostly for free, producing a variety of material from flyers to videos to logos. The Youth ministry at the church, which I was part of, was also growing and the team were in need of a lot of different creative services. This gave me a fantastic opportunity to keep developing my skills and to get my work seen by hundreds of people, whilst earning the odd bit of pocket money on the side! Churches are a brilliant way to make connections and chat to people who may need creative work, and a lot of the clients I work with today come to my attention through the church.

By the time I turned 18 I was earning enough money from freelance work to not need a part-time job whilst studying at Sixth Form. It felt pretty good being able to sit in my pyjamas, at my computer, on a Saturday morning whilst my friends were out working in cafes and shops! I also began branching out a little beyond just design work and landed a few paid film and photography jobs (both of which I was still doing as hobbies anyway). As I came towards the end of my time at Sixth Form I had to make the choice of whether to go to university or not. I looked at many creative degrees and design-related courses around the country, but none of them seemed quite right. Since I had been working with the creative department at The Belfrey I heard about the part-time, year-long internship scheme the church ran. I could spend a year working in that creative department whilst learning more about the Christian faith. It sounded really interesting to me. I told my Sixth Form tutors about it and eventually decided to apply for that rather than university. I went for an interview, was accepted, and after a great summer I started the internship.

I’m now in the last few months of the internship at The Belfrey, but when I first started there I didn’t feel I had enough freelance work coming in to support me financially. The internship is unpaid, but the church offers rent-free accommodation for the year. Therefore my bills aren’t huge but I still need enough money to feed and clothe myself! So I started looking for design jobs in York. I applied for a part-time design job at a startup called RotaCloud. With no design-related qualifications (other than a GCSE in Graphic Design) and somewhat limited design experience, I was unconfident I would even get an interview. Surprisingly I did get an interview, and I got the job! My time at RotaCloud was amazing. I got to use my skills to create blog illustrations, user guides, logos, t-shirts and all sorts of other really cool stuff. I learnt a lot whilst I was there. But at the same time as working there I began to get more freelance work coming in. It eventually got to the point where I had to turn down client jobs as I didn’t have enough time to work at RotaCloud, The Belfrey and keep a freelance business going all at once. So I made the decision to leave RotaCloud, as I felt that freelance work was more suited to me than working for a company. It was a sad move but definitely the right one.

Since leaving RotaCloud my income has come from freelance work alone. I’ve delved into the world of motion graphics, and a large chunk of my time is now spent on motion graphics and animation work. Business is constantly improving and I’m planning on freelancing full time after the internship ends this summer! Going to university may be an option for the future, if necessary, however I’d like to grow my freelance business as much as I can and see where that takes me.