Confidence. Rates. Nothing up my sleeve. It’s all business, baby.

vio­let­minded opened its eyes at the end of Sep­tem­ber 2009. I didn’t see much in the way of busi­ness until 2010 rolled around. Yes­ter­day, I started to think about why that was.

I had a port­fo­lio with some rel­a­tively decent pieces in it from my days in design school. I even included some sweet print designs I’d done up for April’s art show. I mean, I’m not scream­ing from the rooftops that I’m a genius but I’m cer­tainly no neophyte.

“Dude, you’re doing it wrong” or How I Man­aged to Trip at the Start­ing Line

I did a num­ber of things wrong right off the bat.

1. No blog. *gasp*
2. No rates had been set.
3. Not enough diver­sity to my portfolio.
4. vio­let­minded had no real identity.

The blog was reme­died eas­ily enough, with a bit of elbow grease and deci­sive­ness. I fail at lov­ing my designs enough to keep them so I changed the look of vio­let­minded five times before decid­ing on this incar­na­tion. I need to exer­cise restraint in order to not run and change it again in February.

It was the set­ting of the rates that was the doozy.

You’d think that set­ting your­self up to start bring­ing in cash flow is easy and maybe even enjoy­able. In actu­al­ity, it’s like lis­ten­ing to 80s pop and being forced to drink bad vodka. I avoided it as long as humanly pos­si­ble. I’m adverse to 80s pop and bad vodka, you see.

And so, vio­let­minded sat around until the mid­dle of Octo­ber when I approached Kelly on Face­book (no secret here, I’m madly in love with Kelly & Cleav­age, even though I’m mar­ried… shh… don’t tell Mike). My first step was to work with her, brand her web­site anew, and design her a fancy new blog. It wasn’t all sun­shine and lol­lipops but we had a beau­ti­ful prod­uct at the end of it.

When 2010 rolled around, I took it as the kick-in-the-ass that I required. It was time to buckle down, stop being just a free­lancer, and start being a busi­ness. The buckle down required me to stop being such a pansy about rates. And then I real­ized what was keep­ing me from mov­ing forward.

Rates & Con­fi­dence: BFFs in the worst way.

I con­fess.

Until recently, I had very lit­tle con­fi­dence in my own abil­i­ties. I’d spend count­less hours perus­ing my favourite design web­sites and smack my head against the wall while mut­ter­ing, “Why couldn’t I think of that first? ACK! Does this make me a sub-par designer? Maybe I am just a tal­ent­less hack.”

Whoa. Wait. Back up. Did I just think that out loud? Also, I didn’t actu­ally hit my head against the wall. That would be poten­tially killing brain cells that I may need at some point. But I def­i­nitely have felt like it.

How can I pos­si­bly jus­tify charg­ing mar­ket value rates if I have no con­fi­dence in my own abil­i­ties? How can I mar­ket myself if I wasn’t entirely sure I would be inter­ested in hir­ing me? More head-butting the walls in my head. More trem­bling before the mighty busi­ness model that I hadn’t really thought of.

Time to get a real job?

Hell. No.

Design­ing and cod­ing Cleav­age had opened my eyes: peo­ple actu­ally loved what I could do. The site was all Kelly. It was a min­i­mal­is­tic beauty that came out of me; not out of one of my fel­low design­ers. Just me. And Kelly. And a sexy design brief. We made sweet, sweet web design all night (and day) long.

Hot.

With my con­fi­dence boosted (thank you), I could see straight. Walls crum­bled. Shoul­ders squared. Chin raised. Bring it.

… now what?

Rates. Oh snap. Almost forgot.

The rates. They gnawed on my brain, like wild Vio­let Zom­bies. The prob­lem hadn’t gone away. It had only man­aged to seem like it had gone away. Sneaky.

At the begin­ning of the month, the busi­ness started rolling. I put away my con­fi­dence issues and started my research.

At first, I was astounded! I couldn’t afford to pay another designer $1800+ so how the hell did I expect peo­ple to want to pay me that kind of scratch for my services?

Every­body wants a killer design, espe­cially after see­ing one that they lust over. Prob­lem is, nobody wants to pay for it.

Chris Pear­son, Pear­son­i­fied

Nail. Head. Chris hit it.

It’s also why design­ers hate to set rates. It’s hell. What if nobody ends up want­ing to pay us at all, let alone what we’re asking?

It’s a ter­ri­fy­ing ques­tion. It almost made me want to give it all up for a “cushy” dev posi­tion at the com­pany Mike works at (we make an awe­some dev team, let me tell you).

Almost.

Com­pany. Indi­vid­ual. Par­ity Shift!

Based on my expe­ri­ence, I have rea­son to believe that about 90% of you who just saw my prices thought, “Gosh, that’s awfully expensive!”

Well, you’re right, but actu­ally, you’re wrong too.

You’re right because $1800 is a decent chunk of change – for an indi­vid­ual. You’re wrong because com­pa­nies throw this kind of bread around all the time. They do so because they under­stand that craft­ing a brand holds a value that is often­times hard to mea­sure in dol­lars and cents alone. On top of that, com­pa­nies typ­i­cally have a mon­e­tary objec­tive behind the launch of a new design, so to them, there’s a fore­see­able payoff.

Chris Pear­son, Pear­son­i­fied

Dude.

DUDE.

DUDE!

I got it.

I can’t afford to pay that kind of scratch because I – not vio­let­minded – am an indi­vid­ual. But my com­pany could.

Pro tip: par­ity shifts are use­ful when fig­ur­ing life out.

I sucked it up. I set my rates and then told my new clients that we should work together to make sure they won’t have to donate their liver to the black mar­ket in order to pay me. I’m under the impres­sion that the liver is, y’know, impor­tant. So don’t let me bank­rupt you or your grow­ing business.

I just want to design for you.

Why? Because I love it.

It gives me warm, happy feel­ings of rain­bows and lol­lipops and Alis­tair/Dragon Age. <3

Tagged as: confidence, web design