Most design courses are good at teaching you how to make the technical stuff, like software, principles, and processes. What they’re often less good at is teaching you how to work, or manage a client relationship, or grapple with feedback that doesn’t make much sense because it’s come from someone with no creative background.
These are things that will determine whether your career holds together, and most designers figure them out the hard way (usually in the middle of a project that’s going wrong). To help you avoid falling into the same trap, here are some tips on what you’ll need to know as a freelance designer.
For more tips on starting out, see our piece on advice I wish I’d known as well as how to get your first design job.
1. The brief is never as clear as you think
It’s all too common that an exciting new client sends over a brief which looks complete on first read, but the more you read, the less you know. A lot of clients don’t really know what they want until something lands in front of them – and then that isn’t it.
That’s how creative decisions work for people who don’t make them professionally, they don’t always think about the level of detail designers need to know, or even know how to describe what it is they are seeing in their minds.
The brief you receive is often a starting point, not a specification. Figuring out how to have the right conversation before a single pixel gets moved is a crucial skill in your design career. Think about how you can connect with a client to understand what they’re anxious about, and what they actually mean when they say “clean” or “modern” because it might be very different to what you expect.
2. You will get difficult feedback
The first time a client really hates something you’ve made, it’s a shock. A tutor pulling apart your work is on your side – they want you to get better, and negative feedback comes with positive intent for growth! A client who says “this isn’t what we were looking for” usually isn’t thinking about you at all. They just need a different outcome, and fairly quickly. Most designers take that personally for a while. Some take it personally for years.
The shift is less about growing a thick skin and more about getting curious. Again, go back to thinking about what they actually mean in their brief; what are they not saying, and where might there be some miscommunication or potential to communicate differently, for instance with visual examples of the words they are using? That reframe tends to help client feedback feel less like a judgment and more like a data point for moving forward.
3. Pricing is a skill, not a personality trait
Nobody wants to talk about money, but given the shifting design landscape and the impact of AI making visual design more accessible to more people than ever before, it’s never been more relevant.
The reality is that designers are having to be more flexible than ever, however learning to scope a project, calculate what you actually need to earn, and walk into a money conversation without apologising for it, are things that belong on every design curriculum, right next to Illustrator and InDesign.
4. Communication is part of the craft
Something strange happens when you talk to designers who’ve been freelancing for a long time. They’re not necessarily the most technically accomplished people you’ll meet, but they’re almost always good at the bits that don’t show up in a portfolio, like knowing when to ask a question and when to just get on with it, picking up when a client is thinking about something they haven’t said out loud, and being the kind of person a brand wants to call again when the next project comes up. None of that gets taught, it accumulates, usually through experience, and even projects where something went sideways and you figured out why afterwards.
Design courses are getting better – more are building in client simulation and professional practice modules, but the gap between what formal design education prepares you for and what freelance life actually involves is still wide enough that most creatives spend their first few years filling it in on the fly.
If you’re early in your career, the most useful thing you can do is jump in and work with real clients, but also find designers who are further along the road than you and make real connections. Ask them the questions nobody has taught you the answers to: what you learn might just end up being the most valuable lessons of all.
And if you’re feeling like there aren’t any roles available for you at all, see our piece on are junior designers really disappearing?
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