Peter Micklewright - Freelance Graphic Designer

Out of all the guest lectures I think this is one of my favourite ones because I absolutely love Graphic Design. To have a freelance Graphic Designer come in to talk to us is absolutely amazing. I have always wanted to know what its like to be a freelance Graphic designer. I have wondered whether it is better to become a freelance designer or to work with a company. But I think I would wan to start off by working in a company first then maybe develop to be become a freelance designer. 

Peter Micklewright is the name of the freelance Graphic Designer that came in to give us the lecture and I haven't taken down so much notes in one lecture before. Micklewright listed a few pros and cons of being a freelance Graphic Designer which are:

Pros

• Independent with all the profits
• Its easier to get business running
• You decide when you want to work
• You choose when you work and when you go on holiday
• You can claim back a percentage of your expenses and overheads against your annual income

Cons

• You are the alpha and omega
• You are responsible for costings and quoting
• You will be responsible for your debts
• When you don't work, you don't get paid

Being a freelance Graphic Designer you have to be properly organised to be able to keep your business going. Making sure that your book keeping is up to date and not getting yourself into debt. Micklewright was also saying that you need to have drive and determination, a dynamic portfolio and you need to be able to focus. At the moment I am building my portfolio further by designing logos and flyers for friends for their clothing lines or campaigns that they are organising. So I would say that I do have the drive to build my business and I will have an ongoing dynamic portfolio if I keep continuing to design for people and design in my free time.

In addition, Micklewright talked about how he works out his hourly rate. This is one of the things that I never really knew how people worked that out. He said that we are to calculate how much money is leaving our account every month, so that will include rent, bills, grocery shopping, even little things like Amazon Prime monthly payments. When I calculated how much I was spending every month, I had the biggest shock of my life. From that total amount, you then go on to find out your expenditure over a quarterly, bi-annually and annually period of time. You then add those three amounts and multiply by 12, divide by 10 and divide by 160 hours. However the hours may vary depending on how many hours you work.

In conclusion, Micklewright had concluded with is a question that has stuck with me which is, "What experience do you need for the job and how unique is your skills set?" This is a veery important question I need to think about are my skills unique enough for me to get the type of job I want? It all comes down to how I promote myself.

Pitch 3 - Self Reflection

For this pitch I was quite nervous to do it because as a group we had to present our ideas without any notes. We had to memorise what we were going to say. Standing in front of people and presenting was something that I always had a problem with. When I was in year 11 I told myself that I need to overcome this fear because I would have to present some time in my life as I grew older and I was right. By thinking back to this time in my life and practicing presenting in front of people, it built up my confidence and I was able to present in front of my peers. 

Dan Jenkins - Nimble Ape

In my post about Soapbox, I was not very keen about doing an internship with a website designing company or anything to do with coding as I was not very good at it and I had only just started learning about it. But Dan Jenkins had slightly changed my mind about all of it. It had made me change the way I did things. He mentioned that when you are coding, its not all the time that you will be able to know how to code a certain thing so just Google it but when you do, make sure you understand. I took this very seriously as I am a beginner at coding and for one of my modules named Digital Portfolio, I had to create a website which will be my portfolio just by coding. As I was looking all over the internet on how to do certain things I took the time to sit down and understand exactly what it was doing. It made it easier, so much easier. I started helping others on how to do things which I'm very proud of. Just doing one simple thing can make a huge difference. I would like to thank Dan Jenkins for that.

Another thing is Jenkins was able to understand exactly how we felt as he was also a student at University of Kent studying Multimedia and Design. So he was one of us. One thing he did say that everyone was thinking including myself, was he didn't know what he wanted to do at all. This calmed me because knowing that someone who was once in my shoes, didn't know what he wanted to do at all and ended up becoming very successful and owning his own company called Nimble Ape. But I just have to put the work in. Personally, I thought I was supposed to know exactly what I wanted to do by this time. But looking at him now, having become very successful, I guess if I truly believe in myself I can be like him but I need to be prepared for the work.

Pitch 1 Evaluation

On Tuesday 13th of October Mariana, Yvienne, Marie and myself presented an new idea for a new game show that will be shown during the day on channel 4 to Jane Milton. The idea we had was in the game show there will be 4 contestants and they have to test their knowledge by answering general questions whilst attempting to win £10,000 on the colour wheel. I thought the idea of the game we had was good but I hadn't explained it to the class very well. So they found it hard to understand what the concept of the game was. We needed a bit more detail in it and not to make so vague. However we were praised for actually researching channel 4 on what type of shows they show during the day and who the audience are. By doing this, it helped us to understand who our target audience was going to be and what our show was going to be about.

Soap Box

Given the opportunity to have a guest lecturer from the company Soapbox was interesting. Soapbox is a designing company that do, Publication Design, Infographics, Branding, Editorial, Animation, and Web Design. Even though this company does a range of different things within the Creative Industry but the only sector I am completely interested in is Publication Design because this is where my strengths lie. However, I wouldn't mind working in the Infographics or Branding sector also. Within the Publication Design section of the company they produce 1,000 pieces in a year just by using templates they have created themselves and used previously. 

After this lecture, I have started thinking about what I would like to do for an intern job but first I had to ask myself, what are my actual strengths and weaknesses? Even though Soapbox mentioned that the student that wants to work with then as an intern, they should have passion with willingness to learn. But am I passionate and am I willing to learn?