It takes an amazing project to make the whole experience of doing it for free so rewarding and worthwhile. It also takes such an extraordinarily horrible client to make ‘getting finally paid’ such a negative experience.

This year I’ve been blessed with a diverse set of clients, and I must say that majority of the projects I’ve worked on are really awesome, from designing a startup’s logo, high exposure online and offline branding activities, to art directing and managing production of entire publications – locally and several from the US.

Truly, it is an amazing experience to be able to choose the projects that you’d want to work on. Running my own graphic design consultancy is so far the toughest (yet the most rewarding) challenge I’ve taken on in my profession as a designer – primarily because I had to wear several different hats, and admittedly, I wasn’t that prepared for most of them.

T’was on those holy-sh*t moments that I came to fully appreciate the support groups that I formerly had when I was still employed – specifically the Sales/Account Managers and the people at the Collections department. Only now that I had to also wear their hats and directly work with clients who sucked the life and joy out of getting paid did I realize how much primetime-soap-opera-ish drama they were dealing with behind the scenes while I blissfully work on their artworks.

Before going back to the main point of this entry, I’d like to spare this line to give a well-deserved holler to all of my ex-colleagues from my previous design posts. Thank you for a job well done at letting me concentrate at what I enjoy doing most in my job.

Now all this epiphany, like any other life-changing I-finally-see-the-light-moments, came from a sucker punch form life’s harsh and uncompromising realities. I’ve always thought that I can endure any amount of crap as long as I get an above-par compensation for it. Apparently, all this time I was undervaluing the intrinsic worth of tolerance.

Only this year did I fully realize that I valued job satisfaction over compensation. That there really was a line that divides the life of a bona fide designer and a masochist. I am a designer first, whatever other embellishments in my job title are secondary, and I choose to be happy being one.

So if you’re gonna stay utterly unprofessional and disrespectful of my profession (unless you are Apple, Google, Facebook or GQ) this is where we part ways…

…after my bank clears your post-dated cheques.

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