“Welcome back!” I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately. I honestly thought, coming off of the weak summer schedule, that Fall would be different, and return me back to the salad days of months and months of uninterrupted, three-comic weeks. Alas, it seems I was mistaken, and the workload of managing a full-time independent design career along with part-time professoring has steadily crept back into my comic schedule. So my goal is to start working up a buffer, writing strips ahead of time and roughing them out whenever possible. That should help.
Today’s strip is based on me, last week, pouring through old notebooks looking for ideas for strips. Occasionally something will happen in life and I’ll say “dag, I gotta write that down. That’s going into the comic someday.” This happens quite a lot, and dates back a year now. So please believe me when I say I have no idea what happened to cause me to write down the words “Newton has a client who is a stalker…” but we’re going there anyway.
Even though I’ve been at it for two years, there’s still a lot about freelancing that I continue to learn and re-learn on an almost daily basis. The idea of not getting comfortable, ever, is one of those lessons.
By the way, make sure you try out our new sharing features plugged into each post. These will let you drop a link on Facebook, Twitter, and if you click “more,” well just about any other site you care to spread the word on. These will link back to whatever URL you click from, so if you want to share a specific story, make sure you’re on that story’s page, and not, say, on the homepage. Although who am I kidding? You do what you like, we’ll love you just the way you are.
Before we begin, do check out our latest, news-heavy episode of the Reflex Blue Show. I’ve listened to it, it’s a gas.
I have found that, now that Debbie is indeed the President of AIGA, I am experiencing some guilt about not being an active member. There’s not a whole lot to be done about it today, as today’s strip suggests it would take some draconian plans to work the colossal cost of membership into my current professional budget. It would be nice if that number could come down somewhat — maybe chill out on expenditures of supporting design in China for a while — or that (and I’m just throwing this out there) qualified sole-proprietors/independent designers could merit a softer point of entry during the current economic climate.
I won’t hold my breath if you don’t.
Doing what I refer to as contract design work at first seems to be the same as the freelance design work I spoke of last week: you do design for a client and they pay you. But you’re not actually on salary. In those respects, I understand grouping contracting and freelancing together, but other than that, contracting seems to be a whole different job, although in my case and many others, it has been done at the same time as the freelance work we all speak so highly of.
The main difference to me is that you’re either doing overflow work for a creative shop and/or ad agency, or working directly with a client on random jobs that the majority of are too small to outsource to an agency, and would be considered ideal for an in-house designer if they had one (or if it was a high enough priority). As before, these things I learned are listed in no particular order:
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Nate Voss is a designer, illustrator, talkshow host and design journalist. Working in Omaha since 2001, Nate served four years on the Board of Directors for
Donovan oversees all creative development at