Thanks for reading, Ian! Pamela did a fantastic job on this. It’s one of our big philosophical points on Nation1099 — creating long-term value and growth experiences out of the work we have to occasionally do on the gratis.

I can definitely relate to your personal experience there — I’ve done more than my share of FREElance writing hah. You may also want to check out our site founder, Robert McGuire’s guest feature on the B2B Launcher podcast about the importance of demo projects.

While their site’s focus is primarily business writing, Robert’s project advice applies to freelancers of all walks.

Cheers!

When I started out as a designer in order to work on projects that fascinated me I felt I needed to freely offer my skills. The reason for this was because I had nothing similar in my portfolio, and had no true experience working on that type of project (and didn’t know if I was truly capable). This allowed me to learn, practice and develop my skills further as a designer, and once complete I also had projects that I could show in my portfolio for projects of its type in the future. It was great personally, and professionally when applying for jobs. I believe this made me a better designer, and I encourage young designers to do the same.