How To Business: 4-Hour Skills Workshop with Matthew Rechs

Typeface Design program at the Cooper Union, in conjunction with theType Directors Club

Type@Cooper

4-Hour Skills Workshop for typeface designers (includes a lunch break). If you want to make a living as a musician or a filmmaker, it’s not easy, but at least there are well-worn paths to follow. A musician plays in clubs, makes a demo tape, and tries to get an agent. Filmmakers have the festivals and awards circuit. The business life of a typeface designer is scarier! Finding work as a freelancer is hard work. Pricing is a mystery, loaded with awkward conversations and the universal taboo against money-asking. Add to that the arcane minutia of contracts, end-user licensing agreements, invoicing, and collections — it’s amazing any business gets done at all! But business does get done, by the people who have the skills to do it. In this four hour workshop, you’ll learn a set of basic but valuable skills that will help you take care of business. You’ll learn: - How to network with friends, peers, and colleagues to find clients and get work, - How to negotiate transactions that fairly represent the value of your work, - How to structure contracts that protect you and set your clients expectations fairly, - How to invoice properly, get paid on time, and collect what you're owed from delinquent clients. Through a series of short lectures, practice sessions, role-playing exercises, and Q&A, you’ll gain insights that took many of your peers years to learn. With a little bit of help, anybody can learn how to business!
 
Matthew Rechs is CEO of Business Letters, a coaching and consulting firm for the creative industries. Before its founding in 2019, Matthew led the Fonts, Type, and Typekit teams for Adobe. He joined Typekit prior to its acquisition by Adobe in 2011. 
His career on the internet began in the 1980s. At seventeen, he founded one of the first companies solely focused on designing and building dial-up bulletin board systems software for commercial applications. He spent the next 20 years leading the technical teams at several large digital agencies and client service firms.
As CTO of digital agency Schematic (now part of WPP) Matthew spent nearly a decade leading the teams that built hundreds of the largest web sites for the world's biggest companies. Among many others, he led the development of the first streaming video players for the primetime TV networks for both ABC and NBC, as well as the first Beijing Winter Olympic Games — the first to stream every event.
Matthew lives in Montclair New Jersey with his wife Jennifer and two boys, William and James. He owns a sizable collection of ampersands drawn by famous type designers which travel with him (the ampersands, not the designers) everywhere he goes.

The Cooper Union

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How To Business: 4-Hour Skills Workshop with Matthew Rechs

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How To Business: 4-Hour Skills Workshop with Matthew Rechs

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