Zig-zagging along - Graphic Designer David Dooley
David developed an array of skills studying multimedia at university in Ireland, and he’d freelanced on the side of full-time gigs for years, as well as going solo for a while before one of his clients took him on as an employee.
He didn’t stay long though. By then, David had caught the travel bug.
From Ireland to Central America and everywhere in between, he’s spent the past couple of years travelling the world. He never intended to work while he was away, but the jobs kept coming in, and David soon found himself living the digital nomad lifestyle.
Now settled in Mexico, where he fell in love, David’s freelancing full-time and building up his one-person studio. This is his story so far.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE BEING FREELANCE PODCAST WITH DAVID DOOLEY AND STEVE FOLLAND
Steve Folland: Well I'll tell you what, how about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance?
David Dooley: Sure thing. So I suppose I'll go from the top because it's a bit of a winding story with a lot of zigs and zags. So I didn't actually do graphic design when I went to college. So like anyone who's 16, 17, they have no idea what they want to do. So I found a course called multimedia, which was in Dundalk, which was a town basically halfway between Dublin and Belfast, so nice cheap rent. So there I got to try a load of different disciplines to kind of find out what I wanted to do, stuff like video production, coding, animation, design, audio production, and a few more bits and pieces. And then kind of towards the end of that, I started to get into graphic design. So I started to do some gig posters and kind of anything I could get my hands on really.
David Dooley: And keeping with the bouncing around the topic, I actually set up a music show when I was in college called Floor is Lava TV. So what I did there was I was producing bands and doing the audio and the gimmick was it was filmed in my bedroom. And any band who was on the show, they all had to fit on my bed because the floor is lava. Like the TV or the kid's game. And then towards the end of college entered a design competition for Heineken where you had to design a bottle for them. And the winner got festival tickets, which was brilliant because you're a student and I had no money to buy festival tickets. So then when I... I won that in Vienna, which was fantastic. And then getting to see my work on a bottle of Heineken that was being sold in the shops was massive. So that's cemented a love of design.
Steve Folland: That's so cool. So you've been to the festival but you've seen your bottle in the shops and you're thinking I want a bit of this.
David Dooley: Yeah, it kind of put it in my mind like okay, I've tried out all these different things and design is something that I really want to kind of stick with. So and like I started applying for jobs, as anyone who finished college does and got a job with a company called Grab One, which were like an Irish version of Groupon. Pretty nice one to get through out of early college. So I was the first designer and it was a very kind of cool startup vibe, so doing stuff like images for the website, sales collateral campaigns. And then they were owned by a newspaper company. So I was doing a lot of print ads and it was actually in that company that I got possibly the best advice I've ever been given, which was by my first boss Chad Atturbury. And he said, I didn't hire you to agree with me, which was fantastic to hear like straight out of college cause you're in your first job and you're thinking like, Oh should I play the game and try to please people, you know, that kind of way.
Steve Folland: Yeah.
David Dooley: And then so on the side, I was also working for a company called Golden Plec and they're an Irish music website. So I started off with them doing gig reviews, which I'd seen as a great way to go to lots of gigs for free. So I got to review acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rihanna, The Killers, The National, loads more, which was fantastic.
David Dooley: So then as the day job was going on, Golden that I kind of morphed into more of a bigger media project because there was a few guys from the clubs working for them as well. So we started to think, Oh, why don't we actually use our media skills and put them to work here. So what we did for them was we did a lot of videos. Like I produced this joint project, which is called Coast to Coast, where we had 14 acts in the concert hall in Dublin and we filmed them in 14 different locations. And then we were kind of rushing to go to edit the whole thing and get them online as soon as possible. Kind of like Facebook live. But before Facebook live was a thing.
Steve Folland: Wow.
David Dooley: And then we also did stuff like, we did a print magazine in 2015 because who does a print magazine in 2015 so we got to find out just how much work that is when you're doing it after work and on the weekends. And we lasted three issues. So it wasn't the most long-running magazine, but I learned a lot anyway as the designer for that, which was fantastic to see kind of your work in a national print magazine, but then it wasn't to be.
David Dooley: And then some more kind of freelance stuff kept popping up like the Royal Opera House in London got in touch, which was fantastic. So that turned into a recurring project where I would do a brochure for them every year, which we put into a newspaper and distributed throughout all of Ireland. And then another company called Element Productions who were a film company based in Ireland. So doing a lot of work with them on film marketing and kind of localizing still for the Irish market, which was fantastic.
Steve Folland: Wow. How were those companies finding you?
David Dooley: It was all through friends, so all through my network, which was convenient, you don't have to go chasing people. And then, it was around 2015 or it was 2015 actually when the day job for everyone that finished up, so they announced they were shutting down, which meant I was very quickly out of a job, but then I was there for a few years, so I got a little bit of cash from them and did the only sensible thing and booked a three week holiday to Indonesia on my own to figure things out.
Steve Folland: I love that. I thought you were going to say I thought I've got money in the bank. I'll go freelance.
David Dooley: No, that's much too sensible.
Steve Folland: Love it. Next, you're lying on a beach in Indonesia.
David Dooley: Exactly. Figuring out how much I don't like scuba diving. I thought I'd like it. I like adventure stuff. I like skydiving, mountain biking, all that kind of exciting stuff, but scuba diving, I was so bad at it.
Steve Folland: I learned how to scuba dive and I hated it.
David Dooley: Like in my group, there was me and three 15-year-olds and they were incredible at it and I just couldn't do it. So I did one dive in the ocean just to say I did it and then left my course halfway through.
Steve Folland: It's not right.
David Dooley: It's not.
Steve Folland: It's not normal.
David Dooley: So after my little... Well, after the little bit where I ran away from all my problems, I got back to Ireland and decided to go freelance full time. So in Ireland, there's like a really good scheme called the short term enterprise allowance. So you go to the welfare office and they basically make you prove like, okay, you're setting up your own business, you're going on your own. We will give you financial support for nine months, which was fantastic.
David Dooley: So it meant, I had to do a lot of, you know, the grown-up things, like do a business plan and jump through all the required hoops for them. But it was good in a way to kind of set myself up properly. So then I also got a new client around then called Today FM who is Ireland's biggest commercial radio station, which was a bit different going from kind of an eCommerce website to going to a radio station, which was good fun. And then after a few months of working for them, they actually offered me a full-time gig. So I went from full time freelancing back into full-time employment and worked with them for like nine months or so. Like in my first week there we had Ice Cube and Kevin Hart in the office. So that was a bit of a change from working in my bedroom alone.
Steve Folland: And you were doing graphic design were because you've clearly got a lot of skills.
David Dooley: Yeah, sorry that was graphic design. So I was doing stuff like they sent a couple of presenters to the Euro so I did like I did the vehicle skin for that and all the branding around that. We did up like crazy things, like the most popular thing that the station had is a promo product, which was a pair of socks, believe it or not. So they were designed as sandal socks because sandals socks are the most disgusting thing in the world. So they were intentionally tacky and I'm very happy how they turned out.
Steve Folland: So freelance life got off to a strong start.
David Dooley: It did.
Steve Folland: Even if you then went in house.
David Dooley: Well the reason I went in house was the Indonesia trip that kind of gave me the travel bug. So I'm thinking, okay, this needs to build up to something else. So if I can get say anything a bit more I'll do that a bit quicker with a full-time gig, you know?
Steve Folland: And when you went in house though, did that then I presume meme that the Irish government startup type thing, the funding that you mentioned, that must have stopped, right?
David Dooley: Oh, yeah, that stopped of course. Yeah. They were happy to see me kind of back in full-time employment because that you know, balance their books out. So they were happy enough. And then after the radio station jumped to another freelance gig in a company called Maximum Media and I don't know if you know them, they run like websites like Joe & Her. Joe seems to be doing pretty big stuff in the U.K., which was interesting cause I joined them again freelancing and then they offered me a full-time job. Well for them it meant I had to learn After Effects on the job, which I don't know if you've ever had to do, but it's a fairly confusing program when you're new to it.
Steve Folland: So did you?
David Dooley: I know I did. Yeah. Yeah. It was a couple of weekends stuck in the house kind of trying to get my head around it. I had to learn it. It was either learn it or be out on the streets again. But then while I was working for them, I was building up towards eventually quitting the job and going on a trip around the world for a year, leaving my problems behind again.
David Dooley: So in September 2017 I handed in my notice and took a one-way plane to Tokyo. On that trip, I didn't actually plan on doing any freelancing, but I took a terrible laptop, an 11 inch MacBook air, which doesn't have a retina screen. You can see about like a postage stamp worth of stuff on the screen, which I actually took for photography work while I was on the road. Cause I like to do a bit on the side, but then as I'm travelling all around the work started to kind of come in. Clients where like we know you took a laptop, can you... Do you want to take on some work? So I figured why not? And then eventually became the term digital nomad, which I don't like at all but a lot of people seem to know what that means, you know?
Steve Folland: So how long into your year round the world trip was it that you started taking work?
David Dooley: It was maybe around four months in, so without like actively trying to find work, but people are kind of coming to me, which was a nice way to be. So I had to kind of four months with no work, enjoying myself, you know, before getting a little bit more serious with things. And then towards the end of that trip, so that tripped involved like Japan, Southeast Asia, New Zealand, South America, Central America. And then the States, but in Central America, in Mexico, I fell in love and met my now girlfriend. So then once I got back to Dublin was making plans on how to get back into Mexico, which meant I was back full-time freelance again.
Steve Folland: Well okay, hang on. What year are we now in?
David Dooley: Sorry, 2017 I left Ireland.
Steve Folland: Right.
David Dooley: 2018, I got back to Ireland. Yeah, it was a long year but crammed a lot of stuff in but it sounds like a longer time just because I'm flying through it like this.
Steve Folland: Did you feel on that trip by the way, that you managed to get the balance right between doing the travelling that you had set out to do and doing freelance work?
David Dooley: Yeah, that part wasn't too bad. Like the trickier parts were the time zone difference depending on where you were, but hands down, the most trickiest part is finding good internet. Like there was one day when I was in Brazil and I had to send an ad for the side of a bus that was going to be going around Dublin and I was having breakfast, literally holding my laptop up in the air, trying to get the file to sand and connect to the wifi before getting another bus ticket out of that town. So there's some stressful stuff like that, but overall if you can make that work, I'd highly recommend it to anyone. It's amazing.
Steve Folland: It's quite nice sending the artwork for a bus while waiting for a bus.
David Dooley: It was very poetic. Yeah. And that was nice either for my parents to be back on and I could send them a photo said buss being like, here, look what I'm actually doing because it's a bit more tangible, you know, for someone of that generation to go kind of get their head around it.
Steve Folland: Yeah, get yourself to Dublin. Look at that bus.
David Dooley: Yeah, exactly. So then I got back to Dublin and realized, okay, I'm going to be doing this full time, so I should probably start up my own one-person studio, which was where Yo Kyoto! Studio came from.
Steve Folland: I mean you say I should probably, but like you'd obviously been doing all right as yourself as your name before that. What was it that made you choose to be a studio name?
David Dooley: I think in my own head, I just didn't like putting my own name on top of invoices and proposals. I thought it felt a little more professional to put it under a pseudonym. So originally I just had Yo Kyoto!, but then a lot of feedback I got from friends and stuff were saying like, that doesn't tell anybody what you do. That sounds like it could be a travel site, it could be like, you know, a promotional site for the city of Tokyo. So I needed to put the CD studio bit at the end just to round that off. But also being careful not to make it seem like I'm 20 people in one company, which I think a lot of one man bands tend to do.
Steve Folland: And how did you make sure people knew you weren't
David Dooley: Literally, the first thing you see on my websites is saying it's just me. This is a one man show, you know?
Steve Folland: Yeah.
David Dooley: So then spent four months back in Dublin, kind of getting everything set up, getting the portfolio in order, getting the website up and running. And then in January came back to Mexico, which is where I've been since.
Steve Folland: And so now you are like, are you travelling around or are you now settled down in Mexico?
David Dooley: It's a little bit of both. So I'm kind of bouncing around the place, but Mexico is it for possibly the next year or so.
Steve Folland: Where are your freelance clients based?
David Dooley: At the moment they're all Irish, which is fantastic because Mexican clients can't pay as much. It's like a different scale. So if I can get clients in Ireland, that works much more in my favour.
Steve Folland: And what's the time difference like? Like how are you finding it working?
David Dooley: Yeah, the time difference here isn't too bad. It's six hours. So my client's evenings or afternoon/evenings will be my mornings, which means I'm waking up to a lot of emails and then two or three hours of cross over with work. And then once it gets around lunchtime, it's silence. So it actually works quite well for getting stuff done.
Steve Folland: Yeah. I bet that's, I have often said before, like sometimes I'll come into the office on a Sunday into the co-work space.
David Dooley: Yeah.
Steve Folland: And I quite like, whilst I don't like to work Sundays, what I do love is the fact that nobody responds to my emails and I just get a load of stuff done.
David Dooley: Yes, you're getting a head start on the week.
Steve Folland: And so you get that every afternoon.
David Dooley: Every afternoon. Yes.
Steve Folland: Because you're working when people have gone home. Wow.
David Dooley: Just tell people you've moved to Mexico too.
Steve Folland: So that brings us up to date to where we are now with you in a basement, in a coworking space in Mexico.
David Dooley: Exactly.
Steve Folland: There's a question there in itself, like did you try working from home and then like what brought you into the coworking space?
David Dooley: I think I just need to be out of the house to work because my girlfriend, she also freelances, so she works from the house and I think it just isn't going to work if the two of us are here at the same time. And I like just the routine of taking like a 20, 25-minute walk to work, knowing okay, when I'm here to see what I'm getting stuff done. And when I leave that it's. Finished. Cause from freelancing before I know it's so easy for like the hours just to bleed into the evening to bleed into the night. If you're working from home, it's pretty difficult to set some boundaries.
Steve Folland: Yeah. So you've actually managed to do that once you get home, that's it.
David Dooley: Yeah. Like I find if you leave the laptop in the office, it makes it a lot easier not to work when you get home.
Steve Folland: Yeah, that's a very good point. And what's the mix of people like in like is it you and lots of Mexican freelancers in that co-work space? Like what's it like?
David Dooley: A bit of a weird one. So the actual building, it's an architecture firm and they had a bit extra space for the amount of people who are working there. So it's half architecture firm and then half freelancers. So it's mostly Mexicans. But on the international side, there's myself and a guy from Holland.
Steve Folland: So flicking back through this sort of, I don't know, almost fragmented freelance story because you've been in and out and stuff. But nevertheless you've been doing stuff for quite a while about four or five years by the sounds of it freelance, has it all just been through the network that you have made that work has come your way.
David Dooley: Yeah, up to this point it has thankfully enough. I think it helps that I was in three different companies. I got to meet a lot of people and maintained a lot of relationships and like some people that I hadn't heard from in years, like even just a couple of weeks ago, someone got in touch from that first kind of full-time job I had looking for some work to get done. But I feel like I'm at the point now where I've almost exhausted waiting for people to come to me. I need to be a bit more proactive. So a project I am slowly chipping away at now is a showreel, which is tricky enough trying to get it to a minute to fit in kind of eight years of work. So once that's done that'll be kind of spammed out to literally everybody I know being like this what I'm doing, send work my way.
Steve Folland: And are you now focused on graphic design or do you do, cause you said about After Effects, so do you do motion design as well or like what's...
David Dooley: Yeah, so it's mainly graphic design but if a motion project comes my way I'm more than happy to do it.
Steve Folland: So actually it worked well for you. You know, it could've been possible for you to have turned down the full-time jobs but actually going into them is what has helped sustain being freelance.
David Dooley: Yeah, 100%. And like some of the stuff that I learned from them was incredible. Like if I stayed freelance, I don't know if I would've made the connections to do some of the branding projects, like to wrap a vehicle or a taxi to do all that kind of stuff but it's been a nice, it's been a nice mix. I can understand for someone how daunting it is to go freelance full time, you know?
Steve Folland: You clearly had a love of doing side projects.
David Dooley: I'm not very good at saying no to projects. Like if someone suggests something, I'm very happy to say yes to it even if I don't know how to do it.
Steve Folland: And is that still the case now?
David Dooley: That is very much the case.
Steve Folland: That's why my kind of my work is a little kind of zigzag. It's all kind of over, all over the place. But I'm trying to focus a bit more now. Like if someone said, would you do a video project? I'd say, you know, no, I'm only sticking with anything on the graphic, be it graphic design or motion.
Steve Folland: So do you have any side projects on the go?
David Dooley: At the moment I'm still kind of chipping away with stuff for Golden Plec and there's a charity initiative called the 24 hour project, which I was introduced to this year, which is, it's this crazy project where on one day photographers from around the world take one photo every hour and upload it. So it starts in like New Zealand and it finishes up in Hawaii. The whole thing goes off like 36 hours and Instagram is just flooded with these incredible photographers.
Steve Folland: Wow.
David Dooley: So I did a little bit of work for them to kind of help people sign up and explain what the concept was. And then the other side project I have at the moment is a photo book of trying to cram a year's worth of photos into something a little more tangible than having them just sit on my hard drive.
Steve Folland: How have you found the business side of being freelance? Like it sounded like the Irish government made you have a good think about it. Did that pay off?
David Dooley: That definitely paid off. That made me kind of look at the long term, not just kind of what gigs are coming in but more, okay, you need to do some mental work to sustain the lifestyle that you have now to cover these bills. And like they were very helpful in helping me figure it all out. So I'm very grateful for that. But it's definitely challenging. Like the financial side of it is tricky when you don't have the amount of money coming in all the time and getting people to pay you on time is as every freelancer can attest is still a nightmare. Like I think every accountant around the world should have to work freelance for maybe a month just to see how frustrating it is not to get paid on time.
Steve Folland: Well, every person who works in a finance department should have to be.
David Dooley: Yeah, that would be convenient. I think they'd pa a lot quicker if they had that perspective.
Steve Folland: Like how have you dealt with that?
David Dooley: Luckily I haven't been burned too bad yet. There's just been a lot of kind of waiting and just awful things like just having to send people emails where you feel like you're begging them for money. You know? Even though they were happy enough to reply to your emails when you were doing the project. But luckily enough, it's a rare enough case, so I don't want to sound like I'm badmouthing all my clients. But then, of course, there's the good sides, like the freedom to kind of, if you're freelancing and you can just work from a laptop, you've got so much freedom to move around and work where you want really.
Steve Folland: As you've proven for sure.
David Dooley: Yeah.
Steve Folland: What have you learned actually about that whole much as you don't like the term digital nomad lifestyle?
David Dooley: I think just the discipline that's needed because it's so easy to put it on the back burner and go do other things, especially when you're meeting new people all the time and there's so much happening. So I think you just need discipline and saying like, okay, my mornings are when I'm going to work and then in the afternoon I can go do touristy things and just being able to say no to people. Like I can't go to this party tonight because I have work to do in the morning or I have to make a call. You know, that kind of stuff.
Steve Folland: I remember you mentioning early on, one of your bosses saying, I didn't hire you to agree with me. I was wondering like what? Yeah, I guess like how you find dealing with clients
David Dooley: In terms of them not agreeing with stuff or?
Steve Folland: So if people are asking you to do things or like and maybe you've got a difference of opinion, have those words stuck with you?
David Dooley: I think a lot of it just comes down to trying to see their perspective because they're not doing it just to kind of be awkward or to be difficult, but if they're saying something, they definitely have a reason to it and I find that a lot of clients, if you can explain where you're coming from, that definitely helps, which is one thing I'm really grateful for is that in my first job in the deal company, I got such a commercial awareness working there that I feel like I have a better way of talking to salespeople and talking to people and that kind of way as to business objectives instead of just like, if you can back something up instead of just saying, Oh, it's my opinion, or I like it. People are generally a lot more accepting of that and seeing your side of it, you know?
Steve Folland: Yeah. I like that. And do you mostly deal with people via email, especially since they're clearly never in the same room as you?
David Dooley: They're not. They're very selfish. They never come to my meeting room. Yeah. Right now it's all email, like a couple of Skype calls, stuff like that just to kind of touch base and you know maybe stuff that doesn't make sense to go over in an email. But 99% of the time it's going through email. But even when I was in Dublin, like you're not meeting that many clients face to face. Most of them don't think it's necessary.
Steve Folland: You obviously started out like surrounded by other creative people. Is that still the case? Are you part of like a design community or are you the lone person out there doing what you're doing?
David Dooley: I think it's a mix. Like I'm still in touch with a lot of people I would have been in Dublin. But in terms of like a design community or creative community here, not so much and that is down to me having terrible Spanish. Like the town where I'm in now, San Cristobal, it's like a beautiful colonial town. It's quite artistic. It's quite creative, but my Spanish is incredibly basic so I'm not at that point yet where I feel like I can immerse myself in the community here, but it's definitely something I'm working on.
Steve Folland: I kind of feel like there needs to be a film made of your life, but you don't quite know how that film finishes yet.
David Dooley: I really don't. We'll see.
Steve Folland: Are you somebody who plans or is it more like see what happens?
David Dooley: It's pretty loose. There's talk of possibly moving to Barcelona next year because my girlfriend wants to study there, which is totally fine with me. It'd be nice to be there closer to home and then I can practice that fluent Spanish, which I'm going to have next year. But right now it's all quite loose but I'm not going to be taking any more full-time gigs at the moment. So I'm happy enough to kind of build a company and build my freelancing from here and see where it can go.
Steve Folland: Now if you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
David Dooley: It would definitely be get organised. So with stuff like files, backups, admin, all that kinds of stuff. Cause as unromantic, as unsexy as that sounds it makes the rest of it so easy. Like at the moment I've got this master spreadsheet that just keeps track of everything. So all the fun stuff like how much money's coming in and what's coming out, what I'm spending every month keeping the business going as well as a new addition I've done this year, which is anybody who gets in touch with a project, just keeping track of whether the project happens or not and then if it doesn't, why didn't happen. Just like in spots kind of, you know, higher-level if anything's happening with the business so I can kind of make adjustments that way. And it just helps you keep a bigger picture of everything to let you do more fun, creative work.
Steve Folland: But now you're feeling much more on top of it now that you've put stuff in place.
David Dooley: Oh, I'm feeling much more too on top of it. Yeah. Like I feel like I can focus on actually running the business now. Before it felt a little more sporadic like I didn't have too much control. But I think when you know where the problems are starting to come in, like, Oh, if I'm not getting this job because of X, Y, or Z, you could start to make adjustments for that kind of stuff, you know, and be a little bit more grownup about the whole thing.
Steve Folland: David, thank you so much and all the best being freelance.
David Dooley: Thanks, Steve. Thank you for having me and thanks for doing such a good podcast.