inflight magazine

Having just arrived back in New Zealand after being away for 5 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to work for myself. Unfortunately, I’ve decided to do it at a pretty hairy time where the world has gone into one big recession. Sure some countries are hit harder than others, but I believed that I would be just fine in “Good Ol’ NZ”. Well I was wrong for a while, but I’ll explain.I arrived back on the 7th Jan 09, all was well and I’d brought back my beautiful English girlfriend to live with me. At this point we were bullet proof, having saved up our British pounds and converted them to the kiwi dollar. We traveled around NZ for a month and enjoyed the tail end of a great New Zealand summer. It never dawned on us to settle in for the winter!

By February I decided to buy a car plus all sorts of wonderful things including some nice diving equipment. Money soon ran out and I still didn’t have a job, but not to worry because I’d been planing to work for myself while in the UK. So I finished off my web portfolio and sent out a nice “hello please hire me” email to over 40 Wellington web design agencies. The number 1 response was…

Thank you for getting in touch, we really like your portfolio but unfortunately we aren’t hiring at the moment. We would like to keep your details on record for future positions and/or contract work

At first I enjoyed the compliments of my work (nice little ego stroke is always welcome, all designers love it! , but after a while it became apparent that I couldn’t just sit back and ask the agencies to do all the work for me. I then decided to dust of an idea I had been hatching from when I was living in the UK. At this time, no one wants to spend money, but people still need websites… roll up “THE FDG”.

Back in the UK I’d sat down with my flatmate James, who now works for himself as +Good and talked about starting a “design collective”. There are people out there doing it already and it seems to work, so the big idea was to work on projects both in the UK and NZ together. Although we still havent worked on any projects together, knowing he’s there to work with is enough to go looking for bigger fish.

Anyway, getting back on track… THE FDG has a staff count of 1 thus far, plus 4 partners (1 Flash Designer, 1 Graphic Designer, 2 Web Developers (one of which is a rockstar). I have now won 3 small contracts and have pitched for 3 big ones. Although I’d said that times were tough, friends and referals have helped me to get on my feet. I’m not sure what the future holds but even though it’s hard work getting started by myself (lots and lots of paper work) I really enjoy working my own hours and having complete control of my work (well almost, clients can be crazy sometimes).

At this point THE FDG doesn’t have a website. I have designed it but it waits to be built when I have a spare moment between jobs.