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: