I’ve been doing freelance design work for a year and a half now and in my opinion, there are two skillsets you will need to master in order to become a better freelancer/designer.

Skill 1: Communication

In any design environment, I think communication is the most important part of your job.

If you can’t communicate with your team members or clients then how are you communicate through your designs?

What I’ve tried to do dealing with new clients is first to ask them a serious of questions.

What is the current status of your project? Does your client have rough sketches for you to reference or do they have existing designs that they want you to improve? Does your client have rough sketches for you to reference or are you starting from scratch?

If they’re starting from scratch have your client find an app with the look they’re going for so you can use it as a reference. If they have existing designs, what were the designs created in (Sketch, Figma, etc)? Does your client have a color scheme picked out? Does your client have a logo/name for their product? What is your client's timeline?

Make sure you explain there will be an additional cost to finish sooner than the proposed completion date. Is there a development team you will be working with?

This is a good question because if there is you’re going to want to connect with their team it’s important you’re in CONSTANT communication with them so that everybody is always on the same page. Is your client ok with your hourly rate? If you’re ok with fixed pricing, make sure you explain that to your client as well. OPTIONAL: Can you meet in person?

I’m a huge fan of being in front of your potential client it gives them a more personal connection with you and in my opinion, you can communicate more effectively.

Once I got the answer to these questions and the client wants to continue to move forward I dive into creating a user flow for their application which I dive into below.

Skillset 2: Organization

This skill I learned quickly as I started to gain more and more customers. Being a freelance designer it’s important that you’re organized because if you aren’t things are going to get messy… fast.

If you continue to forget/say the wrong things your client will start to get frustrated. At the end of the day, they’re trusting you to bring their idea to life so they can hand it off to a development team that can start coding it.

If you’re not organized how are you going to be able to hand everything off to the developers?

Every meeting you attend with your client, write down notes. Make sure you’re writing down the date every time you add more notes to the project that way you don’t get confused when you go back to reference them later.

One thing that has helped with my organization is creating user flow charts for client projects.

I can’t share any with you but what I can do is give you a link to check out the user flow I created for my startup, Clava.

Click here to enter the Figma file.

Make sure you scroll down to the bottom, the top of the file contains all of our designs in our next update coming out.

The user flow is meant to show the path a user will take in your app. So I usually develop this based on the scope and then I send it to my client. Once my client approves the flow that I’ve created, I start designing each page.

This allows both of us to stay on the same page and we can also use it as a reference in case we forget about a specific user flow.

With everything in a document, it also protects you as a designer. Since the client approved it whenever they want to change the scope they can’t blame you for not putting in a specific flow into their designs because they approved the original user flow.

I know these two skillsets seem easy/basic but you will be surprised how many designers don’t focus on these skills.