let me paint a very quick mental picture for you
imagine that you are a young creative at the very beginning of your career you have just finished
your degree your short course your training your freelancing portfolio website is up and live and
ready to take you into the world of your chosen creative path whether it be writing music the arts
design i'll let you decide all the prep and the leg work is done so you are basically ready to go
then imagine that as soon as you get this feeling of being a hundred percent ready to go
and turn your passion into a creative business you look around and you notice that a word by
pandemic has just unfolded putting most if not all of the creative industries on hold and as a
result drastically decreasing the need and the demand for creative work so what do you do now
hey you guys welcome back to our channel the number one place for people who love design
art and all things creative my name is laszlo you are watching D+B's channel and this video
is going to be one that i need as much as you might do as i want this to be a creative guide
to start the year there is no way around it we are all going through a really tough time
major shifts are happening in all industries so i felt like i should try my best and put a positive
message out there and give out some freelancing advice for beginners in the creative industries
and everyone else of course who feels like they could use a little bit of creative motivation
to start the year i am going to give you three unique pointers freelancing advice for beginners
which you can keep on mind as an aspiring creative at the very beginning of your career
interested let's go okay the first point you're not gonna like so i thought let's just get
it done and over with and then later we can move on to all the fun stuff right so first
of all you need to accept that this creative life the idea of working for yourself this was never
going to be an easy ride anyway it is not a steady career and what's happening now in 2021 worldwide
just illustrating this point that you never really know what's on the corner ginormous obstacles can
get in your way i think there is this very false narrative going on in the world of freelancing
we tend to over-romanticize this idea of working from home you know staying in your pg's
with a hot drink and just you know getting on with your work in like a very cozy homey environment
yeah all of that sounds lovely but it's it's really not for everyone the job is not steady
there's no way around it what i have personally noticed in my freelance career that the beginning
of the year the very first month january and february tend to be very slow months anyway
there is a noticeable drop in the demand for creative work for a very simple reason the people
tend to overspend during the holidays so after the holidays they want to save a little bit of money
this is not a general rule you might get lucky and get some amazing jobs in january it's just
something that i have noticed in my work it's just the way this game works there's always the element
of instability that you just wouldn't find in a nine-to-five job there's no career ladder either
you know it's not like you can see how your career can possibly progress in the coming years it's
more like snakes and letters if you ask me the path is not laid out your breakthrough projects
might only come to you in like a year's time or 5 years time or 10 years time no one knows because
it's different for everyone there is this great video here on youtube with the actor neil patrick
harris who's who made this interview and he was basically talking about the risky life of an actor
advice that he got when he was very young i'm gonna link that video down here because it's
really good you should watch it he's basically comparing the life of an actor to surfing let
me just quickly paraphrase his chain of thought imagine that life is like surfing in the ocean
the waves in the ocean are opportunities and your surfboard is everything you got
your talent your skills your education so the idea is that you go into the water and
all you do is wait for a good wave you don't know when that wave will come and even if you see it
coming there's a lot of tricks to how to actually jump on it if you are not ready you might miss a
good wave or you might jump on it too early and it's not taking you as far as it could
all you really do is look around and see what the other surfers are doing some are better than you
some are worse but you all got the same ocean at this point in time we are going through a period
when the ocean is calmer than usual the waves are just not as lively as they are used to be
so my advice would be use this time wisely and get better at surfing some people will come to you and
say that you should just change your surfboard or go to a completely different beach and you know if
you gotta pay the bills it's okay to take a break and you know get a part-time job at the surf shop
but my advice would be even if you do that please keep your surfboard polished practice as much as
you can and be ready because eventually the waves will pick up you know what i'm saying
that leads me to my second point which is all about learning and experimenting
trying new things please note that by this i don't mean that you should rethink your whole career and
retraining something completely different what i mean by this is expand and build on your existing
knowledge and interests push the barriers and see how far you can take your discipline
you would be surprised where things can take you if you just keep your mind open let me give you
an example a year ago i had no clue how to edit videos like most creative and arty people i'm
quite introverted i'm not very articulate so i have never in my wildest dreams though that
youtube is going to be the social platform that i will get the most comfortable with but here we are
i push myself way out of my comfort zone and it has left an incredibly positive mark and impact
on my creative work yes my first couple videos are awful of course even this one looking back at it
from like you know five years time i'm sure i will cringe but who cares the point is you are learning
i'm not saying that you should all start youtube channels i'm saying you should all approach your
creative work from new interesting unexplored angles experiment build something if you are
normally a portrait photographer why wouldn't you try taking photos of nature or if you are a singer
songwriter with an acoustic guitar try rapping get logic pro and try and make an edm trick the result
might be awful of course but who cares you don't need to show it to anyone if you don't want to
generally speaking it is a good idea to document journeys like this on a social platform because
you know it's 2021 as much as i hate admitting it as a creative you need to show your work to
as many people as possible but the idea here is that you just basically let things happen and
do things just for the sheer fun of it the whole idea is that you need to step outside your comfort
zone and think outside the box you will learn so much about your craft as well as about yourself
when you do stuff like this thing is later on the line once you know you quote unquote make it it is
likely that you will be known for one specific style or one specific product that you are good
at which clients will ask for again and again and again and again so looking back you will be glad
that you did all this sort of experimenting while you still had the chance okay and my third advice
is something that has taken me absolute ages to realize the very simple idea of collaboration
and reaching out to like-minded people basically start big projects with other creatives there is
this false toxic narrative out there about being self-made which is partly due to social media and
the way it works but it's also because of the very nature of creative work i did my degree in
illustration right and very early on my studies i have noticed how much time i'm actually spending
on my own working alone in a little studio or in little room because there was a lot of other
people in my course you know 50 different illustrators and we all just hung out but
at the end of the day we were 50 different people doing 50 different projects in 50 different styles
it took me ages to realize that you know even if i'm the best illustrator in the whole wide world
at the end of the day i still only have 24 hours just like everyone else i do know that we all
want to be self-made and you know make it on our own because it just makes such a nice story we
glorify this narrative especially on social media we all see posts like this almost on a daily basis
we see like a 21 year old guy who has became an overland millionaire on his own because he find
a way to like make sustainable socks or i don't know something similar to that you know the kind
of stories you must have seen them as well of course that kind of stuff does happen every now
and then but what no one really talks about is how these overnight millionaires would have got
so much further and so much faster have they shared the workload with like-minded people i
don't know if it is because of the way we consume media these days on our own as opposed to how
previous generations did maybe it's just easier to think of big brands as you know one person
one creator redhead and opening your eyes and see it height takes hundreds sometimes thousands of
people to collaborate if you wanna do something that is really really big but that's the thing it
is okay to ask for help it is okay to team up and it's a hundred percent okay to give up a little
bit of your artistic ego to be a part of something huge that you could just not be able to do on your
own i'm not kidding when i say that under this umbrella name of 'Dantier and Balogh' partnering
up future clean i have done so much more and grew so much bigger in a year than i did in my previous
two three maybe four years in my creative career i realize how isolated we all are at the moment
so much more than usual and it's a cliche thing to say but remember whatever creative obstacles are
getting in your way you don't have to fight them alone there are many many of us out there who are
willing to help you because i think we should all help each other you just need to ask okay
okay i hope there is something you can take away from this video and i hope it offers you some help
if you are finding it tough what's going on out there right now if you enjoyed this video please
feel free to give it a big thumbs up because that really does support our little channel
and feel free to join our little design shop we make videos about art design illustration graphics
interiors architecture all of that cool stuff take care guys and i'll see you this time next week
bye
you