The Myth of Quick Creative Process

One of the things that people don’t warn you about when you become a freelance graphic designer, is that you’ll run into clients that only want to pay you hourly. Not a problem, but what is the problem is that clients often only want you to work on something for an hour or so, so if you charge $20/hour…you only made $20.

So $20 is still better than nothing right? But when you consider bills that need paying and needs that need to be met in this day and age, $20 doesn’t get you very far.

And when I say you, I mean me. It doesn’t get me very far.

Another issue is the expectation that the creative process can happen in an hour, and for some lucky creatives, that’s totally possible, but for a majority, anything worth doing is going to take a bit more time and research than what one expects. Sure, I can whip something together in an hour, but it might have mistakes, it might be sloppy, and it might not be effective against your competition or right for target audience. Honestly, it’ll probably be the first idea that comes into my head, and definitely not formatted well for all the ways you might want to use it (I deal with this with “make me a quick logo” a lot). Hell, it might accidentally be considered copyright infringement (which happens a lot when people don’t have the time to do thorough research and forgot how influenced they were by another person’s idea or project).

I envy people who can make quick creative progress on a project, I really do, and occasionally I am gifted with intuition and insight that is spot on and makes the process very fast. However, I’ve never known a person to make a quick creative brief before. That shit takes time and effort. You practically have to be a PI, Lawyer, and Therapist as well as a Creative for your clients. All of that takes a lot of energy. All of that takes a lot of time.

All of that merits the money a Creative charges hourly or otherwise. Because clients are picky.

They should be picky. They’re paying you to come up with something great, but the stingy ones are the ones who are a detriment to the process and will get precisely what they pay for…a piece of crap.

Thankful

“I had to do a lot of defending of you…”

As my mother recounted her and my fathers visit with my dad’s family I had to do a lot of self talking. I had to remind myself that I don’t need to justify my life choices to my fathers family or my own. I’m not responsible for their concerns.

I’m not responsible to them in any way.

Part of me was simultaneously relieved and annoyed that I was being told any of this. Mostly because I was grateful to hear my mother tell me how proud of me she was for taking these risks and trying something new. Becoming self employed and doing what I loved was one of the things my mother had wished she had done for herself when she was younger, but I was annoyed that she was telling me at all that I was being spoken of so negatively.

Naturally there is always that moment of “why did they feel comfortable telling you and not me” paranoia. But of course I realized very quickly that my fathers family had often tried to convince my mother to intervene in our lives through manipulation. Which is really sad to say. Their lack of boundaries and desire to control things in peoples lives had become old news and burned me out. It was why most of the time I avoided them. I don’t have time for that nonsense.

As my mother spoke I was grateful for the life circumstances I found myself in. My husband likes his job, is good at it, has pretty good insurance, and has been given surprisingly significant raises sometimes multiple times a year. I have investments that are in good hands and being well managed with my supervision. I have my Three Crystals LLC Etsy shop which is doing better than I expected and I have Tell-Tale LLC which is getting ready to have an online shop of used books and publications of our own. I have great things going and I’ve been doing quite a bit to keep things going and that’s made me extremely busy.

I’m thankful for all of this. I’m thankful for the criticisms and support. I’m thankful for the love and the struggle. I’m thankful for the experience. For the drive. For the flexibility it offers me. Mostly, I’m thankful for the pleasure of serving others with my creativity.

Believing In Yourself

When you start believing in yourself there is a lot that goes with it. A heavy weight of responsibility suddenly pressed upon you and makes the reality of your limitations feel all too real. Emotions flood through you. Nagging naysayers stream in your mind trying to keep you insecure. The overwhelming sense of what you’re really up against looms mysteriously and ominously like a dark cloud casting shadows across a once familiar and dreamy landscape of possibilities.

There is a great deal of risk and change required in the process of believing in yourself. There is potential to lose your humility. To become selfish and arrogant. There is potential to lose people who liked you better when you were more insecure, and you take on your tasks far more lonely than you once thought you would. There are potentials for failure and a whole mindset surrounding the concept of failure that may need to change. There are many ways it can turn on you if you aren’t keeping wise.

Attitudes will change. Desires will change. It will feel as if all reality has changed. That is a lot of weight to carry.

It takes energy to have a healthy balance of the reality of limitations as well as a realistic dream to achieve. It is vulnerable and raw and exposing. It takes self awareness and being willing to choose when you need to hold yourself back and when you need to move forward. It takes wisdom to know a good opportunity versus a too-good-to-be-true one. It takes the courage to start at all.

Is it worth it?

I play with this question a lot, because coming into myself and changing is not a simple task. It takes time, energy, and effort. It takes a lot of self talk and a lot of checking yourself. It takes going against ones nature of wanting to be haughty or wanting to cower. It takes wisdom, and foolishness to meet in the middle and grapple with the tough questions.

It asks much. It gives much. It takes much.

Even small transitions in my life have caused me to lose or let go of friendships. It hurt then. It stings a little now. It’s taken all this time to consider and reconsider the ways it has helped and hurt. It’s taken times of loneliness. It’s taken hard conversations with loved ones who don’t know what to do yet with the slightly newer me.

Its taken a lot of introspection to stay humble and realize that not everything in life is about being happy. It’s about being human. Fully horribly and humbly human. Which I think is the goal.

There is a lot of unrealistic and fakes positivity when it comes to the idea of “Believing in yourself”. There are those who want to tell people that it’s all rainbows and butterflies. That its work but ultimately a breeze when you come into it. Like it’s a gift and blessing to be able to do. Worst of all they make it sound like it’s easy to maintain or that it’s once and done.

It may be some of these things, but with goals of great reward, there is the potential for great risk.

Believing in yourself means believing in your whole self. The good, bad, and ugly. Believing that you will make mistakes and still finding ways to turn it around or let it be. Believing when you’re wrong and need to take steps to right it or let it stay broken. Believing in your limitations and setting boundaries and letting go of that which no longer serves you. Believing when enough is enough or when enough isn’t enough. Believing when you can. Knowing when you can’t. Knowing when you’re lying or being honest with yourself. Knowing when to stop and start beating yourself up over it.

It takes a great deal of self awareness. It takes a lot of taking control where you can and being willing to let some things to chance or Providence.

Honestly, it’s terrifying and difficult to believe in yourself. Which is why it’s such heavy words lightly thrown that make their way into posters, coffee mugs, and greeting cards. It’s easy to tell people to do it. Its easy to make people empowered for a little while by saying it. It’s much harder to initiate it.