Welcome to “Freelance Designer Bootcamp”, a guide for young and old on getting into the freelance design business through the internet to start making money by design. Note though, this isn’t just some tutorial, this is the keys to a brand new career where you are, your own boss. You decide when you wake up, you decide who you work with, and take charge of your life. Not only are you going to be your own boss, but the career your in is very rewarding. Through freelance you will meet tons of people, musicians, models, and bigger companies which will open more doors as you climb up the ladder.

Alright now before you get all excited of thoughts of “being your own boss” and living lavish lets get back to reality. As a freelance designer you must know a couple of tricks, that involve coding such as CSS and XHTML, and using a photo editor, such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. These tools are going to be the wheels of your career, but you first must become the engine to get the wheels moving, the more you know about your tools the faster you will progress up the hill, if you don’t know much you will be rolling slow. In the next segment I will go over where we can find these fountains of knowledge to learn how to use the tools of a freelance career.

The road is about to become bumpy for the un-informed, for the already informed its going to be a freshly paved road. A lot of people think they need to go to college to become good at photoshop, or web design, well you can, but I don’t recommend it. Now say you wanted to become a doctor, you would sure as hell have to go to college because they have the equipment you don’t, but with design the only piece of equipment you really need is your computer, and your textbook, which is the world wide web. So here are some good resources for you to learn what you need to get things moving.

First off your going to want to know X/HTML, which you can learn at w3schools.com/html, than continue reading at w3schools.com/xhtml. Your also probably wondering why you need to know X/HTML, well its a browser side programming language that allows you to inject content into your web designs. Next your going to need to learn CSS, also known as cascading style sheets, you can read about it and learn it at w3schools.com/css. You probably also want to know why you need to know CSS, well its also a browser side programming language that allows you to easily manage the style of your web designs, instead of styling everything with HTML which would just be messy. After you know these two languages like the back of your hand lets move to the next piece of this article.

We are now entering the fun part of this tutorial, learning how to use a photo editor. The two major photo editors that people use and they are GIMP and Adobe Photoshop. First off GIMP is a free photo editor for Linux and Windows operating system that not too many people use but is a very effective tool which you can acquire at Gimp.org. Second Adobe Photoshop is a pricey tool that almost everyone in the business uses, which you can get at adobe.com. You have to get one of these tools, I don’t care how you get a hold of them, but you just have to have one of them. Now we need to find a fountain of information on these tools. A lot of designers get started on a forum, where they can post there work and get feedback from other designers to see how they can improve. Also on the forums people usually post up tutorials on what they know to get other people going on new effects and styles. Although some major fountains of info are google.com and youtube.com, where all you gotta do on these sites is search “photoshop tutorial” to be supplied with what would fill 50 textbooks of information on photo editors. So after you joined a forum posted up some of your work, got feedback on what you need to improve on, and followed a few photoshop courses online, move on.

Welcome to the company intern, me and a couple of other employers in this department are going to show you how things work. Lets get moving, and introduce you to the web, because face it there are too many fish in the sea for someone to stumble upon you. So were going to need to post you up, but just letting you know as a intern your job is not to get money, also don’t ask for money, your job is to do work for free and learn how the business works before you can even make a dime. Now your probably thinking, “Hell no I’m not working for free I’m awesome”, well hey welcome to reality, you currently have no audience, and no past clients, who the hell wants to hire you? Were going to need to build up a portfolio, the key to getting mass exposure is doing free work, not only will this push your name out there, but it will be great experience for you to figure out what people want from you. You might be wondering now, well how do I even get people to work with me, you are going to need to post your resume up, what you know, what you can do and some of your work, also announcing that you are willing to work for free. Some great places to post your resume up on is Guru.com, craigslist.org, and Myspace.com. Here’s a tip though intern that not too many people are doing, “inbox advertising”, yes the art of sending emails and messages through social networking sites to people saying your available to designs for them. After you have done some free freelance design work for a month or so, your name should be out there, and now its time to move onto the next step.

Alright congratulations, after about 1-3 months of training, being abused as a intern, your ready, your name is out there, your work is out there, your email inbox is full of work invites, your a busy man or women now, its time you make your first dollar. You need a way to receive money first to do this, the best thing you can do is get a bank account if you don’t already have one, than sign up for a Paypal account at Paypal.com, than in the Paypal account link your bank account to your Paypal. After you have your Paypal and Bank account, set up, and linked, you are now ready to take money in online. A tip your going to need, always have people pay 50% upfront, than when your done with their design, show them it with a bad watermark on it, than request the other 50% for the design without the watermark. Alright now your going to need to set your prices too, don’t start out too big, remember were gonna want to keep our previous clients, so don’t set them too high, remember there use to getting it for free. Setting prices though is the transmission of your career, you go on a higher gear after you reached a certain point, because remember as long as your doing work, the more your name is going to grow, so raise your prices every 4 months by 50%. Also when setting your prices take in, will you get more money selling a 100 dollar designs, or 200 dollar designs, so the real question is, would you prefer the 10 customers buying a design for 100, or the 4 people that pay for a 200 dollar design. Keep that in mind, the lower the price the more people there is going to be that are willing to buy. After you made a couple dollars, and you feel stressed some times, move onto the new section, I’ll teach you how to be stress free.

Face it, when someone is offering you money to do something, its very hard to turn down offer. When you reach a certain level in your career more and more people everyday are going to want you to work for them, causing you to get stressed because you accepted all this money now, but have so much work on your hands, and your stressed, which leads to exhaustion, which leads to the work not getting done. This is a sign that you need to learn to say simple “no”. But oh no you won’t get the job, which means you won’t get the money, well here’s a cool little tip to keep them waiting for you, and to get 50% of the payment, tell them, “No, I’m very sorry but I am currently busy, you can put 50% down right now and I can put you on my waiting list, and contact you when I can get to work on your project.”. This not only gets you the job, but makes you in demand and makes the client want you to work for them more, so they are more likely to put down 50%. So once your stress free move onto the next part.

Alright well if your reading this you came a long way. You learned how to code in CSS, and X/HTML, than learned how to use a photo editor, also you got your first client, first paying customer, and learned how to handle yourself to be successful. Well I hope you keep working at this so it is a life time career for you, and you will never have to work a night shift or a day job, or sit in bumper to bumper traffic going to a place you hate. I was happy to share my knowledge with you all, if you have any further questions you can contact me at me@grahamphisher.com

-GrahamPhisher.com