Design Process

Pitch to enough clients of a cer­tain size and even­tu­ally you’re going to be asked to sign a stan­dard­ized con­tract or NDA. Usu­ally it comes from a large client with a team of lawyers who burry you in page after page of terms which are so one-​​​​sided it’s becomes laughable.

Seri­ous Twit­ter users know you need to change more than just link col­ors to trans­form Twit­ter into a branded mar­ket­ing tool—the Twit­ter back­ground can become a key expres­sion of a brand. Whether you’re new to Twit­ter or just never both­ered tak­ing the time to cre­ate a cus­tom back­ground now is the per­fect time to have a go at it.

Being a free­lancer is great—the free­dom, the money, the pri­vate office. The flip side can be a harsh dose of real­ity; the paper­work, the account­ing, the jan­i­to­r­ial duties. In a cor­po­rate or stu­dio envi­ron­ment you have staff doing many of these things so you can focus on the task at hand—being a kick-​​​​ass designer. But this al goes bye-​​​​bye when you strike out on your own.

Often when pric­ing cre­ative ser­vices we tend to for­get all the lit­tle hid­den costs. Sud­denly you real­ize all the cost os all the “free” pens you pro­cured from the sup­ply closet you were so fond of raid­ing at the office. Last week I wrote about the basics of pric­ing and I think this arti­cle from Free­lance Schools does a great job of high­light some of those hid­den expenses. I was not being paid the “hid­den” costs which the…

It always hap­pens when a designer approaches me to ask how do they make the leap to inde­pen­dent con­trac­tor the first ques­tion is, ”how much do I charge per hour?” I guess the answer to this depends on how far down the rab­bit hole you are pre­pared to go. The short of it is you should be quot­ing your rate on a project basis but track­ing, and think­ing of it, as hourly.