8 Ways To Stay Productive as Freelance Designer During A Quiet Period

• July 18th, 2011
• Articles

At some point within a designer or web designers freelancing career you will get to a point when quiet period may occur, for instance you may have finished a freelance project and have some spare time available before the start date of your next project. This article share tips on how to stay pro-active as well as productive during a quiet freelancing period.

Start a blog

Why not  start a blog where you could write articles where you share tips, tricks and your expertise upon web design, there’s nothing more satisfying than helping out upon coming designers who are keen to pursue a career within  the web design industry to help fine tune their skills.

Just because your a web designer doesn’t mean its compulsory that you must write a blog about your occupation, you could also start a blog upon one of you hobbies which your passionate about. Just some food for thought.

Brush up on your skills

Brush up on your design skills. The Best way to-do so is by following design tutorials. There is no excuse these days why nowadays modern web designer can not enhance or improve their design skills. Theirs so many online resource to enhance your skills and existing knowledge. The online web design community is like fountain of knowledge and from time to time you should try to absorbed as much as you possibly can from that fountain.

Design and sell web design and design resources

There’s a wide variety of various online marketplaces, where designers can create design resources where the marketplace plays the middle man. The market place will promote the resources you create and will find potential customers who may be interested within purchasing resources, in return for a percentage of each sell which they make through the market place which is usually around the 25% to 40% range. You can choose to create anything from shiny glossy buttons to high quality WordPress themes the choice is completely up to you. This is a great way to stay proactive while at the same time making some money.

Write an E-book(electronic book)

Blogging is great but of I’ve always had the aspiration to one day write an e-book based around a web design topic. E-books are a bunch of fun to create well what of heard from the great vine. If you choose to sell an ebook there are so many websites which will allow you to do so such as the Amazon book store, apples ibook store where a decent size profit can be made off doing so, especially how ebook readers are becoming more and more popular like Amazon kindle and the apple ipad.

Create your print identity

Create your print identity by creating a business card design. It may come as surprise that there’s designers who do not have any sort of print presents, its a great way to network with fellow designers and web designers within the industry. Business cards can be given to potential customers so they can contact you for quote for project or to hire you for a project.

Update your portfolio

During a freelancing period your portfolio can tend to get slightly neglected, for the simple fact that your main focus tends to be working on freelancing projects therefore your web portfolio

may contain outdated content or just old design projects which could be updated with your latest projects you’ve been working on. You should always Bear in mind that when new clients want to hire you for a project they will want to see your past work so ensure your work on your portfolio is at its best possible standard.

Create a person project based on a hobby

Put new skills into practice by designing and coding a website. When creating a website for your self theirs no specific guidelines which you need to follow therefore you have more creative freedom to experiment. This is great way to wind down because you can work at your own pace while enhancing your skills and working on a project which you really enjoy because its based a hobby.

Learn something new

The web design industry moves ever so fast there’s always new design tools and web design languages. A quiet period is the perfect time to spend working on learning new tools such as familiarizing your self with a design application you may not be familiar with such as in design, inscape etc or even focus more on learning something within web design industry such as jquery, html5, CSS3.