For many freelance designers, an extra buck here and there would be a welcome sight. Unfortunately, many freelancers are currently experiencing just the opposite. I’d like to share a technique that can help you create additional income opportunities through recycling old work. For the purpose of demonstration, I will be talking about turning unused logo concepts into cash, but with a little imagination, this same technique could just as easily be applied to almost any other design medium.

If you are a graphic designer, you have probably designed quite a few logos for clients that included presenting multiple initial concepts. What happened to all of those concepts? Some designers may get a little bit of mileage out of their unused concepts by including them in their portfolio for self-promotion, but generally speaking, most unused concepts go to waste.

Continue Reading

As I covered last week, selling stock and digital files is a neat way for freelancers to build a steady income stream to supplement their regular income. By using your off-hours, regular skillset and even work that wound up on the cutting room floor, you can piece together a solid portfolio of creative goods to generate a steady bit of cash on the side.

There are sites out there to help you sell everything from website templates to photographs to flash components to 3d goods, and plenty in between. It’s a growing digital economy and one that can produce anything from a nice holiday fund to a fullblown primary income source.

It’s a growing digital economy and one that can produce anything from a nice holiday fund to a fullblown primary income source.

Like anything, selling stock is something that you get better at over time. In my job working on ThemeForest, FlashDen and AudioJungle I get to see a lot of the things people do to maximize their income, some of them are quite ingenious. Since it benefits us if we have clever authors on our sites and it benefits Freelancers interested in selling stock, I’ve put together my top tips for selling well on stock sites.

Tip 1 – Solve Problems

Selling creative stock is about solving problems. For example, the highest selling photos on iStockPhoto tend to be the ones that are useful in the most situations. As a designer I know there have been innumerable times that I’ve needed some sort of generic “business” photograph, and guess what? They outstrip almost any other category of shot.

So how do you know what problems need to be solved? To do that, you need to get in the heads of buyers. On iStockPhoto I have a portfolio of (not particularly well drawn) vector illustrations. The ones that sell the best are the ones that I needed myself. For example I really needed a vector graphic to represent “News”, so I drew a little newspaper and it’s been selling well ever since – 500 sales at last count. Turns out I wasn’t the only person who needed to represent “News”. Continue Reading