7 Essential Video Classes for Freelancers
Have you ever wondered how most freelancers charge $250 for a logo design, while some others charge $2,500 for the same job? What’s their secret, really? Well, it’s all about the quality and experience. The better you know about the subject, the more you bring to the table, and the more you can charge.
So, the question is: Do you feel comfortable in the $250 bunch? Or would you be interested in doubling, tripling, or maybe even increasing your income by 10X? Then it’s time you start filling your brain with valuable knowledge.
Most people (especially our grandparents) used to say that you can’t buy knowledge and experience. Of course, that was the case a long time ago. But we live in the digital world. Today you can buy knowledge for a price as low as $0.99 cents. Don’t believe it? Just have a look at the courses below from Skillshare. And for a limited time, you can get three months of access to all these courses for just $0.99
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Mastering Mockups
A client only comes to you when they need help with something they don’t completely understand. So, when presenting your ideas, concepts, or projects to your clients, you should keep in mind that they don’t see things the same way you do.
This is why mockups take an important role in the design process. Mockups help you to present your designs to your clients in a more attractive way, to show them what the end result would look like, to show them how a logo will look like on a business card or a T-Shirt without having to actually print it out on a T-Shirt.
This course is all about mastering that aspect of the design process. The Mastering Mockups course will help take your mockup skills to the next level by showing everything from creating one-time social media post mockup to creating reusable mockups and more.
If you’ve got Photoshop CS3 or better, you can follow this course to learn more about the power of mockups.
Logo Design
If you’ve been keeping up with the latest design trends, you may have noticed that there’s a new minimalist-style logo design trend going on around the web. It first started with Medium’s rebranding, then TNW, Instagram, and Netflix all followed. The list goes on.
Most big brand logos are starting to shift from their old shiny and glossy logos to minimalist and simple designs. Clearly, these new logo designs are sending a strong message about simplicity.
The Logo Design Fundamentals course contains everything you need to understand how to apply minimal design to logo designs. When you’re done with this course, you’ll know how to curate a mood board, choose a motivating concept, how to sketch from scratch, how to create a negative space mark, and much more.
Resume Building
Resume, or CV, writing is a profitable field in the freelancing industry. There are so many freelancers out there who’ve made careers out of their impressive resume writing skills.
If you’re thinking about getting started as a resume/CV writer, this course will prove to be a great resource. In this course, Davis Jones, Co-founder of Eazl, teaches you how to write a killer resume, optimize it for keywords, reverse engineering, and how to describe each section of the resume with clear precision.
People often spend hundreds of dollars on resume writers. So, even if you don’t plan on becoming a freelance resume writer, you can take this course to learn how to write an effective resume for yourself. The knowledge will never go to waste.
Visual Storytelling
A picture is worth a thousand words!
That’s what visual storytelling is all about. Telling a story without having to explain it all with any words. It’s how the Olympic Games logo tells us about the unity between the five world continents or how Leonardo da Vinci summarized a great story in his The Last Supper painting.
This is a course you must take to understand the power of visual storytelling. The bite-sized videos in this 60-minute course will show you the importance of storytelling with 4 real-world examples and it will even provide you with frameworks for turning your own messages into visuals.
Needless to say, this course will definitely help improve your design work in the future.
Fundamentals of Photoshop
Why take a Photoshop course when you already know how to use it?
Well, first of all, you need to develop skills at a professional level to earn big money. And no, sadly your funny meme designs and mashups of your family portraits don’t count as professional skills.
This would be the perfect Photoshop course for both beginners and advanced users because the course consists of 5 classes that cover everything from the Photoshop tool palette to typography, creating workflows, and so much more.
As an added bonus, the course instructor gives away a voucher to take the Adobe Certified Associate exam in Photoshop to students who complete the course before the deadline and the top student of the class also gets awarded a 1 free year of Creative Cloud membership.
Presenting Ideas
Even freelancers need good presentation skills to win over the clients, no matter the meetings are held via Skype or in a big conference room.
This course will help you learn how to keep your speech short but intriguing, like a 4-minute TED talk. It’ll also teach you to improve your storytelling skills and learn how to engage and persuade your clients.
Have no doubt about the course. It’s instructed by Simon Sinek, TED Talks speaker with over 20 million views on his videos.
Creative Business Branding
Branding is an important part of building a profitable freelancing career. It’s how freelancers like Faye Brown stay on top of their industry. They don’t even have to go look for work, clients come looking for them.
Take this course to learn the basics of branding your creative business, like coming up with a good brand name, writing a great mission statement, visual branding, and more.
The course is filled with tips and advice from an expert graphic designer with over 15 years of experience. You can’t put a price on that knowledge.
These are only seven of the 8,000+ classes available on Skillshare. When you join the site, you get access to all courses for a low monthly rate. Instead of binge watching Stranger Things on Netflix, try binge watching some of these courses. Double down on your knowledge and who knows, maybe next time you’ll be able to double your prices as well.
Better yet, we have a special offer for Design Shack readers. For a limited time, you can get three months of access to Skillshare Premium for just $0.99! It’s an absolute bargain, so be sure to head over to the site and take advantage of the offer. You’ll be amazed what you can learn in your first three months!