Where and How to Secure Designer Freelance Jobs

One of the things that attracts people to design as a career is the possibility of freelancing as a career. Being your own boss (although you remain answerable to your clients, of course) is highly attractive, as is the possibility of being able to do things like setting your own hours and very frequently not having to report khaki-clad to an office when you’d rather work from home in your pajamas and robe. It sounds awfully attractive, but, like most things in this life, it comes with its drawbacks.

The biggest of these, is that, as a freelancer, you’re constantly going to be in search of work (and paying for your own medical insurance.) How do you find work, you may wonder? The following article will give you some good places to get started, both as a steady freelancer who wants to make a living by working independently, as someone looking for a side gig to bring in some extra money, or even as someone who’s trying to start a design career and needs experience in order to be hired for a “regular” job as a staff designer.

Where to Start

Looking for freelance work has a great deal in common with looking for any other kind of job. You’re still going to need a resume, you’re still going to be writing cover letters, and you’re still going to be shooting applications (or, in freelance parlance, proposals) off into the frozen Stygian emptiness of cyberspace, often with nary a rejection letter to show for your efforts. You are still asking for work, after all.

Where the process begins to differ is that you’ll often find yourself submitting proposals for one specific job, and that will include setting a price that’s competitive with what the market will bear. You’re also going to be less concerned with making yourself sound like a good corporate fit, since you’re not asking to join the company, just to do a job. You’re going to have to learn to market yourself and you’re going to have to hustle for work, although that, while it may not come naturally to some people, does get easier with practice.

There are many, many sites out there in the Stygian emptiness of cyberspace that offer freelancers in all fields the chance to find work. Here are a few well-tried avenues you can try as you seek to become that thing so many people want to be, your own boss.

Indeed and LinkedIn

These two platforms, well-trodden by millions of job seekers, also offer freelance opportunities. Simply type in “freelance” along with the type of designer you are, and you should be confronted with an assortment of more-or-less suitable openings. The application process for freelance work on Indeed and LinkedIn is pretty much exactly the same as that for full-time work, which means submitting a resume, cover letter and link to your portfolio. The rules for tailoring these materials to the job in question don’t change for freelancers, with the exception that your cover letter should be slanted to convince the reader that you can do the job, rather than to convince the Hiring Director that you’re the optimal fit for the company as well as the role. There’s freelance work to be found on both platforms, but neither Indeed nor LinkedIn is a basket into which you should put all your self-marketing eggs.

Upwork

Upwork is one of the leading sites for freelancers of all makes. The site lays claim to 10,000 jobs posted daily, which is a lot, although the competition for them can get rather fierce. You’re once again going to find yourself filling out a profile, but the way the site works is that you research available jobs, find the ones that you think might suit you, type out a fairly detailed proposal, and cross your fingers. A defect built into the Upwork system is that you need to pay in “connects” for every proposal you file. Although you get ten free connects a month, and the cost for additional connects seems nominal ($1.50 for ten), that can add up, as multiple connects are required for each proposal. A further downside of Upwork is that the platform takes quite a big bite out of beginners’ profits (their fee runs to 20% for newcomers.)

Upwork isn’t alone in offering a “freemium” model. Their Freelancer Plus paid plan includes 80 connects a month, and includes other features such as the ability to hide how much you’ve made to date on the platform, which is otherwise (rather hatefully) displayed. It also includes such perks as the ability to see how much others are bidding on the jobs for which you’re submitting proposals and the possibility of creating a custom URL. The features sound good (although it’s annoying that they basically unlock features that got locked up by the platform in order to sell access to them), but the price is considerable: $14.99 per month, without the usual free trial period. If you want to commit a lot of your eggs to the Upwork basket (and people are making solid livings from the platform), the investment might be worth it. On the other hand, it may not be the best way to invest your premium job-search tier money.

Fiverr

Unlike Upwork, which has freelancers bidding for jobs posted by employers, Fiverr works the other way around. Freelancers are “sellers”, people in need of their services are “buyers”, and the former package their services into “gigs” that they then offer up to the latter. Someone looking for a freelance service, therefore, turns to Fiverr, types in (for example) graphic design, and a host of options will show up on their screen. They then sift through the options and hire the person they want. There are no fees involved in posting your gig on Fiverr, although the company takes a flat 20% of your fee as a commission. Prices charged by sellers on Fiverr begin at $5.00 (whence the name of the platform) although they can (theoretically at least) go as high as $995. People have done very well with Fiverr, which offers a great deal of visibility for no investment at all; any freelancer should definitely have a presence on the platform. 

99designs

Owned by Vista (the people behind Vista Print, from whom you may well have ordered your first business cards), 99designs is similar to Fiverr in that it allows buyers to find sellers, rather than vice versa ( as at Upwork.) The platform maintains (and, in its own words, curates) a community of designers, who must submit an application and be approved in order to participate in 99designs’ activities. There are two ways of finding work through the platform: customers with a design project in mind can either have 99designs match them with a designer (obviously this is going to favor those with more experience on the platform) or open their brief up as a competition to which anyone in the community can submit an entry. The customer gets to choose the winner, and can then continue to work with the designer on other projects as they desire. Be aware going in that 99designs’ own fees are substantial and, especially when you’re what they term an entry-level designer, will eat up a substantial part of your earnings.

Behance and Dribbble

Just as these two are top sites for finding permanent design jobs, so are they useful for freelancers seeking independent work. Both are considered portfolio sites, but the goal of any online portfolio is employment. To that end, both sites maintain highly popular job boards. Behance, a creation of the nice folks at Adobe, divides its offerings up with freelance and full-time sections maintained separately. They also have a “creatives for hire” tab which allows potential clients to find you. Best of all, it’s all free and open to anyone.

Dribbble makes things a little more complicated. In addition to needing to be brought onto the platform from an established user or having your portfolio vetted for acceptance into the Dribbble community, access to the freelance job board is also going to require that you sign up for their Pro Business tier, which includes a number of other interesting features, including the chance to create a profile video that allows you to introduce yourself to your prospective clients. Fortunately, the price of the package isn’t steep at all, even by starving aspiring freelancer standards: you can get access to the freelance job boards for $5.00 a month.

How Do I Start a Freelance Career in Design?

Freelancing isn’t for everyone. Some people would (very understandably) like the assurance of a regular paycheck, and not like the need to hustle for work and develop a freelance career, but, for others, it’s an attractive lifestyle, the uncertainties balanced by the relative freedom it affords. People who haven’t worked as freelancers might wonder how to get started on the odyssey of being your own boss, and the only real answer to that question is to get out there and start hustling. That means exploring the job sources mentioned in this article and keeping an eye open for any and all opportunities that might present themselves. They do; the trick is to learn how to detect them.

That’s all going to be useless, of course, if you don’t possess the requisite hard skills, as design requires not just the ability to imagine something in your head, but possessing the means to turn them into shareable drawings and computer renderings. Noble Desktop offers a number of different design certificate programs that will get you the specialized computer knowledge you need to be a viable professional designer. These include (among others) a Digital Design Certificate, a UI Design Certificate, and a Web Design Certificate, all of which will prepare you for a professional design career, freelance or otherwise. In addition to that, these certificate programs include ample career support and 1:1 mentoring sessions with experienced designers who can share their knowledge with students as to how to get started on the freelance design path.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop 

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.