Extra Credit: Joseph Carter-Brown on Design & Entrepreneurship
Designer Joseph Carter-Brown visited UMBC two weeks ago to discuss the role of artists and designers in the present-day workforce and to share some skills that a young artist could use to establish their work through their personal brand. Carter-Brown, a front end designer with Unleashed Technologies (a website designing business), discussed the importance of artists who can grow their own personal, physical network, since the industry is so competitive. Carter-Brown explained that even the greatest portfolios were not tickets into an industry job, and therefore many artists could find themselves “forced into entrepreneurship.” He discussed “design’s identity problem,” and considered how the stereotype of designers as misunderstood loners detracted from the values designers could bring to the workforce. While he explained many ways in which artists and designers must employ and brand themselves, he also suggested collaboration as a way for artists and designers to find their niche in the workforce.
Through Joseph Carter-Brown’s lecture, I gained an insight to some of the realities and struggles he explained as the experience artists go through when taking their creative work to the professional level, or when using their creative skills in the workforce. One of his most intriguing topics was when he explained that some designers worked in such an unconventional way that, as Carter-Brown put it, “their mothers could not brag about their accomplishments.” It is important for artists, especially commercial artists, to see their work from the point of view of someone who is inexperienced with the type of art they produce. Carter-Brown also described the independent or entrepreneurial artist’s struggle to manage their careers when industry jobs are mainly contract work that does not provide assets like health insurance or consistent work. Exploring the realities of entrepreneurial or independent working artists has been one of the reasons I have been turned off from producing some types of artwork commercially, however, even as an artist who mainly works on personal projects or creates art in a more traditional context, I can appreciate these struggles as obstacles that all artists are working around in some way or another. The importance of sharing your work and asserting your values rings true for any artist, and I am glad Joseph Carter-Brown intended to share his entrepreneurial advice with emerging artists.
This lecture applies to the field of animation because many animators understand the importance of using entrepreneurial strategies, and a good amount of animators even complete entire projects through social media campaigns or through Kickstarter crowdfunding. Animators who want to work commercially must understand the importance of working on their own and identifying a personal brand. Hobbyist or student animators can also benefit from learning how to be entrepreneurs so that they can share their creative vision with an invested audience and gain valuable critique that can help them grow as an artist. This visiting artist lecture influenced me to create animations with an audience in mind. Even if an animation is primarily a personal project, identifying an audience or niche can help me enter a community that could support my work and stretch my creative skills. With so few traditional jobs available to professional artists, and few communities available for artists to work their craft while engaged with other jobs that present them outside of an artist role, artists must motivate and support their work. As Joseph Carter-Brown would insist, gaining an entrepreneurial skillset can help artists achieve.
