A wandering journey - Graphic Designer and Web Designer Iain Cameron
Iain’s in his fifth decade now and freelancing for the second time around. During his first stint, he painted blackboards for pubs, restaurants and shops. He started from scratch with a small portfolio and went door-to-door until he’d built a full-time business. And then, in 1996, Iain moved to Copenhagen with his Danish girlfriend.
These days, he’s designing graphics, websites and illustrations for clients who usually find him via Google. He runs a couple of side projects around his business and tries to enjoy the Danish culture of “working very hard but also making sure they take time off.”
For Iain, that means no work on Monday mornings. “It reminds me that I have a choice,” he says.
Iain chats to Steve about how he taught himself on Lynda.com, built up his website, learned to work better with clients and found time for personal projects.
More from Iain Cameron
Useful resources
Find more stories from self-taught freelancers like Iain.
More from Steve Folland
Support for this episode comes from Coconut!
Coconut is the ultimate accounting and tax tool for self-employed people. With expense tracking, receipt capture, invoicing and tax all in one easy-to-use app, Coconut gives you the power of a finance team in your pocket.
Free yourself from business admin: getcoconut.com/beingfreelance
Join us in the Being Freelance Community
Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Graphic Designer Iain Cameron and Steve Folland
Steve Folland: Let's get started hearing how you got started, how you got to where you are today, both career-wise and geographically, I guess, too.
Iain Cameron: Okay. Well, I'm in my fifth decade. Are you up for the long version or the short version?
Steve Folland: Oh, I'm up for a long one.
Iain Cameron: Okay, if everyone can buckle up then. I was an art school dropout. I drew cartoons for football fanzines, which were big in the late '80s I worked as a layouter for a large Scottish newspaper and also contribution cartoons, sold over a hundred thousand a day back then. I moved to London, after working in bars for 18 months, I started my first freelance business as a blackboard artist, painting boards for pubs, restaurants, and shops. I moved to Copenhagen with my Danish girlfriend in '96 I did everything from washing dishes, to bartender, to postman while having a side business as a cartoonist/illustrator. I then decided to teach myself web design and graphic design. This led to work in designing companies here in Copenhagen. I was then made redundant and I then took that opportunity to meet the plunge and become freelance. That was coming up to seven years ago now.
Steve Folland: It's like two phases of freelance, one back in London when you ... So you realized that one way to make a living was to draw on people's blackboards in pubs and things?
Iain Cameron: Yeah.
Steve Folland: When you were doing that, how were you getting clients then?
Iain Cameron: Well, what I did, I'd been working in the pub, so I was aware there was a couple of people doing it full time so that ... I'd never heard of that as a potential job. I just used to, as the arty person, I would always do the blackboards in wherever I worked.
Iain Cameron: So I photographed them all, first of all, got an A4 portfolio made, got some business cards done and I just discovered the sheer hell of cold selling, of going pub to pub, going, "Do you want your blackboards done?" From that I built the business that it became a full time, just from that.
Steve Folland: How did you deal with the knock backs? Were there many knock backs?
Iain Cameron: Oh, it was horrific at first. I was almost physically sick the first couple of days I did it and then I learnt the wonderful lesson that it was never personal. They either wanted their blackboards doing, or they didn't. For every 10 pubs I went into, I always got one client and therefore it became positive to go into a pub. I was one closer to 10. I didn't care whether they wanted it or not, I just really, and it became a positive energy out of it.
Steve Folland: So then you moved to Copenhagen, do whatever you need to to get by but then retrain.
Iain Cameron: Yeah, I think my heart wasn't quite in it. I'd done the cartoons earlier, cartoon illustration. I had no education, no degree or anything. I finally realized something was wrong, I needed to do something else and I was into doing it and then my sister opened a business as a bed and breakfast and it was just a couple of months before it opened and she said, "Could you do a website?" From that, because there was a purpose and a function to it, I just threw myself into it and I just loved it from the minute I connected the FTP, really. That and graphic design needed to go together, there needed to be content for it, and I've just been non stop ever since really.
Steve Folland: Am I right in saying, you said you took those graphic design and web skills into a company first. You worked in agencies first, did you say?
Iain Cameron: Yeah, there was a variety of positions I had. I had about four years of working in different companies as a graphic designer and quite sweet for me was the illustration came back as well, because I had that work I'd done as a cartoonist, I could draw basically. So being an illustrator/designer became something that I could be, I discovered, which was quite nice.
Steve Folland: Are you glad you went into a full-time role rather than thinking, "Oh, I could do this freelance," because you'd had an experience of it?
Iain Cameron: Yeah, and I don't have regret in anything I've done. It was an odd wandering journey and you meet good people and whatever, but there is a bit of me that thinks actually, I could have done this two decades ago is as a freelance designer and that maybe just a bit more confidence, I would have done it. I'm not sure really. It's difficult to look back.
Steve Folland: What was it then, which eventually led you going freelance at that second time, probably seven years ago?
Iain Cameron: Yeah. I was made redundant. They were outsourcing their stuff, the company I was working for and I had quite a long notice period and I wasn't particularly concerned about it and during that period, someone I'd worked with previously got in touch and said there was a position available for about six to eight weeks as a technical illustrator working for a very large Danish company, but the condition was I would need to have my own business. I'd need to be freelance for it. The timing was absolutely perfect. Almost as soon as I made the decision to do it, it felt absolutely right that this was where I wanted to be.
Steve Folland: So how did you then continue gaining clients when that one came to an end?
Iain Cameron: Well, this six to eight weeks ended up being eight months, which was very nice because it was a lucrative job, but at the same time it was very worrying because I didn't know if I had a business. Even though I was freelance, I didn't know what the world would make of me. So from that, it was, I was working on my website and really it was the SEO of the website that's my marketing and what makes the business work.
Steve Folland: What did you do specifically to try and get found then?
Iain Cameron: Well, the blog is a big part of that website, which adds to the SEO of it. But in the beginning when I first got out of that position, I was trying freelancer.com and various ... there was a Danish version of that as well. I had a lot of bad experiences on that and was really quite concerned and wasn't enjoying it at all. Particularly living in a very expensive place to live and you're competing with people bidding on jobs and stuff.
Steve Folland: What was your bad experience?
Iain Cameron: First of all, you're competing with people in the Philippines and whatever, so that you're being pushed down on your price? But I didn't know that on PayPal, if someone pays you money, they can actually take it back again without you even ... or I didn't know. It was just suddenly gone. I had people giving me wrong VAT numbers and stuff and addresses that didn't exist that would then make my bookwork illegal. There was lots of little things like that because I wasn't dealing with proper companies and I just was like, "Oh, this is not good."
Steve Folland: Man, yeah. So what did you do?
Iain Cameron: Well, I was getting concerned and then my first big client came in and that was from my website and that was an international company, was a Danish office and that was a big six-week job, very enjoyable and properly paid. They're still clients now actually. By the end of that job, the next job had come in that was a proper one and it just rolled from there. I had a good 18 months of just pretty much nonstop, not taking a day off virtually, because that early anxiety was pushing me through.
Steve Folland: Obviously you're an English speaker in Denmark. How did you deal with that on your website?
Iain Cameron: Yeah, initially, my website was in both languages and because it gets quite big, it became unmanageable and I just got rid of the Danish one in the end. Also, I was slightly concerned, probably too much in the beginning, why would a Dane use me if a Dane was available as a designer or whatever. It was just anxiety and self-doubt and what have you.
Iain Cameron: But I began to realize that it wasn't a problem at all. My website was effectively telling people in advance what you'd be dealing with or who I was and therefore, all my meetings went well because there was no surprise or whatever. I mean I do speak Danish and with some of my clients, the communication is in Danish, but for most of it is in English. Then Copenhagen is a city that's pretty large and there's a very large community of non-Danes. Plus as everyone knows, Danes speak English brilliantly. So that's kind of helpful.
Steve Folland: Cool. So you worked solidly for pretty much 18 months. Did you cope okay without any time off?
Iain Cameron: Yeah, but it was that first block that was quite extreme. It was a couple of points where, yeah, I do very much regret. I sent a couple of angry emails to clients at points where I was becoming too much of a control freak together with overwork. So the mistakes were being made from not taking breaks, plus being quite new to it. But I got through it in the end and apologized, of course, to those that I'd sent the emails to and stuff like that. But yeah, it was a very fast steep learning curve that was a lot of fun as well, yeah.
Steve Folland: How do you cope with that now? How do you make sure that you get that balance right now?
Iain Cameron: I've introduced a couple of things. I have a little thing of giving myself Monday mornings off that is based on the odd little psychology of what would be the thing I would hate most in a 9:00 to 5:00 job, it would be Monday mornings. I mean, I check my emails in the morning if there's deadlines I'm working, but psychologically, it reminds me that it's a choice and that little break is in there. I'm much better now. The Scandinavian way of life is a very industrious nation, but they're also very good ... I shouldn't generalize at all, but there's a very good work and rest attitude. They work very hard and also they make sure they take time off. It's inbuilt into the culture here. So when it's a really beautiful day in the summer, I'll maybe do a couple of hours work in the morning and then I'll just go off to the beach or wherever and just go, "Great, doesn't matter." So there are little bits like that that I've learnt to bring in to the tendency to overwork.
Steve Folland: Yeah. I like that, to seize the moment when it comes along.
Iain Cameron: Yeah, yeah that's it.
Steve Folland: So jumping back into your story, after that first 18 months, has things just like ticked over in the same way, or has your business evolved in different ways?
Iain Cameron: It never ceases to surprise me, in that the next job, I never know what it would be. I mean, I have clients who've been with me all the way through, you pick up some, you get new ones, but in some ways, it feels like the same business in a really exciting way. So the answer is no, it hasn't evolved, really but only because I really loved the way it was to start with. I don't know if that makes any sense.
Steve Folland: Yeah, and it sounds like you offered ... you have a pretty unique skill palette, if you like. So were you able to offer different people different things or to see what people need?
Iain Cameron: Yeah, I try and ... It's a bit tricky with a website. I'm always wary of being a jack of all trades, master of none but I have clients for whom I'm a graphic designer for and they have someone else who does their web design. I have clients who I'm the web designer and they have someone else doing their graphic design, which when I discovered this in the earlier years, slightly annoyed me because I was going, "Look, look what else I can do." But in actual fact, I think it's quite sweet that and I'm in a service industry. I'm here to give them what they need so that I think it's all good.
Steve Folland: You obviously taught yourself a lot as you went along. Is that something you continue to do?
Iain Cameron: Yeah, it's something that's come back recently. I would say I learnt the vast majority of what I know from Lynda.com. I don't want to sound like an evangelist for them or anything, but I feel that they certainly were a wonderful resource when I was using them in the beginning, when I was learning and recently I made the decision to rejoin them specifically to get myself back into that brain space of knowing what's going on now and just being prepared for the future. I actually realized that it's a place where I'm very, very happy and happy to be learning a little bit, pretty much all the time, to the point where I've now set it that I try and do a couple of films every morning, couple of videos, sometimes it's YouTube or whatever, but just have a little bit of knowledge coming in and that keeps me fresh, I think, as well.
Steve Folland: Nice. How do you find dealing with the business side of being freelance?
Iain Cameron: I would love someone else to do that for me. Yeah, I don't like doing the invoicing. I hate doing my bookwork. I have an accountant but even getting the stuff ready for the accountant I don't like. I would love to just do the work but it's the little bit that make the rest of it brilliant, so I'm fine with that.
Steve Folland: Just come back to your website because you said how important the website was for getting you work and the blog. How much time do you think you would put into marketing yourself?
Iain Cameron: Yeah, it ebbs and flows really, I try and do a blog article per month but typically what I do is I do two of them back to back and that is two months together because I get into the frame of mind of it. It'd be difficult to say really, I've been redoing my website recently, which has been a real labour of love again, back to what I was doing in the beginning. Yeah, it takes quite a lot of time, but I think of it as my shop window and the shop window's incredibly important, in that as a web designer and graphic designer, we're very lucky. We can show literally what we do. To get it out there is absolutely key. So yeah, I can't put a time on it, but it's money well spent I think really.
Steve Folland: When you're writing your blog, who is that aimed at?
Iain Cameron: When I write my blog, I'm talking to Google. Quite simply, yeah. I really do. There's no newsletter, there's no one sitting waiting to hear what I've written every month. I write about four subject matters on my blog roughly and there's the three services of web design, graphic design and illustration. The four subject matter is Copenhagen, which is my location. I mean, really if you ... That's the keywords for the website really as well. So I am talking to them and at the same time, it brings in a few sites and visitors per month. There are some of the articles that actually pick up a couple of thousand a month just from the SEO. But yeah, I don't think of it as there really being an audience for it.
Steve Folland: Right, yeah. No, I get that but clearly people are reading it and some of them end up hiring you.
Iain Cameron: Yeah. I don't know how much that is. Because I mean, the main pages themselves pick up the inquiries. At the same time, the numbers game is very small. I need perhaps 15 inquiries a year. So it's never about quantity, it's about the quality that comes into the site and that works out pretty well. But at the same time, I quite enjoy the writing of the blog articles and the illustrating of them as well is a lot of fun. Yeah, I've started slightly gaming it as well with Google for fun, in that I had one article, "Do you need to speak Danish to live to work in Denmark?" That's an obvious Google question, but I'd written it just out of fun and I have a bit of knowledge about that and it was annoying me, it was picking up a couple of thousand visitors every month, but none of which would be clients.
Iain Cameron: So I then started to see if I could do it again and I've written other stuff about Copenhagen that's done it. Then ultimately, there's nothing to say about graphic design that anyone's interested in, which is sort of ... It's not subject anyone cares about other than other graphic designers. So it's a bit of a conundrum, really.
Steve Folland: But I guess when people are finally searching for, "Graphic design Copenhagen," then your site has proven itself to be popular to other people, so it rises up the rank?
Iain Cameron: Yeah, I guess that's the thing of talking to Google, that's my mentality. It's worked so far, maybe saying this out loud is just going to kill it.
Steve Folland: What have you found to be the biggest challenges of being freelance these past seven years?
Iain Cameron: I think the isolation element is something to deal with, as opposed to working in an office with people, where you've got a bit of teamwork and camaraderie and whatever. I'm lucky, I've got a good friend Pedro who lives in my building and he works remotely. So we do see each other most days but that part, loneliness is probably too extreme, but isolation I find a little bit hard. But you get used to it, put it that way. But apart from that, I think it's all good.
Steve Folland: Are you a member of any communities, be it online or in real life in Copenhagen?
Iain Cameron: No, I'm not and at various times I've intended looking into stuff. I'm not a particular social animal, but I have also looked into maybe getting an office somewhere but I felt as well that as a freelancer that that might still have a slight isolation element to it because people aren't really working together, I don't know. But you work with an office, don't you?
Steve Folland: Yeah, I split between co-work space this past year or so and before that, I worked from home.
Iain Cameron: Okay. Does that work for you is it a good camaraderie?
Steve Folland: Yeah. I quite like having the commute to the co-work space and I hadn't realized how unsociable, I guess, I'd become being at home. I didn't feel like I was until I then started mixing with other people. But you work from home, so how do you stay focused working from home?
Iain Cameron: I don't really have a problem with it. I'm there at the beginning of the day, 8:00 AM usually at my desk. It breaks down, there's a couple of videos to start with. I'll do a little bit maybe on social media for some of my side projects as well, as more like a warmup. It roughly, oddly web design, I'm happy doing that in the morning. I'm happy doing graphic design in the afternoon and if I'm doing illustration or whatever, my brain is happier doing it in the evening as well. So the discipline is done first, the proper job.
Steve Folland: You mentioned side projects, what are your side projects?
Iain Cameron: Oh, I have a cartoon website, which is iain.dk. Yeah, that goes back to what I was doing my early 20s as a cartoonist. That came about, I started at that 18-month point in the beginning where I was a little bit of a control freak and I thought, that's not very good as a graphic designer, the client is always right, it is a service industry. To let go a bit, I thought, give myself something to be in charge of and that worked really well for me. So I do my cartoons and I also have a football blog for my football team, which I'm sure all your listeners will want to hear about Aberdeen FC, and yourself. It's also got a webshop and it sells T-shirts and posters, so it's got a nice revenue stream with it as well. So I do a little bit of work on that most days.
Steve Folland: Oh cool. So it's your own independent fan site to Aberdeen FC?
Iain Cameron: Yes, that's it. On social media, I do illustrations and memes and stuff, which I sort of in the beginning justified as me practising Photoshop. But really it was a sad football supporter who's old enough to know better and I was going to pack it in, and going to pack it in, and then I got into POD, print-on design, the T-shirts and the posters and I thought, "Well I can justify it now." It makes a little bit of money and there are about 17,000 followers between different social media platforms on that. So it's quite nice to have that audience.
Steve Folland: That is really nice. So yes, it brings you a bit of revenue, but it's also that creative outlet where you can do what you want and that, for you, makes it easier than to compromise when it comes to what a client wants.
Iain Cameron: Yeah, that's exactly, and also I was guilty in the beginning ... I think it goes back to the website being so important. In the very beginning of the business, whenever they got in touch and told me about a job, I'd be very excited about it and also imagining how it was going to look in my website and I grew to call it portfolioization as a really, quite a bad thing, because that was making me the control freak.
Iain Cameron: I mean, I was over-delivering, or delivering properly as a designer, as I should have, but at the same time if they wanted changes near the end I was becoming not nice and that's terrible as a graphic designer. It's a service industry, so that really released me from that quite early on, yeah.
Steve Folland: Did you find that was a different then, because you know you worked in agencies, or for companies before you went freelance as a designer in Copenhagen? When you were there, if you were to get frustrated, it would just be to, I don't know, your line manager, your boss, whoever. Whereas now, it's all on you to also keep it sweet with the client?
Iain Cameron: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was that juggling of hats that was very important but I think as well, perhaps I was just getting obsessed with my own website in quite an unhealthy way, where ultimately as a designer, seven years on, and I could have filled that portfolio 20 times.
Iain Cameron: So, no job was ever really that important, whether it was in or not. So it was a bit of naivety and maybe trying too hard, I think in that earlier period, that hopefully now I'm a nicer designer.
Steve Folland: I see, yeah. So it's that frustration, because actually you think, "I don't want to change this because I want to put it in my portfolio and I'd rather it could stay this way, thanks very much."
Iain Cameron: Yeah. Yeah, also because I'm always right, that sort of mentality as well and ... Well, not ironically, but very often the client is right. I mean, whether something's yellow or blue really, it's subjective, but the client's instincts are usually right because they live with their business and their motives are also ... they want the very best. So the artistic ego thing needs to be put in the bin sometimes.
Steve Folland: Are you somebody who sets yourself goals, or do you just go with the flow?
Iain Cameron: I absolutely go with the flow and I love that element of it, I think. Yeah, just whatever happens happens and that's great.
Steve Folland: Now, if you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
Iain Cameron: There's no one overriding thing, but I got a really good piece of advice on Lynda.com that I thought couldn't be right at the time and has kept coming back to me over and over. The advice was how to be in the top 5% of freelance graphic designers. There was only two things you had to do and one was turn up on time to meetings and number two was what you say you're going to do in the meeting, make sure you do it. That's all there was to it. What I loved about that is, well, first of all, I thought that can't be right, but it's that simplicity of being freelance, to remember the really important things. Yeah, that was the best advice.
Steve Folland: Thank you so much, Iain, it's been great talking to you and all the best being freelance.
Iain Cameron: Cheers, Steve. Thanks very much. All the best.