As promised, this is a follow-up post on an article I wrote back in July 2009 titled, “Am I a dumb Design-Whore, or Innately Creative“. It’s about the challenges designers face when working as a freelancer.
After telling you all about my bad experiences and offering some crude advice and resources on how to not let yourself taken advantage of, I concluded with the following question.
…if you were in my shoes, what would you feel like? A dumb design whore who is just getting abused? or an innately creative person with a demand for his creative skills and people actually wanting to use his work by hooks or by crooks?
Well, to answer my own question; I believe I’ve been both. I don’t know what to feel when I say…
Yes, I’ve been a design whore! 🙂
I wrote the reference post about 6 years ago, and I’ve been in the design business for more than 12 years. I can now tell you with confidence that no matter what you do, no matter how many proposals you send, how many carefully crafted “Terms & Conditions” and “Payment Terms” you write, how many follow-up emails you do, there will always be people who will do anything to get out of paying. It doesn’t really matter if you are genuinely creative with brilliant ideas and designs, everyone gets screwed equally. There’s a saying that goes in the business world…
If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it
The quote above has nothing to do with the literal rape, it’s referring to the business world and how companies get screwed all the time. I thought I should mention this lest some ‘feminazis’ come along and accuse me of advocating in favour of rapists on my blog 😛
The point is, if you enjoy what you do, there will be times when you will get screwed by clients and that is okay… It is not the end of the world. And if you are actually creative, it shouldn’t bother you much because you’ll come up with more brilliant ideas.
On the other hand, it also doesn’t mean that you stop taking your work or your clients seriously and be an actual design whore! It help significantly if you stick to your project ‘formalities’, through documentation, written commitments, timely communication and strictly follow your own work ethics.
I’ll post more tips and tricks on how to minimise risk in your freelancing business. But for now, let me know how many times have you been screwed and how?
PS: If you happen to be a client reading this, who hires freelancers, don’t worry, we freelancers aren’t any angels ourselves! I’ll post about the freelancers whores soon 🙂
Stay Tuned…
