Staying focused during the day: A how-to for part-time freelancers

Photo by arinas74

For all you part-time freelance designers out there with a full-time non-design job, here is a guide to help you improve your freelance career. When you have a non-design job during the day it may be hard to keep that creativity flowing, but you have to find the opportunity to help to improve yourself.

The bad

I myself work at a newspaper designing ads. Although I still design, it is kind of the bottom of the line job for a designer. This is because of a couple things, since we create our ads for free (charge for placement of ads) if people care about putting well-designed ad in the newspaper, they will hire someone to do so. So this leaves me with ads that people don’t really care how they look. And secondly, I design a large amount of ads in a week’s time (roughly between 50-60 on average).

The good

On top of creating ads for the newspaper we have touristy magazines that we publish throughout the year, which means I get to work with a larger amount of color ads as well as I get a chance to submit some cover art. Since I usually have time between the time when our newspaper goes out and I have to start doing ads for the next week I get a chance to work on covers ideas and experiment with random stuff. This gives me a chance to design covers that I am not embarrassed to say I did. It also gives me a chance to experiment with new things.

So even though I have all these ads that I have to design, and I don’t get to flesh out ideas usually because of time, when I do have time I make the best of it. On top of that, since I create so many ads weekly I have become quite good in Quark and know a lot of technical elements of Photoshop, as well as learning shortcuts which makes me a faster designer.

The free design job

Photo by Freedee
Well if you have a job like mine, designing ads for a newspaper, yellow pages, phone book or anything like that where people are paying for the ad space not the ad, you have to look for chances to create well designed ads and continue to work on your skills. You can’t win all the battles, but pick a few ads that you can put a little extra on. Don’t do it for the client (because they probably wont notice), but do it for yourself.

The downtime job

Photo by Brad & Sabrina
There are many opportunities to help progress your freelance career, for me it is working on skills, finding out how to work faster. It all depends on what you do. In college I worked in an art gallery as a “guard.” I pretty much just sat around and made sure nobody stole the artwork. If I had known how valuable my time was back then I could have started freelance stuff, create websites when I wasn’t doing school work. This goes for those type of people who work at a desk, as a guard, receptionist or any other job that might have a lot of down time, make the best of it, do other work, as long as it doesn’t get you fired. It might be a good idea to check with your boss first.

Then manual labor job

Photo by Tomas Castelazo
I had one of these too. There are less you can do with this one. I realized after a few week’s things at my job, things become easy. You can always let your mind wonder (just make sure you watch what you are doing). Bring a notepad and brainstorm your ideas and write them down, you’ve got time. Other than that, look for opportunities, does your company have a bad website or logo or marketing materials? Use the opportunity to put your name out there.

Photo by lusi
There are many things that you can do depending on your job and your situation. The most important thing is that you have to recognize the opportunities and capitalize on them. Being a great designer means making the most out of your situation. As a warning though if any of these suggestions could potentially get you in trouble at your full-time job, its best to not to do it. You don’t want to let your part-time work compromise your full-time job.

Have a job that doesn’t fit into one of our categories? Tell us by commenting below.