Why you should see two sides of the story

Hey James,

Great blog post.

I can under­stand your frus­tra­tion, and apo­lo­gise that my art­icle annoyed you so much. Yes the sub­ject­ive nature of my blog post was inten­tional — how­ever the pur­pose was to cre­ate a higher level of aware­ness for freel­an­cers, break down the mis­con­cep­tions, and cre­ate a level play­ing field for both freel­an­cers and agen­cies alike — not to offend those run­ning their own agencies.

Per­haps some of the com­ments on my post say it bet­ter than the post itself — but both freel­an­cers and agen­cies need to be judged on their pre­vi­ous work. Although my art­icle spe­cific­ally relates to one side, all of the points in my art­icle can be applied for both good freel­an­cers and good agencies.

Ulti­mately, my inten­tion was to show that freel­an­cers can com­pete with an agency in today’s world and I dis­agree that the implic­a­tion was that you will get a poorer res­ult from work­ing with an agency.

I appre­ci­ate that you have taken the time to respond to my post in such detail — its only through thought­ful cri­ti­cism and argu­ments like this that we can develop and pro­voke a more act­ive com­munity and industry :)

Good job.

This is a sub­ject I have been giv­ing a lot of thought recently, as a couple of months ago I made the switch from freel­an­cing to agency work, and just the other week made the, quite large, decision to not do either and now find myself work­ing as an in-house designer for a large group of com­pan­ies, a pos­i­tion I never saw or in fact wanted to see myself in.

For me, it was a decision based on the level of cre­at­ive free­dom. I’m lucky that I work for a group of tech­no­logy com­pan­ies, involved in IT sup­port and soft­ware devel­op­ment and as such have for­ward think­ing dir­ect­ors who tend to avoid the design by com­mit­tee situ­ation. I’m also the only in-house designer and was told when I took the role that I would have plenty of time to learn and develop my skills.

I think that’s my point here, each per­son has dif­fer­ent ambi­tions and ideas, dif­fer­ent work flows and pro­cesses, and as such the ques­tion of freel­an­cing, work­ing for an agency or in house is one that will always attract very dif­fer­ent answers depend­ing on who you ask, some work for some, while not at all for oth­ers. I think a lot of new design­ers love the idea of freel­an­cing, which prob­ably explains why they will often aspire to it, but in most cases it prob­ably never hap­pens, and they live out good careers at decent agen­cies, and as such I don’t think its some­thing you need to be wor­ry­ing about too much.

As for me, the age old “in 5 years time” ques­tion ends in me run­ning my own agency, so watch your back Greenwood! ;)

James
Firstly, thanks for the name drop and praise!

I can see both sides of the argu­ment. I set myself up as an inde­pend­ent after spend­ing many years doing work for another soft­ware house which whilst was very reward­ing, was also very frus­trat­ing. In the end I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do and didn’t feel that after being there for over 14 years that I had got from it the own­er­ship that I wanted. I wanted to own some­thing, have some­thing tan­gible for my efforts so went it alone.

I am not, how­ever, a web designer… I provide somet­ing V-E-R-Y dif­fer­ent, some­thing that not many do, and very few do well.

I can see hav­ing felt this myself that there is a romance in doing your own thing, how­ever, would-be-freelancers beware!…

There are some harsh les­sons you need to learn / a real­ity check you must take into con­sid­er­a­tion prior to doing it…

1. Doing your own thing must be lim­ited to some­thing that there is a demand for / an accept­ance to. Somethimes this is dif­fer­ent to the prin­ciple of “your own thing”.
2. You have to real­ise that it is hard to win work, and some­times hard to get paid.
3. Busi­nesses large or small equate your work to one thing, an asset to which they pay money for. They expect guar­an­tees that it will work and con­tinue to work and that you will be there when some­thing unex­pec­ted hap­pens. If it goes wrong, they want some dan­glies to kick, just as you would want if someone / some­thing let you down.
4. Com­mu­nic­a­tion. If you’re going it alone and haven’t done a role with 80% cli­ent facing com­mu­nic­a­tions, stay in your shell with who you’re with, you won’t sur­vive on your own.. Its a skill that is dif­fi­cult to learn and you won’t be able to do it straight away.
4. Repu­ta­tion mat­ters. If you have noth­ing to show them you will loose out to oth­ers.
5. Web design freel­an­cers are ten-a-penny… Its bet­ter to pick a mar­ket you’ve worked in to start with, focus on doing well in that arena to estab­lish ready income and repeat work, then look at diver­si­fy­ing…
6. There isn’t much romance in the “busi­ness end”.. Tax returns, cor­por­a­tion tax rules, PAYE, accounts, invoicing, late pay­ment chasing.…

If you want to go it alone, I would recom­mend form­ing a com­pany with like minded people, share the bur­den and build a net­work of sup­port and con­tacts that you can rely on. Or, estab­lish a good work­ing rela­tion­ship with an agency who need / use freel­an­cers on a reg­u­lar basis.

I con­sider myself to be extremely lucky, it all comes down to being in the right place at the right time some­times. I’ve had lots of work which has res­ul­ted in repeat work and a stronger rela­tion­ship with my clients.

A bit of a ramble I know, but I think I’ve got my points across.

Simon

Firstly great art­icle and read, both Jays ori­ginal and James your counter argu­ments. The com­ments provided as well are inter­est­ing and Simons in par­tic­u­lar very insightful.

Secondly, I am sorry to admit I feel I more than likely fit into the “would-be” “gene pool dilut­ing” cat­egory you appear (with good reason) not to be overly fond of.

Since gradu­at­ing uni­ver­sity in 07 I have bounced around from job to job. I worked for less than a hand­ful of agen­cies on tem­por­ary freel­ance basis and as of yet have had little repeat work bar once agency in Hull. This being said I loved my time in these places I learnt a great deal in such a short time, much more than I would have try­ing to learn and improve solo.

Your state­ment about the per­son you inter­viewed say­ing who knows what he could have become in an agency atmo­sphere learn­ing and devel­op­ing as apposed to a freel­ance career of mediocre design and web stand­ards. I wish more exper­i­enced designer or agen­cies shared your ideas as put­ting time and effort invest­ing in someone’s devel­op­ment. Oth­er­wise the world of design may go the way of idiocracy in that one day there will only be would-be design­ers and poor stand­ards with no hope of improvement.

In my freel­ance work I spent it doing work for pea­nuts just to try and build up a port­fo­lio but freel­ance is not an area a new designer can learn or grow. I can see the attract­ing from another point of view. You all dis­cussed doing it to be your own boss ect but for myself and many people that I know freel­an­cing was the only option to mak­ing a career out of doing some­thing we all love, design, as agen­cies (or at least the few I have applied to) are not inter­ested in young blood unless they are some sort of savant.

Per­son­ally I can see both sides of the argu­ment. I have tried freel­an­cing, but it did not work out, I do not have the right mind­set and atti­tude (right now) to be a freel­an­cer some­thing I can quite hap­pily admit it would do me no good to con­tinue down a road I know I am not strong at. I cur­rently work as an in-house designer, some­thing I am not overly keen on. I miss the lack of cre­at­ive free­dom and hav­ing only one sub­ject mat­ter to con­stantly work with is tiresome.

I have only been in this game for a short while but with so many freel­an­cers out there it is little sur­prise com­pan­ies choose to go with the well estab­lished agencies.

I may have no right at such a young stage in my design career but I would recom­mend to all “would-be’s” in my pos­i­tion, learn, work hard and get into an agency. If in 15 or how­ever many years, you want to change and go freel­ance at least by then you should have the skills, the right know­ledge and some con­tacts. As for me I’m going back to pur­suit of that elu­sive agency job.