Creator spotlight: Sarah Lawrence
I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many intelligent and motivated people about their experience as creative professionals — one of whom is Sarah Lawrence. Hearing first-hand experiences, opinions and learnings has expanded my knowledge of the wide variety of ways tapping our creativity impacts us on and off the clock.
About Sarah
Sarah is a graphic designer based in Atlanta, Georgia. She has been running her own freelance design business for the past six years. I had the opportunity to talk with her about her business, her creative process and advice she has for other creative professionals.
In 2015, you started your own design business. How did your path take you there and what lead to the decision to go fully freelance?
I worked for a music magazine called Paste for a couple years right out of college and really loved it; I made a lot of friends, and learned so much about working as a designer. Afterwards, I went to a startup in north Atlanta. I was always tense there, I felt I was just kind of hands on a computer.
About six months in, I actually got let go. I honestly was a little ashamed about it, but I wasn’t happy from the beginning and already had a date on my calendar to quit. My boss and I had decided it wasn’t a good fit, and I’m grateful that she pulled the trigger when I couldn’t. I don’t think I would have started freelancing full-time on my own, so I needed the push.
I had been freelancing on nights and weekends, taking calls with clients before and after my work day. That was becoming stressful too. It was great when I was able to email all my clients and say, ‘we can talk whenever now!’ I decided to try to make a thing of it, and I’ve been trying to make this work for six years!
What has been the biggest challenge or learning curve being your own boss?
It was definitely really bumpy in the beginning. I had to learn the hard way about defining the scope of a project with my clients. I’ve dealt with clients not wanting to pay how much they owe me and some that didn’t end up paying me at all. A lot of contract stuff was very difficult in the beginning to figure out.
People ask me for advice about freelancing, but so much of the advice I give sounds really arbitrary until it happens. A late fee clause seems excessive until someone ghosts you on a big invoice. Drafting out the super fine details of a design project seems like overkill until a client wants you to give them all three logo concepts even after they’ve picked the final. Each time I had an experience that didn’t feel so good, I added more language in my contract.
You start figuring out how to plan for future projects. It was a lot to work out, but you do learn from those experiences.
Working primarily independently, how do you keep up-to-date and stay inspired?
I like to read and pull inspiration from everywhere. I watch a lot of YouTube videos and am always trying to find more things to learn. I might learn something that I can’t immediately apply, but it always ends up coming back around.
Previous client projects have also helped a lot too. For example, I do enough annual reports that when a client asks for one, I have an idea of what they might need (e.g., stakeholder highlights, financials, stats).
I also attend free webinars. Even subjects that are not related to design may be useful for client work someday.
When I’m researching specific topics, sometimes I’ll look on sites like Dribbble. I did a project that had a motif of shattered glass, so Dribbble let me see how people took that prompt and worked with it. But for the most part, I like to try and go outside of the world of design when researching and learning.
My general mentality is that it’s never a waste of time to learn new things.
How would you describe your creation process?
It varies from project to project. Usually the first step is to have a call with my client. It’s easier to do it over Zoom than email. I get to ask them a bunch of questions — some that are related to the project, some that are not. I just want to get a vibe for if they’re open to suggestions or if they’re straightforward with what they want. With some clients, it can be more of a brainstorming call, but others just want to get the thing made, and I’ll go with that.
A lot of times, the coolest projects come from clients who are open to suggestions. That gets me excited.
From there, a lot of it is figuring out what they want or need, identifying the parameters and using that as sources of inspiration.
It’s about honing in on who we are talking to and what we’re saying in what context and letting that drive the outcome.
Do you work in the Adobe Suite?
Most people when they ask about design programs, I recommend they learn Affinity. They have photo editing, vector editing, and publishing programs, but they’re newer and more intuitive than Adobe. People will ask ‘should it be this easy’, and the answer is ‘it really is’.
I also use Figma. It’s also a newer program that’s made for a modern designer. It’s a lot faster to export assets than Illustrator. There’s a good presentation component where you can send clients a ‘view only’ link and they can leave comments. I would recommend downloading the desktop app and not use it in a browser. Figma also has really intuitive keyboard shortcuts.
Any other words of advice?
The landscape as an independent creative professional is so different just from 2015. A lot of these part-time/contract roles are wrapped up in sites like Upwork. You can’t just work with a company anymore. The process is less personal now.
All of my best projects have come from word-of-mouth referrals, from clients having a good experience and sending my name along. It’s rare that it comes from recruiters or Google. More opportunities have been paywalled and hoops have been added to the process. It’s hard out there.
That just means now more than ever, it’s important to have a network and build a group of people that you trust. Start a network, not just people that may hire you, but friends that will look out for you and you can look out for them.
