Any recommendations? At the moment that advice is a little vague.

I see my immediate problem being that I have no way of demonstrating that I can do what I say I can do. Do you think that's not the case?

Its not my mistake as fortunately I've been lucky enough to not make any real big ones that weren't caught before press, but a now defunct studio I know of once had a contract for one of the grand slam tennis tournaments.

It wasn't a contract to work on any of the larger, main media campaigns they were running as this was just a small 3 or 4 person studio. So most of the work was designing extra collateral and signage as required when the need would popup in the lead up to the tournament. Obviously for a small studio, it was a super high profile client.

One of the jobs was to design pull up banners to line the players tunnel as they walked out to the court. There was one for every player in the tournament, and all of them were on display for every match, and they were just arranged in a random order.

In the first match, the two players started to walk out towards the court, and were to stop and wait at the end for the umpire before walking out. One of the players —who was one of the better players in the tournament and at the time a very well know name— was standing by his banner whilst standing at the front waiting. It was, just by chance, the second or third from the front. When he glanced at his banner, he and everyone nearby instantly picked up that his name was spelled wrong.

No more banners after that. If they were ordered differently it's likely no one would have noticed.

I'm based in Sydney, and I'll be honest, I'm a little concerned how I'm going to fair over the next few months. I've been full-time freelance for 5 or 6 years at this point, but the last 12 months have been the toughest, and I can't see it improving in the next few months.

My biggest problem will be finding new clients and projects, which won't be a unique problem, particularly since I think there will probably be a lot of new people being forced to go it alone. And the biggest hurdle to getting that work will be that despite my many years of experience, I don't have a portfolio of current work that even closely represents my skills and experience due to either;

• The majority of my day to day work being just small and one off tasks like website updates, code tweaks and changes, ad resizes, newsletter updates etc...
• Agency/contract work which I either only contributed a small amount, or don't have permission to share.
• Complacency. There's a bit of neglect on my part which set in over the last few years, as work was mostly coming my way without any real effort on my part. I certainly haven't been on top of keeping my work as up to date as I should have.

My plan will be to obviously build a better portfolio, and I guess be more proactive in out reach to potential clients.

Interesting times ahead.

These are great.

I particularly like the Joshua Tree one.

Nice looking site design. Did you do it?