What do designers and creative professionals do to become successful?
This has been on my mind over the past few years and
I've been writing in my journal what I think just every now and then
marking down what I see.
Creative people who were hyper successful.
What they do, how do they do it, what are the personality traits?
You may have seen this from really successful people
such as like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but I'm talking about creative entrepreneurs.
I'm asking the question, like what is success?
How do they get their money and what they do to make it look so easy?
I think I found out how.
Number one, specifically for us creative people is take creative risks.
This could mean simply quitting your full time job, a job that
you're not passionate about, and starting to become freelance.
That could be a goal of yours.
But again, your goal might not be to be freelance.
Your goal might be to land a really good job at an agency.
Creative risks on a micro level could be doing work that others
wouldn't deem normal.
It would go against the status quo.
The creative industry is held up by those individuals who
take creative risks.
Creative risks maybe starting a YouTube channel, creative risks
starting a shop where you sell resources.
These are things that I have taken in my life to get some
sort of success for myself.
There's a quote that I love, and I can't remember who said it.
But it is, you will miss every shot you do not take.
So that's something that we can all do, is take more calculated creative risks.
The second trait and things you can do to get hyper successful
is learning good business skills.
When I was 16, I knew I wanted to start a business.
In fact, I actually knew a lot before that.
During school the only class I enjoyed was the business studies class.
When I finished school at the age of 16, I went to a college
to study what I thought was business studies again.
But it turns out it was a business administration,
which is very different.
Administration skills is just business administration,
secretary things and accounts.
I did that at college, knowing full well that I wanted to do
something creative, knowing full well that I wanted to go
into the creative industry and start my own business.
From my education in school and college, I learned some core
fundamentals of business.
I knew the lingo, I knew what to do to start a business.
I knew some good business skills.
And ever since then over 12, 15 years later, I have carried on with that.
I'm constantly learning new business skills, whether that's
selling, pricing, understanding returns of investment.
It's hugely important for any creative to understand these things.
If you can put the time in to learn how to be, firstly a good business
then you will find more creative opportunities,
which if that is your goal, creative success.
So I personally wasn't successful because of just my creativity.
I was successful because of the business skills that I learned.
I learned how to make money and to take calculated business risks.
The third trait that I have seen from hyper successful
creatives is empathy, within the context of understanding your
clients or customers needs.
You've heard me talk about empathy before on the channel
where I say, you've got to understand the use case of
either the logo, the poster, the website.
It's all about the experience.
And having empathy allows you to really put yourself into
other people's shoes, those who may not know as much as you
when it comes to design. Empathy is a really strong tool
to use with client work for instance.
If you don't know, I own an agency in the north of England.
I was freelance, and we still contact clients today.
When we have client meetings to present logos and brand identities to them.
It's so important for me to be able to empathize with clients,
because if they're in a meeting with me and I'm explaining a
concept with a logo design, they may not have the lingo or
the practice of explaining their emotional state towards a
product or towards a design, or
they may not even understand where I'm coming from.
So I need to be able to empathize with them on that.
One thing that I've noticed over the past couple of years
when I've been critiquing people's work.
So I promote and critique a lot of designers, a lot of brand
identity designers on this channel.
And a lot of people may ask the question, how are you still
like an agency when you're essentially advertising all
these other people who are doing the same thing as you?
Essentially, what I've worked out over the past ten years of
being a designer and doing these YouTube videos, marketing
myself, and what I do is that clients don't come to me just
for the logo.
They come to me for my brain, they come to me for my problem
solving skills.
They trust me because I can empathize with them.
Number four is to constantly learn.
A lot of designers and creators, especially graphic designers,
are fearful at the moment because artificial intelligence
is going to overtake our jobs.
This is something that I've seen a lot, I don't believe it will.
I think some people's jobs will be replaced with AI eventually,
but those who are true creators will constantly be learning new things.
They'll be constantly honing in on their skills and overtaking
anything that AI could
in the creative realm. To be hyper successful means that you
cannot be replaced so easily.
That's because you're constantly learning new skills.
For instance, I'm constantly learning new design principles
and skills to put in place within product design.
I'm learning how to be a better logo designer day in, day out
by learning from other people online.
I get a lot of criticism from you guys, and you guys teach me
a lot as well.
But I'm always reading, I'm always learning, I'm always
taking tutorials on new things because I want to be that next level.
I really want to get to that next point in my career.
So I found that a lot of creative professionals who are
successful do the same thing they actually are constantly learning.
They may look like they've reached a successful peak, and
then you may think, oh wow, if I could just get to where
Will is one day, then everything will be fine.
But the reality is that when you get to that peak,
you realize it's not really a peak.
It's just another stepping stone to the next climb, to the
next peak of the next mountain.
And to get there you need to learn a lot along the way.
The second part of learning is about being useful.
I like to think that I'm a useful person.
The number one word I could put to describe my videos this past
year on YouTube is be useful.
And if you think about all the most successful people in the world.
Not just successful creatives, but there are
successful people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs,
all these crazy successful, hyper successful people have
been really successful because they're really useful.
Elon Musk, making electric cars, SpaceX, Starlink.
Jeff Bezos with Amazon, all these things are useful for people.
Now in my design work, and when I'm doing work for clients,
whether that's big companies of clients, or whether it's tiny
small coffee shop clients, I don't want to be useful.
I want to be useful to you guys.
I want to create useful things.
So you want to be successful, be useful.
And the last one, which is arguably the most important
factor, is mastering communication.
This is a huge challenge for me.
I think I've gotten better at communicating my thoughts and
ideas because of YouTube being forced to talk to a camera.
But communication is essential.
In fact, me and Jim, who's the graphic designer here in the agency.
We're actually talking about the power of communication.
Being able to clearly communicate with people will
allow them to trust you more.
This goes for clients.
This goes for anyone on the street.
Clear communication that's easy for them to get is the key.
And the reason why for me personally, that communication
is key is not only because of these videos, but when
I'm presenting to a client.
Obviously I've got to be able to communicate the ideas
clearly in a way that they can understand, even if they don't
speak my language.
It's quite ironic that I think a lot of graphic designers are
amazing at communicating visually, but not verbally.
You'll see a lot of hypersuccessful graphic
designers, creative entrepreneurs are great at
communication verbally.
They're able to communicate concisely.
The way you communicate will drastically
influence the outcome of a lot of client presentations that
you may have.
For example, if right now you're doing a logo for a
client and it's all on email and you don't present to them
in person, you should be presenting to them in person or on a call.
We do like FaceTime calls all the time with clients.
Every time we have one, we like to meet with them because
it's super important for us to actually communicate the ideas
verbally, to get that rapport with them and to gauge their reaction.
If you struggle with communication, or if you just
want to get better at it, there's great things that you can do.
For instance, setting a presentation up prior to the
call with the client to explain your ideas, so you can just run
through the slides.
You'll have visual communication and then verbal,
so you can back everything up with the verbal and the visual.
Doing this will drastically affect the way that your client
experiences with you, which in turn will get you more clients,
which in turn will hopefully make you more successful,
if that is a goal of yours.
Now, you see this app that I've been using for the titles.
This is called Vectornator.
And now if you're a new designer watching this, or
someone who's just dabbling in graphic design, and you need an
app that works on your Mac, your iPhone and your iPad.
Well, Vectornator is an app for you.
It's a vector app.
It allows you to design logos, posters, all within the app.
And it's fully functional.
It's amazing.
The best thing is it's completely free and
it's available across all your Apple devices.
I've got a ton of videos about Vectornator, how to get it up
and running, and how to use it in even more advanced ones on this channel.
But if you go to their channel, they've got loads of videos.
Some of them I have done teaching you the basics and the
more advanced side of Vectornator.
So go and check them out.
And thank you Vectornator for sponsoring this video.
So, there you have it.
I hope this is giving you some sort of lease of new life to be
more creative in your work.
I know this video was a bit different, bit talking heavy.
I really wanted to dial in with you guys because success can be
very ambiguous for some people.
They might not know what they really want.
But again, if your goal is met and you've achieved it, then
that is the success.
So hopefully, in any of your goals, whether it's in life or
in graphic design, this video has helped you.
And if it has, press the red subscribe button down below and
over to the right, there are more videos of me most likely.
If the YouTube algorithm is working, there's more videos of me.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.
Goodbye.