To begin with, the starting point of writing this post was a book I've read recently:
The Design Entrepreneur: Turning Graphic Design Into Goods That Sell (Design Field Guide) by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico. The book focuses on '
growing entrepreneur movement based on design ideas, surveys this new field and showcases the innovators who are creating everything from books to furniture, clothes to magazines, plates to surfboards, and more'. Reading it was a moment of facing the truth: clients vs my own projects,
Kata Illustration vs
Kata Kiosk. The moment that I was avoiding for the last 3 years and leaving it for some other time. Well, the time is now.
To be short, when I've just started, client work seemed my main focus, main goal, all the big (international) dreams were related to this path in illustration. Kata Kiosk seemed just something to keep me sane between the client assignments. Later, when Kata Kiosk demanded more and more time, when partner base and my commitments to it grew, it still seemed as something I would quit, if bigger opportunities in working for clients arose. Now, though client work still seems as main focus, I'm not that much sure I could just quit Kata Kiosk. Maybe I could, maybe I couldn't. But the good news I found after a lot of soul-searching and reading books like the Design Entrepreneur, I don't need to make that choice I always thought I'll have to face at some point: now, I think I can do both, and I will not be the first one who does it. So, take a look to my two dreams, two careers, two styles, two everything, before you start reading this further:
My illustration portfolio (client work):
Kata Kiosk (greeting cards, souvenirs, other illustrated gifts):
And so here are few things I wish I was told about finding my place in illustration/design industry a few years ago just after graduating from Uni. Though I have a feeling these few thoughts are not something that could be told in a classroom, but maybe, just maybe by writing this down I'll safe someone else's time; someone's drifting between entrepreneurial dreams and client work right now, trying to pick between two dreams or just starting their career with no idea which way to turn. Plus, writing is one of few ways to structure my own thoughts and state some conclusions black on white. So why not.
A note on style
During my study years I came to my individual
style very late, later than most of my classmates at the university. Well, the word
style is probably not the right one, I should rather say individual technique or individual approach to doing things. I had this famous (not)creative disease of chasing trends which is almost never a good idea for anyone planning a long-term career in editorial illustration field.
But even when I found my own way of making geometric & conceptual digital artwork that looks a bit like a paper cut-out, it took me a while till I managed to become someone predictable in a good sense of the word: someone trustworthy and art-direct-able, so a client who would hire me could predict the outcome of the final work looking into very rough sketches and general aesthetics of my portfolio. So at the time I was graduating without having these qualities and still jumping from one trend to another, few tutors got really worried because I was still doing few styles at once, and I was often advised to have few portfolios and 'market' them separately, even present myself with different names if that would help to get my first clients before I get to the point of knowing what I was doing. That was a really good advice, and now I can recommend the same thing to everyone doing few styles at once.
A note on being Art Directed,
doing things without any Art Direction
and reaching the point of Self Art Directing
So when a year after graduating from Uni, I came back to my hometown and launched my tiny-business (
Kata Kiosk) of souvenir t-shirts, greeting cards and other stuff for local Lithuanian market next to my
international freelance career (or I should say wannabe-international-freelance-career at the time), I did what I was told: I didn't mix the two, as they looked very different, were aimed at to different directions, and actually were very different in everything but the fact that I was personally designing all of the stuff.
At first, I couldn't reach the quality of my client-work when designing my own products, probably because being art directed by an experienced professional is way easier than writing a brief and then art directing myself or I should say - not art directing myself at first, just drawing things out of my head without any proper planning, which led to a lot of mistakes and miscalculations, and in that way a lot of lessons were learned till I've got to the point where my products were on the way of matching the quality of my client work art directed by others (though if compared they still look as created by two different people).
But the biggest conclusion I made after couple of years of trying to make Kata Kiosk work: self-art-directing is very different from just drawing your own stuff. You actually have to plan things at first, make a massive research, put some frame of the series, match things to each other, match them to the brand, keep collections consistent, etc etc etc - it's much bigger playground than just creating your own stuff, because you're a client and a hired illustrator at once. It's a hard work and it's a lot of work, and it doesn't happen if you actually do not sit down and write yourself a brief. So that was a lesson learned a hard way, after couple of costly product launches that didn't take off, because in a haze of my passion for drawing, I wasn't thinking before doing things, and I guess, there is no other way to learn this lesson than a hard way, though it seems so obvious now.
So, this experience of an attempt to put myself in art-director's shoes, made me really re-think the whole process of being art-directed when doing work for a client. Only in this way I've actually understood my place as a freelance illustrator in the chain of producing editorial illustration, and an opportunity of taking all I could from art director's remarks, because, actually, a feedbacks from someone more experienced than myself is one of very few ways to learn something new when working from home (in a faraway country) to the rest of the world. I treasure that, honestly, and I don't take it for granted as I used to, because if someone hired me, it means they showed a lot of trust in me, they put their company's money on the table, and they have full right to get the most of me: so no excuses, no whining, no nothing.
Getting a Masters degree. At the University of life.
So to conclude this first try to summarise my own (and still very short) "products vs client work" experience, I can gladly state, that in some point, these two threads of my career started to feed each other. Not in a direct way, as visual looks of those two "careers" still seem very different, and it probably will stay that way for a long time, but now, after 3 years of a proper soul searching, I can take things from what I've learned in one path and put them in another one, and in this way to grow both as an illustrator and as a person.
So in case you're just graduating or still studying, or just re-thinking your place in any creative industry, take my advice: do not throw away one dream for another - you can have it all, even if it takes a while and doesn't seem very reasonable at first. Don't leave it for some other time, don't wait till you have enough money to start, don't wait for some magic to happen. If you have some energy and ideas of your own, use them, throw them to real life to see if those can take off and take you somewhere where you would never landed (creatively, mentally, financially, personally) otherwise. If it works or if it doesn't, you'll meet a lot of great people and will become a different person after going through this, a better person. I promise.
