A brief summary of my life as a freelance designer in 2021

Hey there, did 2021 go as fast for you as it did for me? Throughout the year I seemed to have had a varied amount of work. There were new clients and some that I worked with for sometime that eventually got permanent staff, others may of had a change of direction but that’s always to be expected when freelancing.

Most enjoyable project

I was involved in a complete redesign and rebrand of an app called AiScout – A revolutionary new way to get scouted by professional football clubs, FA’s & federations.

It all started out with a UX audit, mapping of user journeys, discovery phase, design direction and full re-design their existing app. Later down the line there was a rebrand to fit with the new look and feel. This all started around March time and went live around mid November, you can download it from the app store here and take a look.

Most frustrating projects

I mean I’m not gonna feature any particular names, but I have had a few gigs that seem to just drag on which become particularly challenging, sometimes there just seems to be an open timeframe on the client side so this is a good reason to take part payments as if it goes nowhere at least you’ve been compensated. The other classic is where scope creep comes in with ‘no end of amends’ which seems to drive you crazy.

When someone says your design “is close but not quite there” pic.twitter.com/L9q7pMeQIK

— Daniel Destefanis (@daniel__designs) January 5, 2022

Pricing

I’ve been choosing to work on projects where I act as a consultant, spending time on understanding client requirements, explaining my process and proposing the best way forward, resulting in clients listening more and respecting my expertise. This has been rewarding in terms of a variety of design challenges and adding real value to products – which in turn has given me endless enjoyment through the course of 2021.

What I’ve been mindful of

Communication is fundamental from start to finish, be professional and timely at every touch point of a new client enquiry. I found if you don’t respond within 2 days you’ve probably lost out. Respond and quote as quickly as possible and set the tone from the beginning. I’ve also decided to get out of my home working environment a bit and and for 2 days a week I pop down to Salts Works in Saltaire which is a nice co-working space and enjoy a lunch time stroll which is kind of nice to do that type of thing again.