#Freelance greeting card design jobs professional

It’s easy to do great work when you have only yourself to satisfy. As an artist, however, the possibilities and process can be endless.Īs a graphic designer, doing beautiful work against all odds. When you do a math problem, you know when it’s finished-you’ve arrived at a solution, and it’s either right or wrong. And be professional.Īs an artist in general, there are no right answers. If you want to make your passion a career, specialize.

My advice to those drawn to the arts: talent and interest are a starting point, not a destination. This is very true for me, as I interface directly with my clients. It also means maintaining a stable temperament-no Van Gogh shenanigans! A working artist has to perform well in both the studio and the boardroom. In terms of output, that means refining your creative process so that it reliably yields quality-true even for artists in “non-commercial” fields like painting. Pretty much every artistic field somehow intersects with the business world, so successful artists also exhibit professionalism. Specializing in graphic design turned my youthful artistic meanderings into a skill set with real-world applications.

#Freelance greeting card design jobs professional

So, one of the keys to becoming a paid, professional artist? I’d have to say it’s specialization. Those specialties reflect career paths available to today’s artists, and each demands unique skills that take time and discipline to master-none are dilettante-friendly. To me, “art” is no longer even a description of a viable profession-it’s just an umbrella term unifying wildly diverse areas of creative specialty.

And artists? They’re unemployable, tortured eccentrics active only when the beret is on and inspiration strikes. Ha! Yeah, the way art is popularly understood is antiquated: painting and sketching. I learned to be adaptable, and every experience built my confidence. In that first job at a tiny agency, I wore many hats and frequently had to learn new skills on the fly (I once learned basic video editing in an afternoon). That, by the way, ultimately led to a job managing and growing a travel/tourism brand in San Francisco! I wrote and presented pitches for six-figure accounts-and our agency won them! I worked with clients in a wide range of sectors-nonprofit, higher ed, travel/tourism, etc.-resulting in a varied enough portfolio that I wasn’t pigeonholed into any industry, but it also gave me enough experience in each that I could specialize if I desired. What am I? Junior designer? Graphic designer? Gofer? I ask my boss.Īs art director, I was allowed to take the reins on integrated campaigns. A week in, I’m filling out paperwork and need to provide my title. When I accepted a position with a small, regional ad agency, I was simply grateful to have a job relevant to my degree. In my final class in art school, my professor expressly told us not to expect to be hired as art directors as first jobs-we’d start at the bottom, maybe even be the coffee gofer. I tried to declare my major the first week in college, but my adviser made me wait! By the time I stepped foot on campus, I’d already had a taste of professional design. My fate was sealed when, the summer before college, a job as a marketing assistant came to double as a design internship. Halfway through senior year, it hit me: “I think this is graphic design, and I think I love it!” As editor of my high school’s literary magazine I was also essentially doing art direction - determining the magazine’s theme, overseeing its layout, etcetera. There were all these crazy majors - furniture design! Animation! Fashion! I’d planned to pursue painting, but working on the high school newspaper changed that - I had to design a page in every paper, and fell in love. Graphic design hit my radar when I started receiving catalogs from art schools. By then, I’d been drawing almost daily for 14 years! The summer after 9th grade, I decided to pursue art as a career. In middle school, my hobby morphed into photorealistic drawing (shout out to my art teacher, Joe McHugh!). So thank you to her, the most important person in my life! She encouraged my creativity and gave me honest feedback from the start. Before I get into the story, I must begin by saying that my mom, the beautiful Giuliana Singleton, is the main reason I am a creative person today.