Keys That Click - Minding your own design business and other observations

Posted in Business, Guest Posts, on May 12th, 2010 by Carlos.

This post was originally published on the How Did it Start blog as guest post. Please check out their blog!

We asked Carlos Perez, owner of Pérez Design + Communications Inc., how he got his start.

How Did It Start?

I had been doing design work on-the-side since 2001, but I never took it too seriously. My commitment lay with my full-time job and employer, while the business added a little (and I mean a little) extra pocket change. In 2005 I had opened up a bank account, registered a business name (Pérez Marketing Communications) but I didn’t really know what I ever wanted to do with it in the long term. In fact by the fall of 2007, I was ready to call it quits on my side business as it really wasn’t generating much business, nor was I particularly seeking it. Paying $12 a month on a business bank account I barely used really started to feel like an unnecessary expense.

Things turned around in October of 2007 inside the Wells Fargo Theatre in the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, CO. I was one amongst hundreds in attendance of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artists) Design Conference. My employer at the time allowed us to visit one such conference a year, and it was my first and consequently last that I would take advantage of. I was listening to some pretty incredible people speak about the influence of design on society. But oddly enough, it wasn’t the big speeches with moving words that really got me. It was the people I was sitting with in the audience. A substantial amount of people had a glow of blue on their faces cast by their MacBook laptops as they worked on a variety of projects. I had left my IBM ThinkPad at the hotel… it would have been embarrassing to reveal it in that crowd. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but in my mind, I was sitting amongst self-employed folks working on stuff that they really loved. I saw people working on brochures, invitations, websites, logos and more. At the time, I had quite a cool job as an Industrial Designer in a high-tech company, but oddly, after seeing these other designers work on such a variety of projects, I began to feel jealous.

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