I’ve been a freelance artist for 6 years.
As tasks piled up on my plate, I spent less time creating art and more time responding to emails, organizing files, and calculating my workload for the week.
Eventually, I found myself in the same position as thousands of other freelancers: burnt out and wondering, “Am I even cut out for this?”
A glimpse of the tabs I jump between while I work.
THE PROBLEM
The freelancer workflow is chaotic. Freelancers waste time, energy, and revenue on admin tasks instead of creative work.
tl;dr
A home for freelancers.
With Cattail, freelancers can stay on top of their work.
Receive project requests, track files and tasks for each project, communicate with clients, all in one highly customizable portal.
Notes from our user interviews.
We hopped on calls with 20+ professional creative freelancers and asked them what they disliked about freelancing.
Unanimously, they feel left out, lonely, and lost in the chaos.
PAIN POINTS
Freelancers can spend weeks communicating with a client before a project is confirmed.
Clients don’t know a freelancer’s availability and required materials, and freelancers don’t know a client’s budget, timeline, and expected scope of work.
Freelancers concurrently take on projects of various scope, complexity, and type of work.
They struggle to create consistent workloads in the long term, which easily results in burnout and financial insecurity.
Social media, communication, file management, creative software, websites: the number of platforms needed to be a freelancer are ever-increasing.
Freelancers, particularly in creative industries, struggle to keep up.
HOW MIGHT WE
How might we make receiving and managing projects more transparent, consistent, and lightweight for creative freelancers?
Double diamond design method, the foundation of my design process for Cattail.
V1. A (glorified) pricing calculator
We initially honed in on 1. project intake. I designed a link-in-bio style custom inquiry form that would templatize project inquiries and make pricing transparent.
A couple problems: solving intake isn’t enough. Plus, not all freelancers we spoke to liked the transparent pricing.
A link-in-bio style buildable pricing calculator.
V2. A project management platform
We pivoted to project management, addressing 2. workload consistency and 3. platform fatigue.
Freelancers can create projects and view a dashboard to track their overall workload.
Getting closer, but were we different enough from existing tools like Jira and Notion?
A project management platform.
Wireframes for Version 3, soon to be Cattail.
Nothing was clicking, so we backtracked and dove deeper.
Freelancers felt overwhelmed, alone, and unstable.
How could we address all three?
A platform rather
than a tool.
What if Cattail was not just a tool, but a community?
We added the ability to refer projects to foster freelancer-freelancer and freelancer-client relationships.
What if we automatically used inquiry form responses to populate the project page?
V3. A home for freelancers
Ultimately, we wanted a freelancer’s Cattail page to feel like their home for freelancing.
Every feature was designed with this in mind, from community-oriented referrals to customizable block-based pages.
Cattail.
01.
Submit a project request
First, an interested client fills out the details of their project in a freelancer’s project form.
Freelancers can customize this form to collect every piece of information they need to evaluate a project inquiry.
That form turns into a project request, which freelancers can view in their requests page.
After reading through the details of that request, the freelancer can choose to accept or deny the project.
If accepted, a project page is created, automatically populated with any files attached to the request and shared with the client.
Freelancers can also create project pages from scratch— i.e. for a personal project.
04.
Customize your project page
We understand that all projects are different.
All Cattail pages are modular and buildable, so that freelancers can add only the functionalities needed for that project.
Never underestimate your workload and go through burnout again.
Cattail’s dashboard page aggregates all tasks and files across all project pages and visualizes a freelancer’s overall workload.
Dashboards are customizable too!
XYZ
Cattail is a lightweight platform that streamlines projects for freelancers.
Brand pillars
Intuitive & friendly
As the sole designer on the team, I was also responsible for the branding behind Cattail.
We wanted our product to feel intuitive and non-intimidating, so that even freelancers who weren’t business or tech-oriented would feel at home when using Cattail.
Logo iterations and drafts.
Design system
Simplicity was king: less when possible.
I focused on creating a scalable and flexible design system that would work efficiently with the tech stack our developers were using.
Less states and less variations, while prioritizing clarity and accessibility.
Fun fact: I designed 8 different versions of our pitch deck. Our product’s design, messaging, or brand changed every week, so a new deck was needed to reflect those changes.
01.
Design decisions are vectors
Working with a PM and devs, I discovered that my design decisions have an angle and magnitude.
The angle is the explanation: how this decision will influence the product direction.
The magnitude is the clear and measurable path to implementation, so my developers can bring them to life.
It is the sum of these vectors that create a product.
02.
Wearing multiple hats Wearing one big hat
The title “designer” is deceptively innocuous.
Paradoxically, “Design” is an umbrella term and a single entity at once: product, UI, brand, and graphic are different, but linked such that you cannot touch one without touching the others.
Having sole control of every type of “design” for Cattail taught me the weight of every design decision I made. A color wasn’t just a color anymore, it was a feeling, a brand, and an experience.
The pressure was heavy, but I had tremendous amounts of satisfaction in achieving the level of precise cohesion I could.
Signing off,
Elissa
