I have been doing freelance data viz with Tableau for a little over a year now and love many aspects of the work. I am a full time revenue analyst and find clients on and off for freelance.
I started with fiver.com where I didn't really make any money but I learned many things and was able to do work for Dell and USC. It has more than paid for itself to have their logos on my website, so it might be worth a look. Some will discourage the low rate approach but it has worked for me to gain experience over dollars in the beginning and I can currently charge market average or better because of the experience.
Some other important lessons I have learned:
1. Turn down work if you are too busy. Its worse to hurt a client relationship than to pass up some work, to the point where you will lose much more in the long run.
2. Understand all the specific requirements before accepting a contract.
3. Be realistic with the timetable, don't underestimate any complexities of the data or requests.
4. Make sure the client understands the iterative process and is available for feedback along the way.
5. Reconcile the vizzed data back to the source. Tools and programming can do unexpected things to data if you don't fully understand all of the processes that produce the viz.
I freelance because I love data and helping others understand data through visualization. I also have found that data visualization is my passion when it comes to career interests. If you are discovering the same while developing with d3.js, I would recommend putting all your efforts into it. Good Luck!
I started with fiver.com where I didn't really make any money but I learned many things and was able to do work for Dell and USC. It has more than paid for itself to have their logos on my website, so it might be worth a look. Some will discourage the low rate approach but it has worked for me to gain experience over dollars in the beginning and I can currently charge market average or better because of the experience.
Some other important lessons I have learned:
1. Turn down work if you are too busy. Its worse to hurt a client relationship than to pass up some work, to the point where you will lose much more in the long run.
2. Understand all the specific requirements before accepting a contract.
3. Be realistic with the timetable, don't underestimate any complexities of the data or requests.
4. Make sure the client understands the iterative process and is available for feedback along the way.
5. Reconcile the vizzed data back to the source. Tools and programming can do unexpected things to data if you don't fully understand all of the processes that produce the viz.
I freelance because I love data and helping others understand data through visualization. I also have found that data visualization is my passion when it comes to career interests. If you are discovering the same while developing with d3.js, I would recommend putting all your efforts into it. Good Luck!