Freelancing is hard. I’ve been doing freelance work to a degree for a number of years now but that was very little and mostly part-time while I was still at school and college. When the pandemic hit last year I knew what I wanted to do with myself, but it took me a while to realize it, so in the Summer of 2020 I began considering myself a “Full-Time Freelancer”… which I suppose in a way I was. Before the pandemic I was very involved in the events industry through various part-time and voluntary roles, so when the UK went into lockdown and those events stopped the only “work” I was doing was freelancing… only I didn’t have any work. Anyone who’s started freelancing knows that it’s not an easy ride. Especially when you don’t have much experience and the world is falling apart around you!
So, without any clients, I did what everyone said I should do. I set up a website with my work and began doing some self-set projects to try and improve my skills. And that’s where I was for a while. With literally no work coming in, a website full of mostly self-set projects and some skills that slowly, but surely I was getting better at.
Towards the end of 2020 things started to pick up a bit. I had some regular work coming in from my brother as I started work helping out with the UI/UX side of a white label virtual conferencing platform he created. UI/UX wasn’t really something I had done much of before but doing it on a regular basis I realized how much I enjoyed it. It was at that point that I began to expand my horizons. When you start out freelancing the most common thing you will hear is that you need to “niche down” or “specialize in one thing” and that’s what I tried to do. I became very focused on branding and learnt a lot about that area because it was something that I was passionate about and enjoyed. But the truth is that branding work is hard to come by! Whether that’s a result of me being inexperienced or a result of the financial impact of COVID-19 or a bit of both but clients have been difficult to find. Because of this and the work, I have been able to do I have now expanded my services. I now offer Branding, Ui/Ux, Marketing, and I have recently been developing my skills using Webflow which I hope to be able to offer in the near future as well.
For a while, I was really shy about what I was doing. Telling as few people as possible what I wanted to do almost out of embarrassment. I was hiding behind a name (Digital Guerila) and trying almost to shy away from what I was doing. But that’s not who I am, and for a while, it left me feeling quite down. In a world where everyone is so concerned about what people have to say I decided I’d had enough. So I’m changing my approach
Hi, my name is Matt, and over the next few months, I am going to share my journey as I try to make a living freelancing as a graphic designer.