London Freelancing
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- creativedan
Hello all, I'm in the process of readying myself to join the London freelance game! I'm a print/digital designer with 8 years experience.
Anybody out there and any good / bad experiences of freelance agencies? Any i should avoid like the plague. Any tips, tricks, help and advice would be much appreciated!
Thanks all!
- Dancer0
#1 Get a portfolio online...
- < says 'he' with a holding pageDancer
- haha, holding/losing work pageHombre_Lobo
- Yup. I am loosing sooo much work I have nothing to doDancer
- I dealth with GS and they were ok, nothing special and i think major Players are useless cuntsgrafisk
- How long have you had that holding page up for now?Chimp
- over a year now
its been there since he sent out his xmas promo the xmas before lastWeLoveNoise
- flashbender0
get yourself a copy of designweek if you are looking for an agency to rep you, there are good, reliable recruitment agencies listed in the back.
or have a look at the advertisers on their jobs listing:
http://jobs.designweek.co.uk/
- creativedan0
Thanks for that!
- creativedan0
Anybody and experience of Gabriele Skelton or major players?
- Major Players are probably the best in London. GS are ok.imadesigner
- Hombre_Lobo0
Dancer, your surname is Dance, wtf thats awesome.
"Call me Mr Dance!" Ladies swoon!
Your lucky its awesome, it cancels out the minus points on the creative side for your forum alias ;)
- imadesigner0
Major Players and Cogs are the best recruitment agencies. e-com are also good, but quite disorganised.
- Major Players currently have 0 designer contracts on their site.zr
- grafisk0
Major Players i don't rate at all
Cogs are brilliant
eCom are very good also - JimP is a good guy to speak too
Source are very pro-active, Marc there is coolIve been freelancing since the begging of the year and been to some great agencies, get yourself setup with an Umbrella Co. like Parasol for easy billing, makes life much much easier, then all you do is get paid, with tax etc all sorted, nice.
Having your own laptop, ideally MBP 15" + will sort you out a lot as you tend to get given crap machines with all sorts of shite old app, or even worse get lumped on a PC! SAve yourself much anguish and have your setup there so you can focus on work and not fixing someone else's mac!
- creativedan0
Thanks for the advice peeps. Fantastic stuff!
- crayz0
Great stuff. I'm a recent grad and I have some meetings next week with some agencies. whats puzzling me when I'm looking at job posts on these sites is terms like "integrated agencies" Dose this mean. dose the whole lot i.e print / digital etc. . or dose it mean integrated into a brand like an internal design potions?
- honest0
You should also consider contacting companies directly. You'd be surprised at how receptive creative directors can be if you knock on the door with a good introduction.
- Chimp0
I get quite a bit of work through Mac People.
Most of the time you have to be quite persistent with recruitment agencies.
- neue75_bold0
http://www.design jobs board.com/
- HomeCreative0
It's easier to contact the agency you want to work for direct. Not only do recruitment agencies charge like wounded rhino's, your pretty tied into them once they place you at a certain place?
- thebottlerocket0
^
That's not true at all, unless you sign some exclusivity contract which would amount to a restraint of trade.The main contractual obligation in relation to exclusivity is between the agency and the company they place you at. They try to make it impossible for companies to engage the freelancer directly before a certain expiration period, usually 6 months.
However, there is nothing prohibiting you approaching clients directly, even if you were initially placed there by an agency, even whilst you are still working there. The key is you need to do the approaching. Obviously this throws up all sorts of issues and the recruitment agency might kick up a stink, but the design agency may well do it if they feel they're not getting value for money and they really value your services.
In all my 10 years of freelancing I have never once worked for a company directly until a lot of water has passed under the bridge, but that's probably due to working on large projects that take a lot of time; by the time i am available again, its usually 6 months - 1 year after I finished there.
In relations to Crayz response to what is 'integrated'...as a grad you'll hear a lot of words thrown about that don't make much sense. The thing is, you'll soon realise that they're just words a lot of the time and each agency will have its own definition of what 'integrated' means to them.
Basically, an integrated agency will be one agency that does everything within the sphere of marketing/advertising/pr here, not design, which I must stress,are two VERY separate things. By doing everything, they can control and execute a campaign across digital, print, marketing, DM, PR,etc, etc.
That's supposedly their advantage: "joined up thinking"Like I said, most agencies who use the term 'integrated' are essentially some flavour of that unholy trinity of advertising. If it was me, though, that term is a good sign to avoid that place that like the plague.
Other terms that have loose definitions depending on the company are titles like 'art director' - which can mean anything to do with position of seniority, but most likely refers to a role within an ad agency set-up.
"Copywriter" - well that has been used to describe anyone from 'content' producers (i.e. writers) to the 'non-drawing' partner to an Art director.
'Planner' - well they make convoluted strategy - still yet to work out what they fuck they contribute, apart from unintelligible diagrams of dubious logic.
And 'Account manager' - as far as I can tell, that term should be renamed 'corporate cock-smoker' as it's a far more accurate term for those value-less individuals that contribute nothing to a project.
- say what you mean mateRanger
- This is awesome. Insightful and made me laugh out loud. Heed these words young Jedibabaganush
- planner & account manager definitions: so truesinisnap
- Well said on the 'intergrated' agencies!
creativedan
- DaveO0
Never had a good experience with agencies. Everything I've got has been through knocking on doors or friends of friends of friends.
recommendation through someone is so much better