18 months of freelance and the black dog

Hello. It’s been a while. I’m almost too embarrassed to write anything its been so long but the urge has been growing greater everyday and I have a list as long as my arm of things I would like to talk about on here so best get back in the saddle, so to speak. 

I should explain my absence (possibly and probably you hadn’t even noticed my lack of posts but alas allow me the small indulgence to explain). It all began last summer…

  • Very large client project to finish
  • Computer died
  • Moved to a new county (Norfolk if you’re asking)
  • Moved in with my boyfriend 
  • Ill health and after months of fairly severe illness a wishy washy diagnosis
  • Sick parents
  • Debilitating homesickness
  • I also had two black dogs come in to my life, one of which is called Fizz and looks like this

  • The other however is not so cute, it is that destructive and dangerous devil known as depression.

Excuse the bullet points but I can’t RESIST a LIST (bit of rhyming there to lighten the mood or possibly I mean alliteration?! Anyway…). 

I tell a lie, the second black dog hasn’t just come in to my life, I have suffered from the big D as far back as I can remember, I always knew as a child that I didn’t have the same capacity for joy that my peers did. I was what you’d call a peculiar child. Just look at this outfit…

Poor kitten. 

Anyway I don’t want to drag you down with all the boorish details, who wants to hear about other peoples unhappiness, its… well… depressing innit? Suffice to say for the last 20 something years I did very little about it, I tried medication a couple of times, counselling a couple of times (I always worried about boring my counsellor so this didn’t really work out), I told a couple of friends and a couple of random people, I let migraines ruin my life, I overate sometimes, I over drank sometimes, I started getting panic attacks, two years ago half my hair fell out, I exercised obsessively, I yo-yo dieted. But all of this I did on my own as I had managed to stay single (with the odd relationship) for all my life. It was just a bit easier. 

Anyway I digress! Everything was plodding along well enough last year (I was ignoring getting “ill” every few months as I always had and coping with it in my own peculiar and ineffectual way) until I moved over to Norfolk to live with my boyfriend. Suddenly I find myself alone here, no family, no friends, a newish relationship, a business that was starting to go places that suddenly stopped going places, commitments to other people such as step children, my boyfriend’s family, a nasty divorce going on behind the scenes, a tiny house whilst the boyfriend’s house was being battled over, no garden, three dogs, an office that consists of boxes of sh*t to eventually go on eBay and piles of ironing (seriously a 5 year old’s birthday party would be a more conducive working environment) and then I got sick, not head sick, but physically sick, really, really poorly. I won’t go into the horrid details but it was debilitating and one of the side effects of this illness is depression so HURRAH!! A double dose or ghastliness and then it all just fell apart. And that is how its remained on and off since then. The physical illness has been treated but its left me a bit broken, even more so than before, I feel like I’m on one side of some steamed up glass and all my ideas and creativity and energy are on the other and I can wipe the glass and get a glimpse of it but I can’t get to it. This morning I sat down to write a shopping list and I couldn’t manage it. I got half way through and nothing, I couldn’t make sense of it. The most simple tasks are horrifying at the moment. I started Cognitive Behavioural Therapy sessions in the new year but they are about as much use to me as a chocolate fireguard. I feel silly and embarrassed when I’m talking to the counsellor, she is so nice and I feel like we are playing a really pointless game, its exactly how I felt when I had counselling before, sort of guilty for wasting their time and a bit of a fraud. I suppose one thing has come from all of this and that is that I have finally admitted how poorly I am. I really need to help myself and sort this out. This depression will not go away of its own accord and to be honest it really frightens me these days. I find it hard to breath at times. I’m hoping that in the next few weeks and months my boyfriend and I will start putting into place ways of properly managing this. Writing this post is one of the first steps for me, I can’t carry on in the industry I love without a bit of honesty.

But this really isn’t about self indulgent ramblings or about what a mentalist I am. Its more about the web design industry and how isolated it can get for us working in it, especially freelancers and people who work from home. its about the need to create an environment of inclusiveness. This is a list of observations I’ve made over the last few months when I’ve been on the outside of it all (all these bloody lists are a side effect of being poorly, its the only way I can make sense of things, soz).

  1. There are followers on twitter and then there are friends on twitter, friends notice your absence, followers are only interested in what you can provide for them. Care about the first, don’t worry about the second. This is along the lines of Matt Gemmell’s recent post. 
  2. I firmly believe that we are not always living an honest life. With the dawn of twitter, FB and Instagram we can create a perfect world online for all our “friends” to see and it bares no relation to whats happening in our real lives. I see so many Tweets about how so and so is rocking their day and killing some f*cking sick design  (I have no idea what any of that sentence means but you get the gist) or where they’ve just landed the most awesome client ever and everything is perfect. Then they take a picture of there Eames chair and their 700” iMac and they wonder why they generate no empathy from anyone. I am as guilty of this as anybody. Please can we all be humans with all the foibles and idiosyncrasies that make us so complicated and unique and not vilify people when they show some rare and wonderful human vulnerability.  
  3. There needs to be some more kindness in the world. We work in, as far as I’m concerned, the most amazing industry in the world. It is young, dynamic  there are opportunities for everybody no matter what your talent. It IS diverse, women are slowly but surely growing there status in the industry, there is a lot of cultural diversity too. I’ve worked with people from all over the world, male, female, gay, straight, white, black etc etc. Lets live up to the industry we’ve created and not pull it down. If somebody wants to travel the world being a speaker let them, don’t try to bring them down and ruin their lives. As an industry we’re better than that for f*cks sake. On the flip side I know plenty of people who are extremely good at what they do and have never been to a conference in their lives, don’t know or care who half the speakers are and who have no interest in what goes on at these things. Thats fine too, it doesn’t make them any less good at their jobs. I know its a cliche, but live and let live.
  4. Be more kind to people, don’t dismiss their work, ways of working or ideas just because there is a modicum of anonymity brought through communicating in an online environment  Encourage, enquire and even mentor others if you feel so inclined. There is nothing wrong with a bit of good old politeness either. If I ever ask a web celebrity a question I always try to be as polite as possible and I always remind myself that I am eating into their working day and if they don’t have time to reply then that is their right and its alright. Just because people are published or speak about their line of work regularly it doesn’t mean I have the right to demand an answer.
  5. Most importantly I’ve realised there is NOTHING in the world like real friends, tangible ones. Ones who are are really there for you. If some half wit says something horrible to you on Twitter or stops following you it REALLY doesn’t matter, not in the slightest. If someone says they don’t like something you’ve put on Dribbble, that doesn’t matter either, its just their opinion. What matters most is being well, looking after yourself, enjoying the real relationships in your life and loving your work. Its sad to read of so many good people considering leaving the industry due to a few f*ck wits, f*ck wits they’ll never (hopefully) meet. I’ve been there myself. But I’ve realised if I’m going to get my life and business back on track I need to concentrate on the positives and all the wonderful moments and opportunities this industry can provide. Last week I felt terribly sad reading some of the posts and tweets about the atrocious things that have been happening of late in the web industry but my (real) pal Sean Johnson reminded me what a fab industry we work in in his own succinct way. 

Anyway I suppose suffice to say on a personal level I need to start looking forward and catching up with what I’ve missed in the last few months and hopefully that will go someway to getting me back on track. I feel so out of the loop these days, its amazing how quickly the industry moves forward in a few months. But I’ve realised that hiding away and pretending everything is fine whilst not actually managing to function is not working for me so its time for a new plan. I feel a bit the same about the web industry too, a lot of dirty laundry has been aired of late, lets now look forward to a bright future and building an industry of equality and acceptance for ours and the next generation. 

Seven months of freelance, getting over oneself and the art of becoming bullet proof

We’re a funny old bunch us designers. We spend much of our lives self flagellating over our most recent work and how it could have been nothing short of perfection if we’d only taken that 1 pixel line down to 50% opacity rather than left it at the hideously garish 53% opacity. Or over analysing feedback for our work from clients/ colleagues/ strangers to the point that unless they shout “I F*CKING love it, I want to marry you and have your babies” whilst attempting to dry hump ours legs we feel like wounded animals who want to disappear back to our burrows (office/ spare bedroom) and lick our wounds (play on MW3 or in my case buy shoes). 

Well that’s what I’m like anyway, or was like when I was employed. Before I sent a design over to a client I would discuss it with colleagues and usually the sales person who had first won the job, any tweaks that we felt were needed would then be made prior to the client even seeing it. I may have even been collaborating with another designer so the stress was shared. This all meant that if the client wasn’t totally ecstatic with the first draft of the design we could sit around bemoaning their lack of imagination/ taste/ grey matter and I’d have my sizeable ego stroked back to joyfulness. I was like the love child of Mariah Carey and Elton John. 

This doth a monster create.

However when I began freelancing I very quickly realised that there is no one there to big you up and reassure you that its not your fault, or that it was the “client from hell’s” issues and they just don’t understand what it is they REALLY want, they are just so uncreative and small minded and all that kind of utter rubbish. Now there is just me and I can try convincing myself that it really isn’t my fault but sometimes it actually is. In the last 7 months I have learnt that sometimes I mess up, sometimes I make mistakes. Either I don’t listen enough, or I just do what I think is right and sometimes that is, in fact, wrong. When this finally dawned on me and I realised that the world had not actually caved in and people still respected my work and wanted to work with me it actually liberated me in my attitude towards designing and my clients. It made me stronger rather than more vulnerable. I felt bullet proof. 

One of my favourite quotes of all time is by Winston Churchill.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

He is basically saying get over yourself and get on with it. I like this.

This is summed up beautifully in one of Travis Schmeisser’s slides from this year’s NACONF

Photo by Nick Walker 

These days if I have a negative reaction to a piece of work I have done, I really listen to where it is I have gone wrong, I take on board any feedback. I am totally honest with myself too, for example if I think I’ve not produced my best work I will not make excuses to myself but say okay that wasn’t great but I will remedy it or start again or whatever is needed. Then I move on. That is the most important bit. I listen, I learn and then I move forward. I NEVER dwell. Its too destructive.

It sound incongruous but strangely enough this attitude means that I now go into new projects feeling less scared and defensive which in turn means that I listen more carefully which generally leads to me producing better work which the client is pleased with thus my confidence grows and I become calmer and happier. 

I have embraced my fallibility and as a result it has made me stronger. 

P.S. If you’re wondering what Elton and Mariah’s love child looks like, its ummm this….

N.B. If you’re thinking of hiring me for any future work then please do not base my Photoshop or design skills on the above image… I was short on time, okay?!?!?! 

If you fancy reading another freelance article I wrote called Six months of freelance, DAYS OF FEAR and how I found work then I would be delighted. As always get in touch if you have any questions or if you have any projects you might like to collaborate with Capriccio on liz@capricciodesign.co.uk.

Six months of freelance, DAYS OF FEAR and how I found work

As the title of this post would suggest I have been a freelance Web Designer for six months now. I have learnt much in this time. Not least how to swallow my pride, but that’s a whole other story and not one to be covered in this post. 

This post is predominantly about how I’ve found work in the first six months. This is a question that I have been asked time and time again by other, slightly wild eyed, mildly frantic designers/developers who have either made the break and gone freelance or are planning to make the break and go freelance. I myself also asked this question of other people many times in the early DAYS OF FEAR (I’ll come to those later).

Let me give you a little background detail as to why I became a freelancer in the first place. The long and the short of it is I didn’t like doing what I did for the company I worked for, I felt like a factory worker and I wanted to branch out and take on new challenges. I also needed to have flexibility with my hours but most of all I wanted a new beginning where I was in charge. Feelings, I would imagine, many employed people can relate too.

So I decided to leave.

That’s the easy bit. 

Things got trickier.

I now needed to find work….

  1. Without a portfolio. I had worked too long hours in my old job to ever develop a portfolio of “personal projects”, I had just wanted to drink wine till it came out of my ears at the end of most working days rather than sit down in front of a screen. I did on the odd occasion try combining the two, wine and screen, but lets just gloss over the results.
  2. Without any contacts. I literally didn’t know anybody to approach about work. I didn’t even have one of those “friend’s of friends daughter’s primary school” type jobs in the pipeline. Not one thing that would generate any cash. Of course I had a lot of really supportive friends and contacts on Twitter but they were all doing what I did so didn’t need my skills.
  3. Without any direction. I knew that I wanted to leave and be all creative and wondrous and free like a big, beautiful, designery, creative thing. Don’t we all. But I didn’t have a concrete idea in my head about what I actually wanted to do. What direction I wanted to go in. Who I wanted to be. What all these AMAZING things I was going to do would actually be.

I also have all the other responsibilities that go along with being a grown up (of sorts), bills, bills, bills, did I mention bills? So I couldn’t just sit around waiting for a nice, juicy, ideal project to come along and seek me out.

This brings me to the DAYS OF FEAR that I mentioned earlier. As a freelancer I think these come to us all at some point, be it the day you begin freelancing or at the end of the first month or worst of all, in the middle of the night. This is a phenomenon I would imagine most freelancers have experienced at some point if they’re honest with themselves. These are days created by a powerful equation.

No work + No money = Inertia + Paralysing fear + Panic = NIL productivity 

and back round to the start.

These were days where my fear ruled me entirely and I couldn’t work. I couldn’t see a way through. I was being controlled. These are the days when you think I might as well have stayed employed because this is worse than any scenario I ever found myself in in an employed capacity. In fact this is worse than having your kidneys removed with a spoon.

But fear not. There are ways to get through this. I can’t claim that I found these ways all by myself, I didn’t. I had lovely friends, friends such as Jonathan Frascella (@joffff) who came up with a load of brilliant suggestions. All I did was take these suggestions and develop them to fit my own situation and added some of my own ideas to them too. These may not work for you but in my first six months as a freelancer I found them infinitely helpful. I also had people such as Sean Johnson (@seanuk) from Nice and Ripe who I think of as a bit of a mentor (whether he wants me to or not) as well as a friend. We would meet for coffee and he would encourage me to keep going and give me advise on ways to keep inspired and move forward. You really need people like this in your life as a freelancer, it stops you feeling so isolated.

Okay so this was a plan of action that worked for me, some of these ideas I devised myself, others were at the suggestion of Mr Frascella.

Porfolio - Get a portfolio set up by the quickest and easiest means possible, be it Tumblr, Behance, Carbonmade, Wordpress. I chose Tumblr, it took me a day to customise the design to suit my needs and to get my work on it. I then had something to send to potential clients. I couldn’t afford to spend months designing, redesigning, coding, then scrapping and starting again my own website/portfolio. If you are approaching agencies about work then they just want to see your work. This will probably be controversial but it has worked for me. 

Portfolio Work - Next fill this portfolio with work. Anything you’ve got, it doesn’t have to necessarily be web designs, it can be anything that shows off you have talent and an eye for design. Get your style and personality over in this work. Stuff I included was a CV to send to clients, together with a rates card should they request one. These need not be boring, go to town, go mad. Show off. I also included a small mail out for a client I was trying to win. I put on some previous web design work I’d done that I was relatively pleased with. I designed a card for my friend’s daughter’s Christening, that went on. Even labels for some home made Vodka. It was so liberating to be able to do exactly as I pleased in a design capacity. I really felt free to create for the first time in years. This helped towards keeping the DAYS OF FEAR at bay.

Find agencies - Once I had a portfolio with some work on I started finding agencies. Local agencies that I really rated, other agencies nationally that I always wanted to work with, developers that I admired. I then made a list of names and contact details on a spreadsheet in Google docs.

Contact agencies - as soon as I had a comprehensive list I emailed each person on the list. Not a blanket email, these stand out a mile and I always feel are totally disrespectful. I wrote a seperate email for each agency/ person on the list outlining what I loved about their work and why I wanted to work with them, explaining that I was freelance and sending over my portfolio. I made sure I get across my personality in these emails, they don’t have to be sombre and corporate. Oh and I always make sure I start off by apologising for bothering them and finish by thanking them for reading my email. I set aside a period of time to do this everyday.

Twitter is your friend - One of the best things I did was send out a tweet at Christmas saying “I understand lots of agencies are busy right now. If you need a spare pair of design hands then I’m available”. The response was fantastic. Swallow your pride and advertise yourself.

Be everywhere - this may seem obvious but it really works, the more places you are on the Internet, the more likely people will find you. My ex boyfriend text me last week saying

“I just Googled you and you are EVERYWHERE, when do you do any work?”

My response was initially

“I wouldn’t have any work if I wasn’t everywhere.” Followed swiftly by “and what the hell are you doing Googling me??”

But seriously get on Dribbble, create a FB page, create a Behance portfolio, blog, put pictures on Flickr if you have an eye for photography and the same for Instagram (in fact you don’t even need an eye for photography on Instagram just tilt-shift and filter the crap out of them), get on Zerply, get on LinkedIn (though I loath myself for saying it), create an about.me page, mine has a socking great big picture of me on it but customise as you see fit, maybe a different background design each day and tweet about it. Anything to get people noticing you and your work. And of course Twitter, it has saved me from the DAYS OF FEAR so many times by talking to and bandying around lots of ideas or just having a laugh with people I really respect and like. Tweet links to your work, tweet other peoples work, be kind, be generous and people will be the same to you. Its good to share.

Authentic Jobs - is in my opinion awesome. In my Teuxdeux list I have a reminder set for everyday to go on Authentic Jobs and see what’s been posted. I’ve met and worked with some fantastic people through going for jobs advertised on there. I’m sure there are other sites that are equally as great but I found this one easy to use and the jobs are of a really high standard. 

Go to conferences -  this is a tricky one, I know. They are usually expensive and involve hotels and travel but they are so worth it. I would say go alone as well. I always meet more people when I go on my own than when I go with a friend. You just do. You’re more approachable on your own and you just have to get on and talk to people unless you want to spend the whole day in a corner.. alone. These are good for meeting new people in the industry, for being inspired and for new ideas. Give your business card to EVERYONE.

Business Cards - I was going to spend hours designing mine and then getting them all letterpress printed and it was going to cost me about £1 million. So I bit the bullet did a quick design I was happy with on moo.com and got them printed for £20. I love them. I even included a picture of my face on them so people could remember who I was. You might think its a bit extreme but it worked for me. Just be original and memorable. Then give these business cards to EVERYONE.

That brings me up to the present day. I’m sure there are hundreds of other ways to find work as a freelancer but these are the ones I have employed so far. I could go in to a bit more detail but to be honest I have a tendency to go a bit “War and Peace” in the length of my emails, blog posts, DM conversations! So I will leave each point relatively brief but please feel free to email me liz@capricciodesign.co.uk for more details or if you have any questions. You can always catch me on twitter too.

I now have a small amount of regular freelance clients which is a great place to be in six months. I definitely have room to take on more but the DAYS OF FEAR have subsided a little, I still get the odd really crap day but not as many as when I was employed. I also have time now to pursue causes and projects I feel really passionate about including setting up my own agency Capriccio and designing my first app with my friend and fellow designer Pete Hotchkin (@headloose). A big cherry on the freelance cake for me was to be mentioned in an article the brilliant Matt Gemmell wrote in December about Women Conference Speakers. I was so delighted and flattered and it made all my pixel pushing, conference going, twittering and general hard work worth while.

Freelance really is liberating, these have been the most exciting six months of my whole career and I don’t regret it for a moment.

P.S. Capriccio and I love collaborating with people on exciting projects so if you have a project you would like to discuss then please get in touch liz@capricciodesign.co.uk. 

The year ahead

I’ve just had my birthday which I always have mixed emotions about. Yes there are presents and an excuse to spend time with loved ones but there is also the fact that I’m a year older. This always makes me review the last year and what I’ve achieved. This has sometimes been difficult in the past as I’ve felt I’ve not got to where I want to be.

However this last year has been immense: I left my job, went freelance, set up Capriccio, met an amazing man, become stronger, learnt to worry less and mended very important relationships in my life. I’ve been to two amazing conferences, FOWD and Update, been to a banquet in a Palace, travelled to India, watched one of my best friend’s get married and seen my other best friend’s daughter Christened. No wonder it feels like this year has gone in the blink of an eye.

So inspired by Mr Qwest and his 2011 Challenge list I am making a list of the things I would like to achieve in the next year, ending on 28th November 2012.

Personal

  • Run a 5k race
  • Run a 10k race
  • Continue with the light aircraft flying lessons I started 4 years ago
  • Ride at least twice a week (weather permitting)
  • Worry less
  • Write every day
  • Improve my French
  • Ride in a hot air balloon

Work

  • Complete app project number 1
  • Complete app project number 2
  • Complete app project number 3
  • Develop Capriccio’s brand
  • Design and build Capriccio’s full site
  • Attend a web conference
  • Work harder
  • Worry less
  • Actively seek to learn more through tutorials/books etc
  • Learn how to shoot beautiful videos
  • Organise a mini conference/workshop
  • Pitch to a large organisation
  • Start planning my secret project to be launched in 2012
  • Buy a 27” iMac
  • Achieve at least 2 of the things off my Someday TeuxDeux list

I’m sure I will be adding to these all the time, this is really just a start but its nice to get it down on paper.