A talk by a guest speaker Mr Lionel Chin ,former TP student and co founder of RippleWerkz who has done a lot of works freelance or being in a company. His job is as a web designer.
5 key points
- School and Reality.
The outside world is never like school. It’s tougher and you must learn how to endure the hardship. What you learn in school, you must always remember to apply it in your working life. Although it is going to be a struggle at first. But the key point is that you must have endurance and produce work beyond expectation to keep you job or maybe even advancing in it.
- A Professional Portfolio.
People nowadays seldom use paperwork as a portfolio. Most of them have gone to new media. By using flash, one can actually show case his work foundation and impress the employer with his existing work. It is an crucial factor for client’s decision to hire the designer just by looking at his portfolio.
- Freelance and Working for a company.
He made a comparison between both. Freelance is much more relax as you get to pace the work which you can do. But whenever you unsure to do about something it gets pretty irritating as no one is there to help you. While working in a company, it is much more stressful as due dates are always around the corner. He said at this point, it is wise to start freelance to help us build our foundation.
- Marketing ourselves
So you might think, you want to go freelance. But how are you suppose to start out? He gave some tips by actually using the use of social media to promote yourself. Like twitter, facebook, youtube, etc. This way you are able to gain attention from people and they can contact you easily. As time go by, people would start acknowledging you and you can officially start out as a freelancer.
- Web Pricing
Nothing comes as free of charge, you must always charge your clients! He told us the pricing of a freelancer. Like a HTML website will definitely cost cheaper than a website which has animations or has CMSD (Core Manufacturing Simulation Data). It depends on how much you can do in your codes and make it interactive instead of a plain old html website.
3 Things inspired:
- I was inspired by the way he present. He was proud of showing his work. I mean if it is your work, you must be proud to showcase your work.
- I was inspired by the amount you can earn as a freelancer when you start out. Although it is going to be tough but the money which awaits you $.$
- The way he incoporate social media into his company.
Yes it is useful for him to share his expertise as we would know how the working life would be after we graduate. By sharing his experience, we know where we can start off instead of jus hanging in the air and do not know what to do.
