About

Freelancer to freelancers

I’ve been freelancing, hiring freelancers, and building websites for creative people since the mid-nineties. Freelance World has been online in one form or another that whole time. It started as a directory of illustrators, photographers, and designers back when a directory was a genuinely useful thing to have, went quiet for a long stretch, and is being rebuilt now because the questions it was set up to answer never went away.

Why this site exists

Creative freelancing has no training program. Nobody hands you a rate card, a contract template, or a warning about the client who takes ninety days to pay. You learn it the expensive way, one job at a time, and then you sit on what you learned because there’s nowhere obvious to put it.

That’s the gap. Freelance World is where that stuff gets written down — opportunities worth chasing, rates people are actually getting, contract terms worth arguing over, and honest reporting on the things reshaping the work, including the ones nobody wants to talk about.

Who’s behind it

My name is Jon Ofstead. I run AllStar Creative, where I design and build websites for clients, and I’ve spent 37 years working both sides of the freelance relationship — taking the brief and writing it.

That’s the whole operation. No staff, no investors, nobody paying me to recommend anything. If that means the site moves slowly sometimes, so be it. It also means what’s here is what I actually think.

What you’ll find

• Opportunities — work worth knowing about, including the kind that never reaches the big job boards.
• Rates and contracts — what people are charging, and the clauses to settle before you sign.
• The craft — tools, workflow, and portfolios that bring in the work you actually want.
• Straight talk on AI — where it helps, where it’s being used to push rates down, and how to keep creative control of your own work.

An open invitation

If you freelance and you’ve learned something the hard way, I’d like to hear it. If you hire freelancers and you’re looking for someone, say so. If something here is wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it.

Either way — get in touch. Freelance artists of the world unite, and all that. It was a joke when I first put it on the site. Some days it isn’t.