Design studios on social media vs design influencers
Interested to know what everyone thinks about the recent rise of design freelancer trends on instagram, where we share more about our daily lives like 'A day in the live of a freelancer' than our work. Do you take those designers more seriously or place them in a different category, away from a design studio? Where do you think we should draw the line on social media? Growth is so complicated these days and those trends seem to work, but are they getting us away from our design background? Would love to hear what you think!
Replies8
- @Luke Freeman ✓✐ really interesting article, thank you for sharing!
- @Luke Freeman ✓✐ well said!
- @Ana Davila https://vanschneider.com/blog/where-are-our-design-heroes/
- @Luke Freeman ✓✐ Lots to think about as designers! Embracing new ways of showcasing our work also comes with an evolution of how designers and studios are seen, specially on social media. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way, just what works best for each and their business
- @Filipa Brandão that’s interesting! I hadn’t thought about it like that before
- Influencers are just people who’ve just got carried away with self-initiated projects pretending to be designers they just leaching off the craft to make social media fame. No real designer will have time to design and do social media as they’re too busy making design changes.Influencers will have their use based on their social media following to be used a human billboard to promote the creative sector such as “Envato Elements” brings me to my next point if an influencers are so good why do they use mockups created by others not create their own.Comparing a design studio to an influencer they have different ethics, a studio is a practice whos core focus is to design for real clients and projects with a team of creatives, project managers, strategist etc using design to solve a problems or issue for a brand. Studio will use the same platform but you won’t see them posing for a selfie on insta maybe the studio dog or annual team photo posing naked, more likely a post of a snippet of their project development work. And theres a reasons a lot of studios/agencies have strict rules of giving away their process even make employees sign NDA to not disclose this. You would only find out when they give a design talk at OFFF, OFFSET.An influencer will say they’ve dropped out of education or it wasn’t for them but ironic enough will imitate a studios/persons process that came through the academic institution to approach a project using their process for their imaginary client for social media clicks.My advice becareful of influencers most are not educated in the field, question them on type design they’ll say use the “pencil tool” in Illustrator and wouldn’t know what the purpose of pollting nodes or bezier curves, they couldn’t even recommend a book on type design or typography because they’ve not read the history of type development.Where this trend has come from was Adobe or Skillshare approached established designers to give them content: Aaron Draplin Takes On a Logo Design Challenge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVUVUoXrPzM or https://youtu.be/plwRPf0NOWY Plotting Vector Points with Jessica Hische and shared it on YouTube and this lead others to copy.This has lead to a decrease of new exploration of a design process or cut corners at the process and created an influx of everyone doing the same thing until someone does something different and becomes mass market then others will jump on the band wagon.More likely we will regard influencers based on their following not on their content/portfolio. Currently that’s where we at.
- Maybe we can be inspired by the surrounding
- The net changed everythingThe design studio became not only in one place but everywhere
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