Unit 24

Being a freelance designer you need to know how to market and manage your own freelance services is to identify relevent business contacts. This could be a reasonable online internet hosting service to get your business online from which as a designer you can freelance your services, establishing a social network from which you can make necessary contacts and be able to check out your competitors within the industry. As a freelance designer I can promote my business and use platforms such as design crowd to develop my skills within the industry. Using the social network media and converging technologies I am able to maintain regular contact with clients and potential clients. In doing so I can keep upto date with trends using vimeo, youtube and forums such as speckyboy to help support my freelance activity and training within the creative media industry.

A good way to start is promote business cards or e-cards. You can get a lot of business cards online for about £5 you get about 400. If you think of it you will pay £5 for 400 business card which could being in a lot of customers so you will make profit for that £5 loss easily. You could even print them out yourself if you don't want to buy them. Make sure you have enough though so you can hand them out to people in meeting or on the streets even posting them through peoples doors won't do any harm. The business cards should be smart, clean and easy to read. If they have too much detail on them then people won't bother to even try and read them all it should contain are your contact details your logo and your website which i will get onto right now. Its very important to have your own online portfolio. This is so that people can look at your work to see what its like. Obviously people won't want to hire someone to work for them if their work is bad. You don't need to have an online portfolio but it does help to have one as you can then add the details onto your business card and people can see for themselves how good your work is. You could also make mailer postcards and this is a good way to show off your creative skills rather than just making a business card because they're pretty simple to make/get where as these postcards take more effort and skill. While waiting for all of these to print out you should start to decide who your target audience is. You don't want to be targeting the wrong people, it will make you look bad and it won't make you look like the brightest spark. Which is why I network using facebook to make contacts and send out e-cards using the social network. I also identify key designers who i get to know and offer work at a 50% cost to develop my skills further to attain experience and develop my own skills and contacts. As I know I could be recomended to other designers if they are busy and need a freelancer to take on extra work. Also registration with an online agecy could be a huge advantage when establishing yourself within the industry.

Think about what you do and think about what type of freelancer people want. You should distribute your services 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.


Now you need to understand 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.


1. The blank page


Everyone starts off at the same place and its easy to hear what someone wants but if they don't like what you have done just think to yourself, where were they when i was starting? They weren't there so they couldn't guide you for what they exactly wanted.


2. Anticipate


What you should try and do here is put yourself in the shoes of someone else and approach the work the way they would and not the way that you normally would. Once you have done this go to someone that you have a strong trust bond with and then they could give you unbiased feedback.


3. Know your stuff


You should research all of your stuff to make sure that you fully understand what you are doing. You don't want to have someone come to you and ask for a design and then be stuck there thinking, what are they on about?


4. Power of three


All designers go through loads of different ideas when they are designing. They think of ways to add to what they currently have or how they could change it or how they could have started it differently. but when it comes to presenting your design you can go about it three different ways a conservative option, a forward thinking option or an edgy option.

5. Taking it personally


Designers take their work really personally, they get incredibly attached to it. If someone was to tear down a piece of work that is a designers, a part of them is torn inside too. When designing you need to think about the bigger picture. If you feel that the work isn't good enough for the client then you should just work at it at your very best and then send it away anyway. If the client doesn't like it then don't feel bad about it.


6. Find the value


Even the harshest of words have a source this means that you as a designer must find out what the value of those words are, what they mean to you and if they in fact mean anything at all. No matter what people say don't let it put you down because you can then decide to ignore what they say or take it in and improve what went wrong in the first place.


7. Truth and consequences


The honest truth is that clients will always want their work changed at the last minute. This is fair enough but it's not fair that it's left till the last minute where it becomes impossible for you to complete the task. The best answer would be to say yes I can do that for you but let the client know that it will come with a consequence as the deadline will need to be set back so that you have time to finish the new design. 



8. Young at heart


When you come out of school and walk straight into a job, everyone wants to be the hot shot around the place to try and prove something. Don't do this, simply just keep quiet, sit down and listen. This way you could learn everything that you need to, to launch yourself into a successful career. You will get your chance to be heard but this chance must be earned.


9. Push back


You were hired for a reason, that reason is your expertise. Show them feedback, ask them why they have chosen such a specific design this way you will be able to see their motivation. The clients might not actually know what is best and they may be looking for someone with leadership to help them decide what is best.


10. Don't break the rules


The same rules apply to you as they do to the clients. Don't be a stuck up designer and say nobody can see your creative genius. If the work that you have designed doesn't fit the clients needs then just get back up and move on at the end of the day you tried and that is the best you can do. Find other people who would appreciate your creativeness.


11. Quiet confidence


You shouldn't try to prove how amazing you are with design work but you should try to show how creative you are, don't be big mouthed and make yourself look like a fool just do your work to your best and be confident about it but let others see that that's the person you are and they will appreciate your work a whole lot more.


12. Show me the happiness


If you keep on getting bad feedback off clients and you just simply can't deal with it anymore then maybe its time for you to move on. Quitting should be a very last resort. Especially since you have came all this way if you quit then you have nothing to show. There are better employers and better clients out there and really you deserve to be happy and have people appreciate the work you do for them.


When doing design work you should learn how to manage contracts. You must identify the work that needs to be done by a contractor or a supplier. You must write a brief so that you know what needs to be done and you can always add to it or check back on it if need be. You should prepare specifications and promote invites to clients so that they will be more likely to come to you if they need work done. You need to negotiate contracts to ensure compliance with the legislation and the regulations. If a contract is breached then you need to deal with it the right way and in an effective way too. You also need to understand why to manage contracts. You need to know why contracts and other forms of agreement are important and you need to understand the different types of contracts. You need to know the basic legal, organisational and regulatory requirements governing contracts. You need to know why its important to have clear requirements, an objective selection criteria and to invite a range of contractors to bit for the contract. You need to know why its important to build a productive working relationship with contractors and how to do so. Finally you need to know how its important to evaluate and report on contractors strengths and areas for improvement. When you have a contract and it has been signed it is important that you store a written copy of it so you have it as a back up incase the original gets lost.