A chicken and egg situation?

Almost a year into my life as a freelancer, I’ve hit some tough times.

I don’t mean financially, mind you. A lot of companies are still scared to hire people full-time, and my clients seem to be quite happy with my work and asking me for repeat projects. So I have plenty to do.

The trouble, for me, is in what I do.

Design has always been a multi-disciplinary affair, but today the basic skills and processes of design are applied to ever more aspects of society and business. For design firms, this is wonderful. Some become highly focused specialists, becoming the go-to-guys and girls for very specific (parts of) projects, others grow themselves into all-in-one shops, thriving on the expansion of design into branding, strategy, service design and other directions. Their size and composition means they can confidently offer an integrated approach to their clients.

I am a big fan of this view of design being universally applicable, and strongly believe that designers can help companies and organisations streamline their activities, create holistic experiences and generally do better things.

But I’m just one guy.

I’m confident I have the right basic skillset to be a one-stop-shop all by myself, but obviously I can only serve smaller clients this way. I don’t mind this at all, but convincing small shops to let you stick your nose into how they do their business is something of a challenge, to put it mildly.

As a consequence, I now do very diverse projects I get asked for through people I’ve worked with in the past. These are fun projects, and it’s a nice complement that they seek me out to work with. But I’m not building a coherent body of work to make that pitch any easier…

Luckily, at least the rent gets paid while I figure this one out ;).