Sunday, April 28, 2013

A change of pace, and post cards

Hey hello, it's been a month! Lots of things happened so I kind of forgot about this blogs existence. Whoops. To sum things up:

I decided that I will indeed go back to school again in September, for the Master's course Advanced Product Design at the Technical University Delft, which is basically thé hard-core industrial designer course. I'm really looking forward to it!

My part time job at the cooking supplies shop (which was pretty much my sole source of income) suddenly went bankrupt. So, no more job. Apart from the fact that this sucks - not just for me and my colleague, but even more for the couple who owned the store and had both been working full time on it for 13 years- it means I will have to find a source of income for the months until September.

Since I highly doubt I'll be able to find anything interesting for just a few months -retail is very slow during this time of year, so I doubt I'll find something equal to what I was doing now, leave alone find a temporary (ánd part time) job as designer with no formal experience- I've concocted a new plan *drum roll*:

Web design!

Yep, I've embraced my old 'frenemy' that is webdesign for paying clients. At the time, doing client work next to my part-time day job robbed me of all my time for working on my product designs. This, paired with too low prices and not being prepared well enough for client work (read: communication problems and clients expecting more work than they had paid for), led to a lot of stress and frustration on my side.

At the same time, I still liked web design, I just didn't like it when paying customers were involved. The websites I made for people on a voluntary basis were a lot more fun and virtually no stress. The things is, voluntary web design doesn't pay the bills.

But... right now, things suddenly are a lot more favourable. No day job, so I could spend 3 days a week on client work and the rest on product design. A serious focus on web design also means I can afford investing the time needed to prepare a strong business identity and a standard for dealing with the clients. I could basically prepare a lot of things that would lessen the stress and frustration I had in the past. Checklists to discuss before accepting projects, clear contracts, packages for clients that state clearly what is paid for and what not. And a set time when I'm available for calls and when not, plus a separate phone, so I won't be called when doing groceries...

So right now I'm working on all of that. Business plan, contracts, an acquisition website, business cards, etc. And not completely unimportant, I'm training in designing layouts and improving my technical skills so that the design process will go faster and smoother later on. In other words: I'm busy, busy, busy, but I'm actually having a lot of fun while doing everything so that's all right.

Oh, and I've also been doing other things last month. Things like cooking and baking, even though I've already forgotten what exactly (there is a chance I'll find pictures of them somewhere, so they might be posted later on) and I designed two post cards:


a 'get well' card, and a 'birthday' card:


Once again available in printable format on the 'Downloads' page.

On another note, I completely forgot that May is almost approaching and that I haven't done a single thing for my May wallpaper yet. Bad blogger, bad!

...I'll start on it right now. I promise.

No comments:

Post a Comment