Posts Tagged ‘industry’

Shit hap­pens. It may be trite, but it’s true. You can be the most organ­ized, thoughtful, and thor­oughly pre­pared busi­nessperson in the uni­verse, but even­tu­ally, some­where along the line, things will spiral out of con­trol. Sud­denly, your metic­u­lously planned pro­ject has turned into a beast: a mess of missed dead­lines, a slew of thwarted expect­a­tions, or an end product that simply isn’t shaping up right.

I’m a con­trol freak, so of course I don’t let this happen too often. How­ever, last week, a big pro­ject I’ve been working on for some time got away from me. It had been slowly plod­ding along, months behind dead­line and mostly-stagnant, while I worked on other things and waited for the bits and pieces I needed to come in. I figured nothing was wrong, really—sure, we were way behind dead­line, but the client knew that, since they missed their dead­lines, right? The design pro­cess tends to stall if the client isn’t coming up with their end of things (feed­back, con­tent, etc), so I’m used to pro­jects that go into a bit of stasis for a while. I figured it wasn’t a big deal.

Kabloo-ey!

Wow, was I ever wrong. Sud­denly, some­thing happened with the client—I’m guessing that my con­tacts got chewed out by their boss—and they started emailing me three times a day, asking where things were. I was working on a team with a writer and a pro­ject man­ager, plus two client con­tacts, and there was sud­denly a massive influx of emails flying around all over the place, each more aggressive and inflam­matory than the last. I had been working with an illus­trator based out of [some­where far away], and I started to realize he just wasn’t deliv­ering in a timely manner, he’d go AWOL for days on end, and that I wasn’t able to prop­erly com­mu­nicate my client’s vague dir­ec­tions to him. My stress levels spiked, and panic set in. I’m going to fail, I told myself. I’m going to fail, the pro­ject will tank, and I’ll never work again. It’s over for me. Might as well start handing out resumes to cof­feeshops now.

But appar­ently I’ve now got this big bad logical-calm-adult brain going on. It told the pan­icky screaming little kid inside my head to shush, and started fig­uring out how to fix things. Now, a week later, the pro­ject is nearly fin­ished (well, sort of), my stress levels are reduced sig­ni­fic­antly, and I’m working with a new illus­trator who’s turning stuff around at light speed and gets my client far better than I do.

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Four years ago, when I started out my busi­ness (or whenever it was—I always get fuzzy on the dates) I was char­ging all of $10 an hour (some­times less, as was the case in my first job). Looking back, it’s no sur­prise, really, that by the end of my first solo year I was so broke. Tech­nic­ally, it was more than min­imum wage, so I thought it would suf­fice. Of course, I forgot that around 50% of my time is unbil­lable, which has a rather dra­matic effect, either on your “hourly” rate, or on the number of hours a week you need to work in order to be profitable.

There’s a maxim to pri­cing freel­ance work that goes some­thing like this: you can have two of the fol­lowing three ele­ments: fast, cheap, and good. When I first started out, I tried to be all three. Nat­ur­ally, there ended up being some com­promise, most not­ably with respect to the “fast” and “good” ele­ments of the equa­tion. As I grew as a designer and a busi­nessperson (it still sounds funny calling myself that), the scales shifted: my prices increased as the quality of my work and pro­cess increased.

For some time, I struggled with the idea of offering cli­ents their choice between fast and cheap, but I’m coming to realize that this, too, is imprac­tical on a larger scale—I’m so con­sist­ently busy that it simply doesn’t make sense for me to take on very many lower-paying gigs, regard­less of how spread out their timelines may be. I really prefer working on pro­jects with shorter timelines, anyway: the work-to-reward cycle is so much shorter (and thereby more grat­i­fying), and a more rapid cycle of devel­op­ment means that the pro­ject remains fresher in my mind—I don’t forget details or need to re-learn any­thing as we pro­gress. So, unless it’s a case ofhey-I-really-did-need-this-yesterday, in which case a pri­ority place­ment and rapid-turnaround can be secured with a rush fee (although I’ve found most cli­ents with urgent pro­jects sud­denly decide it can wait a little, after all, when they dis­cover that it’ll cost more), “fast” is non-negotiable. Quality, nat­ur­ally, is even less negotiable

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Bad cli­ents are notorious among designers. We com­plain about them con­stantly, we’ve devoted a hilarious-yet-heartbreaking web­site to them, and we swap horror stories like badges of honour, rolling our eyes in empathy and disgust.

We spend so much time com­plaining about the bad cli­ents that it’s some­times easy to over­look the good cli­ents. Lately, I’ve been working with a few really great cli­ents, and I’ve been so happy because of it. Where a bad client can make you feel as though you’re losing your soul, a good client reminds you of why you fell in love with design in the first place and makes you feel as though you’re doing a good job. It’s the sort of warm-fuzzy feeling I asso­ciate with boys who bring me flowers and strangers com­pli­menting me on my shoes.

Win­ning your designer’s love, regard­less of any other factors, will mean that you will receive a level of ser­vice and quality that sur­passes that most Trouble­some Cli­ents receive. When I love a client and feel that my client respects me as a pro­fes­sional, I invest more of my mental ener­gies into their pro­ject. A good client makes you want to do an amazing job, where a bad client exper­i­ence will often just make you want to finish as fast as pos­sible and get the heck out.

So, how do you go about making sure you’re the greatest client ever, and ensuring your designer feels as pas­sionate about your pro­ject as you do? Here, a few tips culled dir­ectly from my Dream Clients:

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Thank you to everyone who responded to my hiring notice; I’ve selected a can­didate and am looking for­ward to being able to tackle new pro­jects in the very near future, including the much-anticipated (by myself) and much-required over­haul of my web­site. More details to come soon!

I received an abso­lutely phe­nom­enal response, and was able to meet with a number of really fant­astic people. (I wish I could have hired everyone!) That said, it was inter­esting being on the other side of the hiring pro­cess, and I think if I’m ever in the pos­i­tion of applying for a job again, I’d do things a little dif­fer­ently as a result.

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I was recently con­tacted by a design stu­dent at Loy­alist Col­lege looking to inter­view a designer for an essay she’s writing. Ego-bloat aside, I do really like it when young(er), just-starting-out designers ask me for a “worldly” view of the industry. (Amaz­ingly, it’s happened more than once!) (more…)

Everything seems to be in a bit of a lull. I have so many pro­jects that are almost fin­ished, but need that last little bit of con­tent or that last cycle of feed­back. I’m told that this is normal for the design industry in the sum­mer­time. Regard­less, it makes me feel as though I’m not being pro­ductive, even though that isn’t the case in the least. In fact, I seem to be get­ting a lot of my long-term to-do-items crossed off my list, which is a fant­astic feeling!

Well, I’ve been talking about it forever, and, finally, it’s official—resumes are on sale! Get all the details here.

I’m doing a whole host of revi­sions to my custom client admin panel code­base, so anyone get­ting one of those with their new web­site in the upcoming months will be seeing a more eleg­antly designed and more user-friendly inter­face there. While I’m in there, I’ll also be over­hauling the code base so that it’s cleaner and sta­bler, meaning better, stronger, faster web­sites for everyone!

Oh, and there is one new pro­ject I can show for the time being: another news­paper ad for the post office space. Coming up soon: an explan­a­tion for why I’ve been stealing stickers off all the apples in the gro­cery store, and all sorts more.

Thanks to com­bined incom­pet­ence at Apple and at my “local” (see: an hours’ drive away, only open when I’m working) Apple retailer, I haven’t had a com­puter all month, which has ser­i­ously cur­tailed my design activ­ities out­side of the gaming industry. I’ve got a few pro­jects on hold and a few nearing com­ple­tion — expect updates soon.

For now, a listing of my favourite Google search terms that have brought people to this website:

• “why don’t humans hibernate”
• what web­site can i go to to make a layout of my bed­room then print what my bed­room would look like?
• jen­nifer arnold dis­play and design
• grunt labourer services
• hrm unorthodox
• “sarah pretty”

Thanks for the com­pli­ment, Google! I think you’re pretty, too!