02-23-2009, 04:15 PM
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#1
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Junior Member
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Greenock, Scotland
Posts: 1
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Helmut Watterott > Freelance Designer > Media-Slave Communications, Scotland
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1) Name?Helmut Watterott
2) Age?34 (nearly)
3) Business Name?Media-Slave Communications
4) Website Address?http://www.media-slave.co.uk
5) Where are you based? (Town, County, Country)Greenock, Inverclyde, Scotland
6) What type of design do you specialise in? (eg, logo design, illustration, website design etc)All three and more
7) What software do you use for design?Adobe Photoshop, Corel for vectors, Adobe Illustrator, Pagemaker
8) How long have you been a freelance designer?4 years
9) Why did you decide to go freelance?Extra income and I do believe I can help small and start-up businesses with affordable yet quality web and graphic design.
10) Do you work from home? Have an office? Work in-house at design agencies?Home
11) How many hours do you work a week?Wow, toooo many
12) How much holiday do you take a year?Too little, as I still work for a company as well, most of my holiday is taken for family time and also.. sometimes, for freelance work.
13) How do you market your services?SEO, word of mouth, friends and family, twitter, client referals.
14) How did you decide what to charge? What is the process behind your pricing structure?Mainly hours taken to do a project.
15) How do you organise your workload?With difficulty, basically I set our work by priority and importance: Important/Urgent, Urgent/Not Important, Important/Not Urgent, Not Important/Not Urgent. I move my tasks between these main headings. Works quite well. You don't just end up with a long list of tasks that you believe you can't deal with. You just have tasks that you know you can handle and that have been prioritised as needed.
16) How do you manage the business side of freelancing, accounting, invoicing etc?Have a great accounting/invoicing system that runs within my website. Advertising and keeping my own website up-to-date is the hardest part.
17) How do you keep up to date with what is going on in the design industry?Forums, blogs, twitter, friends in the industry etc etc. No magazines, they all seem a bit one sided.
18) What blogs, forums, podcasts, magazines etc do you subscribe to and recommend?BDI, SEO Blogs, actually too many to mention here.
19) What are the upsides of freelancing?Not sure there are any. The whole 'managing life/work' does not come into play because you end up working much harder and many more hours if you work for yourself. The upside for me is mainly direct influence on your own and other companies profits. It is a great feeling if a company or business you work with reaps the rewards of your efforts.
20) What are the downsides of freelancing?Too many angles to cover.
21) Would you ever go back to being employed full-time?I still am in fultime employment and am desperately thinking of quitting it. If I make it solo I will NEVER work for a company again, especially a large corporation... American :-(
22) Do you have any advice for somebody starting out in freelance design?Yeah, 'Hold on to your Butt!'
23) Is there anything else you would like to add?Nope!
24) Where can we view your portfolio?Media-Slave Web Design and Web Hosting Portfolio
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