All booked up

I recently accepted a medium term freelancing contract which will take me up to mid April 2009. Now while it’s nice to be asked to fulfil these roles it’s not always an easy immediate decision to take, but there’s a couple of reasons I accepted the offer to work for 3 months at Swamp…

1. They do a lot of excellent work and the projects I’ve worked on in the past with them have always been genuinely interesting and challenging.
2. My second baby is due to be born around mid April, so having guaranteed work up until the day that he/she pops his/her head out into this wonderful world means I can have a good month off afterwards and make the most of the being a new Dad for the second time.

Had the offer been from someone else or I hadn’t been in the same situation I probably would have said “Thanks, but not thanks”.

“But why?” I hear you ask – surely in these times it’d be daft to turn down guaranteed work? Yes, it probably would, but if I was that bothered about guaranteed work or not willing to take some risks I wouldn’t have gone freelance at all.

Going freelance in the first place for me was…

i) all about getting to spend much more time with my growing family (My little girl had just been born and if I’d still been working in my old place I wouldn’t get to see her half as much as I do now, and that would be a terrible, terrible thing, because there’s nothing more important than spending time my girl)

ii) to work on lots of different jobs for different people

iii)and not having to do do amends to the same old sites I’d been looking at and working on for the couple of years prior. Yeah, the job security was comforting and people I worked with were ace, but the projects were no longer inspiring me and I wanted new challenges. My wife likes it too, the fact I work at home more. And I’m pretty sure the dog’s happy about it too.

All in all I think I’m safe in taking on a 3 month contract – there shouldn’t be too many cobwebs settling while I’m there and it’ll be nice to be part of a studio for a while again. But then come B-Day II, I can shed the shackles of the office once again, safe in the knowledge I’ve built up enough security to have some time off and that there’ll be something else around the corner soon enough.

I’m not entirely sure what the point if this post was really. I think it’s just my way of saying…

ever expanding family + graphic design freelancing career = very good.