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The freelance life isn’t all roses, but it can afford creatives the freedom to choose their own clients, to work at their own pace and to call their studios home. Are you ready to go it alone?
From a staff designer’s perspective, the freelance life can seem ideal. It’s flexible, full of variety and enables you to pursue those dream clients. But this life of uncertainty isn’t for everyone; we’re not all equipped with the extreme self-discipline, tenacity and passion required for a solo career.
Despite the occasional headache from the details of running their own businesses – taxes, billing, number crunching and self promotion – both Chris Sickels and Stefan Bucher have one overriding piece of advice for those wavering between job security and throwing themselves to the mercy of the freelance gods: Just do it. If your heart’s behind your goal, then how can you fail?
Red Nose Studio: Patience, Persistence, Passion and Play
Even when Chris Sickels was a student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, he knew he wanted to work alone. Most real-world illustrators he knew were doing sketches for ads, instruction manuals or kids’ products – not the kind of down-and-dirty creative problem-solving Sickels was looking for. And even more frightening were the clean clothes and sterile offices. He likes to make messes, and he doesn’t clean them up. When he’s working on illustrations, he’s essentially playing. From Red Nose Studio – an 800sq ft. toy box above his garage in Greenfield, IN – Sickels creates 2D and 3D illustrations, character puppets and lo-fi stop-motion animation for a variety of clients including FamilyFun magazine, Sacramento News and Reviews, Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Red Herring and HOW.
By working various jobs by day, like making crates at museums and shipping artwork, and painting by night, Sickels eased himself into a freelance career. As his client base grew, he gradually stopped taking odd jobs. “I started the freelance thing very crudely,” he says. “I would just call art directors and bring these huge, unwieldy original paintings into their offices.”
For Sickels, the true test was being able to stand a few years of rejection and not lose faith. The grunt work and door-to-door selling eventually paid off, but not without persistence. Before patience and grit, Sickels says, you have to have a passion for drawing and creating, because you have to love doing the work, even when you’re busy. The best advice he received as a student was, “If you can’t illustrate every day for five years, then you won’t make it.” He took the advice literally and, even in the absence of paying jobs, kept moving – sketching, painting, drawing.
At the same time, Sickels scoured newsstands for magazines that would be a good fit for his illustrations and started to build contacts. He networked through professors and local magazines by looking up art directors’ names on the mastheads. Securing meetings with art directions was the easy part, but because of his unique style, finding clients who could use his work was more difficult.
His first promotional mailings were small and inexpensive – a few were only black-and-white line art – but he personalized them with sketches and handwritten notes. Part of his original mission was to “take an entrepreneurial approach to marketing,” instead of waiting for clients to come to him. “I knew I couldn’t send to 10,000 people, but even if I had, not that many people would be interested in my work, so I had to narrow by focus,” Sickels says. He targeted publications that had a style and attitude similar to his drawings – sophisticated with subtle humor. John Chuang, CEO of Aquent creative staffing agency, advises this type of focus; it’s much easier to market when you know your target audience.
For Sickels, another surefire way of making connections and a name for himself was working for free. By doing probono projects, he was able to gather the tear sheets, printed samples and experience necessary for landing larger, paying clients. “People will trust your inexperienced hand because you’re doing it for free,” he says. But he advises being careful when selecting these types of projects. Sometimes the beautiful tear sheets and promised exposure aren’t delivered. “It’s a good place to cut your teeth, find your legs and discover that the ideal project doesn’t really exist and you’ve got to take the good with the bad,” he says. “I had the best experiences when the organization was one that I could really get behind and I could see that their heart was in the right place.”
During his first year, Sickels did 12 illustrations. Six years later, he’s up to three to five a month. He doesn’t plan to bring anyone else on board at Red Nose, though he aims to expand his circle of connections to include writers, producers and animators with a passion equal to his to create characters for TV and film.
Sole Custody
Running a one-man show, however, can get lonely. Sickels’ day starts at 5:45 a.m., and it’s not unusual for him to work until midnight, breaking for dinner and conversation with his wife, who may be the only person he talks to all day.
He tries to keep a “hit list” of jobs nearby, organized by priority, and a list of projects to work on when it’s slow. He’s learned to manage his time and stay on schedule to spend weekends with his family, but, as freelancers know, it’s feast or famine. Since embarking on his solo career, Sickels’ marketing and money skills have come a long way. He estimates how long a project will take him, and he sticks to his hourly rate.
Although it was a tedious search for a good fit, he recently hired a rep to help with marketing, promotion, rights, billing and collection, and to take an objective look at the situation. “It’s good to have another head on the business end of things,” he says.
He’s following his heart, but it doesn’t mean that he never doubts his decision to go solo. If you go a couple of months without work, it can be hard to keep faith in what you’re doing. “You start to think, ‘Maybe I should work 9-5 somewhere, even if it’s just shoveling dirt,’” Sickels says. “You have to be naïve enough to think that you’re doing the right thing.”
For Sickels, the challenge and reward of a solo career are one and the same: He’s solely responsible for a project, whether it succeeds or fails. He wrestles with having confidence in his decision-making ability. “But if you don’t have enough confidence in an idea to share it, then it’ll never get seen,” which, Sickels says, is what often happens in large firms. Sometimes the best ideas never make it to the table, and he believes that clients are looking for a different perspective. When you’re on your own and you have a successful project, the client will let you know. In a large company, the praise may not get filtered down to the idea-generators.
“When it all comes around, it’s all you,” he says. “There’s no one else to lean on or blame. It’s you and the client, but, of course, the client is never wrong.”
344 Design: A Man with a Mission
Stefan Bucher is a solo artist, a self-described Peter Graves of the creative world, gathering partners when necessary and often acting along to make every mission possible. And why shouldn’t they be? According to Bucher, there’s a lingering perception that it takes a big agency to handle big clients, and he disagrees. “As long as you have the right creative, the Rolodex and the ability to pick up the phone, you can do it,” he says. “You don’t need a huge entrance lobby.”
Bucher holds client meetings at the Equator Coffee House in Old Town Pasadena, CA – 344’s “main conference room” – after which he heads back to his office with a view of neighborhood cats, two giant redwoods and southern California’s largest magnolia tree. From there, he creates art that, according to his Web site, will make you "happy, sad, mad or mildly puzzled, then bemused, then sort of sad and then happy again.” This emotion-invoking art includes award-winning designs for clients such as Interscope Records, Atlantic Records, AIGA, Modernista! and bossa:nova, to name a few.
Bucher’s been drawing since he can remember. When he was 12, his first illustration was printed in a German fanzine, and he was addicted. At 15, he redesigned an ad for a local bike shop, leading to regional clients, catalog covers and his own line of shirts (featuring embroidered belly-dancing bears). He eventually saved enough money to travel from his small-town home of Rinteln, Germany, to California and enroll in the advertising program at the Art Center College of Design. After graduation at 23, he was recruited for an art director position by Weiden + Kennedy in Portland, OR.
After only a year, Bucher parted ways with the agency when a friend and mentor asked him to help her out with 344 Design. Within months, her plans took her in a different direction, and Bucher became a creative staff of one. “She basically said, ‘Take it and make it what you want,’” Bucher says. He had 10 years of freelance work under his belt, inherited office space, a lawyer, an accountant and plenty of energy; the only thing that frightened Bucher was that 344 wouldn’t take off and he’d have to be a staffer again. In his previous experiences, his personal opinions were often swallowed by the company’s goals.
Feeling the Love
If Bucher has a mission for 344, it’s to create art he loves for clients he loves. He says he wants to produce work that makes a cultural difference and working solo enables him to tackle projects he believes in with clients he finds truly inspiring.
The best perk for Bucher is running his own show and the freedom it brings – the freedom to be audacious and to go after projects that would otherwise be considered risky because they take up too much time or bring in too little profit. Bucher feels taking these risks pays off because they often lead to higher-paying or ongoing projects. And although he only calls in help once or twice a year, 344 enables him to work with design mentors and like-minded artists. You might think that such emotionally driven work would clash with clients’ need for cold, hard results. According to Bucher, people like a product with standard marketing, but it takes a personal—possibly idiosyncratic—vision to make people passionate. “This can mean love or hate, of course,” Bucher says. “So the question is, do you want 80% of the people to kind of like you the way they like a nice piece of toast? Or can you accept half the people wishing various plagues on you, if the other half willingly surrender a little piece of their heart to you?”
For many freelancers, being this choosy seems like a precarious way to pay the bills, but Aquent’s Chuang recommends being selective. According to Chuang, after your freelance career is rolling, you should only take work on three conditions: 1) it’s a wonderful assignment, 2) it’s a lot of money, or 3) it leads to No. 1 or 2. “When you’re starting out, you’re going to take any client you can get,” he says. “A lot of people fall into the trap of doing everything for all clients; they become afloat in the ocean, tossed around by the client.”
Most of Bucher’s clients come from referrals or former Wieden + Kennedy connections who know of his strong opinions. But Bucher still seeks out ideal clients and projects. When he was doing on-site work for Maverick Records – 344’s first client – two representatives from the Los Angeles-based music collective bossa:nova, who also worked at Maverick, were handing out event flyers. Seeing that the flyers could use some visual improvement, Bucher offered his services, only to find out that’s all bossa:nova could afford. “I said, ‘I feel for you, but let me do this.’” Bucher now creates all of the group’s print graphics, one of which was recently featured in Roger Walton’s book Type: No Borders, No Boundaries, No Limits (Hearst Books; www.heartbooks.com).
Bucher’s clients come in all sizes and with pockets of varying depths, but they have common principles, values and passion for making their mark both graphically and philosophically. Because of these symbiotic relationships, he rarely has difficulty dealing with clients. “People hire me because they know I have firm opinions; they appreciate that and are generally in line with it,” Bucher says. “As long as the philosophy is intact, if you want to bump up the type size, it doesn’t matter to me.”
He compares an assignment to an equation with one or two known variables. He takes what he’s got, plugs it in and works out the rest. He takes the same approach with budgets and designs according to what’s available. If he only has $500 for printing, then he won’t do a four-color photo shoot. The system works as long as he knows what he has to work with up front. “If I’ve got a Yugo, I’m not going to enter the Indy 500,” he says. “But if there’s something that I feel that I need to do, then I’ll find a way.”
Such was the case with the 432-page book American Photography 17. “The budget was small, basically an honorarium, but I’d always wanted to do books,” Bucher says. “If I’d been at a bigger company, someone would have figured out that it brought in $5 an hour and ate up 500 hours of work; they would have rejected the project or put sever time limitations on it.” But Bucher’s “pet project” received kudos from the Art Directors Club, AIGA 365, British D&AD and The One Show.
Money Changes Everything
Bucher runs his business the same way by keeping his overhead low, which has caused him to feel nearly no effects from the downturned economy. He suggests getting the equipment you need when you need it and not waiting for upgrades. But buy only what you can afford. “A slow computer will slow you down, but not as much as huge, crushing debt will,” he says.
Bucher’s low expenses not only ease the pressure to get gigs, but they also keep him mellow. He’s happy with and proud of what he does. “I’m into greed control. My happiness isn’t tied to a big paycheck; it’s tied to doing the best work I can possibly do. It’s more about doing things that I think are meaningful and have integrity.” The poorer you are when you decide to go solo, he says, the happier you’ll be.
His office, however is equipped with the necessities. Without a DSL line, computer and FedEx, 344 couldn’t exist. And technology allows him to work more efficiently with clients throughout the U.S. and in his native Germany. 344 can function like a bigger firm, without the long chain of command and layers of approval.
Bucher believes in the driving energy that comes with doing what you love. Maybe leaving his position as art director at Wieden + Kennedy wasn’t the most financially responsible decision, but good things happened when he took that risk. He found both inspiring people and amazing opportunities. “It’s weird. I see people who try to be responsible by staying at a job and getting regular paychecks, but I think your biggest responsibility is to your artistic self and to be happy. If you do what you love, then it will work out.”
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