3 days after I signed up I got a call from Sweden. It was from Johnér Bildbyrå. A lady with a pleasant tone introduced herself and told me she was aware that I was looking at a few images recently and wanted to know if I found what I was looking for, and if not she would be glad to help me find it. I kindly declined her help and told her I was merely gathering information for a client and that I was not looking to purchase anything personally. She repeated her offer to help me, I repeated my declination and I hung up.

Today I received 2 items in my mailbox. No, not my electronic mail but the physical one where your grand parents and your bank send you stuff. One folded envelope, and a plastic wrapped pink notebook from Johnér. Inside the envelope there’s a hand-written letter saying “Welcome as a new customer. Your friends at Johnér”. It also included a USB-stick with some sample stock photos and videos.

I’m a little bit astounded. When they called me a few days after I signed up I was quite annoyed. I don’t like people pushing their services, and especially not over the phone. But after getting all this stuff in the mail I’m not sure what to think. I’ll give them credit for trying so extremely hard, but I can’t help thinking that this is just way too pushy, and comes off as desperate.

Dear Johnér. I’m now scared to visit your website just because I might risk getting another phone call and even more stuff I don’t need and never asked for in the mail.

I would just like to point out one very important thing that I have discovered during the last year.

My progression as a designer in an agency has been a whole lot faster than the progression I experienced as a freelance designer.

This might be obvious to a lot of people, but for a young guy like me it surprised me. As a freelancer you are able to pick your own tasks, pick your clients and working hours. The freedom is great and comes with a lot of benefits and gives you enormous flexibility. As a designer in an agency most of the projects are picked for you. I’m able to have a say at what I want to do and I can definitely express which projects I’d like to be involved in, but in the end it’s my boss who makes the decision. So far I’ve been working on both things I’m comfortable with and things I’m new to. You can do this as a freelancer as well — pick projects you’re not at first comfortable with. But the big difference lies in how you execute your work.

At Jimmy Royal I’ve been working closely with our Creative Director for several projects, where I’ve been in the driver seat and he’s been sitting next to me and basically challenging all aspects of the design I’m presenting. It’s been a great learning process and it still is. The most important and perhaps frightening part is that if he had not sat down next to me, given me his thoughts, challenging me and motivating me to continue working on the design I would probably be satisfied with the job done and send it to the client. Because that was usually my life as a freelancer. It’s easier to be satisified with the work you have done and chances are that the client will be pretty happy as well, as long as you’ve made it look nice.

I can’t emphatize enough how big of a difference it can make, just being more critical and expecting more of yourself (and from time to time letting friends or colleagues take that role). Take another round. Trash your current design and start over. Deliver five designs in 2 hours. Give yourself challenges or find someone that can give them to you or else you can end up losing growth and important insight — and perhaps end up not being as good as you have potential to be.

Although this is something I’ve experienced and learned in an agency, I think the same can be achieved as a freelancer. You just have to share your work with someone. Someone who’s as good as you or better, or someone who doesn’t share your point of view. Someone you’re afraid to show your work to, because you know they’ll not necessarily love it at first sight.

Just a few cents about progression as a designer in an agency.

I spent a couple of days thinking about it. Ideas such as designing the new iMac, iPad or Macbook, the new Mac OS X Panda GUI or Apple.com (It shouldn’t surprise you that I want to do something with an Apple product!) were ideas that I found on the very top of my head. I figured that if I had the chance to design anything I wanted, knewing I couldn’t fail, I’m sure it would be a lot more rewarding if I did something outside my current skillset. I thought about designing a car, a bicycle, a yacht and a house, things that would involve mechanics, much knowledge about material and laws of physics and even great amounts of math — fields I have very little or no knowledge about, but that fascinates me plenty.

Wanna-be architect

I spent another day thinking about it, and came to the conclusion that I would like to design my own house. Doing everything from the early sketching, calculating the measures of the house, finding the perfect size, what number of floors and where I would place the windows for the optimal amount of sunlight. What materials to use to save energy and create the perfect and the most comfortable enviroment - to what sofa would fit best, the size of the bed and wether I would have a swimming pool or a sandbox in the garden. All of these questions inspired me a great deal, and come to think of it, this is definitely something I want to attempt some day. It wouldn’t necessarily need to end up as a house, but as a model or even just thoughts on a paper would suffice – just some sort of realisation.

Beautiful combination of architecture and interior design — House of Convexities by Antonino Cardillo

What about you?

Now, I’d love to pass this torch on and see what other designers out there would attempt to do. So, if you’re a designer, ask yourself what you would attempt to design, write a blog post about it, send me the URL and I’ll set up a mini-site with a nice overview of everyone’s answers.

Back in October of 2009, I was contacted by the guys over at 45royale regarding a project they wanted me to help with. I had been admiring their work and their attitude for a long time and felt really honored when they asked me. The project, though super intense, went really well. Everything matched—style, communication and ambition. We immediately became friends.

We kept talking every once in a while about doing more projects, though with my situation as a full-time employee of Scandinavian Design Group here in Oslo, the timing just didn’t quite work.

Meanwhile, about a month ago, I wrote a post on my blog where I opened up about my current plans for 2010. I mentioned that I’d like to do freelancing for 6 months and then traveling the world. Not long after, Adam from 45royale asked if we could set up a call on Skype and we did. They asked me if I would be interested in working with 45royale as a designer on a more permanent basis starting on March 2nd. This call couldn’t have come at a better time and of course, and overwhelmed with joy I said yes!

It’s an absolute honor for me to be able to work with people I admire and as of March 2nd, I’ll be a designer on the 45royale team. I’m really excited and can’t wait to get started!

Stay tuned for more awesome news this week!

A river we crossed while driving through the city.

After we got our room, we went out to find a kaiten sushi restaurant, which was a lot harder then first expected. We didn’t have a clue what to look for, and it took us about an hour and 6-7 locals to point one out. The food however was delicious (oishii desu in japanese). Our room is on the 14th floor and we have a spectacular view, with the Shibuya Crossing just beneath us.

Shibuya crossing, seen from our hotel room

Ferris wheel we drove past on our way through Tokyo

So far this has been one of the coolest experiences in my life. Everything here is so different, and I love it.

I’ll post some more pictures and write more about the stay in Tokyo later. Now I have some sleeping I have to attend to.

The classics, from 1978

Felt like being a bit creative in areas I usually don’t wander today. This is probably a result of doing too much web the last couple of months. Gonna try to experiment more the upcoming months in typography and print work.

Large version

At times, I’ve considered going back to school again. I’ve been tempted by trying to get a Master in graphic design at some university.  I’ve also considered applying for a full-time job at several agencies, both in Oslo and abroad. Yet, these options have features that doesn’t appeal to me simply because they involve a lot of commitment over a long period of time. This doesn’t mean I’ll never consider doing it again, it’s just that at the moment I need more time to figure out what I want to commit to, so I don’t end up doing things I don’t want to do. With that said, I’m not trying to avoid doing mistakes in life, just delaying them!

So, as a result of a lot of thinking and considering — I’m going freelance and I’m gonna travel! The plans are not set in stone quite yet, but I have a few ‘drafts’ in my head of how I want to do it, and what I want to do. I’ll be going freelance from March 1st, and I’m hoping to make a deal with an agency to fill at least 50% of my availability (I’ll try to explain this decision in a later post). The rest of the time will be spent doing freelance work for clients, as well as personal projects.

September 1st, 2010 (not set in stone) I’ll be packing my bags and travel the world! Woho! I’m extremely excited about this :-) I have made some thoughts about where I want to go (thanks to a lot of help from my readers), but at the moment I’m gonna keep it pretty open. The thought is to allow myself to find new destinations as I go, and embrace the fact that I have no commitments.

While I will try to spend most of the time exploring the places I visit by taking photos, blogging, eating great food, drinking beer and wine, wrestling tigers, exploring the world, meeting new people (you!), snorkeling and enjoying myself, I’ll also be working! The plan is actually to finance parts of the trip with money made while freelancing while traveling. If you hire me, chances are I’ll might stop by in person!

I’ll probably write a lot more about this in the future, and I could probably need a lot of help with the planning of this trip. Where should I go? What’s the cheapest way to travel? Can I sleep at your sofa? Will you make me eggs for breakfast?

2010 is definitely the year for adventures.

One year ago a man sent me a mail regarding a website he wanted me to design, including a graphical profile, some graphic elements and icons. A rather large project, but the project was interesting, and the size of it made me excited as I were looking for new challenges and find out what I was capable of. We got started, I designed and after a bunch revisions and discussions things were going quite smooth. Logo was settled, icons designed, site architecture, back-end was set up and the design on the way. At the very start of the project we decided to split up the payments in several pieces for safety reasons. We also signed a contract, although it never actually arrived in my mailbox.

After a few months, the project came close to the finish line, and there were just a small amount of bits and pieces remaining to be put in place, and the project would be ready for take off. Throughout the process the communication went on and off, sometimes it was good, other times days and weeks could pass by between our correspondence. Although this annoyed me and certainly made the process a bit slower than it could have been, the payments arrived as we agreed, and I felt comfortable moving on. The 3rd payment however (3 out of 4), he never sent. Being a bit naive, I continued the work, but as more days went by and I heard nothing from him, I discontinued the work. I continued to mail him, for several months without any response. I gave up after some time.

Looking back I see a lot of stuff I could have done different, and that there are a lot of things to learn from this. From a business perspective there are number of flaws from my side as well, and I don’t do business this way anymore. But I still don’t look back and consider this project a complete failure. The hundreds of hours I put into this project makes me proud and aware of my passion for this business. I worked day and night for several months, with only myself and the girlfriend I had back then as motivation and support. I think it is a nice reflection, as it definitely reminds me of why I’m in this game, and it also reminds me how I should play it, as ultimately, I can’t survive in this business not getting paid.

The name I saw in my inbox, which I could so easily remember is the name of the client. He says he is sorry, and wants to continue this project, 1 year after it’s original start up.

Dear interwebs, what do you think I should do?

• Tom, @pope52
• Eduardo Mota, @eduardomota
• Jake

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I’d like to thank everyone for submitting comments, and hopefully I’ll be able to give out some more invites to CloudApp, or some other fancy new application sometime soon.