When it rains, it pours
It should be every freelancer's career motto. It's cliche yet true; we presently have a unique ability to create our own work. Let's explore a few ways you can find remote design (and other freelance) work online.
1. Remote Job Boards
Remote job boards will be an obvious choice for many. But not all job boards are created equally. Here are some of the best:
Authentic Jobs allows you specify to the job type, location, and remote availability, as well as perform a specific keyword search.
Several sites offer the ability to subscribe to job listing updates. We Work Remotely and Authentic Jobs offer RSS notifications.
Here is an Authentic Jobs RSS feed that will give you updates of remote, UI Designer jobs.
Here is a We Work Remotely RSS feed for design jobs.
Though Behance doesn't have a specific filter for remote jobs, you can cmd + F (Mac) and ctrl + F (Windows) the term "anywhere" to find listings that are location-agnostic.
2. SketchDeck
Full Disclosure: I periodically work for SketchDeck as a freelance designer/developer. However, I've received absolutely no compensation for mentioning it in this list.
How It Works:
1. Apply to work as a freelance designer at SketchDeck.
2. Complete the design challenge. While I'm typically against design challenges, this is an exception as everyone gets the same design challenge and doesn't get used for actual work at SketchDeck.
3. You'll usually hear back within a few weeks (often sooner) if you've been accepted.
4. When you join SketchDeck, you'll get placed on a team of project managers, developers and directors who will give you briefs that you can accept/decline whenever you have extra time.
More information available here.
3. Twitter
Weren't expecting Twitter to be here? Oh you were? I guess you're ahead of the curve. Or just me.
Well hopefully some of you are surprised to hear that Twitter isn't just a playground for celebrities and stand-up comics. Actually, it can be a pretty powerful resource for finding freelance jobs of all sorts.
First of all, if you've never saved searches on Twitter, go ahead and read up a little. They allow you to: easily call up promotional codes when a giveaway is occurring, find invitations to beta software releases, quickly scour live updates from a band's tour and much more.
How To Find Jobs On Twitter:
1. Narrow down a specific design discipline or type of project at which you most excel. This is imperative to landing a job. After all, you're applying in less than 140 characters for something that could pay thousands of dollars.
2. Create a generic search. Some that I've found work best are looking for animator and looking for illustrator. Even looking for designer can work if you're willing to hunt through results (think of other design jobs that can be caught by this search phrase).
3. Repeat as often as you have free time for jobs.
Note: This is a hit-or-miss technique. I've had job opportunities within minutes of reaching out to people, and I've also had many instances where I never heard back. But, if you're persistent, Twitter can be an incredible way to find rewarding work opportunities.
One Last Thing
To make these steps easily repeatable, save all relevant links in a bookmarks folder. You can then right-click the folder and select "Open All Bookmarks".
If you find any/all of these methods to be helpful, or if you have other ways of finding design work online, please post a reply. Thanks, everyone.