I was working on employee contract, freelancing and also running my own businesses. All of these are totally different experiences and teached me so much! When I had my first company, I started with no knowledge whatsoever. While running my second one, I can reflect on my journey to become better business owner.

My story...

I opened my first company at the start of 2015. I started my creative agency - Sweet Beet. I was my own rudder, sailor and ship! Everything depended on me. And it was super... scary! I was terrified! Especially because law in Poland was constantly changing and I was hearing a lot of horror stories how owning a business was super hard.

During this time I learned so much! And I use it until today! I already had a few years working with different advertisement agencies, cram school or even doing games! Some experiences were brief and the other took a few years. I was sure that my skills in graphic design were good and on demand. But I had no idea how to do the rest.

I've got my first client even before starting my own company, which was great and good idea from the get go. It was a publishing house, and I was doing DTP and graphic design for books for kids. It was awesome! I loved working for them! I learned so much! Especially Adobe InDesign and professional DTP. You can check what I did for them here!

Another of my regular customer was Panelove - a manufacturer which produce ornament panels for furniture and mirror frames. I did for them not only branding but I also help with designing frames and panels. Here are some ads I also did for them: click. I did quite a lot branding and other ad designs in general during this period of time. I need to say, I was pretty busy! I was also working with one of the big corporations - Aon Hewitt (marketing materials).

I closed the company in the end of January 2017. This was a year that changed my career for better, that's for sure. I didn't have any earnings or loans from the period I had my own company. I can't say if it was a success or a failure. It just was. For sure I made a lot of mistakes, and one of them was very low prices.

In February 2017 I started working with indie developer on turn-based strategic game - Eternal Skirmish. I was responsible for visual side of the mobile game. I did a logo, 2D assets, UI design, Character Design and stop-motion animation in Unity engine. It was my first published game since 2013 where I did Character Design for game for kids with ADHD.

Later on I found a job in Lucky Duck Games, where I was working on tabletop games and hybrid games. I jumped into the deep end. I used all I had in this work: my graphic design skills, my DTP experience, and my desire to learn more when I started working on companion apps UI. I really like to work there, but it was intense to put it mildly. Thanks to that my portfolio is packed with games I was working on, but also, it drained my energy to the fullest.

At the end of 2021 I found a new job, where I was focusing in UI design. I was working in Netherlands company, on drag racing game and then on VR one. The pace was slow. I also had very big challange which was Unreal Engine UI implementation. I think it kinda overwhelmed me a bit at that time. I lost this job, and found another one 2 months later - in Toya. I needed to open company. My 2nd one.

I was starting as Social Media Artist, designing graphics mostly for social media. But after a short time I was assigned to do UI designs for L.O.L. Surprise! Simulator and Winx Club. It was a great time! I had a blast. People working in Toya were amazing! But... there was problem. Whole gamedev started to fall apart. Winx Club was canceled or paused. There were group lay offs. And after surviving that, I was assigned to Miraculous Ladybug RP.

During my time in Toya I was working with German tabletop publishing house, and I was doing game localizations (you can see some examples here). But that's it. This was my mistake, I should've expand my customer list further. But I didn't. I start doing that just before I was part of another group lay off in January/February this year.

So here I am, doing freelance again! I was working on a few localizations. A two games I was working on will be hitting Kickstarter very soon! I'm super excited! I heard that graphic I did for a Detectoku (I'll write about this soon) will be featured in the magazine. I'm still waiting for the premiere of a game I was working some time ago for American publisher. I'm currently working on the UI for something exciting for kids.

So what exactly did I learned?

Time management

I’m rather chaotic person in nature that's why time management of my projects is pivotal. I'm using something that might be called double planning. I'm juggling a quite few projects for different clients at the same time. Most of them takes months to finish. That's why I need to think in matters of months or even a year upfront.

Some time ago I introduced Notion into my workflow. It helps me to long range plan projects I'm working on. At the start of the project, I divide it into smaller tasks. Although I make my notes mostly on paper, I like to upload them into the project description in the Notion, so I'd have them on hand in any case.

For short term planning I use ordinary pad notebook to write down tasks for whole week. I like to divide them in even smaller tasks to focus on these parts, not the whole thing. Especially if it's super big project. I'm focussing on stuff that are priority: have short deadline, are corrections for file already sent to print, etc. I usually add there things that I'm doing privately too like laundry or drawing.

I also have a calendar, but I don't check it so often like my to-do list that's always on display at my desk. I have there monthly plans for the upcoming months. I put there sticky notes with expected income for each project, so I could move it around if anything gets delayed. Thanks to that, I have relative view of situation and if I need to get another client or if it's ok this month.

Communication with client

What change the most since my first company is my attitude toward clients. I know now that I can’t expect from clients to know how to work with me (or any graphic designer/ UI artists whatsoever). I can put myself in their shoes and understand why they behave the way they do.

Clients won’t be bad if you educate them. I see huge difference when I start relation with client from setting expectation of how our cooperation will look like. What is ok, what isn’t, what I expect from client (client likes to be part of the process most of the time), etc. I'm pretty flexible and I like to work the way my client wants me to. Of course, I have my preferences, like that I prefer to have e-mail/Discord communication instead of video calls, but whatever works that works.

Motivation

I started to believe there's no such thing! I do what I need to do, that's just that. Sometimes it's very hard to start, I'm not gonna lie. But I found some ways to help myself with that. I was always making up for my lack of sense of time by doing everything fast. I'm not perfect, I sometimes do some stuff last minute (especially when I'm overwhelmed with multiple projects at once), but it's always on time or with acceptable delay.

I found some natural remedies that help me to focus - like Ashwaganda, even when I'm not in my hiper focus mode yet. It helps me to start, and that's enough, because when I do that, I'm jumping in my hiper focus mode and I'm back in the game!

It's super hard to work from home as me. Some can't, but to be honest, I think that working from home is a blessing. I can control what I do, how long, etc. I can juggle my personal tasks with the work ones. I'm more calm and relax, and I'm more productive. I'm usually working with long breaks between each task, and it helps me to not burn out so fast!

My English skills

I really got better with my English. I can not only speak freely, but also understand people with different accents. To be honest, there are still some that I have some problem with, if they are speaking fast, but most - are just fine. I'm not native, and I don't speak like one - I have my Polish accent, but I don't really care. When I started working in Lucky Duck Games, I had such hard accent, it was awful. I sounded like some Russian babushka. But when I started to chill up about this, it got much softer. At least to the point that I don't cringe every time I open my mouth.

I can easily communicate with everyone, and that's the most important thing. I have some nervous laughter during calls - so brace yourself for that, but other than that, it's all good 😅.

My work process

My workflow was changing a lot of times during the time I was describing at the first half of this post. As I said, I'm pretty flexible with my clients and like to adjust my ways of doing things to work the best with my clients schedules and habits. I found this strategic the most productive. Of course I need to keep my boundaries, but I'm not so strict about this as I was just a few years ago. I educate myself about clients project and how it should look like. I like to learn what are the expectations for it before hand.

I do the project in small pieces, so on each stage I can ask client for feedback. Feedback is something that I'm basing my work on. I can educate client about some stuff, what I need to do the project, etc. But It's the client who knows more about the project than me, so I'm not gonna take it over. We cooperate, I don't need to show off if I can do something better. I don't reinvent the wheel if it's not needed. If my client doesn't expect me to show off my skills and give me a freedom to do anything, I can, but it's not usually the case.

I'll wright about this more in separate post later on.

I hope you like this post!

If you have any questions, please contact me! You can find contact in the bottom of the page!