New to freelancing- need help with this situation

Re: NDA, this is what I thought, that’s why I didn’t say anything. It was weird to me that he was so eager to share so much information without having me sign one, but oh well.

Ditto.

Hah. I hadn’t seen this one.

sounds like you should walk for sure. Just keep it simple. You want me to do work? It costs x.

This is a slightly over the top comparison, but what you have described about asking you to research and come back with ideas while he goes on vacation is directly analogous to the below story I hear years ago.

What I would say was that a person who has issues of self-worth and low self-esteem would probably be a better candidate to become a □□□□□□, or a □□□□□□□□□□, than someone who didn’t. Now, that sounds fairly obvious to anybody who would hear that. They’d say, well, that’s pretty obvious. But the thing about it is, is that it’s not something that people necessarily wear that’s so obvious to see in a person. And so I think that’s what makes some good □□□□□□□□□□□□ is the little probing of a person to find out where they’re at.

I’ll give you an example of a very simple probe a friend of mine used to do. He’d be in a club, and he’d meet a girl. And he would go up, and let’s say he’s having a cocktail. She’s sitting at the counter next to him. And he would, after a bit of banter and small talk and conversation, he’d say, buy me a drink. Now obviously, some girls would automatically say, buy your own drink. Or you buy me a drink. But some women would buy him a drink.

That’s the little kind of probing stuff that people do. You see, because just through five minutes of little conversation, now all of a sudden, he’s seeing that he can exert his will over this woman, that she, not even in a conscious way, is basically giving in to his will. And sometimes it’s that simple, something as small as that.

Pimp Anthology on This American Life

Like Richard says, walk away.

Update on the situation: I emailed him again to reiterate that without agreeing on a pay structure prior to doing work I couldn’t do anything for him.

He emailed me back to say that he WAS going to pay me for the work he had wanted done while he was on vacation. I told him this was entirely unclear and that we hadn’t discussed it specifically, nor had we signed or even discussed any sort of contract. I said that I don’t know any designers who work before getting any of those two things settled first, and he said (not verbatim but close), “we know plenty of those people, we work with them all the time. We agree on a rate and pay as we go with a monthly check.”

So I just want to make something clear here. Is there a whole legion of freelance designers out there who operate like this? As far as I have learned, I would want to sign a contract with any and every freelance client that I work with. And yet somehow he has worked with aaaallll these people who are happy to just work with him, not sign a contract, and trust that he’ll pay after all the work is done? Am I missing something here?

(And as far as getting contracts written up going forward: is this something a client should generally produce, or am I expected to present one to them? How do I go about finding a good/reliable/trustworthy contract lawyer? How will I know they are not ripping me off and/or that they are actually telling me everything I need to know?)

He then went on to say that because I hadn’t done the work for him, he no longer wanted to work with me. Oh well.

Thanks everyone, again, for your advice.

His loss.

Nobody should work before a contract is in place and a deposit is paid for a new client. You write the contract/proposal.

How could he agree to pay you if he didn’t even know your rate? Makes no sense. You don’t want to work with people like that.

R

Sociopath. He’ll probably be in the newspapers for the wrong things in a few years.

If on the odd chance you don’t listen to the people here and run, just email him back and tell him that its normal to get an upfront engagement fee of $1000 (or whatever you think would cover your time on it). He will then abuse you and you will have dodged that bullet.

Cheers
MAS

At first, as a young design student with barely any experience yet, I thought I couldn’t offer any good advice on this and just wait for the story to be released as a ‘True ID story’ but then I realised I would say this:

Please don’t do this job, I don’t want to leave school and face people who are used to having talented designers work for free!

Unfortunately, he already is working with at least one recent grad.

In my experience people like this often dupe recent grads to work for little or no money. Which is ironic because a recent grad is relatively untrained in bringing an idea to market… It starts a conscious cycle of devaluing design. This can happen on the corporate level as well where a company with no design in house will bring in a fresh grad to try out when what they need is an experienced practitioner.

I recommend staying away from these types of situations. They will always pose themselves under the guise of opportunity but look carefully.

Exactly my thoughts… but really no surprise because he’s obviously trying to pinch every last penny.

He told me he wasn’t willing to start me at a day rate because he “did not yet know my value to him”, so I asked him how he could have expected me to meet his deadline (ie the work he wanted done when he came back from his vacation) if he was unsure of my value/ability. Not surprisingly, he didn’t have an answer.

This is a very good point. I happen to work in an industry heavily entrenched in spec proposals, but luckily all of the design work is paid work. I’m not aware of any designers in my industry; freelance, corporate, or agency that do spec design. That’s all fine and good for us designers, however it perpetuates a broad perception with many clients that the design work is actually free, and things that are “free” are perceived to have less value.

So I read Liam’s comment as, “please don’t de-value the work that good designers do”.

It sounds to me like your client is a bottom feeder when it comes to design, and probably doing business in general, he’s going to take the path of least resistance to the the largest volume of work at the lowest cost that he can and then mine the work for a couple of semi-precious gems. As you stated, the products are “lame”, now you know why. If you think you can add significantly more value to this guy’s products through design, then you have every right to set up a contract, that’s what professional designers do. It depends on how far you want to take it, but if in your discussions with him he revealed his competitors maybe seek them out and work for them?

Pretty much exactly this. I knew what it was going in, I just have very little experience dealing with these kinds of people. Lesson learned.

It’s funny because he mentioned people who added a lot of ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’ to the products, when there is clearly not much going on in the way of design. I kind of had to bite my tongue and wanted to just hear him out. I did tell him I thought I could help him out a lot and that the best way for me to show him this was to have him hire me at a daily rate so that we could sit together and go through the process. He didn’t see the value in this, so yeah, ‘path of least resistance’ is a great way of putting it.

This thread should be forum frenzied. This is a BIG problem.

My first internship was with a guy that sounds incredibly similar to this guy (I wonder if it’s the same?). He was all for the hard sell of how great his company was, how his clients would eat up the stuff they were producing etc etc.

Turns out he ran his company off the back of unpaid interns and a $12 an hour freelancer. Really he just wanted warm bodies in his office to make him feel like he was running a design firm when really it was just an expensive hobby. He was the first to grumble when clients thought he was too expensive or stalled with paying their bills yet he wouldn’t pay for real designers to work for him. Before I left (early may I add) he was starting to discuss how he wanted to bring on four new interns to work in shifts - two starting at 7am and finishing at 3pm, then the other two starting at 3pm and finishing at 10pm. Crazy.

It saddens me that some people will exploit younger designers in such a manner, the ones desperate for any kind of work/experience.

For me it sounds like you are working in Italy :slight_smile:
(and here they call it “experience”)

I also miss the “crisis” argument as a reason why they don’t pay you in your story :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

(serious mode on):
I have a similar ‘client’ at the moment. He convinced me to work for him and royalties will come when a product goes into production. I decided for myself to give it a try knowing there would be a big chance it wouldn’t go anywhere.
In the meanwhile I luckily got also some other clients that do pay and the only thing I can say is that working for somebody without knowing ‘if’ one day they will be satisfied or working for somebody with more or less clear goal is a lot different.

The only reason why I personally would continue is the fact that you are working on something that you can put in your portfolio anyway.
Don’t get over enthusiastic and pre-calculating any royalties in advance :wink: that’s just frustrating…
Keep up the good spirit and learn from it for a future possible client/conversation.

Hah, doesn’t sound like it’s the same company. That guy you worked for sounds even more ridiculous though. I just don’t understand how people work without contracts, as apparently this guy claims to do with so many people. Am I just naive here? I don’t get it. I can understand in some situations where there’s a level of trust that’s natural, but with personalities like this, why would anyone even take a chance?

I won’t be working with this guy after all. I wasn’t even going to put the stuff in my portfolio! The only reason I even gave it any consideration is because I need some freelance to help pay bills at the moment.