One thing I am often asked by designers – old and new alike – is: “how do you get work” or “how do you get clients”. Here are the principles and practices that I have used and found successful over the years. Put most of your effort into developing your own site Building and maintaining [...]
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Article filed under: Business, Freelancing on August 16th, 2010 9 Comments
I wasn’t always a freelance graphic designer. I used to teach English to Brazilian businessmen but that’s another story. I started by working for newspapers and magazines so my background is in print. By a mixture of application and good fortune I taught myself how to create usable, aesthetic, standards-compliant websites and discovered how to [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Freelancing on June 28th, 2010 14 Comments
All graphic designers and people trying to create eye-catching imagery for print or web with have at some point used stock photography. Stock photography negates the need for hiring expensive photographers can license individual photos for specific uses. The two largest traditional stock photography agencies are Getty Images and Corbis. They offer mostly photographs that [...]
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Article filed under: Design, Freelancing on October 18th, 2009 15 Comments
Recession, credit crunch, slowdown – these are bywords of the moment and you would be forgiven for thinking that we’ve got to tighten out belts and prepare for hard times ahead. The natural inclination for some businesses might be to scale back on marketing activities in an effort to save money. But, last week it [...]
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Article filed under: Business, Design, Freelancing, Marketing on July 2nd, 2008 20 Comments
Here are my favourite three blogs of people who, like me, are graphic designers and write about it on the internet. Firstly, from Romania, I really like webee design blog. Webee has really helped me out with his tips and encouragement. Also a beautiful creative design blog by David Airey who has blogging help as [...]
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Article filed under: Artwork, Design, Freelancing, Internet on April 24th, 2007 15 Comments
One of the most asked questions on graphic design forums is: “How much I should charge?” Well, the answer is, I don’t know! But here is a list of my most recent price quotes. These design estimates include image sourcing and copy editing but assume images and most text have already been supplied or paid [...]
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Article filed under: Artwork, Design, Freelancing on April 6th, 2007 11 Comments
Here’s my top tips for saving money whilst running a graphic design business or as a freelance graphic designer. Work from home. Use of house as business means that you can put some of the cost of home improvements and numerous other things to offset your profit and therefore pay less tax. Meet clients in [...]
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Article filed under: Artwork, Design, Freelancing on March 20th, 2007 8 Comments
I would advise anyone who wants to make money and find more work to get blogging. I was encouraged to get a WordPress blog by a friend but I didn’t really realise what blogging was at first. I thought, what’s the point of writing “I woke up this morning, had breakfast …”? I really only [...]
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Article filed under: Artwork, Business, Design, Freelancing, Internet on March 8th, 2007 17 Comments
I very often need freelancers to help me with my jobs. So I am looking for hard-working, honest individuals to contact me and supply me their details. Here are the sort of people I am looking for: print designers, web designers, interior designers, artworkers, photographers, illustrators, copy writers, copy editors, Flash specialists, Photoshop re-touchers, PHP, [...]
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Article filed under: Freelancing on February 21st, 2007 71 Comments
Independent freelancers often outperform agencies in quality, price and timeliness. To some the word “freelancer” may have a certain stigma of a maverick who ignores rules and misses deadlines. In reality freelancers have usually been around the agency block already and know their stuff. Nobody starts work as a freelancer. There used to be advantages [...]
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Article filed under: Artwork, Design, Freelancing on February 19th, 2007 27 Comments
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