How to make it as a freelancer

Freelancing can be scary. Freelancing can be rewarding. Freelancing can me the best choice you ever make.

Most of us have thought about going it alone on a particularly cold morning when we couldn’t bother to get out of bed. If those musings stirred a passion in you here’s a playbook from someone who makes his living as a freelance VR artist, animator and motion graphics designer among many other things.

Jason Drakeford has worked for the New York Times, MoMA, The Museum of Natural History and has also been nominated for various awards including a news Emmy. He also currently teaches a class at Georgia State University.

Jason’s First rule for anyone who wants to be a freelancer is to Do The Work.

This is much easier said than done so he also gave us a few tips on how to get it done:

Avoid too much communication- Ever sat down at your desk and realized 3 hours have gone by and you’re still getting through emails. Great, now you’re tired and you haven’t logged any billable hours. Jason fixes this problem by only corresponding with clients for the purpose of updates and clarification. That way, the time he spends making contact is also time he spends moving forward on the project.

Be dependable- If you say you’re going to do something, do it on time. Jason was adamant about this one. Relationships are incredibly important to any business but when you are the entire business, fostering bad relationships can affect your ability to support yourself. This is why it’s always important to let clients know they can depend on you to meet your deadlines and produce quality work.

Make it personal- When you personally invest in something you are actively working to produce the best result. Think of yourself and the client as a team striving to be successful. There is no wall between you and the client.

Still not sure you know how to make it happen? Jason has another couple tricks and tools for making it as a freelancer. The second secret to killing it as a freelancer is to Be Organized.

The first step in organization is Focus. This can often be the hardest thing to do. Luckily Jason let us know some of his favorite tools that help keep him organized. There are Chrome extensions allow you to blacklist distracting websites like Gmail, Twitter or Facebook for preset amounts of time until you’ve completed your task. Before you lock in and get everything done you might also want to track where your time goes with the super useful Harvest app. Tracking where your hours go allows you to know which billable hours go where and how many hours you’re spending doing just busy work.

Even when you focus on work, sometimes inspiration for other ideas come up and derail you. It happens to the best of us. Jason has a defence against this type of distraction; Evernote. You can use it to backburner exciting ideas and also jot down notes and to-do lists.

A really well organized dropbox also lets you streamline content sharing and reduces the time you spend communicating. Here your workflow matters just as much as anywhere else. It’s a good industry courtesy to people who may have to revise or edit your work later to have logically and well set out storage systems in your folders.

Workflow is important. We found this article with a useful guide; https://99designs.com/blog/tips/how-to-keep-your-design-files-neat-and-tidy/

Once you’ve got a handle on the work itself, there are a lot of other things to keep organized. You will have to keep track of invoices, status on different projects, due dates, budgets, client info, payment to collaborators etc. For this, Jason uses google spreadsheets.

So now that you’ve successfully secured and completed a project, the next step is finding future work. A lot of the time you will have to juggle this with doing the actual work. One thing Jason makes sure to do is keep the inspiration coming. Platforms like behance and Vimeo are an ocean of inspiration and luckily have a community with less amateur/novice types. The professionals share their work here. It’s a good way to see what others in the same industry are thinking about and working on as well.

These aren’t the only places he looks for inspiration. Wherever you find it, Jason suggests keeping a library of different styles of artwork against different media. You never know when a client will want a Japanese silk art inspired graphic. Jason uses his library to produce moodboards and lookbooks.

If he doesn’t do that, then he may use the proof of concept strategy to sell a client on the idea. This strategy worked on a project he did for the Museum of Natural History. The museum initially wanted a 2D animation but the proof of concept Jason’s team produce won them over. He advises that you take calculated risks here because these are time consuming to produce.

You may also want to keep a potential client hitlist, sometimes a freelancer just has to reach out. This could be a ledger of who’s on your radar, follow up dates, notes from meetings, possible connections and possible budget range.

As you progress in your freelance career you will also need to brand yourself. Jason has two brands, one for his animation work and one for his films. Each one take a different tone and voice because the customer base may be different. Sometimes separating your skills into different brands help you organize your marketing efforts as well.

The lasting advice that Jason gives to any creative is to be open. Be open to opportunities, people and sharing yourself, your progress and your process. Be open to new ideas. Be open to learning more. Being open took Jason to the Congo to work with a nonprofit organization and it brought him here to CMII.