the graphic design school blog.

At the same point each month, every month, an employed per­son receives a wage packet from his payroll depart­ment, and his his bank account is cred­ited with his salary. Safe in this know­ledge, he can plan his fin­ances around this fixed point. For the intrepid freel­an­cer things are a little dif­fer­ent, for he must send out invoices to his cli­ents, and then wait to be paid. So far so straight­for­ward, but there are sev­eral factors to con­sider with regard to invoicing, which I’ll be tak­ing you through below. After all, get­ting paid on time is what keeps us all afloat, and what freel­ance designer doesn’t desire that?

They come in all shapes and sizes, from all dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sional back­grounds, and we rely on them to pay our fees. A large por­tion of the freelancer’s life is spent look­ing for them, bag­ging them, and spend­ing a con­sid­er­able amount of our daily slog try­ing to work out what they want. I’m speak­ing of course about cli­ents, and this art­icle is all about work­ing with them…

This week’s art­icle on pro­fes­sional design prac­tice con­cerns pro­ject plan­ning. Good, thought­ful pro­ject plan­ning can be indis­pens­able to the smooth run­ning of your pro­fes­sional life as a freel­an­cer. By run­ning your busi­ness along well-oiled, well-organised lines you’ll be able to wring the most amount of time out of your days, max­im­ise your profits, avoid mis­lay­ing things and gen­er­ally inject some calm into your busy life. A modicum of plan­ning, far from act­ing as a restraint on cre­ativ­ity, can in fact free us to spend more time on the cre­at­ive pro­cess. It should there­fore be an integ­ral part of all our work­ing lives. Fol­low the guides below, or a life of pro­fes­sional chaos awaits!