After not having worked for four days, I am officially unemployed from today. Now what should I call myself?
When I went to a job fair early last month, I brought some “business” cards and called myself “in-between product designer”. I was employed then, but was “in-between” a design school and a design job, so I called myself “in-between product designer”. Since I launched my portfolio web site a few years ago, I have described myself as “in between” in the web site for this reason. My LinkedIn headline is still “In-between Product Designer”, but since I am officially unemployed now, this is no longer a joke. On LinkedIn, you can call yourself as you like. I’ve found that some people call themselves “Freelance Designer”, but I doubt some of them. I dare to honestly call myself “in-between” there.
As I mentioned yesterday, one of the options I am thinking now is to do a part-time job and prepare for starting a small business. Probably I will not do product design at least in early phases of the business. I will focus on graphic design, web design and presentation design. This is why the subtitle of my portfolio web site has been “Total Design Solutions by Hiro Shibata”. Today I made new “business” cards and called myself Total Designer. I know I will need to explain what it means, but it’s better than writing “Product Design, Web Design, Graphic Design, Presentation Design” to make it messy.
Anyways, I will wait for the former company to ask me to come back to work as they said (which I doubt) for a few more days. Even if they actually ask me to work for them again, it won’t last long and I will need to look for a new job anyways. In next few days, let’s sit back and make a plan for coming few months, and then look for a part-time job.