Repeatedly, I meet designers, who maintain full-time jobs, while running their own freelance studios outside of their day-to-day duties. Why do these hard-working entrepreneurs keep a steady 9–5 job, and also gig after hours or worse yet, during their 9–5 job? And which office is which?
Do they call their full-time office the office, and the one where the freelance magic happens the office? Maybe they defer to tax filing jargon and call it the home office. No matter the name (freelance, gigs, experiments, labs, research, authorship, home business, extra work, personal work, self expression, small business), it seems like a financial success because these folks earn outstanding hourly pay when working on home office gigs between 9–5 at the full-time office. Short of extra money, why else would you juggle two jobs?
When it comes to the cause of these sleepless nights and longing for creative autonomy, the motivation begins in one place: school. In most education settings, young and budding designers act as researcher (market analyst, anthropologist, fact checker), writer (in most cases, you need written content), creator (designer), and audience (seeing things with a discerning and objective eye, albeit speculatively). Rarely is teamwork employed or prescribed. Is it any wonder that designers are born (or bred) to work around the clock on self-directed projects later in their life as freelancers?
