Free-lance Designer Starter-Guide

Are you beginning your journey to become a free-lance designer? We here at wipshot have done the hard work for you by gathering and summarizing for you the important tips all starting free-lancers should know.

Setting up:

Here are the most important steps every starting up free-lancer should read.

• Build and maintain a strong brand identity to attract customers
• Network to build mutually beneficial relationships
• Learn your competition, then do it better
• Market your brand
• Strong Portfolio
• Create content
• Post on multiple social media platforms
• Advertising

Read more about setting up here.

How to charge your clients:

For starting-up freelancers, it can be hard to figure out how much to charge your client. Here is a basic guide on how to calculate your price.

Calculating hourly rate (minimum amount of money you need to earn per year/billable hours per year)

• Calculate the minimum amount of money you need to earn
• personal expenses
• insurance
• software, material, office fees
• tax

Figure out your billable hours (how many hours in the week you can spend to earn money)

• Calculating price by project
• (design time + time spent working with client + unexpected additional hours) x (hourly rate)

Calculating value price

• for bigger companies that will indirectly earn a lot of money from the help of your design

Change your rates

• increase your rate regularly (e.g annually)
• increase rate depending on improving skills and expertise

Read more about pricing as a freelance designer here.

How to build a free-lance contract

To protect yourself as a free-lancer, it is important to build the correct contract to make sure your projects go as planned. It takes time and practice to build the right contract for you, but we’ve gathered some important pointers you should include on any project deals with clients.

• make an initial proposal of the project including the key details
• payment
• project fee
• allowed payment method
• payment deadline
• late/non-payment fee
• deliverables
• project scope
• revisions + additional work
• copyright + IP protections
• legal protections
• terminations

Read more about building a contract for free-lancers here.

Now it’s time to begin your journey as a free-lance designer. To help you begin your brand we have gathered you the important tips you should know. At wipshot, we also want to help starting free-lancers by offering you a short time offer to use our platform designed for communication between clients and creatives for FREE. Sign up now to get PRO for free. Forever.

Illustrations from DrawKit.