I recently took a choice that i think many designers are faced with at one point or another; the jump from fulltime employment to a self sustained career. I’ll try to put my thoughts into words here, who knows, perhaps it will spark the minds of people with the same aspirations.
The best education
I’ve been happily employed as a graphic designer at Retouch for the past year. In the wooden loft of this Copenhagen based Web Agency i’ve been working on a myriad of projects with a broad sweep of clients. I’ve seen the company grow, the lifecycle of projects evolve and the people behind them in their finest hours. I’ve been brought up in various project management theories and tools, co-worked with professionals around the world and had plenty of one-to-one client time. In short; i’ve earned my wings as a designer and learned alot about the industry. It’s been a tremendous learning experience and probably the best kind of education one could get. While sustaining this wonderful position, i’ve moonlighted and kept the fire lit under a humble freelance career. These two workplaces have been my main source of inspiration for the past year, and have helped me grow as an artist and a professional. The few posts i’ve managed to author here at Pixelresort has been in the coffee-breathed limbo of these two responsibilities.
Working with Retouch has been a great education.
Being your own maker
Two weeks ago i quit my day job to shift my time and energy towards my personal projects and my freelance career. The decision had been brewing in my subconciousness for some time, and i passed a mental ’point of no return’ three weeks ago – growing ever more sure that i would be able to sustain and manage my own career.
Quite alot of contemplation goes into an elaborate transformation like this. And while i won’t bore you with the lifestyle intricacies, for me the decision rested on a need for bigger personal and creative freedom. Once it became apparent to me that we are completely free to invent our own careers and that I had the very real and pleasant opportunity to be my own maker, it didn’t take long to connect the dots.
Why i’m getting out
I have my quips with the service industry as a whole. To tell you the truth, I think it consists of a very large group of people who have no idea what they want, how they want it or how much it costs anyway. It’s these people that then set out to hire a much smaller group of people, the professionals. These people may have the answers to all of the above, but it usually all drowns in budgets, paperwork, meetings and good old stubbornness. While there certainly are great high-fiving days at a service agency, it can also sometimes feel that you arrived another day at the kindergarden constantly having to educate clients and argue semantics. In these time consuming projects that seem to drag on, you have to be a very neat person to enjoy the sheer bureaucratic grind of it all.
Some biased but honest illustrated factors that weighed in my decision.
Above I’ve tried to illustrate the factors that meant something in my decision. This is ofcourse horribly biased, but it gives you an idea of what was going on in my mind when choosing my path. In the end, I think the most important question I got from a friend was “do you see yourself doing your current job a year from now?”
What are you going to do?
I still enjoy doing freelance work for clients, and with this move my services are going to be more available than ever. Despite my ranting of the overall service industry above, I find great pleasure in doing complete custom work in unique projects, where I actually feel that I can make a difference and cover ground faster. I find pleasure in expanding my skills in interface and icon design and discussing them with likeminded clients that appreciate the input.
Hopefully my distribution of time in the future will look something like this.
A huge part of me quitting the nine-to-five, is so that I can better arrange time for my own projects. A few of them I’ve yet to reveal, but I’m very proud to announce my upcoming iPhone Dev. Company (much more on this later) Robocat and our first ambitious App called Outside.
Our upcoming iPhone App. Clicking the picture will take you to the teaser site.
Outside is visual weather forecast combined with custom push notifications, all set in a completely unique interface. Read more about it at outsideapp.com
The Future
Hopefully this move will give me more time to grow my personal projects and see some of my dreams spring to life. Ideally this should also bring you more content here at Pixelresort, where I’ll try to put in more time authoring articles and giving you free icons. I will also have to eat at some point, so I’m still looking forward to harnessing my skills on your interface projects; icons, websites or iphone apps – just send me an email with your project and I’ll give you a quote.
I feel that I’ve started another chapter in my career, and I hope you’ll stick around to see how it plays out. What about you? Have you ever stood before a similar choice? How did it go? Give me a piece of your mind on twitter.