Missed Creative Freedom Brunch Wellington? Here's how the day went, a couple of the lessons and why Auckland in October should be in your calendar.
On 30 July we filled a room at the Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club with Wellington designers for the Creative Freedom Brunch. Coffee, a proper brunch and a morning of talking about the work behind the creative work, the stuff many of us have to figure out alone.
Jeremy's keynote
Jeremy Johnson, Rocketspark co-founder and co-author of Creative Freedom, walked through the seven-step framework, built from his own years of feast-or-famine freelancing.
The lesson people kept bringing up over brunch was pricing. When Jeremy stopped underquoting and priced his work properly, revenue per project went up 62% and meetings dropped 42%. Charging more got him better clients and gave him his time back. There's a free pricing excerpt from the book you can read right now, and the book itself is there too if you want the full framework.
The other big one was terms and conditions. Jeremy shared the clauses most designers leave out of theirs, and the deposit and progress payment ones alone were worth the ticket. Plenty more where that came from in Auckland.
Can you beat the room?
Carlos from CarbonInvoice (CEO, founder and tree!) ran a design quiz that got surprisingly competitive. CarbonInvoice helps small businesses measure their carbon footprint from their accounting data and fund native tree planting to match it.
Two to test yourself on:
In a New York Times experiment with 45,000 readers, one typeface made people significantly more likely to believe a statement was true. Which was it? a) Helvetica b) Comic Sans c) Baskerville d) Times New Roman
Which brand has the world's oldest logo still in use today? a) Twinings b) Coca-Cola c) Levi's d) Stella Artois
Answers at the bottom of the post and no scrolling ahead!
The panel
Tyron Noble from our team hosted the panel, with Jeremy joined by Sara-Jane Austen of Designerbloom and Rach Riddle of Riddle Media. A big shout out to Rach and Sara-Jane for getting up in front of a full room and being so open.
There were hard lessons, progress payments chief among them, mostly learned the expensive way. And the conversation kept coming back to why they do this work in the first place. What creative freedom means to each of them looks different: time with family, room to pick the projects they care about, a business shaped around a life rather than the other way round.
What do you bring that AI can't?
Our AI workshop was about proving your value against AI, and we put one question to the room through a live poll: name what you bring that AI can't.
The biggest words on the screen were uniqueness, empathy, authenticity and creativity. Around them: "putting myself in the client's shoes", "lived experience", "a point of view", "challenge their thinking", "a human conversation". Someone wrote SWAG. Great answer 👏
We think that word cloud is a pretty good list of everything AI can't do, written by the people who'd know.
But naming your value is the easy part. The second half of the workshop was about proving it, because clients can't see empathy on a price list. Three ways came out of the discussion.
Build case studies that show your thinking, not just the finished work, so a client can see the questions you asked and the problems you solved along the way. Here’s a great example (plus a cheat sheet for creating case studies).
Be more active on social media about the value you bring (showing the wins) because your next client may be watching long before they get in touch.
Take a stance on AI. Having a point of view and putting it out into the world.
One of our attendees went and did exactly that. Days after the brunch, Valerie from Kaaio Studio published her own take on [AI and the creative industry], sparked by the workshop conversation. We won't spoil it, go read it. But we were stoked to see this come to life after the event.
Keeping the money side simple
Sammie from Hnry followed the workshop with a talk on keeping your finances in check as a sole trader. Hnry handles tax, invoicing and payments for freelancers automatically, taking care of income tax, GST and ACC as you get paid, so there's no end-of-year scramble. For a room full of people running their own creative businesses, a talk about never having to think about provisional tax again was always going to land well.
The afternoon session
For those who stayed on, we ran an optional afternoon session with a peek at what we've been building in Rocketspark. On-page feedback so clients can leave comments right where the change needs to happen. Side by side buttons. Side by side mobile and desktop editing, so you can see both views while you work.
Here's to more
The survey feedback afterwards kept coming back to one thing: the value of connection. Designers who'd never met were swapping pricing stories and portfolio advice over brunch, and conversations ran well past the finish time. We felt privileged to be part of the room and to help some of those connections happen. Here's to more of them.
Auckland, you're next
The Creative Freedom Brunch is coming to Auckland this October. Same format: a keynote, a panel with some amazing speakers (announcing soon), the AI workshop, a proper brunch (+ lunch!) and a room full of your people.
Tickets go on sale soon, but you can jump the queue by joining our waitlist.
Quiz answers: 1. Baskerville. 2. Stella Artois, dating back to 1366.
The Creative Freedom Brunch is brought to you by Rocketspark with support from our mates at Hnry and CarbonInvoice.
