Bringing Our Community Together: An Evening with Vasjen Katro

At Skillshare, connecting members and teachers is an integral part of our platform. It’s what makes us tick.

From graphic design to software development, our open platform allows anyone to share their expertise. One of our top teachers, Vasjen Katro, has reached almost 40K students during his first year on Skillshare by sharing his unique approach to poster design or what he has coined as “Baugasm”.

As our community grows, we are looking for more ways to engage our members, so we recently hosted our first in-person teacher event, Baugasm Live in NYC: An Evening with Vasjen Katro.

Katro shared 10 lessons from building his creative career, his experience teaching on Skillshare, and a live demo of his design process. A few of the lessons included the importance of continually learning by adding new softwares and techniques to your toolkit, managing your time to pursue side projects, and accepting that at the end of the day not everyone will love your work.

While our platform exists online, bringing our community together IRL (in real life!) reminded me just how impactful creating connections can be.

A few takeaways I had from Katro’s presentation were:

Start where you are:

When Katro launched his daily poster project, Bausgam, on Instagram in 2016, he was a UI/UX designer and used the project as a way to explore his interest in graphic design. Baugasm started with a mere 200 followers (mostly comprised of friends and family) and since then has grown to over 90K.

Consistency is key:

By posting a new design every day, his followers knew what to expect and were excited to see his content, which allowed him to grow a large community of fans. The project also attracted the attention of high-profile clients and his work was recently featured on the Adobe Illustrator 2018 release page.

Teaching online expands your impact:

During the event, Katro shared an anecdote that stuck out to me. Teaching almost 40K students would take an entire lifetime or more in a traditional in-person setting, but it’s been made possible through online learning. One of the event attendees, a 16 year old student named Ben Migliore, traveled over 90 miles that day to meet Katro. Since then, he’s begun to expand his own online portfolio. Check out his work here.

Interested in sharing your expertise and building an engaged online community? Drop us a line at teach@skillshare.com to get started!