Tips To Grow Your Income
I’ll be explaining my journey briefly on how I made almost 15 thousand dollars in 6 months as a graphic design freelancer before I fully started on YouTube, my thoughts and recommendations, and things that you should look out for when getting started.
- Learning
- Getting work started
- Understanding Clients
- Understand Money
- Market Yourself
- Conclusion
This article will have a ton of value and I hope someone gets something from this article. Either you’re just starting as a graphic designer or you’re already even experienced and would like to pick up a thing or two from this article.
1. Learning
The first point. Learning! Learning One thing you should know is that as a beginner, you can never really know exactly how to do something unless you learn how to do it or practice it. To set it in sweeter words, "your understanding of your creativity is defined by your skill". You have wild imaginations and in your head, there are so many amazing ideas but you just don’t know exactly how to put them on paper or in photoshop.
So now for you to express this creativity, you have to learn that skill and practice it and become more and more competent…by doing it… really every day. On an important note, no one was born a designer or with that ability, you can LEARN ANYTHING. Now if you haven’t you can maybe get a pen and write some things down, one way I started and this isn’t a hard and fast rule.
I started watching tutorials on websites like Lynda.com, now called
- Linkedin learning,
- Udemy,
- Skillshare,
- YouTube,
Yes, tons of free and valuable information on YouTube.
The first tutorial I’ll recommend for any graphic designer is Ina Saltz’s Tutorial on Typography. Apart from the fact that she’s a professor of Typography, and she has put more than 35 years in, This course was super helpful for me especially because the area of graphic design I specialized in was more information-based than art-based. Web Design that is.
So I had to present written information a lot, I designed websites, magazines, flyers, posters, and a lot of useful projects that had a lot of typography which, let’s face it, many graphic design projects that would be used to sell products would require typography, essentially putting words on art or typing something that sells so this is the most crucial thing I think every designer should know.
I’ve even seen very artsy designers that can draw and create image concepts well but don’t know how to present or order text on a page and that’s just wrong, I’ve seen many many high profile designs with wrong use of typography and, trust me the rules are there to be broken but there are terrible typographic designs.
This tutorial and her other tutorials in her series would sincerely help boost your creativity in that aspect. There are other tutorials I watched as well,
- Foundations of Color,
- Composition,
- Contrast and Scale,
All in different categories on Lynda.com or Linkedin Learning and these are the things I studied during my journey. Of course, not everyone can pay N6,800 or $14 for a 1-month subscription, a platform that has worked for me without fail is YouTube. There are two main things you’ll almost always do when you’re on your design journey,
- Major Thing
I believe not every designer can pretend to know everything so one thing you will and should be doing is heading on to Google and searching for solutions, like How to create noisy drop shadows and special effects that and one point note is that Google is the biggest search engine,
YouTube is the second largest search engine and YouTube is controlled by Google. Some of the results you see on Google will lead to video tutorials and creators on this website can teach you for free.
- Major Thing
Another thing to note though is that, you should have fun with the process and try to drop any assumptions you have before learning and see how you can absorb as much as you can. At this stage in my design career, I hadn’t made so much when I was learning but I genuinely loved what I was getting at and so far I had zero dollars to show for it.
2. Getting Work Started
As a graphic designer when you’re first starting, if you’re not directly employed you need to do some work for as many people as you can to grow your income or work on as many projects as you can and because the design is very subjective, you have to live with the fact that well you might not be good enough but that’s okay.
If you can and I think you should, when you’re starting, you’ll want to make a bunch of free designs or lower-paid projects you can learn from but you have to make sure it’s meeting the wants of the gracious party aka the client. Don’t take any feedback personally, you have to accept that you’re just starting.
At this phase for me, I was an intern in my 2nd year in university as an undergrad. I did my internships in 2 companies and I didn’t get paid a ton of money but I learned a lot. I also did designs for my university department during events and presentations, most times for free and I did for some of my friends who wanted to organize events, conferences, parties, and the likes, those were also paid.
In all that processes, I listened clearly to what was being said and required, deciphered the brief, and got to work. Always understand the brief and ask as many questions as possible. It now got to time for me to freelance and this is where things started to change for me. I was able to start working for around $500 where I was making a book design for like $250 to $400, sometimes even 500 dollars.
I did that consistently on sites like,
- Fiverr
- Upwork
- 99Designs
- Crowdspring
I even got to one of the highest levels a designer could get. Within this time, something I figured out was that the tools you use now are very important. I already touched on the fact that learning was super crucial but now, I needed to have the right tools,
The Right Tools
This meant a fast computer, a fast mouse with multiple buttons, for some people, a stylus, and a wide enough screen. This would help you become more efficient and make you a more reliable designer. Being a reliable designer meant I responded to the clients I was designing for almost immediately, regardless of the time.
It meant I didn’t copy any other person’s design work and even when you’re taking inspiration, you’re crafting something truly unique and done by you. Don’t copy as that would get you in trouble faster than you think.
3. Understanding Clients
Understanding Clients Speaking of reliability, which is a major way your income can and will grow, make sure you understand the clients and what the clients want. Ensure that when you give your plans, you completely clarify the plans, clarify why you added a button, why something was uncommon with regards to your plan what you did right and what you did differently.
I found that this made the changes to my work much less, it made the client trust my judgment more and it overall made my workflow smoother. Understanding your clients, involve
- Studying their brand wholly
- Understanding the assets
- The colors of the brand, and
- The meaning of the brand
Make certain you know what they need to achieve with a specific design or project and see how this design you’re tasked to design is going to solve a problem for them. Research is very important at this point and the last thing you want is to be the designer that delivers something other than what they require.
You won’t get far if you speed the process therefore take your time to understand every single appearance before putting the mouse on the pad or taking your stylus. Now, with regards to the money-making tips at this point, try to ask your clients if there’s any other thing you can create to help.
Show interest in future jobs
I know this might sound cliche but for real, JUST ASK… if you’re tasked with designing a web page, for instance, you can ask him if he wants a mobile version designed as well. If he asks for an app design, you can ask if he has his developers and you can partner with maybe a friend of yours who can develop and you can share a commission.
Asking for more work and also asking that the client recommends you can help you get far. I know because recommendations have helped me get from $500 a month to 1,000 dollars a month to make that much per every single project and it just mattered how many projects I wanted to work on and for how long.
I even was able to retain some clients all over the world for quite a while and I did a bunch of designs for them. It was at this point we were able to get to almost $15,000 in 6 months, the early funding I got to start this channel mostly came from my graphic design work and it has helped me create so much value relatively in a short while.
Understand Money One thing any designer should note and can help them grow their income is also to understand how to be wise about money.
4. Understand Money
Two of the questions people have asked me are how much to charge or how do you charge and what platforms did I use.
How do you charge the client?
With thoughts on how much you should charge as a freelancer, you can start small but always give importance, and then on the next project you can test a higher amount, when a higher amount, when a higher amount. Add more assistance you’re delivering and require for it. This is exactly what I did.
I started with 5,000 per design, went up to 500 dollars per design online, tested $1,000, tested $2,000, 2500 you get the idea. With concerns to the platforms, most freelancing platforms require a percentage of how much you sell your client, that’s how they make money.
They give you exposure to clients and you then get paid. After a while, you might not need to use the platform and would be working independently, this way you’re able to charge properly. One platform I used was Payoneer which is also in partnership with many of the aforementioned platforms. One thing I like about Payoneer is that now.
I think it’s a recent update but now you can receive your money in dollars into your domiciliary account, although for a small fee. However, it can be annoying if, for instance, you charge like 3,000 dollars and the platform takes 30% which leaves you with $2,100, that can be a huge loss, and not only that when it gets to Payoneer, you’ll pay a small fee for withdrawing that much so yeah, you’ve almost lost $1,000.
Receiving Payments
One way I started charging was with bitcoin and an app I highly recommend, which is one of the biggest if not the biggest cryptocurrency trading app is Binance. It’s a global cryptocurrency exchange and I like that they even let me withdraw directly in my local currency, which is even faster and more secure if you will.
So if your client can pay a certain amount, all you need to do is send them your wallet address or the public key, which is like your account number. You can be sure you’ll get that exact amount and in minutes. Most of these platforms have a 48-hour payment window and it can go as high as 72 hours.
I’ve been using their service for quite a while now this year, and their interface is fun and straightforward in all the crypto-ness and if you want to know how to trade bitcoin especially after the CBN ban.
5. Market Yourself
Finally, one way to grow your income as a designer is pushing your designs out there, market yourself, don’t be shy because if you are, you’re gonna be broke, so let's do a quick recap, firstly, you’ve learned design, the first point I made,
- LEARN
- Getting Started
- Understand what the client wants
- Understand you finances
- Market Yourself
Now, you’ve been able to start working for clients. You understand the brief and their brand, you understand your finances, and now is where you want to grow your business and market what you have to offer. A very good way is to join portfolio and showcase websites like Behance which is a very dope place to post your designs and dribble.
Not only are these websites super dope for inspiration, but I also browse it almost every day for design inspiration, you can post there and you never know, a client might prefer your work and hit you up to hire you. Dribbble is an invite-only platform that has a way of letting people know you’re available for work.
You can also leverage your social media feed like Instagram and Twitter to put valuable design content and your work to build sort of a portfolio, that way you’re getting way to a larger audience also from your circle.
Conclusion
Those are most of the things I’ve learned over the years that have helped me grow my income as a designer. Now I don’t design anymore or publicly at least, I’ve deleted many of my profiles to focus on YouTube but I’ll say that these tips are still as valuable.