How should a Freelance Developer Partner with a Designer?

I have been a developer for great about 20 years I want to go freelance the problem is that my design skills are very raw therefore I believe I would greatly benefit from partnering with a good designer I have some questions though my first comment about this email is that it's very well written so the fact that you have good writing skills is a huge bonus good job all right his questions nicely laid out in bullet points so it's easy for me to read another good business communication tip short paragraphs bullet points you're gonna get your message across much more easily which means you're gonna have a much easier time at work and in business what percentage of pay is typically fair for both parties and how does one decide to me development seems more difficult and time-consuming than design so I could see a larger split going to the developer however I could be wrong about time and difficulty plus it's crucial to have good design I just want to be fair to both parties very cool question and a very reasonable attitude which is going to help you deal with the partners in terms of the paint really comes down to the nature of the project some projects are very design heavy where a lot of the work is designed and not too much back-end and vice versa if you partner with an outside contractor designer/contractor on a per project basis then you're gonna have to work with somebody and just bid hours accordingly now how much pay they should get per hour if you will really depends on their level of skill now dooby-doo good-looking user interfaces fine but can they also do good UX as well bringing that architectural planning if you will of the user interface as you know that's super important not only does your application have to look good it has to be easy to not now maybe you might be good at UX who knows but that's very important good UX is a huge part of the perception of value in an application if you look at people when they review iOS the new version of Windows or a new version of Mac OS the thing that they criticize first and foremost is whether it's easy to use so keep that in mind so how you judge the pay look at the prot individual projects perhaps and see you know and then everybody quotes in terms of how many hours it's going to take and then you have to sort of set a baseline with your partner designers how much they are going to make per hour and that's one way to do it you could handle the contract yourself and then farm out the work to other people where they designer types where they will tell you how much they want how many hours is gonna take what did it take per hour and then you can factor that into the price what you present to of a claim that's one way of doing it I get into a lot of detail about this kind of stuff terms of pricing out projects and so forth in my freelance course shameless plug but it's apropos is it common for one party to find the work but negotiate the dollar value for forming out the work very common for example if the designer finds a client would he or she then offer a dev a certain amount without disclosing how much he is getting from the client why not it's possible it depends on the arrangement that you have with your which your collaborative partner if you will on this if you're working as Co independent contractors yes of course they're very take is their business really on the other hand if you're working together on a regular basis then maybe you can collab in a bigger way where things were more transparent it depends on the business arrangement that you have depends on how consistently you're gonna work with people so if you if a designer comes up to you and says okay I got this back-end project this is what it is and if they don't reveal their client information or how much to gain pay from the client then you could ask but it's not really relevant you can just you can just set whatever you want give them your price and that's it right and if they're making money off of you then that's because that's their client vice versa on the other hand if you have a regular working relationship let's say you decide you're gonna go freelance and you know one or two good designers really good designs what you think you think you can work with you can sit down with them and come up with the working parameters prior to getting any contracts as an example where everything is transparent or it's not again nothing is set in stone really this is really up to what you negotiate with your partner contractors whether they be designers or programmers right you'll find that some contractors won't care which you charge to the client they just want to make their money right if you want to make X dollars per hour and you look at a project and you budget this much money this many hours as long as you get paid that's all you want really at the end right the only thing is you got to put in parameters in there as a tip and turns what do you do with overage right well oblems if you bid 30 hours and do two you know typical feature creep project creep perhaps client mismanagement or bad management you find yourself instead of doing 30 hours or doing 40 hours now do you charge for a fixed amount for that project which is dangerous but a lot of clients are going to want that initially they don't know you who are you gonna get a rate based on how many hours you put into it which is more of a trust oriented thing in terms of costing per project meaning getting a fixed price for a project some some client comes to you or some designer comes to you and says okay we got this project here it is here's a spec how much to do the whole thing you write you give out your bid and then you figure it was 50 hours it turns out to 75 hours what do you do in that situation you have to establish that those rules if you will procedural rules in terms of pricing and costing and time budgeting etc before you get into a project before there's many ways to do that again I cover that him of course a lot to talk about in a vlog number three what are the typical roles of both parties I read an article that said that the designer usually works more closely with the client and the developer which makes sense yes I guess if you had a a project where the roles were kind of like you didn't have a point man with the client meaning you didn't have it at one of the developers involved or developers designer I'm gonna put them all under one category like web professionals you got what professionals they could be UX specialist it could be coders full-stack back-end etc so so the role again it's up in the air yes the designer is going to be communicating more with the client because designer is gonna be showing skins gonna showing they're looking and showing the UI getting feedback where's you if you're writing the backend code you're implementing some MVC framework or something you're not going to get common from the client about how you're writing your code of course but again it's really it depends on your particular arrangement how you initially structure it who owns the client if you will right if you get a client in your independent contractor that's your client so when you hire talent a designer to help you out you still own a client they don't on the client may they may have to communicate with the client or you may broker the communications between the designer and a client meaning that let's say it's a web app and you get a bunch of screen so you get the specifications and turns the views the screens that they need for our web app and then you you get a basic profile the style that they want for of a web app to look and feel if they like some different web sites etc etcetera cetera yet it's all process there and then you afford this to your designer and then the designer will put questions to you you've got a real a questions so you become the point man and the real a be in between the client and the designer you may want to play that role you may not you may decide now okay we'll just have this designer talk directly with the client which means that you're relinquishing a little bit of control on the project in some senses because if you have the client you're it's you so you have the client talk directly with the designer bypassing you or you just monitoring it you know there's you know then you're creating a little bit more work for of a designer so they may want more because they're gonna have to deal with that client as opposed to you being a buffer between the client and the designer you get the idea again for a vlog difficult to discuss all the ramifications all the details I cover a lot of us in my freelance course final question what else should I know about partnerships partnerships are like marriage so before you get into an entangle alliance with a partner be sure that you know the individual very very well accuse your partner's not just based on their technical or design skills really paint close attention to who they are as individuals can you trust them can you get along with them if there's somebody you know do you know that they've proven to be honorable or dishonorable individuals when the pressure hits and in any type of business pressure will hit so when the pressure hits you want to know that this person is not going to crack or stab you in the back you want to make sure that they're they're top-notch people characterized character wise I leave you with this one of my mentors once told me that if he had to choose between the hotshot unbelievably capable employee like the hotshot developer the amazing designer but who was a jerk versus the guy was pretty good but it's really easy to get along with he would go every time with the person was easy to get along with because the skills can be updated but being a jerk is very difficult to fix takes lots of lots of therapy for them to get fixed or jerkiness so when you're choosing partners vet them more or less for whether your personalities mesh well whether you can identify if they have integrity if they're financially secure that's even better people are not Spencer esp--you don't need that check every two weeks are much easier to deal with and people who are always on the edge financially so that the character of the individual at least as much as you would their technical skills because technical skills can be developed right if somebody has got a good a good mind if you will and a good disposition visa vie wanting to learn new always willing to challenge their own ideas etc etc etc very good questions I like how you sent them to me the way you organize your questions gives me confidence that once you get up and running as a freelancer you will eventually find success because a big part of Elvises communications all right we'll talk soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: Stefan Mischook

Views: 3,300

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: freelance, freelancedeveloper

Id: AMosvE-Rt88

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2019