There are thousands of great designers online who can’t make ends meet with their passion. They have to work as baristas, virtual assistant’s, and in factories to pay the bills. The biggest reason these designers don’t succeed, even though they’re great designers, is: They don’t understand that being a professional designer is not about design only.
When you turn a passion into a profession
Your first job as a designer is not to design, it is about making enough money to be able to design. A skilled designer can make anything look good, but a professional designer can make anything sell good.
Most of my daytime is spend on non-design tasks, even though I call myself a creative focusing on design. I need to find clients, make sure clients find me, write invoices, set everything up for my accountant, invest time and money into marketing, publish educational material to position myself as an authority in my business, and many things more.
If you want to be a professional designer, you’re running a business. And that means that you’re now a businessman first, a designer second.
What you need to learn to be a professional designer
Mediocre designers who can sell are more successful than great designers who can’t. I wish the world was different, but this is just reality. Every creative, designer, photographer, musician, artist, and moviemaker should hone their craft, but on top, they need to understand the moneymaking game.
What you should study (on top of your creative craft):
Marketing – Classic and new media marketing should be in first place on your to do list. Some people are born into families with fame and connections, but most people need to create that for themselves.
The good news is: It has never been easier and cheaper to start marketing yourself to the world. Social media, blogs, podcasts, and email marketing can be done for free, if you’re willing to invest the time to learn how.
Finances – Know what you need to make to pay the bills. Understand what design costs you (software, printing, web hosting …). Analyse what the competition charges. Think about how you can make it to the next client level.
Education – I expanded into teaching design, offline first, now online. This gives me the opportunity to learn more about design myself, increases my reach, positions me as an expert, and creates another source of income.
Create YouTube videos, write articles, publish a book, develop a udemy course. Everything you do in that regards, becomes a building block of a solid foundation for your business.
Writing – English is not my native language. As the English-speaking market is bigger and more lucrative than the German market, I decided to improve my English by writing these little articles.
This will improve my conversations with clients, with students, with followers. It will expand my reach, my market share, and my target demographic.
Additionally, we should all learn how to be nice and polite in written conversation. This alone will make us better, especially when we communicate with clients that are paying us.
Time management – Everyone has 24 hours in a day. To manage that time efficiently is a skill that can be learned. Most important: We should always keep deadlines with our clients. Hard to understand, but there are so many designers that can’t even keep a simple deadline. Clients will rather work with decent designers that can deliver within specific timeframes instead of great designers that are unreliable.
Speaking – I struggle with public speaking, in English as well as in my native language German. But I’m working on it.
Start a podcast or a YouTube channel and work on your speaking skills daily. This will make you a better communicator online and in real life. Skilled speakers can sell better, as most communication in the upper levels of design is taking place face to face.
Organizing – Creatives are chaotic. A creative mind needs to be disorganized at times. But when you run your design business, you aren’t just a designer anymore, you're now a businessman. Let the businessman take over and let him organize your business and your life.