We have had the pleasure of working with international clients, and these projects have been some of our favourites. These days all you need is a good internet connection and you can work for anybody from any place you want.
Apart from us doing a good job and delivering creative and effective solutions, there are a few benefits as to why overseas clients should consider working with a South African freelancer or agency:
Capitalising on the exchange rate
A prime example of this is the booming film industry in Cape Town, the quality of work is still good. It’s cutting costs without any negatives, you can still get great creative work.
Time
Time also plays a part when it comes down to tight deadlines – in certain instances, companies have called upon us purely because without the additional sets of hands their deadlines would not have been met.
Helpful tools for remote teamwork
Dropbox – Share all your files with clients and the client can share files you need as well. All files are in one folder, easy to share, and we can add comments to files, plus it tells you if someone else has the file open that you are working on, which is quite handy.
Skype
It’s good for conference calls, instant messaging with clients, and chat rooms, quicker and less formal than email (always good to free up that inbox). We tend to prefer Slack but Skype is generally used more for client meetings.
Adobe Creative Cloud
We work using Adobe software, which is an international standard in design so the files will be compatible with the client’s machine.
Google Docs
The best way to share documents and copies. The files can be edited in real-time and you can add comments. It also makes tracking of copy/content changes in the design (particularly important for web design)
Trello
A project managing system that lets you organize anything with anyone. It uses a drag-and-drop, card-based system, where you can create columns, and checklists, and add team members. It’s an easy way to instantly get a full project overview.
Toggl – To keep track of the time we either use Toggl, or a simple pen and paper (which we afterwards input into a spreadsheet). Toggl is a very easy-to-use time-tracking tool, it gives you reports.
