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deadline's friday. freelance gig for a wellness brand, which already tells you everything. they sent the brief as a 14 page pdf and a separate mood board that's just nine screenshots of the same beige instagram feed. today's note: "love it! can we make the logo bigger? like 40% bigger." the logo is a wordmark. the whole card is the wordmark. making it bigger means deleting the phone number, which, sure, honestly, fine. the thing that gets me is i did this exact conversation in 2019. and 2021. i know all the moves. i say "sure, i'll try a version" and then i send the version where it's 12% bigger and they say perfect. i'm not even mad at them. i'm mad that i'm this good at it. spent two years in art school to get fluent in the language of making a thing slightly worse on request. anyway i'm gonna go paint something flat and ugly and loud after i hit send, for me, where nobody gets to say bigger.

the freelance logo job I took to pay rent is due tomorrow and instead I've spent the last three hours sorting my paint tubes by "vibes" which is just code for color families I made up. there's a pile for "weird browns" and a pile for "aggressive greens" and neither of them is helping me finish this logo. the logo is fine. the logo has been fine since Tuesday. I just refuse to close it. anyway the green section of my wall is looking incredible if anyone needs inspiration, absolutely free of charge, unlike my rates which I keep accidentally undercharging.

took a logo gig last month because rent was due, told the guy €300 flat. it took me 30 hours. i brought that number up myself. i did the math on my own and then agreed to it. €10 an hour for a thing that's going to be on their truck for a decade. worst part is i knew better. i've done this exact dance like six times. there's a version of me that charges €800 and the client probably still says yes because they already had a budget in mind, and i keep volunteering to be the cheap option because i'm scared of the silence after i say a real number. i keep a running list of freelance rules for myself on my phone. rule #1 is "don't quote before you've slept on it." i texted him back within 40 minutes. i don't even know why i'm surprised anymore

took a freelance logo job i was dreading because rent was due and my studio's a glorified walk-in closet. and it was... fine? client actually let me pick the palette, paid half up front, didn't ask for 47 revisions. i know that sounds like a five-star yelp review for basic decency but in this economy that's basically a miracle. the real win is i finished it in three days and still had energy to paint something for me after. first time in months i didn't feel like a vending machine that dispenses the same beige logo for "exposure points." i even sort of liked the logo by the end. not enough to say it out loud to anyone who'd make fun of me, which is why i'm telling strangers here instead lol rent's paid, i've got a canvas prepped, and the cat finally stopped sitting on my palette. good week.

been running an experiment since mid october. put "8x10 = $180, 18x24 = $650" right in my bio, top line, before the "i don't do logos for exposure" bit. not one person has mentioned it. no lowball offers. no "wow that's expensive" DMs. nothing. what i did get: three inquiries that skipped the whole "so how much would something like this be" dance and went straight to "can you do a 16x20 of my dog." closed two of them in under a week, which for me is warp speed, normally i lose people in the four-day gap between their first message and my reply because i'm bad at email. the weird part is i put this off for a literal year because i was convinced a number in the bio would scare off the casual followers and make me look like a shop instead of an artist. turns out the casual followers aren't the ones buying and the buyers just want to know if they can afford you before they invest emotionally in liking the work. still not sure it's "working" so much as it's not actively hurting. the sample size is like five people. but i've stopped writing the price paragraph in every second message and that alone is worth it. curious if anyone else has tried the same thing and gotten the opposite result, because i keep waiting for the other shoe.

doing a freelance thing for a small bakery, logo refresh, and the owner sent me a "brand guidelines pdf" that is three pages long and page two is just comic sans with a note that says "this is our font, it's fun." i have spent an hour now trying to make comic sans work. i have tried it big, i have tried it spaced out, i have tried it in a nice warm cream on brown. it still looks like a permission slip from 2004. i am losing to it. the worst part is she's right that it's "fun." it is fun. it's fun in the way that a whoopee cushion is fun, which is to say it works exactly once and then everyone in the room wants to leave. i can't say that to her, obviously. i sent back a version where i quietly swapped it for something friendlier and she replied "oh no, that's not our font." considering just painting a sign for my own wall instead of finishing this. my wall doesn't have opinions

finally sat down and actually did the math on the series I wrapped in february. 4 months of painting almost daily, probably 300+ hours total between making the work, photographing it, writing statements, the whole grind. sold one painting out of 12 for $900. after materials and the stupidly expensive frames I wanted for the show... $642 net. that's $2.14 an hour. i looked at the number for way too long and then went and did a logo for a startup i hate for $500 in like 3 hours and felt genuinely ill about which one was the better use of my time. idk what the point is other than i keep doing this to myself and i'm gonna do it again which is either stubbornness or a brain problem lol

finally invoiced a logo job i finished in march. it's been sitting in my drafts since, fully written, addressed, everything. just couldn't hit send. it's not a big number, $650, but i kept telling myself i'd ask for more if i waited, then that i'd lost the right to ask at all by waiting. four months of a $650 invoice aging in my drafts is a very expensive way to avoid an awkward email. sent it at like 1am. they paid in 20 minutes. no comment, no "hey where have you been," nothing. i've been carrying that around like a rock and it turned out nobody was even holding the other end of it. anyway if you're also the kind of person who lets money rot in drafts because asking feels like a confrontation, hi. we should probably start a support group. or just invoice each other.

did a 3x4 ft abstract commission last month for $300. flat, took me 9 hours total including two rounds of revisions because the client wanted "more movement" which means "make my living room look expensive" and i did it because i always do it. $300 divided by 9 is $33 an hour, which sounds fine right up until you subtract the canvas, the paint, and my studio share. studio is $420 a month. i work maybe 40 hours in there if i'm being generous with myself. so that's about $10.50 an hour of studio time baked into every hour i stand in that room. net it's closer to $11/hr. less than i made doing logos for a crypto startup in 2021 and i hated that guy. the actual problem isn't the number, it's that i quoted it in 4 seconds over text like i was ordering a sandwich. i have a whole spreadsheet now. that's the humiliating part, the spreadsheet.

I changed my bio a few months back from the usual "artist, mosaicist, available for commissions" to something that just said what I actually do: I sit on the floor and put small pieces of stone together, it's slow, here's the work. That's it. No hype, no "transforming spaces through ancient craft", no keywords. And I started getting messages that were different. Not "check out my page" or "can you do a logo for my cafe for exposure" but people asking real questions. Where do you source smalti. Do you cut your own. Can I come watch you work sometime. I think there's a whole strip of people who are tired of the polished performance and just want to know what's really happening. Nobody needs another artist who sounds like a copywriter. I'd rather lose the ones who want shiny than lose the few who actually care. The irony is my follower count dropped a bit and my enquiries went up. Make of that what you will. 🙂

ugh, just submitted the final files for a logo project. it was one of those rare ones where the client actually had taste and didn't try to micromanage me into oblivion. felt almost like a real art commission, lol. paid the bills and didn't make me want to quit painting forever. a win is a win i guess.

i've got a 40x40 canvas in the corner of my studio that's been "nearly done" since march. quoted a guy 1200 for a commissioned piece in the same size last year and nearly threw up sending it, so you can guess how the pricing on this one's gone. anyway. today i put a number on it. $3400. typed it, saved the draft, and it's just been sitting there in the drafts folder like a grenade. the thing is i know the math. i know the hours. i know that a designer would bill four grand for a logo they crank out in a weekend and nobody blinks. but the second it's paint on a panel and it's mine, my brain decides the real number is "whatever makes me not feel like a fraud," which historically has been about 40% under market. freelance brain rot. didn't spend two years in art school and drop out to price my own work like a charity. sending it tonight. or tomorrow. somewhere in there.

not a brag, i'm annoyed i didn't do it two years earlier. i'd been quoting the same day rate since like 2021 because i was scared. same number, same pitch, same "happy to be flexible on scope" line i'd copy paste. then in may a client asked me to redo a logo for the fourth time and i just... wrote a new rate into the next quote. didn't announce it. didn't post about knowing my worth. just put the number in the email. three of four said yes immediately. the fourth one ghosted, and honestly that was the one i was doing the most unpaid emotional labor for anyway. what actually changed my mind was seeing a muralist i follow post her day rate publicly. not in a hustle way, just... in the caption. two digits i would've been embarrassed to ask for. i sat with that for a month. anyway the tip nobody gives you is that the scary part isn't the number, it's that you have to stop writing the apology paragraph underneath it. i still write it sometimes. deleting it is the whole job. curious if anyone else has done this recently or if i'm just late

there's a freelance logo job that's been sitting in my inbox since mid july. client wanted "warm but corporate." i opened the file like nine times and closed it every time. tonight i actually did it. eleven minutes. sent the invoice at 1:40am. the relief is unreal and also kind of insulting, because the thing i was avoiding was never the work, it was the email where i have to be a normal person who says "let me know if you'd like any revisions" and means it. the work was nothing. it's always nothing. anyway rent is now theoretically handled. going to go paint something that doesn't have to be warm OR corporate.