1. Perfect your elevator pitch. While the “elevator pitch” may seem like a cheesy, old-fashioned term, it is an important way to tell people what you do. Can you paint a picture of the work you do (with words) in a few minutes? You never know who you’ll meet and if they or someone they know needs your creative skills. So think about and practice what you might say to complete strangers about your creative work.
2. Maintain an on-line portfolio. Your website will be your #1 marketing tool. It’s out there making connections with people near and far and working around the clock, even while you sleep. Use this work horse to it’s full potential by keeping it up-to-date with your recent projects.
3. Be proactive! Approach people and clients you’d love to work with. Especially in the beginning of a freelance career, clients won’t just come a-knockin’ at your door. In addition to telling your friends, family, and past co-workers that you’re pursuing freelance work, feel free to do the same with people and companies whose aesthetic matches yours. Simply email or mail them a short and genuine note about what you do and how you’d love to work with them in the future should they have the need for someone with your expertise. Be sure to include images of your work that best fits their aesthetic and the type of work you do.
4. Stay in touch with your mailing list. Create, maintain, and keep reaching out to your mailing list. If you don’t already have a link to a mailing list on your website, add one. It’s a great way for people to know what’s going on with you and projects you are working on. They may not need your products or services now, but if you keep updating them, they’re sure to remember you down the road when they are ready for your work. (Note: Do not add people to your mailing list unless they have signed up on their own or if you have asked their permission to be added.)
5. Reach out to press, both print and on-line. It’s not always about getting into every magazine or blog. You should really find one that best fits you. Do your research and get an idea of the things they post/write about and aesthetic they’re interested in. Create a list and start contacting them. In your correspondence, make sure you include good photographs or images of your work.
6. Keep a blog. A blog can be a great way to introduce people to your work and aesthetic, as well as give insight into your thought or creative process. It can be an effective way to get feedback on your work, attract fans, and keep people returning to you often (even daily). Whether you create a blog with original content to attracts readers or simply create one to keep track of your ideas or work–try to update your blog at least one a week, if not daily. Even if you update once a week on Wednesdays, readers will know that they can come back to find something new that day every week.
7. Engage in social networking. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are also other effective ways to stay in touch with your clients and admirers of your work. Use the tools that you enjoy most and can commit too. People always ask: what should I tweet about or post on my fan page? Think about what you like when you read other’s you follow. Do you like it when they mix in bits of their personal life? Do you like seeing little snippets they come across in their travels? Since these tools share bits of information and less content than a blog post, most people will follow you on Twitter or Facebook to get glimpses into your business, your life, and what you do in your spare time.
8. Make genuine connections with people. As a freelancer, the relationships you make can often determine how successful you become. Even though many opportunities happen through word of mouth and through the connections you make, it doesn’t mean you should approach everyone with a salesperson mentality. Focus on building real and genuine relationships with people. The best way to network and make friends, whether real or virtual, is to also take an interest in what they do.
An excerpt from Creative, Inc.: The Ultimate Guide to Running a Successful Freelance Business
1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
2. Forget about good.Good is a known quantity.
Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
6. Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study.
A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift.
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader.
Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas.
Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving.
The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down.
Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
14. Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions.
Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16. Collaborate.
The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ____________________.
Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late.
Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor.
Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks.
Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself.
If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
22. Make your own tools.
Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
23. Stand on someone’s shoulders.
You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software.
The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don’t clean your desk.
You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
26. Don’t enter awards competitions.
Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages.
Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”
28. Make new words.
Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
29. Think with your mind.
Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty.
Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’
31. Don’t borrow money.
Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
32. Listen carefully.
Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips.
The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster.
This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate.
Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat.
When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. Explore the other edge.
Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40. Avoid fields.
Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh.
People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
42. Remember.
Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people.
Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.
article via, Anne Nahm
photo via, DharmaLemon
“A man modeled a Burberry umbrella in Vogue that costs about $200. Some 456 million Indians live on less than $1.25 a day.”
Vogue’s Fashion Photos Spark Debate in India - NY Times (via)
I know what you’re thinking — the Geekologie writer has lost it and is posting fuzzy pictures of a scrambled skin-flick on Cinemax. Well, you’re wrong. What you’re actually seeing is a picture of two million plastic beverage bottles — the amount used in the United States every five minutes. It’s a piece in an exhibit entitled Running The Numbers, by artist Christ Jordan. That particular piece is actually 60” x 120”, and there is a partial zoom and close-up after the jump, along with two others - plastic bags and cell phones. Check them out, and definitely hit the link to his gallery for a whole bunch more. They’re definitely all worth seeing. And while you may argue with the statistics Chris used, I think we can agree that it would be fun as hell to dive into all those plastic bottles.
Kidding, these pictures are disturbing. If you need me I’ll be hiding in the closet weeping into my blanky for the rest of the day.
artist:chrisjordan
article: geekologie
