Lotus – An Open Source Framework for Ruby

Some people think that working for free or for very cheap is always the same as working on spec. This is most certainly not the case, and here’s why: when you work on spec, you’re providing the same level of service that you ordinarily would charge for.

                       

This is bad. Really, really bad.

Designers who do this are not only devaluing their work, they’re also stunting the growth of their entire careers. When a client realizes that they can get thousands of dollars worth of work from you for mere hundreds, there’s a mentality that develops in their head about you, and about designers in general. Basically, they start to believe that your work just isn’t worth thousands of dollars, and you will be forever branded as a cheap, low-end designer.

Type design is visually complex as well as highly technical – however it is easier to begin making type now than ever, partly because of the availability of free tools like FontForge. FontForge is a free (libre) font editor for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU+Linux. Use it to create, edit and convert fonts in OpenType, TrueType, UFO, CID-keyed, Multiple Master, and many other formats. While being a handy tool with which to begin, FontForge is not just for beginners. It has an advanced toolset and is rapidly improving at the time this book is being written.

FontForge aims to offer technical help and general insight into planning a type design project, and also offers advice about how to make your workflow more efficient. If you wish to help them, you can contribute to making FontForge better by giving feedback or even by contributing content and fixes on GitHub.

The key, like being on a diet or pushing yourself to finish a long, tedious project, is to think of free or low-paying work as a temporary arrangement, rather than an indefinite circumstance. If you give it all away for free or for very cheap, or you continue working for low rates for longer than is necessary to build your client network, your clients will never consider you for higher level work.

Why would they? If you’re lodged in the client’s mind as a $200 designer, why on earth would they automatically think of you when they have a $5,000 or $10,000 project? It’s just not going to happen.

On the other hand, if you’ve been providing your client with an appropriate amount of work for that $200, and they know you’ve been holding back on certain deliverables, they’ll be much more likely to consider you for higher paying work.