Graphic Designer Career – Top 10 Tips to Give a Kick Start

[Md. Anikuzzaman]

You have acquired all the graphic design skills after years of experience. Now is the time to use these skills to enhance your graphic designer career. With your skills and experience in place, you can easily get work from home, saving your travel time and money. Surely, you will be your own boss and will have the freedom to do some really creative work from your studio at home.

However, you need to consider some suggestions in order to boost your graphic designer career. Do not forget that you are not the only designer in the market. In fact, there is a multitude of graphic designers that's lined up to grab clients' attention with utmost creativity and ingenuity. Quite expectedly, you are bound to face a stiff competition if you wish to grab a better-paying design project or portfolio. Some of them are working with big companies, are on the job and are getting handsome amount of salary.

Here are some heedful questions to build a rewarding freelance graphic designer career:

Are You Made For Freelance Graphic Designer jobs?
There are a lot of jobs in the market to kick start a graphic designer career. Think calmly about your personality and evaluate it! You must be honest about the graphic designer career when evaluating yourself to realize if you can really work from home and do not want to go to a company's or an agency's design studio for work? An honest evaluation of your personality is the first necessary step to take in order to start your freelance graphic designer career.

Please note that working from home requires a lot of discipline ranging from getting up early and going through all the chores of design work, throughout the day. Can you do that? Many people start working from home with much fervor but with days slowly passing by, they tend to become lethargic and ultimately end up rejoining an agency. Remember that you will be working alone at home. So, find out if you can really work from home by following a strict disciplinary work schedule.

Do You Have All The Necessary Skills?
Running a graphic design business from home or own studio is not just about your graphic design skills alone. Of course, you are supposed to be a master of design techniques. But remember it's a business, which means that you will be required to handle your graphic design projects professionally. This means that you must possess at least some skills of business management as you would constantly need to handle the expectations and demands of clients and their projects. It is smart to get a business administration degree in order to understand the basic tenets of project management. Certainly, a design business requires you to manage it efficiently.

How About Funding? Can You Get A Loan?
Since you harbor a desire to open a studio for graphic design business, you must brace yourself to arrange a lot of funds. There is much expenditure to be made on different items for home studio as you would like to equip it with the all futuristic design tools. You should consider acquiring bank funding, borrowing from your friends or knocking the doors of venture capitalists. So, if you wish to realize a high-flying freelance designing career, find out the sources that can fund your business.

Have You Evaluated The Competition?
Before you start working from home, know that you will have to get some work simply by outperforming your competitors. So, first find out the level of competition in your local market from where you wish to source in freelance design projects. But you can also expand your reach to distant markets via internet, phone and writing to the clients. If you have to work in a saturated local market, then target a smaller community that is closer to your home. Tackling the competition efficiently is in fact the soul of your design business.

Can You Come Up With An Effective Business Plan?
You need to have a vision of your graphic designer career. This means that you should know about where you will stand after a few years. Such a target helps in making a concrete business plan to move accordingly. Make sure that the plan includes your income levels, employees, location, number of clients and much more. The more detailed plan you have, the better it will guide you to achieve your targets of graphic design business.

Do You Have Access To Professional Business Advisers?
Your business must get professional advice and guidance on different issues. For example, you need to protect your income from various, unwarranted taxes. And only a financial advisor can guide you on how to save money that you may otherwise end up wasting in underserved taxes. You should also get advice on keeping your business in line with the federal tax laws.

Have You Created A Graphic Designer Portfolio?
You must equip yourself with a nice graphic designer portfolio. Make sure you present your best works in your design portfolio for it will help you beget the attention of potential clients. The clients will judge your skills on the basis of the works displayed online. Select only those design fields that interest you genuinely. Avoid including all of your randomly created design works. So, before you start your graphic designer career, ensure that you have launched an impressive online portfolio of your design projects.

Also, the portfolio should be visible to the clients online on search engine result pages. It means that your past works in the portfolio should not only be impressive but they must also be visible to the potential clients. This also implies that you must optimize your portfolio so that search engines can show it to the clients on the first result page.

Have You Asked Clients For Referrals?
Of course, this is easy to do. All you need to do is to contact your clients or friends for whom you have worked in the past and request them to refer you to their friends and acquaintances for graphic design jobs. While it is important to ensure offering quality work to the existing clients, it is even more important to keep looking for references for a consistent flow of work.

A suggestion to follow in this regard is to pre-frame the referrals. This implies that you get an assurance from the client that they will refer you to their colleagues/associates, if they find your work satisfactory. Most of the clients will agree to refer you to their colleagues/associates.

Hope these tips offer you guidance in building your graphic designer career! Happy Designing!

Source: https://www.designhill.com/design-blog/top-10-tips-kick-start-graphic-designer-career/