Svenja Sund, freelancer El Puerto de Santa Maria

Svenja Sund worked in New York for three years after doing university. So before going to the Miami Ad School, this German designer already knows what living abroad is all about. After working at Landor Associates in Hamburg she decided to go to Spain and become a freelancer.

Hola. It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me to write about my working week in El Puerto de Santa Maria / Cádiz in Spain. Yes, Spain! Olé! My name is Svenja Sund and after graduating from Miami Ad School and spending a few months at the design office of Landor Associates in Hamburg, I decided it’s time to leave the rain and clouds behind and move to the South of Spain. Having been here for almost 10 months and having assimilated to the Spanish life style and work ethics, it’s quite surprising this text made it onto Robin’s blog this quickly – or even at all.

About a week ago Robin contacted me via E-mail and normally this is what would have happened:
Robin: to email me and ask if I would like to write about a week out of my life as a designer in Spain.
Me: to send an enthusiastic reply about how great this is and how wonderfully I would write something and send it out within a few days.
Robin: reminding me a few days later that there’s a deadline and he would love to see the text by Wednesday.
Me: no answer.
Robin: it’s Wednesday and another e-mail to Svenja asking if it’s still going to happen.
Me: short reply, yes, yes, for sure -- sending it out right now!
-- a day later still no text from Svenja --.
Robin: ? (if he had my cell phone number he might have already called and I would have either promised to send it tomorrow, something just came up and he would have it mañana, or I would have hung up on him in the middle
of our conversation, or I would have sworn never to have received his reminders, or I would say I already sent it and be wondering why he didn’t have it, and sweettalking and promising him he would have it tomorrow).

To make a long story short, my text might have never made it onto this blog, even though I had the best intentions to write and send it. So it’s a good thing, I guess, that even under the Spanish sun some German traits such as reliability, accuracy and productivity don’t fail to come through.

Working and living in Spain, well, you just got a gist of how it can be. Apart from sun, beach, siesta and fiesta, here, as well as in other places in the world, hard work and good ideas are acknowledged and rewarded and get you ahead. Being a freelance graphic designer I have to kick myself to do what I love, and when I have done the hard part and acquired a new project, I can enjoy the ride in an environment where stress doesn’t exist – unless it’s home made of course. So without a lousy paying job in one of the ad agencies of Andalucia, I opted for doing my own thing. And it’s been good so far. Organizing your own day and setting routines like getting up at 8am and sitting down at your desk in your office with a window. Spending the morning with reading and answering e-mails, reviewing the to-do's, talking to your client in Hamburg to agree on the last changes to their logo, talking to the printer in Berlin to get a quote for a business card, sending out a bill for that dj sandbox, nyc web-design which was finally wrapped up and finished a few days ago.

Sooner than you can think the morning is gone and judging from the growl in your stomach it’s lunch time. Great! The sun is out and the next hour or two are spent outside eating and reading or sketching out ideas for a new website of an interior architect. Around 4 pm the second part of the office day starts. Back inside, the logo for Bee Designs, the interior architecture office, needs to be polished and the layouts for their website need to be further developed. Around 7 pm I am wishing I had some colleagues around for a more energetic environment to keep me going so I won’t get so distracted by online chit-chat. Ok, gotta pull myself together and put in a few more hours on Bee Designs and also evaluate an inquiry for a brochure design. Around 8:30 pm I am ready to call it quits for the day. With a previous deadline in the first half of this week where the dj sandbox website had to be finished and hours and nights were spent finding the right java scripts and getting them to run smoothly, let’s do more mañana. You know, creative work doesn’t fit in a set time frame and you gotta run with it while it flows. But then there’s also time for a break and having fun. If I had co-workers, we would go out for a few copas now. For me a beer on the terrace is good enough. Cheers and have a great creative day!