What do you find most challenging about being a creative?
I spend my life helping to guide and give the best community experience to freelance creatives, and I'm always searching for feedback!
Replies13
- In short: I would say to get a satisfying career while staying true to your own vision. Here a youtube video which I created how feedback can help to shorten this error prone process dramatically https://youtu.be/4RBaHy31ucg
- Competing with cheap, online design packages that promise an unrealistic world of opportunity and success. Canva, Squarespace, Wix etc have almost made me redudant. I all but closed my business at the end of 2020, too few clients who actually wanted on-going work to be completed and too few new clients who want to pay a daily fee when they can get a one off cheap website or design for next to nothing. It's soul destroying. 😞
- Didn’t mean to tag you Hamidah!
- @Hamidah Duffus trying to find a healthy balance between doing free/cheap work because it’s an exciting project versus needing to feed yourself
- Getting consistent work
- Pushing back on unreasonable client requests, setting healthy boundaries if you like.
- It is important to me that by freeing myself from a more corporate job I am not simply tethering myself to another banal activity. You have to be clear about what you want, evolve, listen to yourself and try not to slip into a different rut. The idea of being a creative is not merely exchanging one pointless activity for another albeit 'creative' one. The term itself does nothing to define what one does anyway. But, given the type of response you might be looking for, one of the hardest things (and this depends on your creative activity) is coming to terms with the hand-to-mouth nature of the industry - the networking and nurturing of a throughput of clients and work. By being freelance you are usually choosing to work for 'yourself'... I mean for a variety of clients that will come and go. These relationships need to be nurtured continuelly - do so with the pareto principle (80/20 rule) in mind.
- Generating new leads are always a headache
- Pricing. Full stop.
- Balancing my professional and emotional head. There's a lot of questioning: "do I bring my WHOLE self to the workplace? Warts and all?" I think creatives tend to be emotional creatures, so it's hard to know where to draw the line between life and work.
- Waiting to get paid, companies payment terms are beyond a joke!!
- Overthinking
- Connecting with clients as a new creative.
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