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Selling your work

This is a big topic, so be prepared. If you're serious about representing yourself, this will help you get started.

You may have stumbled on this page while you're employed somewhere and you're ready to move on, or maybe you already freelance and you want to drum up more business. Maybe you're a frustrated studio owner who desperately needs to figure something out in order to get cash flow going again. Whatever your situation, this can help.

I'll provide down-to-earth outline of what you need to do to get started, as well as sales secrets not even known by most salespeople. One of my early accounts was a sales manager for Herman Miller, and top-sales person earning clost to a 7-figure income. In the 1980's I worked in trade to learn some of her tips, and I'll share those here. They are fool-proof skills, and will really help you get the extra edge you need.

How to get started... what you need and how to put it all together.

STEP ONE:

• Get you portfolio in shape
• Develop samples based on pretend accounts to show how you would design something if you worked with companies of your choice
• Locate a mentor to help with printing and other vendors to be sure you do everything correctly
  

The first step is that you'll need to get your book (portfolio) in shape. The old rule applies here: start with your 2nd strongest piece, and end with your strongest piece. What does "strong" mean? It means it's the work which will appeal the most to your potential customer. (They don't tell you that part in school.) For now, start with a basic portfolio of your best and favorite samples.

If you're new, you won't have many samples of prior work, will you? So have some fun designing, and build items for pretent projects, as if they were real. Print them out yourself, or have them printed out on a color copier or high-resolution ink jet printer.

If you use actual companies or samples, here's some advice: show a company's real corporate identity, and then show what you'd like to do if given the opportunity to change everything. This will show a good contrast between the two (the real logo and your updated one) and might even demostrate to your prospect that he/she needs their logo redesigned. It's a great "before and after" story to tell to the prospect.

However, if you lack real printing or production experience, you absolutely MUST find a mentor to help you with some of these new projects. You owe it to the client and yourself to do the actual work well. Plus, you'll learn a lot. Working with vendors like printers, billboard companies, trade show display companies, has a learning curve of its own.

Here's the list of what I found that a good portfolio should have:

• Corporate Identity - a program consisting of a logo and how it is applied to letterhead, ads, flyers, brochures, folders, trade show display, postcards, newsletter. This can also mean a stlye of photography, types of illustration used, etc. If you don't have this, make one up and print it out for samples. You should have a minimum of three corporate ID's. Need some inspiration?
• Ads - basic ad design is always good. Directory ads (like Yellow Book ads) are good to show that you can work in black and white or limited color. Unfortunately, these types of ads are generally not impressive since they tend to be functional, not artistic.So, choose the ads which use the medium the best, or are likely to be the most successful ad (for the advertiser). Sometimes the most clever design is not the most successful choice for a directory ad. You should explain this to whomever you're showing your portfolio to - explain that the ad was designed to accomplish a particular goal. If you don't have image ad concepts, create some. Get some magazines and slect a pretend client and get to work. If you need photography, take some photos of your own. Some stock companies might agree to allow you to use their low-rez photos for placement.
• Catalogs - well, not a lot of designers do catalogs because they're hard to come by. But if you had a catalog to design, what would it look like? What would the cover show? Index? Theme of the book? You only need to show a few pages.
• Package design - take any package and redesign it. Select something small, like a medicine box. Also design a toy or retail product which is a little larger. I've done a lot of package design, but didn't keep many samples since I didn't want a bunch of boxes around forever. So it seems to be pretty acceptable to show PhotoShop renderings of the packaging, or the flat keyline lahouts of the packaging. The important thing is to understand how to design 3D form, how the bottoms of boxes are designed to be locking, which tabs are necessary, stuff like that. This is how your mentor can help too!
• Flyers - use only the best! Don't put it in just to make the list!
• Poster - maybe for an event or group in town?
• Multimedia - web sites, story boards showing video, Flash movies (use story boards or screen captures to show). If you have a Mac, there's no excuse for not having a movie since iMovie is free, so create something!
• Brochures - tri-fold, large brochures - everything is okay to use as long as it looks good.
• Letterhead - only if it's really good and part of your corporate ID designs. Don't use letterhead to say, "Uh, I designed this letterhead" unless you're applying for a job at Kinkos or something. Unless you designed the logo on it, showing letterhead says your just a beginner.
• Illustration - if you like to illustrate (by hand or on the computer) use the illustration in something, even if it's an imaginary brochure. This way you show two things at once: that you can illustrate and that you have an eye for designing, placing and cropping images.
• Digital Image Retouching - I'm bad at showing these because I'm so glad the image is done that I rarely keep the first untouched sample! But do this for yourself... keep the orginal image - save it as a low resolution so it's easy to print out. Then save the new, retouched version at the same size. This works well online too. But be prepared to explain exactly what you edited, since it won't be obvious to the person looking at your work. For example, here's a glimpse of extensive photo editing for a spread in a catalog. I dropped out the background, added pillows, created a blanket to look like an actual product of the client's, using swatches of patterns from the products below, and changed all the of the dolls' pacifiers to have ribbons, not chains as they did in the original photo. The photo editing was critical in this sample, since the photo was about 9" wide - every detail had to look natural. Scroll over the photo to see the edited photo.