What a year of working alone taught me

A year ago I left a studio job to start Field Notes, a one-person design and code practice in Helsinki. I had two clients, a long list of side projects and a vague plan to keep things small. Twelve months later the plan is less vague, and some of it survived contact with reality.

Small is a feature

The thing clients mention most isn't the design or the code. It's that the person on the call is the person doing the work. There's no handover between a designer and a developer, so details survive: the hover that was promised in a meeting is still there at launch. I stopped apologising for being one person and started putting it at the top of every proposal.

Rules I'm keeping

• Two active projects at a time, never three.
• Fixed prices for defined scopes, with a short list of what's not included.
• Updates in writing, twice a week, whether anything shipped or not.
• Fridays for side projects, because that's where the best client work comes from.

The first rule cost me two projects this year. Both clients came back later, once their timelines had relaxed, and both projects went better for it.

The fourth rule is the one people raise an eyebrow at. But BrewBot, the texture generator and most of the motion studies on this site started on a Friday, and three of this year's client projects arrived because someone had seen one of them. The side projects aren't a break from the business. For a practice this size, they are most of the marketing.

The work I'm proudest of this year came from saying no to the work that would have filled the calendar.

What I got wrong

I underpriced the first three projects, mostly because I priced the hours I expected to spend designing and building and forgot the rest: calls, feedback rounds, content that arrived late, a launch that moved twice. Now every quote has a line for the work around the work, and nobody has questioned it yet.

I also waited too long to write things down. This journal is partly the fix. Writing about a project after it ships forces me to notice what I actually learned, and it has become the easiest way to explain to new clients how I like to work.

Year two starts with the same two-project rule, a slightly longer waiting list and a desk that finally has room for a second monitor.