Quality of work
It's funny, but during the preparation of this article, I got a message from the same client we used to work within medical services. He asked permission to give my number to a potential customer. This isn't the first time that old connections are coming back after a few years. And they come back for two reasons.
First, because I did my job well. There is no way without it. The client should be satisfied, and you yourself should be sorry to waste your time, so always try to do each project better than the previous one. Only in this case, you will grow.
Secondly, I have proven myself as a reliable performer. Working on financial services, I used to go home after a workshop with business representatives, promising that by morning my work would be done.
And I still remember those nights when I was designing banking services until 4 a.m., and after two hours of sleep I was going to the office of a well-known payment system and demonstrated the service first to the focus group, after the project managers, and in the end I presented it to the bank's management board. (I even had a chance that on the way from the office to the hotel's conference room in the car, I was finalizing an interactive prototype).
You know what kind of responsibility was on me at that moment. But having appreciated my attitude to work, clients were ready to come back, despite the fact that they could easily find a designer twice as cheap.
Presentation
Without the right presentation, your, even genius ideas will not be heard. At the start of my career, I did not understand this and could just send the layout to the client and wait for the feedback. Now I understand that this approach is in most cases utopian.
Imagine that a developer sends you a code to check it. Will you be able to estimate how efficient it is? Of course not. The same way with the design. Usually, the client doesn't know our craft, but he or she will certainly want to express his or her opinion. Therefore, your main task is to present your work competently.
In short, the essence of the presentation is to raise the problem in the first part of it, and in the second part to show that your concept solves it best.
Thinking advance about what questions the customer can ask. In this way, you will be able to find defects in your work and prepare logical answers.
I've been involved in product design in startups for several years and here presentation skills are just as important. It's just that instead of making official presentations, you're arguing your decisions in collective conversations.
What would I do now
I described above how I managed to get my first clients. And now we wonder what I would do now if I only started my career and wanted to earn my first money in design.
But before I give you a concrete plan, I will share an important thought that makes life very easy.
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When you achieve your goals, you get something else, no less important than the result itself. You gain an understanding of the mechanism for achieving your goals. And its essence is insanely simple, but for some reason, few people believe in it.
The main secret to achieving meaningful results is to start doing something and not to stop for a long time.
It's so easy, but I keep wondering why most of us can't take advantage of this advice.
Let me give you an example.
Gary Weinerczuk launched the YouTube channel WineLibrary with 0 subscribers, just like each of us in our business. (My Telegram channel also had 0 subscribers, and three months later it is read by more than a thousand designers). But Gary understood that success can only be achieved through disciplined work, so he recorded more than 1000 episodes of his show. 1000! Think about what it cost him. Today Gary is an entrepreneur and one of the most popular people on the Internet.
Think about yourself now. Have you done at least 10 projects?
I don't know how you answered me, but I know that successful designers are nodding at this moment. Because it's true. Quality comes only with experience.
Look at the portfolio of the best designers and imagine that at the beginning of their career their work was horrible, and the photos of their profiles were not taken in the studio. It's hard to believe, but it is. And the only thing that made them better was patience.
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And now I'll get back to the question posed:
What would I do now if I wanted to prove myself in design?
I would choose a certain sphere (services, sites, applications, animation, motion, graphics) and set myself the task of publishing one project per week in the portfolio for at least three months. And I would carry out this plan, despite the lack of approval, the presence of negative and trolling drops in motivation, bad horoscope and new series of your favorite series.
Where to get ideas for projects? Study the works of other designers and try to copy them. Think about your dream project and try to implement it. Think about how you can improve the services you use yourself.
Friends, the world is made by people no smarter than we are. The services you use every day were made by the same specialists you are, but a little more experienced.
If you want the coming year to be more successful than the one that's leaving, appreciate every day. Don't flush your time down the toilet by flipping through endless tapes and browsing popular blogs.
As was said in the movie "Fight Club": "This is your life and it gets shorter every minute.
