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4 things a freelance graphic designer must do every day

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There are 4 vital ways every freelance graphic designer must divide up their day if they want to continue to develop as an artist and stay ahead of the competition, be it agencies, design firms, or even other freelance designers. Let’s start with the first 3 you might already be able to guess:
  1. Produce New Designs: This includes but is not limited to client work. Of course this is the bedrock of getting paid, but should you be paid for everything you do? I would suggest no. You need to design every day regardless of workload. Shoot for every day, but only replace the production of new design with #4 from below. But don’t look there yet! When you don’t have client work due, create something else. Never let a day without producing something go by. Here are some ideas:
    • Create a logo concept for fictitious or random company
    • Create a poster on a topic you really like
    • Recreate a famous design in a new way, or simply try to replicate a famous work down to the pixel. You’d be shocked what you could learn by copying. Hey, it worked for all the artists of the last couple thousand years or so. Renaissance artists often had to copy other master works for 2-3 years before the studio Master Painter would allow them to do anything with a brush besides clean it. As graphic artists, we should head back to the “classroom” and copy the recognized “master” works of the great designers of the last 50 years or so.
  2. Market Your Freelance Design Business: If you don’t market now while you are busy, suddenly you will have no work and no marketing “seeds” anywhere ready to “harvest”. Marketing must happen at least a little every single day, because you don’t know what efforts on what day will produce what results on what day in the future. It also seems that most traditional ways of marketing are near death. I would not suggest wasting money or time on cold-calls (warm calls are different) and certainly not on printed marketing material outside of a business card. The internet is the way to go. Start a blog and find a niche. Become an expert in that niche and write excellent content. Do a good job with SEO but don’t worry about it beyond the basics.
  3. Bill Your Clients: Seems obvious, but make sure you are getting invoices out on time and following up on invoices that have been “forgotten”. For serious right-brainers, this is extra-hard. If it’s that hard, get someone else to do it. Use the simplest billing system you can find. There are great invoices resources online for pretty cheap, and they use big shiny buttons and lots of white space. Get one, use it, keep it, rely on it. Keep it up-to-date on a daily basis, or at least keep your hours system up-to-date. How many hours, really, have you gotten foggy on and ended up not billing for because you weren’t sure how many hours it really was, 3 days after the fact?
So what is the fourth thing you must do every day as a graphic artist to keep growing and developing a unique style and voice? 4. DRAW! Drawing is the fundamental skill needed by every designer. If you don’t use a pencil or pen from time to time, but only design on the screen, you are stunting your growth and greatly limiting the solutions you are able to come up with for any given project. In a sense, moving blocks of color around an Illustrator file is a kind of drawing, but at best a substitute for process that has no parallel. The ability to draw straight line, to draw from life, to handle a pencil, etc, are the mechanical abilities that enable us to use a mouse or stylus. You are also limited to the tool palette in your application. Really now, are you able to whip up great ideas on the fly using the bezier path tool and a few squares? Well, having at least a good grid can make some decisions for you, but I’m not talking grid at the moment. That’s another topic entirely. Take for instance the practice of drawing from life. The ability to “flatten” a three-dimensional image into a two-dimensional approximation enables and trains the brain to see composition – a series of related shapes. Still life drawings in a certain sense are really “designs” of interconnected shapes approximated from the tree-dimensional objects. For instance, when the petal of a flower recedes into space, your pencil does not recede into the paper to draw it. Instead, it flattens it out into a random shape that really doesn’t look like a flower petal (until you add some shading). The connectedness of a series of shapes recreates what looks like a flower to our eye. In graphic design, we have to have this skill, the skill to balance out created shapes – those we draw and those created indirectly by what we draw – in order to create a compositional harmony. Experiment: Stop what you are doing right now and grab a pen or pencil. Pick one thing, however small, from your immediate surroundings and draw it from life. How faithfully can you recreate it? If you find this exceptionally hard, to recreate something using just your eye, go ahead and work at it for a few minutes here and there for a week. After this “workout routine”, I’m willing to bet that you see your computer screen diffrently.

A few tips for drawing to become a better graphic designer

  1. Carry a PAA – personal analog assistant known also as a sketchbook. Moleskines are not overrated so try one of those. Carry it with you all the time. [sketchbook]
  2. Keep a retractable pencil on hand. There will be no excuse if you have both paper and pencil.
  3. Draw anything. Don’t let “it’s boring” stop you. Draw anything. Draw crumbs. Draw the edge of your notebook. Draw your other hand. Draw what you see out the window. Draw the corner of a book. Draw your lunch. No excuses. Draw for 10 minutes a day.
  4. Draw daily. Practice makes perfect.
  5. Stop reading so many blogs and draw more instead. Well, stop reading some but not this one. And go draw!
There you have it! Make sure you stretch and educate yourself, market yourself, pay yourself, and most importantly, dig deeper into the artist you are by drawing, the most fundamental skill of all the graphic arts.

About Douglas Bonneville

Douglas has been a graphic designer since 1992, in addition to software developer and author. He is a member of Smashing Magazine's "Panel of Experts" and has contributed to over 100 articles. He is the author of "The Big Book of Font Combinations", loves cats, and plays guitar.

Comments

  2. Douglas Bonneville says

    Hi Clayton: And when inspiration doesn’t hit, you can force it into action by sticking the pencil on the paper and dragging it across to see what happens 🙂 Sometimes you can trick inspiration to do your bidding…

  3. Phyllis says

    #4 is a bit tricky for someone like me. I came into the design field by mistake (long story) and learned on-the-job via computer-based design only. I’ve been a designer for more than 10 years. I recently completely formal study to obtain a Certificate in Graphic Design (and am now working on a Certificate in Web Design), but at no point have I ever learned to draw by hand! I would disagree that it’s a necessity, though I imagine for someone who started off in fine-arts it might be a productive brainstorming technique. Interesting article, thanks!

  4. Douglas Bonneville says

    Hi Phyllis. Drawing is the foundational skill of all graphic design. I don’t necessarily mean drawing from still lifes, but drawing by hand is critical, especially during the initial stages of a design. Many designers get by without drawing, but it’s too their detriment, whether they know it or not. All the great design schools and great graphic artists would concur. You don’t have to draw though. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do! But, the benefits of drawing as a habit in any form at all are just too clear.

    All the digital tools we use as designers are imitations of the real deal. Hence the “pen” and “pencil” tools, “erasers”. These digital tools approximate their analog parents. In some ways, they are better, as is the case with “undo”. But the Holy Grail of all design applications is really being as close to analog as possible.

    So, if you are working only and ever in the digital approximations (the toolbar of your various apps) you are missing out the very thing they are trying to approach.

    Again, you can get by without drawing. But it’s a bit like feeling around in the dark and figuring out that the thing in the room is an elephant, instead of simply turning on the light and seeing it all at once. You can get there the hard way, but man, that IS the hard way!

    All the elements of design are rooted in drawing, as is painting. Drawing is the fundamental skill of visual artists of any stripe. The better we draw, the better we paint, and the better we design, because drawing contains all the problems and pitfalls we must overcome as designers. If we never fully deal with the problems with a pencil, we never fully solve our graphic design issues with much cruder tools.

  6. Phyllis says

    Hi Douglas,

    Wow, I can’t believe I inspired an article!!! How cool! 🙂

    I will say that I’d *like* to learn to draw. If I ever finish all the design classes I’m taking on the side (I work full-time as a designer, plus study to improve my design on the side!), then perhaps I’ll take a drawing class also.

    I will say I think there’s a bit of a bias present though: If you start off having a natural talent to draw (or paint or what-have-you) and natural inclinations towards the fine arts, it’s easy to consider that essential. It’s easy to look at the digital work as doing it the hard way. I come at it from the opposite perspective though: I have no natural talent for drawing (no one can understand anything I create in Pictionary!), but I can design really well via computer. If I were asked to draw an apple or something like that, I could draw it much faster/better on a computer than by hand!

    Interestingly, I find it easy to work with points and paths but difficult to use a stylus. Maybe it’s just the way my brain is wired!

    Thinking over my career history, I imagine I would have been too intimidated by the drawing requirements to have entered a graphic design program originally in college (although the reason I didn’t originally study graphic design is because I had no idea I would like it!!!). I started off as a writer but ended up learning design work on the job. The story’s too long to tell, but I loved it! I’m really really enjoying the classes I’m taking on the side now ( via http://www.Sessions.edu ), but that’s all digital work too.

    Thanks and I’ll go read your new article! I’m really glad I came across your website as it’s very informative and interesting.

    Thanks, Phyllis