Hi again How are you doing? is every­thing fine? I hope so  Today I’m writ­ing very unusual post, cause I’ve never writ­ten about such thing before. Well, it’s never late to start Hope you agree with me.

Lots of you already work as a free­lancers or at least think­ing of doing a free­lance work. It is good, if you already have some client data­base. Then you can just “milk cow” and make money. By cow I meant client There is always some work to do for old clients, so I’m not going to explain, how to work with them, how­ever some­times it is also important.

Today I’m going to dis­cuss such moment as get­ting more clients.

There are actu­ally many ways of get­ting them. More­over, this is not a secret that every client needs an indi­vid­ual approach. Some peo­ple have some kind of 6th sense and they know, what to tell, to offer or how much to ask Lots of young design­ers either too shy or think­ing about them­selves as about a super­star. How to find that equi­lib­rium, that would fit with your expe­ri­ence, skills and client possibilities.

Well, that is not so hard, as it seems to. First of all, review what do you have? Do you have a port­fo­lio? How many works do you have in it? Were they made accord­ing to stan­dards and ten­dency of design? That is not so hard to do. All you need is to browse through some port­fo­lios and com­pare, what tech­nolo­gies do they use, what kind of works do they put, how their port­fo­lio is structured.

Show­case

Here are some exam­ples of good portfolios:

FA Design http://www.fa-d.com/ Very cool, col­or­ful, flash-driven first page. And html one-page port­fo­lio, blog-styled You don’t have to click every time “next” to see next work. You just scroll your mouse and that’s all…

Design Attik http://www.designattik.co.uk/ Nice port­fo­lio in blue col­ors. Cool idea with a man stand­ing and look­ing into infinity.

Momen­tum 18 http://www.momentum18.com/ Gray with a small addi­tion of blue tones. Very styl­ish and clean. Also pow­er­ful typography.

Ectoma­chine http://www.ectomachine.com/ Gray/dark-dark gray with ele­ments of magenta and a cool abstract image + pow­er­ful typog­ra­phy

Jack Her­bert http://www.jackherbert.com/ I really like the idea, how desings are “stand­ing” on a shelf. Very clean, pure and inter­est­ing to watch.

Dot­Case http://www.dotcase.com.br/ Beau­ti­ful and sat­u­rated green col­ors with a tree in the cen­ter. It really makes an image of nature-friendly design + some mad ideas in the heads of designers.

Main prob­lem

The biggest prob­lem of young design­ers is that they don’t have enough of works to show client, or they have some works, but all of them were some non-commercial projects for “my counter-strike clan”, “my uni­ver­sity project”, “my home­work in dig­i­tal design” and so on. Imag­ine you’re a busi­ness­man and you need a web­site or some cool Ad. Will you order it from some guy, who don’t have any other works for other busi­ness­men. Of course, not. That’s the first rea­son young design­ers have a rejec­tion Even if you draw an exam­ple to a client, but you still have no other com­mer­cial works, 80% will be a rejec­tion + you maybe will get your self-rating low­ered by sweet words such as “you don’t know, what is design, I shall find some other designer, who will be able to make a really cool advertising”.

So, in my opin­ion that is a main prob­lem.

How to get rid of that? You may ask: “How will I get any work if every­body will reject my offers?” Read care­fully. I didn’t say, that every­body will reject your offers. I said about 80% will do that. The rest 20% will order some­thing from you and tell you, that you’re a cool designer

But do you want sit­ting at home and wait­ing for some­body to knock at the door and order some­thing from you? That’s not how busi­ness is have to be done.

Ana­lyze yourself

First of all, try to fig­ure out, what are you good at. This is actu­ally very hard part, cause we always think we are good at every­thing, and it turns out that we SUCK. More­over, we can suck in EVERYTHING. Try to ask for other designer’s opin­ion. What will they tell you about your work? This will be the first thing that have to be done before you’re going to start look­ing for clients. Cause you can’t just offer client some­thing you’re not good at. When this part is over and you know your def­i­nite pow­ers and weak­nesses in design, you can start look­ing for clients.

Pos­si­ble solutions

Here are some ways of get­ting clients with no seri­ous port­fo­lio or with­out a port­fo­lio at all:

• search for some local com­pa­nies, that have really poor web­sites, old and fancy with vio­let text over green back­ground and with a pure yel­low 2 pix­eled bor­ders on tables Yeah, they are still alive…offer those com­pa­nies some cheap redesign.
• think out 5 to 10 com­pa­nies and cre­ate a full busi­ness solu­tion for them — busi­ness cards, logo­type, web­site, busi­ness appli­ca­tions and so on. If you have your own host­ing, you can freely put them “live” and also into port­fo­lio Yeah — that’s a risky busi­ness, but still — it works for some start. After you receive some clients, you can exchange fic­tive works with a real ones.
• ask your rel­a­tives, your friends, your friends friends and so on. I won’t believe, if you tell me, that none of your friends or their friends have some busi­ness. Well, of course, if you live in a small vil­lage with a pop­u­la­tion of 20 peo­ple, 5 horses, 15 pigs and 3 cows then it will be hard to find some­body, who needs a design. But I don’t think that you actu­ally live in such a place
• if you are study­ing in uni­ver­sity, then it is also a per­fect place to put adver­tise­ments. You can design some fly­ers and posters for par­ties, cre­ate web­pages for pro­fes­sors (cause lots of them are hav­ing some sec­ond life beside uni­ver­sity) and so on.

As you see, there are a lot of ways how you can find some clients. My friend, when he was start­ing as a designer, has his own cam­paign. When he was eat­ing in some cafe, restau­rant, pub and so on, he always ana­lyzed design of their menus, adver­tise­ments , fly­ers, ban­ners and cre­ated some ver­sions of same things, how they could look bet­ter. Then he sent those designs to man­ager of that place and in 70% of cases he received an order for redesign­ing their busi­ness style.

Pos­i­tive conclusion

What I’m try­ing to explain. Some­times there is no need in brows­ing through free­lance web­sites in search of work. Some­times it is more sim­ple to look around, because design is a part of fash­ion. It is devel­op­ing very quickly and there is always some­body, who needs a good mod­ern out­look for his com­pany

So, if you haven’t started free­lanc­ing yet, it is not late to do that