graphic design, freelancing, illustration, advertising, web design

Freelancer Focus is a regular feature, where freelance designers are invited to answer a series of questions about themselves and freelancing. This week Teddi Deppner (pictured left) is the freelance designer in question. If you would like to take part please read my previous post. Any designer or illustrator can also take part in Design Case Studies.

1. Your name?
Teddi Deppner

2. Where are you are based (Country/Area)?
Sacramento, California, USA

3. What type of work do you do? (design for print, web, multimedia etc)
Primarily web design, with supporting services like logo design and small print design projects (brochures, flyers, identity materials)

4. How many years had you been working in the design industry before you went freelance?
Over seven years.

5. How long have you been freelancing?
Since 2006.

6. Why did you decide to go freelance?
I’ve always valued the idea of staying at home with my children during their early years. I have two children under 6 years old, and freelance is an excellent way to stay in the groove and bring in some income while nurturing and training impressionable young minds.

7. How did you market yourself (find design work/new clients) in the beginning - (online portfolio/brochure/direct mail/email/phone etc)?
I had an online portfolio, which brought in a few new clients, but most of my work came by word of mouth. Previous clients I’d worked with, friends and extended family or church contacts — people who knew I did web design were interested when they heard I was freelancing.

8. How do you market yourself (find design work) now?
Pretty much the same. Word of mouth usually brings enough clients to keep me busy, but occasionally I mention my work and drop a business card to people I run into casually who sound like they could use my skills.

9. How did you decide what to charge? What was the process?
It’s a work in progress. I’ve done the calculations that factor in annual expenses, taxes, desired profits and all that to determine an hourly rate. I’ve searched the Net to see what’s being charged for what quality work, what corporate web design salaries are like. With all that in mind, I consider at least two other factors: what is the client willing to pay (always a guessing game, but you get a sense for it after a while) and what is my time worth to me for this project? Some projects I charge more for simply because they’re not my favorite type of work. That’s my privilege — it’s the client’s privilege to look elsewhere for a cheaper designer on that project if they don’t like the quote. And above all, I *never* cheat the client or lie about my hours or break a contract. Trustworthiness and proven reliability is part of my “services”. If the client is willing to pay for that, then I don’t need to feel guilty charging more than the guy down the street. I know that I’m offering more than just the face value of a website.

10. Do you work from home/have an office/work inhouse at design agencies?
Currently work from home.

11. How do you organise your workload, do you work long hours?
I try to fit the bulk of my design work into my kids’ daily nap and play times. This gives me 2-4 hours a day as a starting point. When under time constraints on a project, I may work long hours — later into the night, weekends, etc. Our household is a geek place — my husband is a computer systems engineer / architect / programmer — so we don’t generally look at work as an 8am-5pm M-F sort of thing. We work extra when needed, and other days we don’t work at all. When I accept a project, I keep my preferred schedule in mind (no more than 2-4 hours a day, at the moment) and schedule things so I don’t have too many happening at once. I do a lot of personal Internet publishing projects, too, so it’s not just client time that I need to schedule, but all my computer-based projects. As the kids get older, I’ll have more time to devote.

12. How much holiday do you give yourself?
Holiday? What’s a holiday? Just kidding. We take family vacations (road trips, camping trips, day excursions) regularly — maybe 2-3 per year that are longer than 4 days. Maybe one every two months that are day or weekend excursions. Since I’m still so involved with my kids, we spend a lot of a time playing outside, going to the park, working in the garden, so I get time away from the computer whenever I need it.

13. How do you keep up to date with what is happening in the industry?
Primarily reading online. Blogs and RSS are great tools for this. I’d love to network with fellow professionals in my area again someday, join some local user groups, etc, but it’s not a priority right now.
What blogs, magazines, podcasts etc do you subscribe to?
Whew. Let’s see. No paper magazines, except spiritual types. A sampling of my blog subscriptions:
www.laughingliondesign.net/
www.moleskinerie.com/
www.davidairey.com/ (and his www.logodesignlove.com)
www.10e20.com/blog/
www.writetodone.com/
www.courtneytuttle.com/
www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/
www.webdesignerwall.com/
www.obsidiandawn.com/blog/

14. How do you generate ideas/what techniques do you use to stimulate creativity?
I often explore logopond.com, startdrawing.org, cssdrive.com, csszengarden.com, cgbrainchild.com and places like that for inspiration. Browsing the magazine section of a bookstore works, too. Then I sit down and sketch the ideas that appeal most to me for the project at hand.

15. What about the business side of things, accounting, invoicing, bookkeeping, how do you manage it?
Ugh. Not so fond of this side of things. But my business is small enough to do it all pretty easily through handwritten ledgers or Quicken Premier Business version.

16. What is the biggest piece of advice you would give to someone starting out freelancing?
Be honest. With your clients and with yourself. Included in honesty (for me) is the idea of integrity — following through and doing what you say you’ll do.

17. Would you ever go back to fulltime work?
I’m not vehemently opposed to it, but it’s not in my current plans. Not at all.

18. Any thing else you would like to add?
Find a way to do what you love and keep working hard at it, and you won’t regret it.
Where can we see some of your work (URL)?
www.creativewebguru.com/

It’s not easy for graduate graphic designers to get that initial experience for the design world so I thought it would be worth flagging up a graphic design placement that has just been posted onto the Free Graphic Design Blog Jobs Board. The position is based in Macclesfield, UK and more info can be found here

I was sent a link to a new design book by the author Maggie Macnab, which has an unusal idea behind it. Her theory is that memorable graphic designs come about because they contain symbols and shapes that occur in our everyday lives in nature. Take a look at the video for the book, it’s on my Amazon wish list.

I was recently contacted by a designer who had been out of the industry a little while and wanted some advice on what sort of computer/software set up I would suggest. As a designer who deals more predominantly with print design I would definitely go for a Mac. Although design for print software is now readily available on the PC from my experience more designers who design for print use Apple Macs.

Computer
The new Imacs with computer and thin screen all in one are great giving you a nice large screen (19″ or 24″) without taking up to much space. I would go for at least 2GB memory, the more the better if you are using Photoshop a lot and any 3D packages.

Printer
An A3+ Inkjet printer is ideal for printing out any visuals required, possibly postscript colour management software - Iproof (gave me loads of problems) or Print Fab, try out the demos of these before you buy them (I wish I had). I was using an Epson Stylus R1800 but was having problems with colour casts and have now swapped to a Canon iX400. You can also get round a non postscript inkjet printer by creating a PDF first and then printing that, though the colours may need some tweaking.

Fonts and Font Management
Mac system software now comes with built in Fontbook for managing fonts or you could look at a third party font management system such as Suitcase

Several fonts will come with your Mac and software packages. More can be bought from many sources such as linotype and Faces. Free fonts are also available from many sites such as Dafont, though I wouldn’t generally use these for main body copy as they don’t always have a full character set or good kerning.

Software
Adobe Creative Suite can give you all the packages you would need for most design for print jobs - Photoshop for image manipulation, Illustrator for vector work, Logo design etc, InDesign for page layout, Acrobat for creating print ready PDFs.

I still prefer Quark Xpress for page layout over InDesign but many designers are now swapping/have swapped over to Indesign. As a package Creative Suite works out far more cost effective than having to buy Quark Xpress plus Photoshop and Illustrator.

Also for pulling in supplied Word/Excel files into layouts is the Open Source (free) Office Suite NeoOffice which I use regularly and saves having to pay for Microsoft Office.

If you are going to do some web design work the standard packages are Dreamweaver and Flash, which you could buy along with the other Adobe software in a bundle if you need them. If you intend hand coding there are lots of free text editors out there - Note Pad, Crimson Edit etc etc.

Scanner
Most images these days are supplied digitally so a fairly basic scanner is usually fine. Mostly I use mine for scanning in sketches of logos etc. I would go for an all in one black and white laser, copier, scanner.

Backing Up
An external hardrive or some free online storage space if ideal for backing up your work

Other things to consider
Virus/firewall software and Mac Maintenance software

What about free open source design software?
For print graphics I there are some open source packages that you could use, though personally I haven’t tried them and don’t know of anyone who uses then professionally. If you are going to be working for other design agencies you really need to be using the professional packages so that you can pass documents between each other. If however you are going to be designing directly for clients and no-one else needs to be able to edit your files I guess Open Source Options would be possible to use as long as you could output them to print ready PDF.

• Scribus - Open Source layout/desk top publishing
• Gimp - Open Source Image Manipulation other free photo manipulation software can be read about here - mac, pc
• Inkscape - Open Source Vector Graphics Software
• Komposer - Free WYSIWYG web design software
• Aptana Studio - Open Source web development software
• Blender - Open source 3D design and animation software other free 3D software is listed here
• Synfig - Open source vector animation
• NeoOffice/Open Office - A free open source Office suite

What would be your suggested set up for a graphic designer?