LinkedIn and the price of design

It seems quite fashionable right now to say "I am not doing Facebook anymore."  Even more frequent: "I have no use for LinkedIn."

I won't get into Facebook here, but I have to say that I find LinkedIn quite worthwhile.  When I first joined, like many people, it was because I got a request from someone, and thought, "why not?".  Then my account sat idle for a very long time with a terse profile description and the odd connection being randomly added.

Then I found out about the groups, and it changed everything.  Depending upon your industry, there are hundreds of groups of people with similar interests who are chatting away about something or other that may have real relevance to things you think about every day.

I hasten to add, though it is referred to as a social network, I view LinkedIn as a network for making business connections.  So, I am a textile artist and designer, and I want to talk to other people involved in similar pursuits.  In particular, I would like to have more design clients, more design opportunities, so I have joined groups of people who are working toward similar goals and sharing information about them.

I belong to Textile Designers, Freelance Textile Designers,  The Art of Licensing, Design Sourcing, Jacquard Designing, sustainable Textiles, among others.  Some groups are quite active, others don't have much bearing on my interests and I really should kiss them goodbye.

This post was inspired by a discussion I read tonight in The Art of Licensing, a very active group of all kinds of licensing artists from illustrators to cartoonists to textile designers like me.  It was about pricing your work, a very dodgy issue, which people are quite secretive  about.  I can't tell you how hard it is to figure out what to charge, and you don't want to seem like an amateur and flat out ask, do you?  Every job is different , in some ways, and every job has a different value.  So, for those of you interested in such arcana, here is what I was referred to.  I hope it is as helpful for those of you who are designers, as it was for me. I am posting the direct link to the article which was discussed on LinkedIn.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3025992/how-much-should-you-charge-for-design-work-a-guide

Radiant Orchid 2012

I was going through my vast number of uploaded designs yesterday at Spoonflower, the online print-on-demand fabric service (Spoonflower has a great option in that you can offer your own designs for sale and receive a nice commission whenever someone else buys fabric printed with one of your designs).

 All designs copyright Laura Foster Nicholson 2012-2014.  All rights reserved.

I did a big collection in a colorway I called Plum in 2012, and as I came across it yesterday I realized there it was! Radiant Orchid!  I have written about this rather curious color a couple of times already, commenting on how "outside" the norm it seemed to me, and yet here I had used it with a generous hand in a design collection 2 years ago.  OK, proof that color trending is indeed insightful.

I wonder how many of you have had this color creep into your wardrobe or your home or your creative work in the past couple of years? Yes, that is how a trend is spotted.  Most of us unconscious of it until it reaches a critical mass, and someone like Faith Popcorn or Pantone points it out and shout, "AHA!"