Resourceful Designer

I want to share something that happened to me this week. I came home from a nice lunch with friends to both an email and urgent voicemail message from a client saying someone had hacked their website and their URL redirected to a porn site.

The idea is to build relationships with your clients. Building relationships is the main ingredient in building client loyalty. I’m not talking about designer/client relationships, but relationships on a more personal level.

Selling digital products is a great way to put your design skills to the test. Not only will you challenge yourself to come up with great ideas, but if you're successful, you can make excellent money doing it. Tom Ross of Design Cuts joins me for this episode to share his insight on this topic.

I was recently leafing through an old business magazine from the early 2000s, and I came across an article on organization skills. Specifically, organization skills to help you regain control over your schedule, your environment and your life. Although this article wasn’t about design, I found a lot of what it said still applies to today’s businesses and us as designers.

Did you make a business plan when you started your design business? If you did, then you are in the minority. Most designers who freelance or run their own design business don’t bother creating a business plan unless they are required to do so by a bank or such.

Opinions vary amongst designers regarding designing for family and friends. Some are firmly against it and for others, it's no problem. I fall into this latter group.

slipping up on your design business won’t result in death like falling off a mountain will. But it could ruin your reputation, which in turn will ruin your design business. That’s why it’s good to stay on your guard and avoid these 12 ways to ruin your design business.

For your design business to succeed, you must set goals for yourself, and for those goals to be reached you need to break them down into micro goals.  

Since launching Resourceful Designer in 2015, one of the biggest struggles I’ve seen from my audience is starting a design business and finding clients. I realise that I've never actually said what I would do if I had to start a design business from scratch. Until now. 

If you attained perfection, there would be no more motivation to carry on because everything after that point would be a step-down. That’s why I choose the title Progress Over Perfection. Because perfection is unattainable, your goal should be to make progress instead by continually improving your design skills. You do that by practising. There will never be a time in your life when you don’t need to improve your design skills.

No specific time of year is best for reviewing your design business, but January seems like the most popular time for taking measure of things in your life. Spend a bit of time taking measure of where things stand with your design business and make whatever course corrections you need to make.

I want you to take a look back at what you accomplished and what you failed to achieve in 2018. With that in mind, what are you going to do to make 2019 even better?

I learned of the three-tier pricing strategy many years ago, but I never gave it much thought in regards to the design industry. Until recently that is. A few months ago I came across it again while reading a business book. A day or two later I was watching a YouTube video, and a designer mentioned using a three-tier pricing strategy in his design proposals. 

To the uninitiated, running a design business sounds easy. You find clients, you create designs for them, they pay you, repeat. Freelancers, however, know there is so much more to it than simply designing. And yet, even armed with that knowledge there are still several mistakes freelancers make when it comes to running their business.

You work hard for your money. Don't spend it unnecessarily. Use these 10 money saving tips for freelancers to keep as much of your income as you can.