Home business – Freelance Graphic Design

Freelance graphic design is an ideal home business. One popular sub -branch of Graphic Design is desktop publishing.

Most of the overheads are located on a personal computer or workstation and most modern household already have personal computers.

As a freelance graphic designer, you will need to have good artistic and technical expertises. Good artistic skill is both inborn as well as comes with training and experiences.

The overhead of being a freelance graphic designer usually consist of the following:

1. A reasonably powerful computer. As graphic work is fairly resource-intensive for the computer, fast processor and huge amount of RAMs will determine how fast a job gets done.

2. Supporting hardware and equipment. Depending on the type of work, supporting hardware may varies. Typically the following equipments are important:

1. Colour printer
2. Scanner
3. Portable drives
4. DVD or CD burner

3. Graphic software. The most popular software for editing and creating bitmapped images is Photoshop. However, many graphic designer also need to do layouts that are resolution-independent. For that one will need to use a 2D vector graphic program. Some of the more popular programs are Adobe Illustrator and Freehand. If you are doing desktop publishing, you will need to get specialised deskktop publishing software such as Indesign and Quarkxpress.

The equipment and resource is just one aspect of the business. Besides that, you will also need to know about the transaction and business-processing part. For this, you will need to know the following:

1. Writing quotations, agreements and invoices. This is important as a mean to safeguard yourself as well as the client.

2. Methods and procedure for safe delivery of deliverables. This is dependent on the type of graphic work. Usually a CD or DVD is used to burn the softcopy of the work to the client. Also, many clients will need hard copy printout of the work. Therefore having access to a good printer is also important.

Typically, Graphic Designers charge the clients either by hourly rate or by per project basis.

This article is about the basics of running a workable home-based graphic studio. Experience, skills and specialization will determine the specifics and details of individual graphic freelance business.