Hey, what's up? It's Oren. Thank you to everyone who watched my Design Life vlog this week in LA and who came out to the live on Thursday with myself and the Brand Brothers.
Today, I'm going to talk about building a personal brand as a creative. And this doesn't mean you have to become a full-time creator. I'm going to say that right now. I'm going to talk about what do you do now that portfolios are antiquated?
Because they are. They don't tell the story well enough. They're hard to believe and understand.
And people don't hunt them down to look at. So if you want to find more work, both freelance and actually get good jobs, move up inside your career, develop leverage in your career. Here's how you begin to put those foundations together.
And I'm going to have examples, one, not being a full-time creator, and just how you build what I'm going to call a living portfolio over time. Second, I'm going to talk about building your portfolio and your work anonymously and the reasons why you might want to do that or not. And then third, I'm going to talk about the route to becoming a creator if you do want to.
I think at a lot of points in someone's career as a creative, you're going to really think about it, whether you're launching your own brand, it's part of it, or you realize it's going to help you get more work because a lot of people are going to consider it. I'm going to walk through video formats that are easy and succeed in showing your work, whether you're a creator or not, as well as carousel formats and content overall that will help tell your story to people that will hire you. First, I'm going to kick off with walking through a couple of content types that I think every creative should know how to make that are actually relatively straightforward.
We're going to go through the concepts of a bunch of examples. So the first one is this transformation video, what I call them, or BTS. So it starts with like a couple iPhone clips from whatever you're working on. And then it ends with the actual results. And so you'll see here, Mob Wife Spired and Photo Shoot.
A couple iPhone clips of the model. And then you have the actual action and results. Second example is this direct flash photography.
So they're actually talking a little bit about technique. Again, they show a couple behind the scenes and they show all the end result photos. These videos are like six seconds to 15 seconds. And it's the ultimate format for a creative of any kind. Photographer, videographer, designer, whatever you are.
Or someone in marketing and branding who did like the strategy or who works on the campaign or an agency that actually does these or a brand who is actually doing the campaigns or an influencer who is doing this kind of stuff to show their work in a way that is potentially viral. So I've talked about this on other social media. I'll mention it again here. Transformations are huge, whether it's unboxing or a sketch to reality to get ready with.
Everyone wants to follow a journey in a narrative, even if it's just 15 seconds. What helps social media succeed? And this is a perfect narrative for creatives versus a traditional portfolio for a few reasons. First, it plays to.
a successful social media format. People are always trying to fight the wave. Oh, I don't want to make trending content. I don't want to, you know, I want to be able to show my art in my way. Guess what?
If you can show your art in a way that actually succeeds on social media, even if it means that you just get a hundred more likes than you typically do, you are now showcasing not just your ability to make your art or your skillset, but you are showcasing that you can actually do it in a way that makes sense on social media. That is a massive signaler to people that want to hire you and agencies that want to work with you or potential people that, you know, are going to retain your work. that you know what you're doing in the context of where every single thing that they're working on likely lives, which is in some way related to content. The second thing I love about this format is you do not have to have perfection. I've talked to too many creatives who are working super hard on their Behance portfolio or their website, and it just never gets done.
And this is literally a couple iPhone shots that happen from whenever you're on a shoot or a campaign or making something. And if you're not doing something exciting like this, like working on a campaign, it can literally be like, say you're just designing and you're at your desk. Like show the behind the scenes of like, you're pouring a coffee, you're banging your head against the table, you're rocking back and forth, you're playing with some pixels, whatever that is, like find a couple of little funny things that you can do, whether they're real or they're contrived, and then lead into the work.
And then when you show the work, you're only showing a handful of clips or a handful of photos. You can just cherry pick some of the things that look good. And since it's not some big portfolio piece, the perfection, you know, the elusive perfection doesn't have to exist.
You can just ship it. Couple iPhone clips, couple of the things that you like from the shoot that you feel represent whatever you're doing right, and it is done. And the expectation on the other end of it is not perfection. And this, I feel, really helps people actually ship this type of content and actually make their portfolio and then consistently add to it. We'll talk about that in a future section versus just kind of like having it dwell or be continually outdated.
So every single time you're working on something like this, you should try to capture one of these moments and post one of these moments. And I think a big thing, too, people get caught up on is, well, what do I do depending on my position? Like, OK, if you're a junior designer or you were like the art director on this or you worked on the brief or whatever, you can still run the content. Just explain to people in the caption.
what you actually did. And this is a huge one where you're like, hey, this is a shoot that I art directed. This is a shoot that I did the copywriting on.
This is a shoot where I was a grip. It doesn't matter. You are, as long as you are honest about your participation, and especially for design work, where you can very obviously be like, hey, I did the wireframes, or you know, guess what?
I did the final color correction, whatever that is. Tag the other people that are involved and see if they're down or not. But like, there is a, the ability to showcase that. and just tell your role in it. And that's a big part about building this as a portfolio or something that exists on your social media is explaining your involvement and being able to tag along on something cool that you worked on.
Now, the second form I'm gonna call out is called the creative carousel. And this is a great way to go about social media that works in your regular life. They work super well on TikTok and they work super well on Instagram. And if you put them all into a PDF, they also can work pretty well. This is the idea of taking a handful of photos and or photos or videos that you would normally do.
as a photo dump everyone's seen on instagram but just telling a story more related to your arc and your work and your career this is a great one um i it's 9 by 16 would succeed a lot more 4 by 5 like standard quart carousel format um so you're doing this vertical versus doing horizontal but she has her own trademark design style that she's placing on top of this second clip is a video showing something that she's working on it doesn't have to be as nice or artfully directed as this but again with her little brand kit she's not doing too much on this starts to add like some more of a brand kick she's got some actual pretty sophisticated stuff on some of these other stuff she does but it's just four slides they're showing her work in a branded style. And so if you are in any creative marketing, branding, design, videography, et cetera, illustration, whatever it is, you need to have your little kit of the things that you think are good to actually represent you as someone who knows what they're doing. And this is a great way to do it, where literally it's like a couple of color combos, a couple of font sets, it's a little iconography and illustrations.
And that's the kind of stuff everyone knows that they can kind of pull together. You should do something that's up to your standard that you can do on your social media. Another great example where I'm basically taking the normal stuff happening in your life and then placing it within this kind of design context.
So literally she's just placed an outline on herself and she's put some text in and around this, but it does really well. 6,000 likes on this. And I found this on my explore page. And I immediately was like, how do I do the bro version of this?
Like I'm going to put this text around in old English. We're going to have the global look different, whatever. Like you begin to think about what can I apply my style to, like my individual like brand kit to something that, you know, a format that works for others.
And then she has kind of like a collage style, similar fonts, that kind of stuff where she's showing her life in that context. But it's like a designed life. And I think this is kind of a more personal example. And applying any level of intention to that. for what you do, whether it's copywriting, whether it's just adding that brand kit to it, it immediately sells yourself better.
And if you look back on how you want to show your portfolio, this is the things I worked on in March. This is the best, my favorite things the last quarter. Hey, I went to this trade show, whatever it is. Showing it in that perspective begins to build your work portfolio as a creative online. Amazing example I love, where literally applying some typography, some like light Canva or Photoshop to the beginning of a carousel.
The rest of it's like a normal carousel of those photos. but you immediately get this designed element and like developing your trademark style like that to add to your kind of personal content is an excellent way to show yourself off as someone who cares and is intentional about branding and marketing. Another excellent example, this is just a work showcase. And this is again, another reason I love this so much is this is a portfolio, except it doesn't have these standards and requirements of like a perfect, everything must be presented aesthetically with everything tagged and called out.
She's just showing her favorite work from this year and you can go do the same thing. and you start to remind yourself, oh, I can capture clips. I can bring some stuff on the computer and show the PDF coming together. You know, I can, what do I have on my phone?
Bring that together. Every one of these clips is like one second max and she's just showing the work. And guess what? What you have, show it. You don't have it, you don't.
And you can tell that story. And because these formats do really well, you know, you may end up with 46,000 likes that she has. Even if you have 469, you're beginning to do things in a format that move well on the internet.
And no matter what your portfolio is of, you can still engage in that style. Like virality isn't the goal here. The goal here is beginning to establish your narrative. as a creative online.
And so some of the tricks that she's using on this, like this is all done in CapCut. I rant about CapCut, some other parts of this video, but literally like that tap onto the screen is like a great visual trick if you have a physical object. She's doing some things with keyframes where they zoom in. That's all done in CapCut. What's called the keyframes, just YouTube CapCut keyframes.
It's super easy. And like that little zoom there, also a keyframe. Those are like just little visual tricks to make this kind of content more compelling. Another example of the straight showcase.
So just literally this girl sitting there saying here's this website and then she scrolls through the website. Now, a couple of things that make this great. The manicured hand helps.
a couple little punch ins and outs. And then she's like style, but you sit in there to begin. And like, it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what you look like. Pick a good looking outfit, pick a fun environment, either one of those or both of those things. And you are setting yourself up as a hook, as a creative for that basically one to two second shot to start.
So literally I will copy what she does. Put yourself in an outfit that you're proud of. You can take some time in it. Pick a place that you think looks pretty cool. And just have that shot, like taking a sip of a drink, just because doing an action is always more natural than not doing an action.
And having a drink is a perfect one. Pick your favorite beverage, tag the company. They may even work with you.
And then just get into this portfolio. So she's like scrolling on a laptop. Like it can be that simple.
And the last piece we talk about is curation. If you don't want to show like much of your own work, start to curate the things that others do. And so Hans was in our Cut30 cohort, which is like the social media program I run.
Blew up off it and he's huge now. Started at zero and he was in there, whatever that was like six months ago. He's bigger than me at this point. And he's just doing these curations of like, here's trees you should add to your house.
He has an intentionally designed style. And it's the beginning to think about him as an interior designer, showing his thought process of like what that work looks like. Another good example of a completely different niche. Now I show this example just to show you like, it doesn't matter what your niche is.
It doesn't matter what you do. If you do anything visual or interesting, there's church graphics. Like, right?
You're like, is there a church graphic cottage industry on Instagram? Like, yes, there is. There is 1300 people that like this graphic designer showing off his church graphics.
And he's literally curating best church graphics of the week. I don't think he did all these. Uh, let's see this translation. I think he's just curated them.
Okay. He made, he made these graphics. He's putting them together into a collage style and he's presenting his beginning and end of it. And this is a perfect like work example of doing that. of curating those things, putting his own unique spin on it and saying, here's how I want to present my work like in this carousel form.
So as we go into this next section, where I talk about different ways to put yourself online, whether you want to fully become a creator, whether you want to like take the step-by-step portfolio development approach, which everyone should do, or you want to kind of be like an anonymous creator, those are the three options. These are like video and carousel references for post types that you should use to achieve that. If you don't know the tools to start, it's literally CapCut and Canva will get you to like 90% of the things that you see here.
So why would you want to make content? And why would you put your portfolio out there? The first thing is social media is distribution. One of the things that designers and creatives suffer a lot from is getting people to see their work. Because there's a huge disparity from people that actually need that work and knowing where to find it.
I get both sides of the equation in my head. I have dozens of people hit me up every week. looking for designers and art directors and like people of a certain talent or caliber or a certain price point.
I also get hit up by tons of designers who are trying to find better and more work. Not a lot of them like intersect in the way you I'd like them to and I don't spend a lot of time like trying to compare everyone in a spreadsheet. Maybe I'll make a tool for that or something soon but it is really interesting to see the disparity that's there and I know that too. Like I'm hunting for great tech pack designers all the time.
Hard to find and I know a lot of designers especially good western designers are not necessarily on like Upwork or some of these platforms that you can hire creatives easily. So A, social media content helps solve that disparity in distribution. And even if you don't build a big following at a base level, just with your network, this is really important to understand.
Getting the Instagram of everyone that you come across or getting the LinkedIn that they come across and just following up and following and then having your work on there, even if it doesn't get mega views or you post all the time, is the foundation of allowing your portfolio to move. And a quick example of this. So I've been working on MuscleGoo, which is a product I'm doing with Colin Lanforce. that we used to do and sell on Amazon back in the day. And now we are taking and relaunching it to sell here.
We needed the designer to do the packaging revamp. And I wanted to use someone who had like a different look and feel than my style of design. And so I had been to Expo West, which is a trade show about natural foods, organic foods. And there was an it bag at the show. Basically, it was a swag bag that everyone was lining up to get.
And I put it on Instagram. And someone hit me up like, hey, I designed that bag. And I went to her portfolio. We struck a bit of a conversation.
I was like, hey, we actually have this design project. Do you want to do it? Because her visual style that I could see there and a couple things she had really matched what we were looking for inside this product.
Now she designed this new package that you can see. But that happens because of putting your work out there online and also finding people talking about your work if you do do it and actually interacting. But the second thing that social media builds is leverage.
And this point is like absolutely massively important to hear. I remember when I started on TikTok. I did not expect TikTok to go well. I was learning TikTok to learn it as a...
marketing executive. I wanted to be better at my job by understanding social media. But then I started to get a lot of views, 10,000 followers, 20,000 followers.
When I got to 50,000 followers, people I were working with were talking about it. People would start to see me. People recognized it.
It became a thing. And all of a sudden, when you're in meetings and you have 50,000 TikTok followers and you're in a marketing meeting, your opinion begins to matter way more because you're actually doing it. When I got 100,000 Instagram followers, and now I'm at like 500K up across platforms, like every meeting changed. Meetings where I was in with major retailers changed, where it's like, hey, guess what?
Do you know how the social strategy works? Like look at my engagement versus the engagement of your entire channel has millions of followers. And all of a sudden those conversations begin to revolve around you. And so I've had a lot of comments about if you know what to do from a creative standpoint, but your marketing director doesn't, or people won't listen as an executive, they'll listen to help a lot more when you have success and their account doesn't.
And they're like, why do you have success and our account doesn't? Or when you're like, Hey, look, listen to me because I actually do this and I actually get results. And it's not going to be the cure all end all.
But it certainly helps get your voice heard and all it takes is the time and dedication of creating and it will reward you for the rest of your career. So we're going to hop into three approaches to building that. The first approach is you don't want to become a creator.
You want to do a gradual approach to it, a living portfolio. But what this is, is it's a foundation that if you ever want to go all in on social media, you're already there. And it's something that you're going to be able to build upon and build a network upon will serve you for the rest of your life.
I base this theory and this whole program based on what I wish I'd... because I had a big social media account when I was younger on X. And I gave it up because it was like, some of the content was like more risque. So I was like out partying a lot.
And like, it was really funny and humor focused. And I was like, as I became a more serious professional, I was like, this doesn't represent me correctly. And I'm just going to move away. Now, in hindsight, it doesn't really matter.
I should have just ran with it because it had a huge following to start with. I could have used it as a basis to move on. And on that other note, I was also building personal brands for other people.
So I was running an email list for my boss and then partner in a business at the time. And we built his email list and his LinkedIn up pretty large by just regularly publishing the things he was working on. And he has like a 27, 30,000 person email list from us doing that regularly at these projects and establishing him.
That is super valuable for him. But I woke up one day and was like, oh, I should have just been building that for me. Right. And I'm happy I did it because I learned how to do it. We've done businesses together.
But if I had been building my small version the entire time and regularly communicating with them. All of these projects I'm doing now would go faster, I'd have more work, more opportunity, make more sales in the things I do. And no matter where you're at in your career, because I had this epiphany at like 36, you know, but whether you are 21, 30, 45, the next 10 years of your life can revolve around building up email and social media, and it can be gradual. We're going to walk through all that. Second, we're going to talk about being anonymous online, which if you are in a job where they really don't want you talking about it or you think it's going to reflect badly on you, you still want to be a participant in the social media economy, you should go anonymous and it's easier and cooler in a lot of circumstances than you might think.
And third, I'm going to talk about becoming a creator, which is obviously something I do a pretty expansive program on separately than this, but I'll hit the very creative focused version on this and like what it takes to show up every day and make content and like what the rewards are for something like that and where you get started. So this is the foundation of a living portfolio. So what you're going to think about. your task.
I'm going to lay it out here, then talk about the piece. First, you're going to put out one piece of content every month. Then you're going to put out one email every single quarter. Let's break that down a little bit further.
So what do I mean by one piece of content a month? I mean on multiple social media networks. I'd particularly choose Instagram and LinkedIn, at least, but you might as well also throw in like X and TikTok or whatever it is, if you're making it, if it's a video, and we'll talk about the types of content in a minute.
But the reason I say LinkedIn and Instagram is because that's where you can actually interact with people. As you're going to go put out this content, your precursor is you need to start with relationships. If you are on a shoot, if you are working with people, if you meet people online or meet people in real life, your homework, your task every single time is to ask them their Instagram handle, make sure you have their name, and you are going to connect with them on LinkedIn and Instagram. You're going to do it every single time. And it takes you two minutes.
It is extremely good use of social time. It allows you to stay connected to them. And then those people are going to be the foundation of your audience because this Living portfolio is not about growing to 10,000 followers or 100,000 followers.
It's about an audience of 10. This is my concept. If you meet 100 people in a year, 50 people in a year, 40 people in a year, and you have that relationship there, and that stacks up two years, three years in, 10 of those people are going to be decision makers of some kind who could employ your work. I guarantee you. And if you are posting that work on there, all that matters is that they see it.
It doesn't matter if it's distribution. anything else that matters of those people who are going to make a decision about employing someone who does what you do if you are somewhat top of mind. And this is an extremely useful concept to wrap your head around. You need to focus on those 10 people.
And so what do you do? You start getting these people in, you're just making friends with them, you're doing your normal life. Once a month, share your work.
The formats that I just discussed about the transformation of a behind the scenes to reality, the format of the creative carousel, or the growth content. Those three types of content I broke down, one a month. Once a month is completely achievable for anybody.
That means if it takes you 10 days to make this content because it's so hard, you could do it because you have a month. Or you can say, hey, I'm gonna have that one evening or whatever it is where I craft this one thing and it's low pressure, I don't have to do all the time. It doesn't matter if it gets four likes, turn likes off on it, doesn't matter. Put it out there. Because let's look at one year from now.
You have 12 of those now on your profile, on your portfolio. Can be sprinkled in with your personal content or it can just be this. And so if someone, anyone meets you, Now, because you're going to be getting people's handles and whatnot, and they go to your profile, they know what you do, and they have examples of it. And like I talked about in the growth content section, if you're not good at it, if you're new to it, they're going to see you growing and learning and trying to establish that and have its own benefits.
A year from now, there will be a 12-thing portfolio on social media in a format that may work and may get you more attention, but that shows people that you are on the internet, that you are somewhat savvy to putting this together, and they can actually interact with find easily and share this. And all that is super crucial to how hiring works nowadays. And we're going to talk about email. Your call to action on all of these is going to be to join your email list. You are going to set up with ConvertKit because it is free up to 10,000 subs or Beehive, I believe is also free up to some amount of subs.
They are both great platforms. They both have their ups and downs, but they are free to set up. You're going to set up your ConvertKit or your Beehive. If you really want, I can do a video like walking through it, but it's not that hard. And you're going to put a link to sign up for the landing page.
If your name is John, it's going to be John's newsletter, Julie's newsletter. If you don't have to come up with a brand, you can. You can make it cool if you want.
But literally just like put your thing and literally just put like updates about my career, life, project, and interests. And you just want to get, again, any number of people on this. Whenever you do something, you say, hey, if you want to follow along on this stuff, link to my emails in my profile. And you're going to start to see. You get five people.
You get 50 people. Over the course of two years, you're going to get 50 people, 100 people on that list? Yes.
You might even get more if you put out something really cool. And that is the foundation of your quarterly update. Your quarterly update is almost an exercise in thought. You can take your three posts that you've made, right? You made one a month.
You now have three things to talk about in your quarterly update. You go there and you reflect on them. Here's what I did. Here's what I think I'd do better. Here's what I think I did great.
Whatever that format ends up being. Some kind of breakdown of like, here's the thing I did. Here's what I want to do better in the future.
Here's what I liked about it, whatever. And then a couple of things. things you're interested in or following along can be that simple. Write like you're writing to a friend, shoot out that email, people will see the three things, and you are beginning to now communicate with a community of people that understand your work, that are following your journey, that are going to expect to regularly hear from you, but you're not emailing them so much that it's annoying.
We'll talk in the creator section about growing and building this and whatnot. People aren't unsubscribing from getting an email. from you once a quarter who you've met right like if they are it doesn't really matter it's not a huge volume and you're now learning to describe talk about and share the stories you're working on on two platforms that make a huge difference and they form the foundation if you ever want to lean in you're not starting from zero you have 10 email subscribers four email subscribers doesn't matter if it's your mom and two of your best friends one of them is anonymous whatever it is you are now have a foundation where you are not going from zero to one on social media or email you are already at one and you are growing and this is a super critical thing that i would just highly recommend doing. And that really is the gradual breakdown. One post a month, one email a quarter.
You do this, do this for a year, you have a foundation. You do it for four years, you kind of have a massive foundation. You've got 48 things in your portfolio. You've sent out whatever that is over the course of four years, 16 emails.
You're now communicating and building up a serious rapport. And this is the foundation of a creative career and the minimum I feel like you should be doing. Now let's talk about going anonymous.
There's a number of reasons you might want to go anonymous. You don't want friends and family to know you're not proud of your work. It's okay, it happens.
You have a job that you don't feel like would like you to be on social media. Okay, whatever. Or you just want a way to get started and need to figure it out.
Great. Going anonymous should be cool. Come up with a studio name.
You know, Studio Mezcal. Whatever it is. Something weird.
Something fun. Something that has like a theme or a ring to it. And build an identity around it as a creative. Make a logo.
Learn a little bit of design. Have a fun tagline. Get a visual theme.
This is your opportunity to flex as a creative. Because it is just for you. It's purely for you and for social media.
And now, you put it online. You can do one of two things. You can follow the portfolio thing I mentioned before, try to put something new every month, or you can try to be a creator on it.
But either way, you're going to show your work, you're going to show your work in a faceless manner, or you're going to create work just to do this. And really, it's about creating a portfolio just for yourself. If you're a sneaker designer, design 12 sneakers under your fake Studio Mezcal brand and be putting them out there and showing the process, showing the transformation from sketch to a sample, showing the transformation from sketch to illustrator, from your notebook to your iPad, whatever it is.
But you can show off whatever that thing is you're doing. under the guise of a completely creative endeavor that doesn't involve showing your face. You can make it as cool or as provocative as you want.
And then someday, when you're fired from the job that you're really worried about, that you're like, oh, I want them to see my social media, or when you say, hey, my work is actually good enough, I wanna start sharing it, you assign your face to it. And now you've basically pre-built an audience you can begin layering yourself into and introduce yourself and be like, hey, I'm John, I now run the Studio Med's call account. You know, this has been my work for the last couple years.
I'm gonna start talking about it in this way. You can start doing green screen videos or whatever. There is no excuse not to do one of these things.
A lot of people's excuse for not being a creator is it's too much. Do your kind of living portfolio. A lot of people's excuse for not doing a living portfolio is I don't want to put my face out there. I'm not proud of my work.
Great, go anonymous. You have to start. This is all the leverage you're going to get and all the distribution you're going to get is going to come from doing stuff like this.
If you don't do it, you have no power in the current system that we're at. People aren't going to listen to you as much as they would if you have social media. You are going to be at the whim of applying to jobs on like Indeed and LinkedIn and stuff like that.
competing against hundreds of other people versus working from the network that you started that now knows that you are putting yourself out there doing a thing like empower yourself to make these moves and the most important thing from a personal level and going back to things i wish i'd done i wish i had a catalog of everything i designed from when i was in college through my first jobs through the marketing stuff i worked on through this if i just put up a portfolio once a month of the thing i was most proud of i would love right now in my late 30s to look back on that and be able to look at that journey just from a personal level say i'd never gotten a job off it raining It's kind of amazing. Like I look at, I've got some Virgil books up here. Like some of them are just retrospectives.
He just kept all of his stuff. It's amazing to look at as an outsider. I'd love to be able to say, hey, I have, you know, I have thousands of fans for lack of a better term.
If I put out that for free as a PDF, I'm sure a lot of people will be curious what that arc looks like, right? So think about it even for yourself. This is an amazing way to document your creative life. And I would highly recommend. Now there is becoming a creator.
and I run a whole program on this. I try not to sell hard in these videos but I have this thing called Cut 30 where in 30 days, we teach you how to do green screen videos and find pillars and you workshop in our Slack and whatever. If you do want to do something like that with an accountability group, you can join it.
It's $500 for the month. If you're like a student or you're new to some of this, don't do anything that I sell. You learn, just follow the stuff I say in the YouTubes.
I'm not trying to ever sell anything to you. If you are like in a career and you're making some money and you want to get better, I build things for you and I will 100% be working with other people to make sure that you're doing the right thing. make whatever you're doing better.
You can run those programs. But I say all that and I bring it up to say that we've now run, God, 700, 800 people through that program. We've had a lot of creators come out of it of all styles. And a bunch of them are just basically building their portfolio as creatives or finding work through that.
And so we've learned a lot about what works and doesn't. I'm going to bring up my boy Brady here, designed by Brady. He did a great job, just cracked 10K recently.
And he's just followed popular formats for design and helped curate fonts that he likes, helped show off things he's designed, developed a bit of a personality. He just kept going. That's what I'm going to say here. It's your goal, if you really want to be a creator, is to start creating. Video a day is the goal.
You can't do video a day, three a week. You try to do less than that, stick to the gradual portfolio thing. You can do three a week. You can do one a day.
When I started, I was doing more than one a day, and now I still do one a day. And you are literally just going to follow these formats of curating things that you like, that's bucket one, documenting things that you do, that's bucket two, and then developing opinions and ideas, that's bucket three. Your job on the internet is to find formats and to find things that work for you that you can easily create to allow you to do. So all the creating that 99% of us do is done in CapCut.
And then all the kind of edited graphics and carousels and stuff are typically done in Canva, or you can do it in Adobe. And also Figma, whatever your weapon of choice is for tools, but Canva is probably the easiest if you haven't done this kind of thing. CapCut has a couple features which are key.
One is effects. Go to effects and you can find green screen. Green screen has green screen photo and green screen video. If you've seen any of my TikToks or Instagrams, most of what I do is talk on green screen.
Put an image up behind me that's 9 by 16. I make all of them in Canva. Just pop graphics in there and resize them. And then you literally can go graphic to graphic and talk to them.
When you've talked over one, you go hit the effects button again, hit green screen again, and you put up another image and you're talking over your second image. And you can make a video talking about those. This is the easiest method to go talk about things that you do or work online.
It doesn't need you to have a fancy setup or a fancy camera. It's all on the iPhone. You can use a wired headphone, Apple headphones.
Mic is a great one to get started with. You don't want to spend any money. Or you can use like a Rode mini mic.
I think that's what I typically use. But your goal is to make three of those a week at least in perpetuity. Doing one of those things. Curious.
What do I mean by that? Find things that you like and share them. Five grails that you have for brands. Your favorite athleisure.
Fonts that you use. Hacks for video techniques. Eight designers you should know. Whatever it is, curate. Find things that are out there in the world, put your spin on it, and explain why you like them.
That's topic category one. You can do it in carousels, you can do it in video, whatever it is. Carousel two is documentation.
We talked a lot about this, same thing as the gradual portfolio. Things you do, show the before and the after, or talk about what you did and what you'd like to do better. You're basically developing your portfolio live.
A fun way to do this and get a lot of views is to tie into pop culture. Be like, Nike released this blank by blank. Here's how I would put my spin on it if I was designing it.
Or like, I redesigned the Buick Enclave, whatever it is. Take something that's happening in popular culture and put your spin as a creative on it. I filmed a spec ad. I redesigned this poster.
I did whatever. It's a very good way to leverage attention on something that's already popular, but put your spin on it. And third is ideas and opinions. This is a lot of what I do online, where you can basically say, cool, I'm going to come up with a concept. Whether it's like a tactic, a strategy tactic for marketing, or just a way you think life should be different or change, or hey, this thing is good or this thing is bad and why.
But putting yourself out there and developing opinions. The reason this is big is because so few people have opinions nowadays. They just do what everyone else says and does.
If you develop an opinion, you can objectively say, I think the Dior Stone Island collab is good because X. I think the Under Armour Balenciaga collab is bad because Y. You being able to say that online, developing the conviction and the authority to be able to follow through on that and believe it and writing like that is an amazing exercise for creatives to begin to think... objectively about what is good and bad, their sense of taste, what they like and they don't, and begin to refine yourself.
It's almost just as important for you and your work to be able to develop that conviction, to have an opinion online, or to share an idea that's original online, than it is to just get the views. But you're gonna do those three things, and you're gonna put those videos out. You're gonna learn CapCut, and literally, YouTube CapCut tutorials. I learned CapCut by YouTubing CapCut tutorials. I took Jimmy Farley's course.
You've heard Jimmy Farley from Creator's Corner, making all those kids rich on TikTok shop. I bought his $150 whatever, I got all the basics and I got all the advanced stuff from YouTube. And it can literally be that simple, but you can just track down.
Use CapCut. Green screen effect is going to be the easiest way to start. And any of these other formats I've shown where you can film a couple clips and put them together, this is the way you go make your content.
And I've broken down some of those carousels and formats earlier in this video. All right. I hope you found that valuable.
As you can probably tell if you're watching a lot of my content, I'm splitting up my week. So in the middle of the week, I'm doing vlogs. I'm talking a lot more about my brand and what I'm building during that. and just also showing a lot of like lifestyle and things that are a little more fun, interactive, they're shorter.
Please tune in on that, especially if you're interested to see like how I'm building, what I'm building. Those are the videos I have the most fun with and I'm excited for you to watch them. So those are gonna be every Wednesday or Thursday. And then we are live every Friday now.
Myself, Ashwin, Jordan Rogers, and Bima Williams. I love the live format. I love live Q&A and feedback that people get to watch us talk about what's happening during the week.
And so you can find that on YouTube here. every Friday morning. I think it's 9 a.m.
Pacific time. We are streaming and then the recordings are up after. It's a super fun time. If you like branding and marketing and want like-minded people to chat with it about and to hear us kind of talk about any topics that you bring up, we're here to hit it.
Drop any topics you want to hear us say or work with in the comments here. And I appreciate y'all watching so much.