So I’m just putting the finishing touches right now (meaning, uploading the DVD to kunaki) on my first real professional design gig.
I got the job through VV and it was to design the cover, insert, disc face, and website for her project “Electric Aquarium,” which is this awesomely trippy ambient jellyfish video.
Check a preview here:
This was my first real well-paid professional design gig and I learned a lot from it:
- If you are good at something, make sure to charge a lot for it, because being good takes a long time. I went into this job in a sort of just rush it through, no problem, no real time involved, very little effort, sure I can do it sort of way. This didn’t happen at all. I was dealing with professional people who expected professional results, the elimination of all minor errors, the best work I could do, and a lot of attention, because they were paying me.
- Doing a good job at something takes sooooo long. I know that this is basically the same thing as the first one, but let me just re-emphasize. Wow. It takes a long time, way more than I would have ever expected, to do that last 10%. The people who came up with that cliché about how the last 10% takes 90% of the time were not kidding. I spent so much time fixing up minor errors, reuploading, re-encoding, re-emailing, and on and on and on. I thought it was going to be one draft, upload, get check. Not hardly.
- All the talent in the world is only going to get me so far. It is just hitting me more and more everyday that (I’m loving percentages this post) it’s 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. I had all these dreams about how talented I was and how the world was going to be blown away by all I was capable of. These days, I have all these dreams about OH MY GOD it’s going to be so much work to make something that is even halfway presentable!
- Get really clear with a client at the very beginning of the job. I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants on this one and just kind of took things as they came. But dealing with email after email about little things and having to hold hands through different processes was both draining and made me realize why it’s important to charge a lot! In the future, I would get a very clear understanding of what exactly the job requires and will entail, in writing, and if the client was unable to give me such, I would add that to the price.
- With all that said, experience is payment in itself. As my good friend Bashar says, the only thing SUBSTANTIVELY REAL about reality itself is your experience of it, and so the experience is its own reward. I learned so much from this project about what it means to be a professional, I got clarity on how I want to move forward in my life and my career, and I got the opportunity to work on something and forge bonds with people that could last a lifetime. Not to mention networking and referrals and before you know it, it seems like a pretty good deal indeed.
This feels like another step in my direction of growing up and being an adult and taking care of myself and handling my business, both literally and figuratively.
And after that mouthful, here’s the work I did:
Tags: electricaquarium, design, vv, jobs, professional, work, thoughts, lessons, learned, adulthood
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