We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Beth Harper a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Beth, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about how you got your first non-friend, non-family client. Paint the picture for us so we can feel the same excitement you felt on that day.

I have a very special place in my heart for my first clients, they’re an incredible group of people doing amazing work called Holistic Life Foundation who teach yoga and mindfulness to kids in underserved communities. At the time (this was about ten years ago) they were mostly just doing work in Baltimore and were starting to get more national attention and needed a stronger web presence. I was side hustling as a server at a vegan cafe where they frequented, and it came up in conversation that I was a web designer. I started out making updates to their current site, which led to a full site redesign, and then ongoing support. I couldn’t have had better first clients, our meetings were always a blast and they were so easy to talk to and work with, and so grateful for the work that I was putting in for them. I was so nervous since I was totally new to the business side of freelancing but everything with them felt totally organic and easy. I’m also very passionate about yoga and meditation and getting to do design work for their nonprofit (and get paid for it!) was a total dream come true. The work I did for them is what led me to realize that being a creative entrepreneur was my ultimate career dream.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Of course! My name is Beth Harper, I am a graphic designer and illustrator. On the graphic design side I focus on branding, print, and digital/web design for small to mid-size businesses and non-profits. I’ve also recently been branching out into illustration in the stationary and surface pattern markets.

I started getting into design in college. I had gotten really into art in middle and high school and my parents agreed to send me to college to study art as long as I also studied “commercial art”, what the older generation called graphic design at the time. I found my way to a liberal arts school that had a studio art/communication dual major and studied under some incredible artists and designers. After graduation, I took a bit of a detour to pursue my other creative passion, music, by touring in a punk band for a few years. I had studied classical piano since I was a toddler, which ultimately led to playing keyboards in bands. Your early twenties is the only time it really makes sense to jump in a van and sleep on strangers’ floors so that’s what we did for a few years, until it no longer made sense. I was still interested in pursuing a design career so I enrolled in a publication design master’s program in Baltimore which then led me to start a career in web design and development. My first corporate design job out of grad school left me very unsettled, it was for a mortgage company, and I just did not connect with that industry or the corporate culture at all. Freelancing on the side of that job really gave me the creative outlet I needed and through that work I learned that I loved creating logos and conceptual brand work for clients. Doing the illustration work that I’m discovering now really connects me back to my roots of being an artist and putting pen to paper. Being a freelancer I love that you can pivot and really mix up the work that you do.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

The first time I decided to go full-time freelance I took a huge leap of faith and had a very hard landing. It was very early in my career, I was a couple months into my first corporate design job, and I was very unhappy there. I quickly realized that my dream was to be a creative entrepreneur and I was very fulfilled by the freelance work I was doing, so I went ahead and put my notice in shortly after signing my first big contract. However, I did not have many subsequent contracts lined up and soon found out that most people don’t want to hire a designer that’s only been producing client work for a couple months. The job market was not great, and ultimately I ended up taking a part-time web design internship designing websites for vacation rental companies just to get some more experience. The team there was amazing, my boss was even more amazing, and I learned so much. That whole experience taught me to above all else, stay humble, find people to work with that you have a connection with, and not to quit your day job too soon!

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Word of mouth–Baltimore is a small city (we call is ‘Smalltimore’ for a reason), so community connections are huge here. Most of my clients have been referred by friends, colleagues, or by past clients. I provide excellent customer service and I find that my current/past clients are eager to pass the word on when someone that they know needs one of my services.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bethharperdesign.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bethharperdesign
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BethHarperDesign
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beth-harper-design/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/bethhap

Image Credits
Headshot image by Karen Rainier