I’ve never had a fixed design career - it was always freelance and I had the luxury of switching context often - working on interesting things. I can imagine why someone might want a change of scenery once in a while for the sake of switching things up a bit.
Discussion
I still love building things and love engineering. Switching things up is a great way of putting it. I've been feeling like I'm in a creative rut with work. My current job sucks up so much of my time and mental energy that there's not any left for pet projects. I built a block clock display over winter break and felt more alive doing that than I have anytime in recent years of my job.
How do you find freelance work? Are they consults or contracts? Do you get repeat business?
I have heard this so many times (the part about taking up time and mental energy) it’s a common thing.
As for freelance, I started on Upwork back when it was ok and built up contacts over time. I also built up a mailing list so when I needed work I’d just let everyone I know I’m available. That and some combination of referrals, Twitter and LinkedIn also did the trick.
For development work I imagine you’d have longer contracts. Mine were fixed engagement contracts.
About a month ago I accidentally deleted my account that had my mailing list so if I go back to freelancing I’ll be starting from scratch 😂 😭
TLDR; make good work. Make noise about it and share far and wide. Then let people know you are accepting work. Otherwise they won’t have a clue if you don’t make it known.
Really appreciate this advice. I plan to spend the time actively building since I'm not so much craving downtime as I am more time to work on building things I want to build.
If I can freelance beyond the break and never return to corporate engineering that would be a fantastic outcome IMO.