A quick note: Around 50% of the readers of this newsletter are creative students. This issue is aimed squarely at that audience as graduation approaches. If you’re in the other 50%, the next issue will be regular programming, but consider sharing this with students and recent graduates in your network.

The following are my answers to the four most-asked questions after recent guest lectures at the University of Hertfordshire, the University of Cumbria (my alma mater), the University of Central Lancashire and Norwich University of the Arts.

Preface: This is one perspective, not the only perspective.

1. How do I choose a creative company?

The majority of graduates join creative agencies. In-house teams and startups have a minority share. This answer is biased towards that current trend.

In your chosen sub-category (e.g. design firm), the simplified truth is that most companies do more or less the same thing. They have similar clients and briefs, the same tools, pricing power and operating margins are the same, and they produce the same kind of work. There are degrees of how high standards are, scale, how much money they can pay you and what your title might be. Otherwise, structurally similar.

What isn’t the same is the people.

How they comport themselves, speak, how they treat their teams, what their motivations are, and the posture they take during the bad times will vary greatly. (If you want to get a quick read on actions in the bad times, by the way, ask them how hard they were hit during the pandemic and what they did).

Place your decision primarily on one thing: people.

That is, the specific team and, importantly, the specific manager you will have. The latter grows in importance the bigger the company. Spend as much time with that person as the hiring process allows. Find an individual you are excited to work for and learn from, whose words and actions are in accord, whose background inspires you and who is committed to what they do. Compensation and badge value of the company’s brand (that is, the press they generate, awards, and renown) are part of the equation but not the bulk of it.

Don’t pursue the artefacts that give the impression of a creative environment; they can be misleading. Pursue the people you’ll be in closest proximity to.

2. How will they find me?

They probably won’t.

Not because they don’t want to. They do. Good creative companies are desperate for capable graduates. Most of their leadership are just busy to the point of distraction or need to get better at operationalising how they get graduates into their businesses.

Don't assume or wait, and don’t place this in the hands of others.

You control how discoverable you are.

Three things to consider:

First, list the top 20 companies that inspire you. Find people on LinkedIn who are senior enough to have hiring power but probably not the managing director or CEO. Buy the £29.99 premium LinkedIn account so you can message them directly. Tell them you admire their work (you do need to actually admire it) and that you’d value a 15-minute call or coffee to learn more about them and how they entered the industry. You’ll be surprised at how generous most people are with their time.

These conversations will give you important insight but can also turn into hiring decisions. It won’t be instant, but it’s better than a cold job request. Finally, follow-up. One message can get missed. It often gets missed. Follow-up at least 3-4 times over 2-3 months. Do it gracefully, but do it. You’ll probably feel gross, but you will go far if you can stomach the brief sickliness of trying a third, fourth or 10th time. The worst thing that happens? You don’t hear back, and you move on.

Second, you are only as good as your ability to sell yourself.

This isn’t so much a skill as it is just an act of doing.

The internship which became my first job, happened because my lecturer suggested I submit one of my second-year projects to Computer Arts magazine. I did, and the work was published. Wini Tse, one of the founders of Manchester-based agency Code, saw it and emailed me, and that was that. A year later, I entered my graduating project, a short film called Solar, into the Escape Awards. It won, and at the ceremony on the roof of the Tate Modern, I met Ajaz Ahmed, who, two years later, suggested me for the founding team of Zolmo. We then made the Jamie Oliver app together.

Luck made all of those things happen. But luck was given a chance.

Finally, create differentiation through personal enterprise. I hired Joshua Ogden as a design graduate because he had a good portfolio from his studies, but he also launched and edited a magazine called Justified (the name of the studio he later founded). I hired Oliver Rogers as an advertising graduate because he had good work but also attempted to launch a self-tanning chocolate brand and had discussions with Harvey Nichols as a potential stockist. You read that right. Lots of graduates have good portfolios; far fewer have self-initiated projects that act as a spotlight for capability and ingenuity.

3. What advice would you give a younger you?

My professional relationships, which in many cases have turned into long-standing friendships, have been made mainly by accident; people I’ve had the good fortune to work with or meet along the way while trying to make something from nothing, like writing a book, making a film or starting a business.

My youthful failing? I didn't engage in deliberate network development early enough.

Because of that, I’ve likely missed out somewhere and somehow, and it means I’m not very good at it today. Connect with peers who are on the path that you’re on, either people in the same position or those ahead. These connections should be anything but transactional. They are not for short-term wins. They are there so you can help each other succeed over the long term.

4. What’s your creative process?

For the record, I don’t think anyone wants my process, but rather just a process in general. I’m always disappointed by my answer to this question: I don’t have one. I know the great auteurs and artists do, or at least appear to, and that might be the reason for their accolades and riches. But if they have codified it for themselves, I’d wager that each individual process wouldn’t work for anyone else.

There is no universal method.

Structured idea generation works for some people and can stifle others. Some people thrive in teams; others need time for private industry. Motivation for some is to make as much money as possible, while others rank that much lower, neither right nor wrong, but they partly dictate the approach.

Here are a few things I believe to be true for most people:

1. A professional creative process is not scrolling through social media or spending disproportionate time on endless design platforms like Dribbble and Behance. These platforms are just not helping you. They will offer you an awareness of a thousand other people trying to make something that you want to make, which can paralyse action. Or worse, they’ll trick you into making the same thing as everyone else, the majority of which have never been proven. We shouldn’t confuse things up-voted in a design community to mean the same thing as an original solution validated in the market.
2. A professional creative process is also mostly via discipline and a default position of “not feeling it”. Remove the phrase “when inspiration strikes” from your vocabulary and put something, anything, down on paper, whether you feel like it or not. Then, do it again, consistently. Creative people fall into two categories: people that make things and people that talk about making things. You want to be the former.
3. Your education is never over. The best creative people in the world go out of their way to say they don’t have the answer and then spend considerable time finding it.
4. Some deliberate downtime is needed. One particularly damaging side effect of the stupidity of ‘hustle culture’ is people thinking they need to be at 100% productivity 100% of the time. If you want physical symptoms of stress, overwork and disinterest to manifest in your twenties, this is how you achieve that. Go easier on yourself. You have time. Work hard, but have moments where you are unproductive by choice.
5. Exercise acts as a generous benefactor to creativity.

Finally, here are two books I think you should read.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
‍Most books on creativity are specific to marketing, and their authors often believe their own bullshit. This book is different and more broad. I first read it in my late thirties, I wish I’d found it 10 years earlier.

The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway
‍There is a giant business, wealth creation, wealth management and entrepreneurial gap in creative education and early creative careers. This book is US-centric, but it will go a long way to closing that gap for you.

If you’re reading this as a student or as a recent graduate, just know there are people who are an expectant audience of what you’ll add to the creative industry.

If you find this issue helpful, please subscribe and share.

Ian