I’ve barely had time to wee since getting back from The Design Conference in Brisbane last week. There was just enough time to reset for the week and it was straight into two days of Boys in STEM and Girls in STEM. Our biggest and most energy intensive program at the Ballarat Tech School.
I was still fizzing from my time at the conference. Alongside making heaps of new buddies, I feel emboldened and empowered to rekindle some projects I’d let slip. For example, I've been wanting to put together another YouTube tutorial on how to make a book using InDesign after the success of my InCopy tutorial. I beta tested the idea with a group of students at the conference and they loved the idea which got me pumped!
You see, what happens at conferences like this is that you can suffer from overwhelming awesomeness. When every person gets up on the stage and has an amazing showreel of mega clients (my friend was taking a telly of how many people worked with Nike - she was at 5 last count) they can feel incredibly far away from where lots of people find themselves professionally in the audience. Their success feels unreachable.
I feel it deeply which is why I self-nominated myself last year to speak on the platform of ‘Putting average on a pedestal’ and ‘Creativity in the face of catastrophe’. I'm not an award winning designer and while the majority of speakers are humble, approachable and so generous in their sharing, there is always one or two who are so far removed from reality that you might as well be speaking in another language. One in particular lost the audience when they started bragging about budgets in the millions which actually surprised me because normally this perspective is somewhat revered at the top end of the design industry. It seems the ‘cost of living’ crisis has called bullshit on even our most celebrated designers.
I digress, back to my conversation with these enthusiastic, young designers. Their experience had been one of overwhelming awesomeness overload and they were quite intimated by the whole experience. I took this as an opportunity to share a class we ran last month with my Student Leaders at the Tech School. It was about introducing yourself to strangers. The power of introduction.
I lined up all my new friends and made them look me in the eye, shake my hand and introduce themselves. It sounds quite ridiculous now but it was fun at the time. I tasked them with simply introducing themselves to a speaker, telling them something they liked about their talk or complimenting them on their awesome sneakers. Anything really. Just start to ask curious questions, don’t stress about talking design. Ask them how their week has been or if they’d been to Brisbane before - just talk to them like humans.
While I was getting them pumped about meeting new people I mentioned how much I loved InDesign and the crowd went wild - you see another thing about the design conference is lots of people on stage are CEOs, business owners, creative or art directors. Not many are ‘on the tools’ which is where we all start out. When I talked about making a tutorial that got into the nitty gritty of paragraph and character style and making books in InDesign, it got rowdy. This is where these lovely ladies were at and they wanted a super nerdy video about InDesign!
Uni is terrible for giving you an indepth understanding of the programs you use or at least they did when I was studying. That deep knowledge comes from 100’s of hours of making primary school readers and typesetting books. It's not glamorous and doesn’t win you awards but when it's done well it's awesome - like beautifully written code. You don’t see it when it works well. It's the work of the quiet ones that support the ones on stage. It's important and meaningful and useful. Speaking to these students made me realise I have to make this video, even if it’s just for them, and my colleague who I promised I’d make a tutorial for!
One of the running themes of the conference was people leaning into projects that interested them and not their clients. Creating projects that don't pay. Projects that excite and have no particular outcome. It's embracing the projects that keep getting moved down the priority list. One day I’ll make that video… One day I’ll write a book… One day I’ll have time to do that thing I’ve always wanted to do…
One day you’ll be dead.
There is no right time to start, there is only right now. As in, right now. Set 10 minutes aside to start today. Just 10 minutes - I guarantee that after a week you’ll be wanting to spend 20 minutes, then 30… the hardest part is just getting started and getting over the ridiculous notion that we have to create for money if it's our job to do so. We don’t. We can create something for fun. We can make something because we’ve always wanted to. We can make things that no one will ever see.
This applies to everyone by the way - not just “creative” people. Anyone who has a project they haven’t started because they're not ready, sorry to disappoint, but there is never a perfect time to start anything. Whether it's a new project, career, hobby, exercise routine or family, life‘s too short to sit around waiting for the right time to live.
