So, you’ve decided to go out on your own as a freelance graphic designer?
First, you should know that competition is fierce. Like, animals fighting over the puddle that used to be a water hole after a month-long drought in the Serengeti fierce. If you want to survive, you’ve got to get tough, you’ve got to be savvy, and you’ve got to be creative about ways to make money with your design skills.
Photo by Juan Pablo Olmo
Most designers go directly to graphic design job boards for work. This is a good place to start, but have you considered all the possibilities open to someone with a degree in graphic design? Creating logos and marketing campaigns for companies isn’t the only possibility open to you. There’s web design, animation, game and app design, book covers, art for magazines, original printed materials, the list goes on and on.
- Image by John Fischer
If you have web experience and can write in code, you can go into web design, creating templates for existing blog platforms like WordPress, or building web pages for clients, both businesses and personal pages. Authors are notoriously ignorant when it comes to web design, but in today’s publishing world, a web page is a necessity. If you can present an author’s collected works in a way that emphasizes their brand, you’ll have as much work as you can handle.
The magazine market is wide open to creative graphic designers. If you can come up with artwork that expresses abstract concepts like “saving money”, “losing weight” or something tasteful that expresses ways to get “better sex”, you may be able to sell your work to magazines, both print and on the web.
Magazines offer freelancers graphic design opportunities. Photo by Karen Horton
Don’t forget graphic design contests, competitions and the like. While not many have cash prizes, winning awards adds to your resume and gives you practice in creating designs to specification. Keeping an open mind and applying your creativity to your job search can lead you to opportunities you never dreamed of.
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Tom Chu works for PsPrint and PsPrint Blog. When he’s not sitting behind a computer, Tom likes watching sci-fi movies and Japanese cartoons, hitting the golf course and playing with his four dogs. You can connect with Tom via Google+ or Twitter. |
