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14 Comments

Where to offer free design?

TL:DR; While I'm designing a bigger collection of icons, I want to design icons on request free of charge... where would you promote this offer?

Context:
I've found offering design freebies is a great way to get shares with my first project, SVGBackgrounds.com. My latest project is offering a free icon set, called Indie Icons (Visiwig.com/icons). While the icon library is not complete (66/500), I figured I'd take requests for specific icons since I'm going to make more anyway. IH has made me think more about sharing the journey, rather then simply publishing a product when it's complete.

  1. 2

    I love it - both the SVGBackgrounds and icon set. Great job!

  2. 2

    If you are going to charge for the Icons, I have Ad slots on my newsletter 1k+ subscribers, I am putting all together in this very moment.

    Otherwise, if its free or has a free package I can link back from my site in fact you can submitt it yourself ( https://www.colorsandfonts.com) and feature the icons on my newsletter for free. ( colorsandfonts.substack.com ).
    This Tuesday goes out again.

    Feel free to DM me on Twitter.
    @Mike_andreuzza

    I love svgBackgrounds, I have played with it countless times. Kudos to you.

    1. 1

      Thanks Mike, glad you like SVG Backgrounds.

      The icon set (75 and growing) is free for commercial use without attribution, and I'll look at adding it to your site Monday. Eventually I will add premium icon sets. P.s. your site looks cool, and I need to get a better look when I get a chance.

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        Ok, well, then I will link to it on the newsletter if thats fine for you.

        I will wait for you to submit it.

        Thank you !

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          Submitted! Thanks for offering to share my resource, and it's more then fine, it's appreciated :)

          You're site is rad. I'm aiming to put together a bunch of small tools / resources together (focused on SVGs). How long did it take you to build your collection? I feel like it is going to take years to do all the things I want to do, that and the list keeps growing.

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            How good!
            Well, Indie Icons are up on the site.

            Thank you!
            Well, to what it is now is been around a year or so I launched on may19.

            I have the same feeling too it never ends,...
            Are launching or making public soon?

            1. 1

              My site is open to the public now, no big launch as I'm getting things in place. Getting the icons up first, testing the waters to see if people like them. Then slowly building up a marketplace for graphics. Will be introducing new tools like SVG backgrounds... all under one site, like your doing.

              1. 2

                That sounds like, something I would definitely use.

                I have realized, after having all togheter that when you build a site like what you are saying potential users tends to like it, because it saves the time of looking around for more.

                And if you are going to focus on SVG's, kudos to you.

                For example, I tend to use Svg's where I can....

                Nice, can't wait to see what you do !

  3. 2

    Couple of thoughts:

    1. Other than the post like you've done here, which is cool. (I'd ask for people to give some reviews or something to show the appreciation and let you leverage that once you're done building out the set.

    2. Find groups on LinkedIn and Facebook for UI/UX. I recently joined a group on LinkedIn with 70k users. Super easy way to get some exposure.

    3. Maybe this is the same as #1 but getting in contact with other IH'ers that are building products atm and offer them for free, so you can say your icons are featured in XX amount of live products already. For example, we're currently building a rental site, where we would use icons of amenities (just an example (-; ) so we would have probably a list of 20-30 icons that would make sense for our use case. Get enough of those and you start to have a decent portfolio.

    All the best with the project!

    1. 1

      Thanks, this is helpful.

      Any specific groups you'd recommend on FB or LI? I found a good one on FB a year ago that eventually closed down, so I will start my search over again.

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        I recently used this group to try and find some UI/UX help for our product.

        https://www.linkedin.com/groups/137552/

  4. 2

    Hey, I'm starting a community for designers: https://marketplace.8designers.com
    If you want to you can offer your free design services on the platform.

    1. 1

      I'll check it out.

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