So I've come to an interesting point in my life—stressful really. I need to be creative, this is how God created me an artist through and through. I also need to provide a living.
While I've always loved the thought of freelancing; the creative freedom, setting your own hours, feeling like your work is really your own, etc… I've always have been afraid of the loss of dependable, residual income. In some ways I currently feel like a sell-out chicken, or a "life-er" if you will. I feel like I'm not being true to my calling of creativity and that my talents are being stunted. In other ways I feel like a responsible adult who is building work credibility in a real job environment. So I'm stuck in deliberation with creativity and responsibility
What are your thoughts on this?
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4 comments:
From what I've experienced, the work's not really your own when any*one* is paying you to do it. Clients/bosses will always ask for changes that ideally you don't want to do. They pay, so ulimately it's theirs.
In my experience in watching the world whirlby:
Freelance design work is only as good as the clients you can find to work for. Gennerally you're selling a service experience to someone, the design is just part of that.
Corporate design work, you're there more to service a process or support another non-design related goal. Your work is always going to be secondary to another goal (Sales, products, whatever).
So I think it depends on whether you want to "service people" or "service processes".
To "service creativity" you have to come-up with your own product that you commission and create yourself, that you can find *alot* of people to individually pay a little sum of money for that in aggregate adds up to a wage, otherwise if the payment is coming from one or a few people (freelance or corporate) you're always going to have to be focussed on the people or the process over the creativity.
Good luck thinking it all through though. Your topic is one every designer finds themselves constantly wrestling with (and it's a topic I've seen designers even in their late 50s wrestling back and forth with too.)
Thanks for the Advice Chris. I really appreciate feedback (a lot)
I hear you about the clients but I still stand by working WITH them directly is a better way. It puts a bit more control in your hands rather than being a in-house graphic designer.
And as graphic designers we need to advocate good design. That is our calling. Otherwise public will just wallow in the sea of design filth.
Remember:
"The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.
—PAUL RAND
I know I use qoutes quite a bit. But who are we if we don't listen to the wise people of the past to envoke change for the future? We are the torch carriers of a higher calling. If we don't see the design of this, then are we truly designers at all?
MB
I'm not sure that I've seen that either the freelance or in-house design path are inherently "better" directions.
It's been my experience that the design work experience centers more around the combination of a) the reality and b) one's perception of, 1) the people one works with and 2) how one's opinion, within the collaborative group, is favorably weighted on any given project.
Those two things: people and opinion within the group, are going to effect how positive the the design experience is more than anything else.
Good Design, of course, can be much more empirically measured although by human nature it's always going to be mired more in opinion than truth, due mostly to that "public" you mentioned ;)
As to what is a designer, a designer is one who designs.
I think, a calling to change the future is an entirely different thing, and alot more work than design ;)
Related, I've been talking alot about this stuff with a friend of mine lately, and at present we've both settled on the idea that once you're able to take care of the basics, whatever those are to you, monetarilly, then afterwards it really comes down to:
"How do you want to spend your time?"
I don't have any advice, but I can honestly say, I feel ya.
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