Never, Ever Make These Freelance Graphic Design Mistakes

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graphic design courses in Pakistan

You’re a graphic designer, so you want your work to be the best it can be. That means you want it to look professional and polished.

Graphic design is a delicate balance of art and business. This is why it’s important to learn from your mistakes and avoid common mistakes that others have made. In this article, I will share with you 10 common mistakes freelancers make when it comes to graphic design on any platform like Fiverr, Upwork, or any other.

Some Common mistakes freelancers make with their graphic design

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graphic design courses in Pakistan

graphic design courses in Pakistan

1. Not understanding the instructions:

As with all things, communication between the designer and the client is very important. It is the customer’s prerogative to provide clear and informative instructions, but it’s the designer’s responsibility to ensure that those instructions are understood, even if they require additional customer inquiry.

Strongly recommended that you review our Customer Policy multiple times while taking notes and brainstorming. If there are any misleading statements in the instructions, it is important to contact the customer immediately for clarification.

2. Don’t Work For Free

No one will work for free, no matter if it looks good on a friend, family member, potential future client, or portfolio. Don’t slash your prices to the same people for the same reason. There are many reasons to respect yourself, respect your work, and respect your designer’s profession.

People don’t respect what they get for cheap or free. For each order, there may be disagreements between the customer and the designer. It doesn’t get any less happening with free or heavily discounted jobs.

As a result of free labour, Your time and talent may be wasted and you may end up hating the design.

3. Using too many fonts:

Playing with fonts can be fun, but trying to read something that changes fonts ten times in a single paragraph quickly becomes tedious and tedious. Planet of the Web recommends using up to three fonts in a single layout.

Better to stick to one or two good fonts. When designing business cards, even if space is limited, the number of fonts should be kept to a minimum.

4. Not Creating a Marketing Plan:

Often when people are just starting, they jump on every platform imaginable to market themselves. And I totally get it! You want to be successful, acquire new customers, and generate income.

But the problem is, trying to be everywhere at once will burn you out. Instead, pick one platform (or maybe two), focus all your energy on showing up there and delivering value to your audience, and keep doing it until you’re good at it. After that, you can also add another platform.

5. Pricing Based on what Other Designers charge:

The next mistake is pricing based on fees from other freelance designers.

It’s always good to evaluate prices from time to time and ideas from other designers. But when asking other designers how much a particular project will cost, consider your expertise, business costs, client industry, client size, project scope, deadline, and even geographic location need to do it. But remember, your case could also be different. These factors can have a significant impact on the pricing of your design work.

So you might think that another designer is demanding crazy money for something. But maybe it’s because they have more expertise in the field, or it was for a large client, or their business costs are much higher than yours. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to charge the same rate.

6. Overpromising, then underperforming:

Of all the errors we’ve covered so far, this is one of the most serious and potentially damaging. As stated on his website for Go Layer Cake, it’s rare to find “quick” work in graphic design.

Therefore, when talking to clients about deadlines and expectations, be careful not to promise something great or fail to deliver on that promise. It’s better to finish a project before a long deadline than late for a short one.

Take your time. You should let your clients know that they can spend a lot of time creating their design work. Don’t make big promises that raise expectations to a very high level.

This way you put pressure on yourself to plan the quality of your work and design.

7. Lack of design process and organization:

What steps do you take to complete a project from start to finish? Is there a specific process you follow each time, or do you release each project?

We all know that design is a form of artistic expression and creativity, like a folder, is a prized commodity that can always be tapped. Good design takes a lot of brain power, inspiration, and action.

Although this may all be true, going with the flow, doing what you think is right, and working when it appeals to you are not efficient to process. A clear design process allows you to plan your time for each phase of your project journey, from idea to final production.

What happens when there is a lack of a process?

With a little luck, you got the project which is fine. But most of the time, especially as the scope of the project, the number of participants, and other complexities increase, the lack of process leads to frustration on both sides, missed deadlines and extended schedules, and a lot of unnecessary stress increase.

8. Having only one client:

Are you worried about time management?

Don’t worry. You can always outsource tasks to others. It’s important to take in a lot of customers at once and not get overwhelmed. If your workload feels too high, it probably is.

The key here is to set yourself up to do enough work, but not too much work. The only way to achieve this is to have multiple clients at once. But how?

To get more clients:

Create an effective portfolio website or blog so potential clients can see your work, read testimonials from previous clients and You can learn more about what type of project you are best at (For example Logo design).

This way you can build trust with potential new customers. That means they are more likely to hire someone without meeting you in person.

9. Saving in the wrong format:

When choosing a file format for your design image, consider whether the image should be raster or vector. Vectors are made up of geometric lines and curves, while raster images are made up of pixels. This means it can be scaled to any size while preserving its shape.

Since vector graphics are usually created in Adobe Illustrator. You may also hear vector files called AI files. If you’re worried about your design being pixilated, a good rule of thumb is to make your design bigger than necessary. You can lower the resolution at any time, but you cannot increase it. Also, consider whether you will print your design or view it online. All of this makes it easy to choose the perfect way to save effort.

The three most common file formats for web-based images are .jpeg, .png, and .gif. Here are the differences between each:

  • JPEG JPEG images are ideal for gradient files and can be compressed to reduce file size.
  • PNG – PNG images are lossless, so there is no loss of quality when editing, they support transparency and are usually larger than JPEGs.
  • GIF – GIF images have a small file size while supporting animation.

Other common file types such as .pdf, .psd, and .ai are related to where a particular file is.

  • PDF – contains all the elements of a printed document as an image that can be viewed, printed, or sent to others.
  • PSD – The files created in Adobe Photoshop are PSD.
  • AI – refers to files created in Adobe Illustrator.

10. Designing for Yourself

Finally, it is always essential to recognize the fact that you are designing a project for a client. Whether you’re a freelancer or work for a site, it’s very important to follow your client’s instructions and not make changes just because they look better to you.

The client pays for the graphic design and as a designer, your job is to do whatever it takes to help your client bring their vision to life.

graphic design courses in Pakistan

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graphic design courses in Pakistan

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