Full Time vs. Freelance

At the last company I worked for, I met Courtney Cochran, who taught me more about being a creative professional than anyone else I've ever met. One of the many things she taught me was about the idea of internal and external clients. As a graphic designer, she viewed her work for the company in two ways. There was some work, of course, that was for external clients, i.e. the clients of our company. For them she would design and format training materials and workbooks-- the materials that our whole department worked together to create each month. There was also work for internal clients, i.e. our supervisors and coworkers. Marketing brochures, web graphics, PowerPoint presentations, anything that had final approval from our supervisor rather than an outside entity was, in Courtney's view, for an internal client. What made this view point interesting for me was how it revealed Courtney's strong sense of self, even when she was part of a team. She was a designer, and she made things for other people. Even within the company, she viewed the relationships surrounding her work exactly as she did in her freelancing days.

After meeting with a potential client yesterday, it occurred to me that there is another way to view the role of companies in a creative professional's work life. A company is, in one sense, a service that brings clients together with a variety of professionals to meet certain business needs. As a freelancer, I find my own clients, or they find me. It's up to me to network and put out feelers and respond to job descriptions. At a company, the businesses find their own clients, often clients with an common need like "people who buy asphalt plants" or "auto sales professionals." They also find their own professionals, makers, and doers to meet the needs of those clients. The company is, from a certain view, a middle man there to connect those who provide a variety of services to those who need to accomplish something in particular, like make build better roads or sell more cars.

There are pros and cons to both, of course. Not everyone has a head for business or a flair for entrepreneurship. Just because you arrange the most smashing bouquets of flowers doesn't necessarily mean you have the chops to run your own florist shop. How many times have I heard a small business owner bemoan the fact that he or she wanted to be the boss, and now has no time left for the thing they originally had a yen for? Quite a few. Also, if everything in the world were done on a freelance basis, there would be chaos. Companies exist to set standards, streamline production, and mandate efficient processes. They are there to help work get done quickly and as well as possible by organizing people and the way their services all add up to a happy client. 

The best companies succeed because they are better at business than anyone else, at predicting the needs of their customers, and finding a way to give them what they want by having the best employees, the best means of getting those employees to work together, the best equipment, the right location, the most functional facilities, etc. etc. The worst companies have poorly trained staff, or employees who are unhappy, stressed out, and can't communicate with their colleagues. At a dysfunctional company, power struggles, politics,  or interpersonal problems like sexual harassment interfere with creating effective production processes. Poorly designed equipment or a bad location can make a business ineffective. Companies run by executives promoted because of their talent in the trenches, despite having absolutely no management or people skills and zero business sense aren't great companies, because they are failing at the one mandate a company really has-- to be effective at the business side of things so all the employees can succeed at their individual professions.

When you freelance, you don't just get to write or design, or install electrical wiring, or what have you, all day. Your taxes get real complicated. You have to develop your own brand, find your own clients, and manage your own time. You don't have the safety net of other people creating rules, bringing you tasks, and matching your 401K contribution. Whether or not you succeed at freelancing depends on if you excel with added structure, within certain rules, or if you need to play a little faster and looser. In this case, business is like poetry. There are some poets who write their best work free verse, letting the images and metaphors flow and the language riot on the page. There are others who create masterpieces by working within the frame of a sonnet, or sestina, or haiku, their creativity unleashed by a set process.

Season of Change

I've been wearing different hats all spring, trying new kinds of writing, and getting tossed into a lot of other projects. That's meant some radio silence here on my professional website. When you are flying by the seat of your pants, to borrow a great old cliche, there's just not much time to stop, contemplate, and blog.

At Woople I was diverted from all but the most routine writing projects when the graphic designer was offered a job at another company, and I took over the considerable amount of layout and design work she had done. It was a fast-paced crash course in Adobe Creative Suite, which I hadn't really used since high school and college. Back then, Adobe products were mostly a fun way to toy around with my amateur art projects and I used them to do the final formatting on comics I was writing and drawing. In college I did a little graphic design to advertise events around campus or for the improve troupe I was briefly involved with, but not much else. At Astec, I was using a very old version of Adobe Indesign but never had to do very much with it, so I never got a feel for its full capabilities.

The graphic designer I temporarily replaced set the bar very high. She is a woman of considerable insight and talent, who brought an intense amount of visual literacy to even the most mundane, rote project. I wanted the changing of the guards to be as seamless as possible, and scoured tutorials to figure out how she had put together newsletters, educational materials, and ads for print publication. I learned about bleeds, clipping masks, text wraps, and more. It was the most fun I've had in a long time-- I love learning new things and having a huge challenge every day.

Speaking of huge challenges, I also spent two weeks in China this May. I was invited along as an alumni chaperon on a trip for some of UTC's Honors Program students. We trekked through Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, and Beijing and had a marvelous time eating unfamiliar food, taking on the subway, and seeing how far we could get knowing barely any Chinese. I climbed the Great Wall, watched a guy eat a live scorpion at a tourist market, sampled Peking duck, found hundreds of new recipes I want to try, and grappled with some of the most intense questions and philosophic quandaries travel has ever dredged up for me. As a writer it was invaluable to get outside my element and see something new. As a social media addict, both professionally and personally, it was a challenge going without any social media access for two weeks.  I wrote long letters home about what I saw, and drew comics about the things that would take too long to explain in words.

When I returned, it was time for more change, and Woople and I parted ways. I am grateful for the time I spent working there. I met some amazing people who continue to teach and encourage me, and who made me a stronger thinker, writer, professional, and human being than I was the year before. I'm also really excited for a change of pace. That's the thing about creative professionals-- too much repetition can make us antsy. I'm glad to have some time to explore other projects and get to my personal list of backburner items, like changing the look of this website, and doing more writing in the vein of pop culture criticism. It's taking some getting used to going without the security of full time work, and I hope to find some soon at a company  that needs a smart, creative thinker with big ideas, and where I can feel I've made the world a better place every day. In the mean time, I'm having a blast giving my freelance clients some extra attention and taking some time to learn new skills.