Taking a break from freelancing
Today marks a very important date for my professional career, I have been freelancing for as long as I can remember, it feels like yesterday (no, it was about ten years ago) when I decided I would help local developers bring their products up to scratch with more usable interfaces, it was also a way to keep paying my rent while at university.
But this year I have decided to try something new, actually that’s a lie, I have been trying new and different ways of working every single year: I can vividly remember racing with go-carts (and crashing) as part of the Fueled team, or working in Munich in the middle of a heatwave helping a small startup get their designs in place, or going through uncountable calls with put name of big SF company here and dropping all the offers because I didn’t have any intentions of moving to SF, or… You get the picture.
Now it feels different, it feels special.
But, but, what about Brotherhood? Only less than a year ago, me and Jamie decided to join forces and create Brotherhood, a two-men and a cat design studio based in the North West and shortlisted as the best new design agency of 2015, it is still going strong, and in fact, we have just hired Cassius to run our day-to-day marketing and PR operations, so that’s all good and you can still work with us if you have awesome projects that need awesome designs.
So where am I a going with this? Oh right, yes! In early March this year we were contacted by the awesome Gary, the mighty mind and beard behind Mad Mimi (now part of GoDaddy), to work on his new startup: Pinecone. Upon getting the call me and Jamie scrambled to get a few design samples in place (we were battling against a few other agencies and designers to get the job), and to our surprise we were accepted and started working on its redesign.
It’s been about 4 months of amazing, almost full-time commitment with Gary and the Pinecone team, and we’ve seen a fully functional product grow in size, shape and scope thanks to everyone’s commitment, but like any project, it’s those little tweaks that make or break the experience, and to help with that (including some smaller coding jobs) I have agreed to throw myself fully at Pinecone, while advising Jamie as and when needed, and taking more of an advisory role for the time being.
So, why Pinecone and not company x?
Why yes, that’s a good question I am sure I’ll get asked by many, but Pinecone is a rather special project, and so is the team behind it. We clicked since the first day, our vision was taken seriously and the happy feel of the project is something I’ve always wanted to achieve personally.
You see, for most, freelancing can be amazing and liberating, you can be your own boss, you can choose who to work with and when to work, or how much to charge, or where to work from, when to have calls or when to have a nap, but that all comes down to two outcomes: you don’t own shit, and your life revolves around money.
As vague and naïve as that might sound, it’s really an important point of freelancing for clients, while all of the positives above are true, it’s also true that, most of the time you have to pick new clients based on money, after all you have to pay the bills, now, not in a year’s time when the app might become successful, and as shitty as the job might sound, you still have to convince yourself it’s amazing and it will be an amazing experience (often it is not). Money is also the reason you’ll be tempted to work on 4 projects at once, it’s a great feeling when you get paid, it’s a crushing feeling when clients are late paying you, or you have to haggle the few extra quid (swap that with your local currency) and throwing in an extra bit of work that turns out to be an extra month, just with the hope that they might return for more. And they do, only this time they believe you should have charged what you did charge 5 years earlier, that was the last time you heard from them and their amazing app. But this is also unfair and it’s not always the case, since I wouldn’t be in this position for all the lovely clients that I’ve encountered during the past 10 years of freelancing, but it’s not all roses either, you get the point.
I think I have written too much already and that is how I feel this morning, I could keep writing forever, maybe I have to write more at some point. I am excited to be part of Brotherhood and equally excited to shout out that I am a part of Pinecone! We have also launched a Medium blog and a Dribbble Team Account 🌳 you can follow and comment. Things are almost ready, I will make sure to shout even louder when things go live!
Peace.
