Nanyang Graphic Design Training School ~ Xiaofeilong Education

Little Fat Dragon Education

The Designers Alliance has talked to many designers about "private work" outside of work. Young designers will feel that taking on more private work can enrich their own work cases, you can get to know people, you can also subsidize your own meager income, as long as it is not "good brother, help me design a LOGO" such a pit thing, their own energy can hold, most of the time they like or even yearn to be filled with private work to fill their lives.

However, my point of view is precisely not to recommend that designers (especially designers who have recently worked) take on excessive private work.

First, effective working hours are compressed, and private work projects are usually not completed high enough

Review the whole process of taking on private work:

The client finds you to help you with the page design of the app, website (which is still a high-quality project), etc., mostly because his (entrepreneurial) team does not have enough design budget to recruit designers, or the designers are graduates (or interns), so they find you and hope to complete their project design.

And once this cooperation model is launched, there is no conventional design process, aside from the working hours during the day, overtime time and overtime time on Saturdays and Sundays (designers you know) can be used to do private work less time is pitiful, under the premise of ensuring quality, if it is a regular design cycle that takes a month, it will be due to less personal remaining time, which should have been extended to a month and a half or even longer to be reasonable. However, because it is a "private work" model, time will be suppressed to half a month or even a week by customers because the project is "very anxious", "very important", "found an individual, not a company" and so on. Spending more than half of the time on private work, and completing daily design work during the day, so the probability of really making private work into a work that you are satisfied with is usually not too large.

There is also a private work model, that is, to help relatives, friends old Li family cousin's daughter-in-law to open a store need a LOGO, menu or leaflet design (this mode you also understand) When they find you, most of them say "Brother, you are so powerful, just help me design a LOGO" The design cost is not to say, will you work hard to polish the details, colors and shapes in the design for such a "casual" project? The end result is that you are not demanding, I will design it according to my needs.

If you have ever jumped ship, you can compare your own experience, how many people can really put the things you do in private work into your resume library? How much of your hire is due to the added value that these works bring to you?

Second, the increase in income from designing private work will not change your current living situation most of the time.

Continue to take these two models of private work as an example, one is to take the outsourcing of small teams, (there is no occasional design outsourcing of large companies, but large companies are generally more inclined to find professional and stable outsourcing companies to cooperate), and there is to help relatives and friends around them to do "human" design private work.

Looking back at the whole process of taking on private work, is the design cost so much as you expected? Is the collection process as pleasant as expected? Pay on time or press down to someday? Can these incomes consistently account for one-half, one-third, or just a quarter of your work income?

We tentatively determine that your current income is 8,000 yuan, and you can earn 4,000 more per month by taking on private work, that is, a total monthly income of 1.2W.

What practical changes will be made to your life:

There are more opportunities to have a dinner with friends...

You can change the latest cosmetics or digital products...

Go to the bar a little more high...

Watch a few more movies:

Save some money for a short trip (do you have time)...

… …

Surely a lot of designers will also list a lot of changes to life because of the increase in extra money,

But the more fundamental problem is:

Have these extra money changed your current housing situation? (From a shared house to a solitary home, or from a solitary to a homeowner?) ）

Have these extras changed the means of travel that make you work? (Taxi or drive to work?) ）

Do you dare not pay attention to discounts and prices when you go shopping?

How much filial piety have you used to honor your parents?

Ask yourself again, have these extras really changed your life in a fundamental way?

To paraphrase Han Han's sentence "I have heard a lot of truths but still have a bad life", it is "after taking on so many private jobs, I am still poor + hard-pressed.".

Picking up private work can take a lot of time and energy that you should have spent studying and resting

For more than a year, I have particularly endorsed the concept of "compound interest", and if you are not clear, then I will quote the definition in Baidu Encyclopedia:

Compound interest means that after each interest period, the interest generated is added to the principal to calculate the interest of the next period. In this way, in each interest-bearing period, the interest of the previous interest-bearing period will become the principal of interest-bearing, that is, profit-making, which is commonly known as "profit rolling profit"

For example, if an investor invests 50,000 yuan of his savings every year and receives a return of 3% every year, and he invests the sum of these principals and interests together with the annuity into a new round of investment, then, after 30 years, his total asset value will become: F = 50,000 × [(1 + 3%)^30-1] / 3% = 2378770.79

Yes, this is a mathematical concept, the above example is to tell you that if it is under benign planning and calculation, even if the daily growth seems to be minimal, through the day-to-day "profit rolling profit", the final gain will appear explosive growth at a certain node, making up for all the previous losses, this is the concept of compound interest, and this growth curve is the compound interest curve.

I've said so much that it seems a bit far off, so let's go back to the topic of private work.

As long as the design is done, no company can guarantee that the designer will leave work on time. Most designers often encounter the situation of staying up late and working overtime. Putting aside work and overtime, the time I can control is really very small. Because of the relationship between the past few years of work, I have come into contact with a large number of excellent or even master designers, and I will have such a feeling in the process of contact with them, no matter at that stage (senior or not), I have a fixed time to learn and recharge in my spare time. You can pay attention to the designers you envy, who often post not works, not icons, nor overtime work photos. They may be posting books they have recently read, where they have traveled, or what ingenious designs they have discovered around them...

Improving skills depends on work to hone, but only work, without contact and understanding of life, there is no way to make a sincere design. Design is a multi-dimensional knowledge combination of profession, a mind of P drawing, drawing, changing the picture, is a disguised departure from the design. Friends who have seen Jonathan's specialty should remember that this world-class master also has a month a year to abandon the design of the family vacation. I saw a more exaggerated designer on TED, whose name is not clear, and he recounted that he and his company would take a year off every 7 years of business, traveling, creating, doing and designing seemingly unrelated things, which made his company run better and better... (It's a bit far away again, pull back and say)

This is the design compound interest accumulated by good designers, who spend precious and limited time outside of their daily work to experience, perceive and learn cross-border knowledge. This is all a push to design a compound interest curve for yourself. It is precisely because of this accumulation that excellent works have been made at a certain moment.

Most designers who have this view are confident in themselves and their future. It is precisely because of this that they will not spend a lot of their time and energy on the small profits in front of them, because they are building their own compound interest growth curve or enjoying the changes they bring because of such accumulation.