Freelancer Interview: Jon Phillips

Welcome to the second interview here on Guerrilla Freelancing. Today we’ve got a friend of mine here to answer questions – Jon Phillips from Spyre Studios. I’ve written countless articles for Jon’s blog and over the past year or so I have really come to realize how great of a freelancer he is. He tours the world as a rockstar (a real rockstar – we’ll get into that later in the interview) and runs a very successful freelance business.

Check out the interview and make sure you keep an eye out for the awesome things Jon has been doing. Any questions you have for him, let him know in the comments and I’ll make sure he gets here to answer them

Introduce yourself to the readers here and let us know what you do for a living

Sure! My name’s Jon. I’m a 27 year-old designer working from Montreal, Canada. My portfolio and blog are located at SpyreStudios.com. It is also my company/business which I founded in 2007 after freelancing for about 2-3 years. I’m also a guitarist and I play in a heavy act here in Montreal.

What does your typical work day look like?

Well, every day is different from the last but usually it starts with a good cup of coffee, checking emails and replying to messages on various social networking sites. Then I’ll work for about an hour on my personal projects (SpyreStudios and Design-Newz) and then I’ll write down a couple things on my to-do list – that’s when the ‘real’ day starts. I rarely know when my day will end, but I try to clear my to-do list before going to bed

Any “I wish I knew this back when I started” advice for freelancers who are just starting out?

The best piece of advice I can give would be to never stop networking, even if you’re having a very busy day, setting even just 30 minutes aside for networking will pay off in the long run. You can never have enough contacts.

Also, don’t get caught in the feast or famine cycle. Save some money for rainy days and don’t forget to put some money aside for when tax time comes. When you can afford it, get a good accountant.

I really enjoy your Design Newz website. How’d the idea for that come about?

I’ve always liked the concepts behind sites like AllTop and PopUrls and even though those 2 sites show quite a lot of design-related content I thought it’d be nice to have a site dedicated only to design and development. Being an active Twitter user I also noticed that a lot of designers were sharing and retweeting design-related links so I though ‘why not have all of this in one central location?’. I wanted my new site to be like a one-stop-shop for designers and developers looking for inspiration, articles and tutorials. So I opened up my Moleskine notebook and started drawing wireframes and all. And then about 6 hours later I had a complete site running on WordPress and was ready to launch.

When did you realize you wanted to be a freelancer and was your first role as a web designer or something else?

Actually I don’t see myself as a freelancer, I prefer to think of myself as a business owner and entrepreneur. I am, of course, always looking for opportunities and partnerships, but I prefer to create opportunities and set the rules myself. I like to work with clients – as opposed to working for clients. This way I can also focus on my own projects.

If you could give five pieces of software as “must haves” for freelancers, what would they be?

These are the apps and software I use every single day. Of course this list could be much longer.

• Adobe Creative Suite (mostly Fireworks)
• WordPress (needs no introduction I guess – my favorite platform)
• MAMP Pro (for installing WordPress locally)
• TextMate (or any other text editor)
• Mail app (or another reliable Mail application)

Your Spyre Studios site is a blog but also your portfolio. Do you find it easier to manage both on one domain? Are there any benefits from having the blog as your main focus and the “portfolio” secondary to it?

I find it’s much easier! I actually tried separating the two and setup SpyreMag.com and left SpyreStudios.com as a simple portfolio site. But I soon realized there was no point in having two separate sites and diluting traffic. I then went ahead and put everything back on SpyreStudios.com and redirected the SpyreMag domain.

I like the fact that the blog is the main focus. This way, potential clients can see what I’m interested in and what I (and guest authors) write about. I found that this setup works for two reasons:

• People interested in the blog have direct access to my portfolio, no need to ask them to check out my portfolio on another domain. Everything is right there.
• I work a lot with bloggers and small business owners looking into starting a blog, so it just makes sense for me to have the blog as the main point of interest.

Where do you see yourself in five years? Will you still be freelancing or do you have plans for something bigger?

I can’t say where I’ll be in 5 years, but I don’t think I’ll be freelancing. I’m working on creating different sources of recurring and passive income to allow me to have more free time to focus on some personal projects and play music.

Just for fun: Since you’re a real rockstar, do you find it weird that designers are calling themselves rockstars?

I’m so glad you asked me that question! I’ll try to be as concise as possible with my answer because you know I could rant on this for hours haha

To answer your question: yes I find it weird. I see no reason to call yourself a rockstar if you ain’t one. Seriously, unless you’re actually in a band, are touring the world, spending time in a recording studio and drinking Jack Daniel’s from the bottle… don’t call yourself a rockstar. Period.

Why would I want to work with a rockstar anyway? Would you trust a Pornstar to design your website? I don’t think so. Same goes with Ninjas and Gurus. What? You’ll do some killer Ninja moves while you upload files to my server? Come on!

While it may appeal to some because they’re very ‘trendy’ buzzwords, it doesn’t appeal to me at all, and I actually am in a band and have toured all over the country.

// Ok, rant is over

Go ahead and plug anything else you’d like – Thank you for doing the interview!

You’re very welcome Mike. Thanks for having me, always a pleasure! Stop by SpyreStudios and Design-Newz anytime!

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Thank you Jon for being a good sport and doing this interview.