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Informational Interview with Student from Western Washington University – Part One

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a Senior in the Graphic Design program at Western Washington University. She was interested in meeting up to do an informational interview with me. I had done a couple of these with designers myself when I was in school, so it was cool to have the opportunity to be on the other side of the table and hopefully offer up a young person in our community some advice.

While much of what was covered in the interview are things that I touched on before on this blog, I decided some of you might like to see what we talked about. The interview was a little over an hour, so I am going to publish this in parts, here you go! Thank you to Nicole for the transcription!

Interviewed by: Nicole Adsit, Friday, October 22, 2010.

What got you jump started into computer graphics? Did you go to school specifically for that?

No I actually started school as a fine artist, emphasizing in painting and drawing. Computers were my guilty pleasure. In the art world it’s not cool to spend your evenings coding websites so it was a thing that I liked to do but didn’t really talk about it and didn’t really think about it in a way of a career. At the end of my freshman year in college I had a professor that saw that I had an eye for design and talked me into doing a double major. Then I realized I loved design and that I could feel creatively satisfied from it …plus I could incorporate this love of computers into a visual medium.

Once you graduated how did you enter into the field?

When I graduated it was a shock to me because I did really well in school and got a lot of encouragement from my professors so I was expecting to move from school into career but it was really tough getting my foot in the door for that first job.

The first job I got out of school was for a company that made high-end presentation material — mainly portfolio books. Their mail client base was commercial photographers and they had a full design department that offered design, branding and marketing services to commercial photographers. Now, I really wanted to get in there doing design — but they weren’t gonna hire me cause I had no experience.

They did have a sales position available though selling the portfolios and I thought I can do this, get my foot in the door that way. I worked as a sales person for almost year got close with the Art Director showed her projects I was working on on the side and one day she said “Hey, Do you want to try giving me some ideas on this project?” So I went home worked on that and within a few months I was pulled out of the sales job and started as a designer. I was there for almost 5 years collectively before I left to start my own business.

So it was taking whatever I could and being like, “I know I’m not going to be a designer but I at least wanna be around creative people,” and in that environment I just focused on learning whatever I could about the business and making myself indispensable there.

When you were doing projects on the side what were they?

It was stuff for friends and family. Sort of freelancing but I wasn’t changing back then, It was mainly just for fun. I did some design for friends bands; t-shirts, album covers, stickers… I mean I was doing sales all day so when I went home I wanted to do creative design stuff.

So what made you decide to jump into opening your own shop?

I had been with the same firm for a while and I was feeling like I had reached the end point and wanted to move on. I started looking for another full-time position, just doing design for another company. I was at one interview for an in-house position and they were asking me all typical interview questions and one was “What do you see your doing in 5 years?” I was like, “Well, I would really love to have my own business; I’d really like to do freelance work and start my own company,” The guy interviewing me asked, “well why don’t you do that now?” and I didn’t have an answer, that had never occurred to me. I said something, whatever good interview answer that I came up with, I don’t know.

When I left the interview though, I was thinking, “well why don’t I just do that? Why wait 5 years?” So I started laying the ground work and left my job 4 or 5 months after that point.

How big is your design firm?

I’m a one woman show right now. I have worked with other freelancers, outsourced some work, I bring on other developers or designers from time to time but for the most part it’s just me.

So your focus is web?

I specialize in web and work a lot with websites powered by WordPress. But from my former work, I have that background in print work — I have clients where I do all their stuff; logo, collateral materials, print marketing, web site, all of it

What steps did you have to take to start your business? Did you have a client base?

I kept my job, I didn’t quite the next day. I started saving my money to create a bit of a nest egg. I knew that I had to have some what of a nest egg to keep me going through the early times. I contacted some of the creative temp agencies in the area like Filter, Big Fish, Creative Circle — these are agencies that specialize in the creative industries. They work like temp agencies: you go into them and let them know what you can do, they look at your portfolio and they have contacts with all the big design firms and large corporations that have in-house departments. If they know that you can do the job at hand they give you a call. They are really great resources for short term or long term contracts.

So I went in and interviewed with them and let them know I was going to be looking for freelance work in the next few months. That was encouraging, there was a lot of security in those positions but also a lot of freedom. When you’re on a contract there’s a little bit of security but you’re not an employee. I ended up taking a short term contract doing web development for a hospitality company in town… it was only 15 – 20 hours a week, but that was enough to allow me to leave my job, pay rent and stuff. Once I landed that I left and started focusing on building my personal brand online, networking with people building up a client base.

When you first started networking did you just call up people?

I’ve never done a cold call in my life. A lot of my networking was through other people. This person would introduce me to this person. Basically, getting to know one person, them hooking you up with someone else, and so on… meeting other designers.

Did you have any of your clients from your former job follow you? Did you take any clients?

No. I think that would be completely unethical to steal someone else’s clients. My former job actually became one of my top clients and would hire me out for freelance work regularly and I still have a working relationship with them. And after being gone for several years, I have had some clients I worked with back then that have since ended their relationship with my former employer come to me, but to actually take a client — I just see that as shady.

How has it been for a small start up company in this rocky economy?

I started working full time in February of 2008 which was the beginning of the recession. You would think that would be the worst time but I feel that was the best time. I feel like if I can be successful in the last three years then it’s only gonna get better from here.

Oct 8 10

This Week in Freelance!

I’ve had a pretty busy week! On Monday, the redesign of MyGreenlake.com was launched. This blog is a news site for one of Seattle’s most charming neighborhoods and the woman who runs this blog (Amy Duncan) is just awesome!

Amy contacted me a long time ago and expressed interest in having me redo her website. We chatted about her wish list for the site, her community and some of her concerns about the existing layout, I quoted her on the project and immediately got a response telling me that she could not afford me, BUT that she was going to save up and would be in touch again. Well… I don’t want to sound snotty, but I had heard that before and never once had someone actually came back. Well… Amy was the first! A few months later there was a new message from her in my inbox saying she was ready to lay down her deposit and begin work! :)

This was actually a pretty large project, the site has a loyal following, a hefty archive of posts and a number of paying local advertisers. This was truly a project where I worked hard to not only pay attention to the details, but also the BIG PICTURE. I look forward to watching how the site’s re-vamp will help it’s community to better utilize all of the great content Amy provides!

Business & Freelance

This week I met with a fellow designer who I have done some Illustration and production work for. She has been a print designer in Seattle for over 20 years. After the last few years of slowly downsizing her business more and more, she is closing up shop and had one client left that she had decided to pass off to me. She gave the a run down of the type of work they’ve done together, gave the owners a sparkling review and clued me in on that billings she’s done with them over the last 3 years. I feel honored that she thought of me as someone to hand-down her prized client to! Forming relationships with other designers is so invaluable! Aside from awesome things like this happening, you can learn so much from them!

Podcast

This week Niki and I released the first Pagebreak Snippet! Basically, we realized that having 3 weeks between each Pagebreak episode was a long stretch, so these snippets are short-format episodes where we take about 10 minutes to discuss a blog post related to design, development, business or marketing. We plan to release snippets at least once a week throughout the month and of course we will continue to do our long-format book review episodes!

Our book for October is “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug, which is a all about website usability. I just received my copy in the mail yesterday and already am on page 35. I can already tell this will be a great benefit to my design work and I think Niki and I will be able to have a good discussion about it!

Sep 13 10

My Clients Make Me A Better Designer

Some of your may hear feedback from your clients on a design mock-up you present and want to claw your (or your clients,) eyes out! You worked really hard on this design and you love it, they should too! Well.. that isn’t always how it goes – an sometimes this is a good thing!

I know you think I’m insane, but here is why I say this…

Keeping Focus

This post is largely inspired by a current project I have going, and the events over the last 2 weeks where I created an initial design mock-up and then after going over it with my client – realized we hadn’t communicated with eachother well enough before the design process started and I had went down the wrong path.

What I ended up creating was something very cool – but, not right for the client – so cool or not, good design or not, if it isn’t right, you have to be willing to scarp it and readjust your focus!

Letting go of an idea can sometimes be really hard. I put a lot of work and passion into my design and when I show something to a client, I feel confident about it – so when I realize it’s not the right fit, it can be difficult to let go of something.. but it’s essential to do this in order to be able to focus in the right direction!

Pushing Yourself & Being Creative

Sometimes the first idea you have isn’t always your strongest, being pushed to look at things in a different way that your first instincts help you to be more creative! Sometimes the obvious solution is the right one, but not always! …Sometimes if you push yourself to be creative you will come upon the solution and thing “Oh duh! Why didn’t I come up with this an hour ago!?”

Sep 2 10

PageBreak Podcast with Niki Brown & Liz Andrade

(Hey, that’s me!)

So the wait is finally over, Niki and I have been scheming about this for a long time now and then over the last couple weeks pulled it all off…

PageBreak is a design, business and marketing-themed book club and podcast, started by Liz Andrade and Niki Brown. The main goal of the club is to build a strong online community of designers, developers, freelancer (like ourselves) and to discuss and enjoy books about the stuff we love to do!

We’re starting out with the plan to pick a new book and record a show at the end of each month, so if you have a suggestion we’d love to hear them! You can subscribe to the show via iTunes or stream the show at pagebreakpodcast.com (we’re working on a site with commenting and all that jazz, so stay tuned…)

Book #1? Rework by 37Signals Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Make it through the show (or download it and skip to the end) to find out what we’ll be reading for September, maybe you’d like to read along? If you’ve read Rework and you want to discuss it with me and Niki or other listeners of the show – head over to the GoodReads PageBreak group!

Aug 27 10

My Client is Getting Married Online

I’m totally serious!

One of my dear friends and clients, Seattle Wedding Photographer Laura Marchbanks won a contest last month that was put on by another Seattle company (and another client of mine!) CreativeLive! They were hosting a contest for a free wedding, so that they could broadcast it live and make the process part of a photography course taught online by Jasmine Star.

(I know, crazy huh?)

It was just a couple weeks ago when I got a frantic call from Laura asking for help with her invitations, the two of us have worked together on marketing for her Photography company so she was confident I would be able to quickly tune into what she wanted on the invite and get her something that she loved. We talked about the style she was after and after about 8 emails back and forth and less than 2 hours we had the design done and sent off to the printer. (That is NOT a normal turnaround, but Laura was putting this wedding together in 4 weeks with the team that CreativeLive compiled, and I was happy to have her back and be a part of this awesome experience!)

So this evening, I will be headed to celebrate Laura and Billy and you can check out the whole thing yourself, cause it will be happening live online at creativelive.com/billymarieslaura.

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