Graphic Design Lead For Adult Oriented Website Logo Needed
Posted: 07/30/2010

Graphic Design Project Description: I prefer to work with designers: US Only My Goals for this project are: I need a catchy logo for an adult website which will also need a detailed, cartoon illustration of a specific model incorporated into the logo. The existing logo will be provided, along with pictures of the model and a link to the competitor`s logo. The logo must also be able to look good on dark and light backgrounds. The other key to this job, and possibly most important, is it needs to be done quickly. The quicker the better! My Industry: Adult industry

Graphic Design Details: My Budget is Flexible: No My Maximum Budget is: $250 Best way to reach me is: phone / email ...

Who is the person in your life that helps you be the best freelancer in your world?

Is it a loving spouse that goes to work every day, providing your family with the extra income you need to make sure the mortgage is paid, food is on the table, and your kids are not dirty urchins picking the pockets of the fine folks on the streets of London?

Maybe you’ve got a good friend that promotes you to his customers and business associates, and his influence is so vast that you doubt that you will ever be short of work from these contacts.

Or perhaps you have an amazing client that loves what you do, pays you handsomely for it, and trusts you to spread your creative wings on every project.

Have you said thank you to these folks lately?

Here are a few simple ways to let them know you are thinking of them, and that you appreciate what they mean to you.

• Supportive Spouse – Take a night to appreciate them.  Have the kids stay with friends, make your partner their favourite dinner, tell them why you are grateful for their support.  To someone that has to go into a real job every day, listening to you gripe about how rough your life is while working from home might be a bit difficult.  Let them know you couldn’t do this without their support – be honest, where would you be without them?
• Fantastic Friend – If you can afford it, take them out for a nice lunch and give them a gift that lets them know you appreciate what they are doing for your business.  It’s not about how much you spend, but make sure you show them how much you appreciate what they have done for you and your business.  If you can’t afford it, maybe you need to look at your rates again.
• Perfect Patron – Find a new way to promote your clients business.  Make sure your friends, family, and former high school crushes all purchase products from this client.  The more they succeed, the more you succeed – and that’s the best way to say thanks.

What are you doing to show your gratitude to the people around you?

In this issue of Ask FreelanceSwitch, Travis King and Thursday Bram look at the drain of working two jobs and how to grab the eye of a video agency.

Ask FreelanceSwitch is a regular column here that allows us to help beginners get a grip on freelancing. If you have a question about freelancing that you want answered, send an email to askfreelanceswitch@gmail.com.

Hit it!

Question #1

Hi I moved to Spain about 3 and a half years during that time I’ve landed a few projects I have a 2 year old kid and my wife works so I had to find a job at a local pub to provide for them I just work at nights, so is there any advice you can give me when it comes to focusing on my career when I find myself working more than 45 hours a week. Although I feel the desire to work on projects that come to me, I’m just too exhausted to get them done.

-Celso

Thursday: Trying to manage a freelance business at the same time that you’re working full-time on your feet is definitely not easy. At best, if you’re serious about making the switch to freelancing full-time, you’re going to be in a position where you have little time to spend with your family. With that in mind, the most important advice I can give is to raise your rates. That may sound a little unconnected, but here’s the thinking: if you’re working what can easily amount to two jobs, it needs to be worth your while, especially when you’re spending time away from your family to do so. That has to be worth your while, so you need to bump your rates up.

You have to be worth that higher rate, of course, but most of the freelancers I know really aren’t charging all the market can stand, so the odds are good that you can increase your rates. Ideally, a higher rate also means that you can cut back on hours at your day job.

The other piece of advice I have is to get up earlier if you can — work on your freelance projects before going into the day job. You’re just about guaranteed to be exhausted when you get home from work, making it slower going on freelance projects. If you can hit them when you’re freshest, though, things often go faster. On the down side, you’ll have less energy for the day job, but if it doesn’t require as much creative thought, that isn’t always a problem.

Travis: It sounds to me that you’re nervous about starting your freelance career, and with a young family to support, I don’t blame you.

I was pretty terrified too when I started freelancing. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if there was a 2 year old in the mix. Because I’d probably be all “What’s this 2 year old doing here? Is he mine?”

The truth is, it will be pretty near impossible to get beyond were you are now unless you commit to making it happen. So either you’re going to need to cut back on your hours at the pub and work like crazy to build up your client base, or you’re going to have to continue to burn the midnight oil to make it happen.

Currently, you’re like a man trying to straddle two row boats as they slowly drift apart. You’re going to have to pick a rowboat and jump in. After all, other people are waiting for rowboats and nobody likes a rowboat hog.

Question #2

I would like to know which is the best way to introduce yourself and your company to publicity agencies when you work with video and motion graphics? Who should I talk to in the publicity agency? What material should I present and in which way?

-Daniel

Thursday: Because I don’t work with video or motion graphics, I went straight to Mel Rainsberger, who takes on freelance film and animation projects. She told me the following:

First thing first, find out if the agency does any video in-house or if they hire outside agencies. Most agencies aren’t big enough to justify all the expensive equipment needed to offer broadcast quality video production. Many prefer to hire studios dedicated to video/animation because they only have a need for video 3 to 5 times a year. Even big studios / companies might farm out their video needs because the cost of building an in-house studio can run into the millions of dollars.

If they do have in-house video capabilities, try to find out who the head of that department is. Next, try to find out if they have an opening/need for another video person. If you’ve seen their work, try to tailor your demo reel/resume to the agency’s offerings. Do they do a lot of stuff with kids? For sporting events? How can you support what they already do? Lastly, submit a kick-ass demo reel. Agency folks like to be entertained. Keep it to 2 to 4 minutes and only use your best work.

If they DON’T have in-house video, try to find out if this is something they want. They may be very happy with the outside contractor/studio they already use. You’ll have to be much more persistent and inventive. Try to find out if all of the three big needs are met: faster, cheaper, better. Maybe, their video/motion graphics contractor is really cheap and fast, but their quality is more akin to a local car dealership. Or, maybe their video contractor is very fast and good, but they are looking for cheaper options for smaller projects. You’ll have to work harder to make friends with someone in the agency, get to know them and their agency’s needs. Try to find out if they go to local networking events, or have a blog, or even just start with the info@agency.com e-mail address that’s on their site. VP’s, design directors, and senior-level designers are good places to start as points of contact. Don’t make friends with junior designers or the marketing team. It sounds horrible, but their opinions on hires are not greatly regarded. This is a very hard route to go, and you might have to take an internship with them or even give a discount to prove yourself. Another route would be to join up with their outside contractor, work for that person directly. A good video contractor/studio will always have too much work and if they can send out another cameraman or grip to an event, it’s a plus. Again, a good, entertaining demo reel, a concise resume.

Travis: I’ve never worked in the video or motion graphics arena either, but I’ve watched a lot of movies, which pretty much makes me an expert in anything.

So I, like Thursday, decided to phone a friend to get the scoop on how things work in Tinseltown and called world renowned TV and film superstar Rowdy Roddy Piper (as a fellow Canadian we’re allowed to call Mr. Rowdy once a year with any question). And while he went on a bit of a rant about bubblegum and butt-kicking, I got the distinct impression that he was implying that you should always bring your ‘A’ game to any potential gig.

So here’s what I suggest you do:

• Research the top five agencies that you really want to work for
• Compare your work against the quality of work that they are putting out
• If your work is equal or better to what they’re doing then pitch your best stuff
• If your work doesn’t measure up, then it’s time to buy a pack of bubblegum and start working on your butt-kicking skills

Anyway, I need to call Bill Shatner now and ask him some questions about this macaroni salad I’m making.

Graphic Design Lead For Logo for chiropractic clinic
Posted: 07/29/2010

Graphic Design Project Description: I prefer to work with designers: local My Goals for this project are: Have a business logo that represents us as a family chiropractor My Industry: Chiropractic

Graphic Design Details: My Budget is Flexible: No My Maximum Budget is: 300 Best time to reach me is: day time Best way t...

You’ve got a 5:00 deadline, 3 pages of copy to revise, 2 logos to vectorize  (or whatever magic you design folks use to make things pretty), and a status report to complete to wrap up another project.  It’s almost the perfect trifecta –your three current projects ending at the same time.  You’re smoking busy right now, but as N.C Winters points out – you might not have enough work tomorrow to warrant getting out of bed.

So what are you doing to keep fresh projects coming your way?

I’ve still got that new freelancer smell, but a few things that I’ve been trying to do seem to be working so far:

• Tweetdeck Alerts – anytime the word “copywriter” is mentioned on twitter, I get an alert that pops up.  I quickly scan it, and if it’s someone looking for a copywriter I’ll send them a quick note.  This would probably work with keywords like logo, graphics, template, etc.  This has been a huge source of new business lately – small and big jobs.
• Job Board Mailing Lists – Most of the sites that I’ve found have an option for daily notifications about new postings within your search parameters.  They seem to be delivered at the same time each day, so I set that time aside to review the postings and bid on the ones that interest me.
• PPC Campaigns – Not a lot of luck for me here yet, but I’ve been playing with Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, and Google ads.  There are a few trial coupons out there, so you might be able to get some exposure without spending a dime.

Are you waiting for your next assignment to find you, or do you have some great ways to score your next project?

Graphic Design Lead For Logo for Roofing Contractor
Posted: 07/28/2010

Graphic Design Project Description: I prefer to work with designers: Worldwide Number of pages (approx): N/A My Goals for this project are: Have someone do a "LOGO" for our firm with existing specific requirements already in existence. My Industry: Roofing Contractor

Graphic Design Details: My Budget is Flexible: Yes My Maximum Budget is: 500 Other sites or graphics that I like: N/A Sim...

Soon we are adding in a new feature that will allow designers to upload a image file that shows the work done for a project from DesignQuote. Designers will be able to add a brief description along with their screenshot or photo.

This blog is for Design Quote News. Browse Graphic Design Jobs and Web Design Jobs at DesignQuote.net

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Today a DesignQuote designer submitted the following question. I realized that many of our designers may have been wondering the same thing, so I decided to post the QandA here.

Question:
I have noticed something strange happening for the last couple of weeks. I get an email alert for a job and underneath the original email is a list of "More recently approved projects:" and there is a list of RFQ's. They are all in numerical order and usually they are all for the same price range and in each case, they are only looking for a single bid. I never get an individual email reporting those RFQ's. I've been with DQ for several years and I've never seen anybody ever ask for a single quote. So here are my questions.

1. Why am I not receiving emails for those single bid requests?
2. Are those jobs real, or are you just getting spammed with fake jobs?

They seem fake because of their similarity to each other and the fact that I don't receive email alerts for them. Please advise.

Response:
The single slot leads are from a new web-design-lead-provider we have partnered with. We are testing routing some of their lead inventory through DesignQuote. They limit leads to 5 designers. They are giving four slots to their existing customers (designers) and then giving one slot to DesignQuote.

- The reason you do not usually receive an email alert about those leads (and probably many other leads in your price range) is because of the way our email alerts work. When a lead is approved, the alert system sends alert emails in groups of 200 emails every 5 minutes. The order we send emails is based on how many credits are in your account - whoever has the most credits gets the first email, the next highest gets the second, etc. ( as described on the alerts page http://www.designquote.net/provider/set_services.cfm )
　
You currently have 14 credit(s). This puts you at number 232 on the email notification list. Which means that 231 designers have 14 or more credits in their account and receive emails before you. There are currently about 2500 designers who have specified instant alerts for projects over $1000 - so when we post a $1k+ project the system queues up about 2500 emails to be sent. We send the first 250 emails immediately then wait 5 minutes (to give the mail processor time to process those 250 emails) and then we check the RFP slots. If the project has not sold out, we send the next 250 emails, wait 5 minutes and check again until the project sells out or everyone has been emailed.

Once a design project sells out all the remaining emails are cleared from the queue and those designers are never notified about the project. So the reason your not receiving alerts for these projects is because the project sells out before it gets to you name in the alert queue.

The clients are actually getting 5 bids, 1 from DQ and the other four from non-DQ designers that get leads from our partner. In order to make our alert emails more informative, we add in a list of other projects with similar budgets under "More recently approved projects:" - The partner RFP numbers are in numerical order because we process them in batches as they come in, one after another and they get sequential RFP IDs.

The partner prequalifies the leads checking their phone and email so they get approved and posted as soon as we receive them. So if several partner leads get approved they are queued and might appear under "More recently approved projects:" before the alerts are even actually sent for those specific projects. The mail-bot checks all open projects every time it sends a batch of emails.

We are currently beta testing this partnership it will change in the future. We just started the partnership 3 weeks ago (the first week of November) which is why you just started seeing the one slot leads. We are collecting data and feedback from our designers to make sure the quality of the leads we get from our new partner meet the quality standards of our regular leads.

We don't have enough data to determine that yet but we should know in a few weeks. If the quality of the leads is good enough, we will expand our partnership and increase the number of slots per lead for DesignQuote designers. The leads would still be limited to 5, but we may divide them up so DQ gets 3 slots and the partners designers get the remaining 2, as opposed to the one single slot we get now.
　
- Wesley Warren
CEO - Vexcom, Inc.
Parent Company of DesignQuote.net
　

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Welcome New Members That Joined FreelanceDesigners.com Wednesday 08/12/09 DesignQuote Freelance Design Project Lead: 08/13/2009 Project: Business Cards for Tattoo Artist Bid on this project Bidding Ends Today! Budget: $100 - $250 Lead Details: 08/06/09 I prefer to work with designers located: MESA, AZ … Client located in Mesa, AZ. This lead is for sale on designquote.net