Donovan Beery: April 2008 Archives

Nate and I have always made it a policy to answer as much of our mail as possible (our emails are easy enough to find), but doing so on the podcast causes a delay based on recording schedules, and CJ may be on a timeline with these, so I'll answer in a written format this time.

CJ: I've been listening to The Reflex Blue Show since it was the Be A Design Cast and have always enjoyed it. I am starting a research paper for class where we interview a designer, and I know Nate and yourself always have cool anecdotes. Would you mind answering four or five short questions for my paper?

DB: Of course. Although cool anecdotes at eight in the morning will be limited.

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:

During my first job it was encouraged that I started freelancing. After all, working on just one website all day, every day, could start to burn you out a bit - and make you start losing that creative spark that keeps you loving this sort of work. My freelancing technically ended at the same time as my fourth job. It's at that time, just over six years ago, that I went full-time working for my own company. The work started out the same, it just wasn't referred to as 'freelance' anymore.

As before, these are listed in no particular order, but since I get asked more about freelance advice than than any other in the field of design, there are ten this time: