Stop Being a Perfectionist as a Freelance Graphic Designer

As a freelance graphic designer you might feel obliged to overdeliver because there’s so much competition and you don’t want to lose a single clients. Consequently you obsess over each and every little detail just to make absolutely sure that everything is perfect. Yes, such dedication can be beneficial to your success — but it can also affect you negatively when taken to the extreme.

As a perfectionist you delight in investing time and effort into your projects, only delivering work that you deemed is perfect. Having high standards allows you to easily meet client expectations — they will be impressed by your professionalism and work ethic, resulting in more business for you in the long run. Perfectionism also applies to handling your clients, where you strive to make them feel as appreciated and valued as possible.

Striving for perfection is usually not a bad thing. However, with perfectionism there is often the fear that things won’t go exactly the way you imagined, which is inevitable as you take on different projects and work with different kinds of clients. In reality, there are many things that are out of your control — a client might delay payment and stop communicating with you, or your workstation might die all of a sudden causing you to lose a whole week’s worth of work.

While other designers can adapt to such situations and move on, as a perfectionist you are more likely to obsess over the situation. Relatedly, there is a tendency to procrastinate as you wait for the right conditions before starting any work, which is idealistic at best.

And when you do work on a project, you find yourself putting in much more effort than what is actually required. You keep searching for minor flaws that can be improved on, when the time and energy could be spent on something more productive. In short, seeking perfection will result in you becoming less efficient and effective as a freelance graphic designer.

Moreover, approaching graphic design in such a way is an exercise in frustration as you waste precious time trying to make things perfect. Coupled with the stress of deadlines, and the result is chronic mental and physical exhaustion.

In fact you are more likely to miss deadlines if you keep getting hung up over each and every little detail. It’s also important to realize that clients aren’t going to pay you more just because everything is done perfectly. A project is about meeting specific goals and objectives, and not so much about drawing that line as straight as possible.

And even when a project is completed to the client’s satisfaction, the same can’t be said for you as the guilt that things could have been done better haunts you. Nothing is ever really good enough, and thinking in such a way will destroy your self-confidence as a graphic designer. As a result, you find yourself charging much lesser than what you are really worth, and skipping high-profile projects even though you have the skills necessary to meet the client’s needs.

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