I have spent the last two days working on my website — redesigning my header, organizing my creative work, rewriting my About page, and updating my projects. I still have more work to do on it, but I’m really happy with the progress I’ve made.
It’s amazing how much harder this is when you don’t specialize in one creative area, especially when we’re often told that we can’t do this.
Some things I’ve heard along the way.
“Just choose one or two.”
“You don’t want to come off too broad.”
“Jane of all trades, master of none.”
Yet, here I am. Going into my second year of working with two ongoing clients who hired me BECAUSE I do more than one thing well.
I get the rationale behind the specialization cries. If someone wants to hire a photographer, why wouldn’t they just hire a photographer? Or a writer? Or a graphic designer? Or an illustrator? The truth is, often they will. But is being a graphic designer and a photographer really going to stop a client from hiring me if they love my work? I don’t think so.
It’s easy to choose a favorite creative skill to focus on if you have one. But giving up or playing down any of the things that I do would leave that part of me empty.
Also, why should I have to put myself in one box? Yes, it is much MUCH easier to market yourself if you have a career that can be described with one check mark. But what if I left out my photography and writing? Or splintered it off into a different website? It may make my site easier to navigate for some clients and could lead to more graphic design work, but I’d miss out on cool writing and photography opportunities that I’d truly love doing.
Being creatively well-rounded has benefits for your clients as well, especially if they can’t afford to hire an entire creative team.
Say you’re hired to shoot a lookbook. If you’re not the person that’s going to design the lookbook (or don’t really know much about graphic design), you’re not going to be considering how the shots are going to translate into the design style of the final product. You may not get all of the details that could make the lookbook stand out in a sea of fashion. You may be so focused on single shots that some of the big picture gets missed or lose an opportunity to come up with something completely awesome that your client hasn’t even considered yet.
That’s not to say that having a single focus is a bad thing. There are benefits to that as well, such as having a deeper expertise in your field.
What I do believe is important to do when you’re juggling multiple creative paths is to make sure you’re building and sharing your creative skills (or “ingredients,” as Pamela Slim calls them) around a central area of focus. Pamela’s book Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together which I read for the first time about a year ago, was super helpful for me. I revisited it yesterday when I was updating my site for another year of creative work. (That’s also important – reevaluating your path and updating your work to fit where you’re headed each year. We’ll save that for another day.)
My focus, for example, is COMMUNICATION. Almost everything that I’ve done in my career, while it may seem haphazard if you looked it as just a list of jobs, projects, and professional background, all fits under this category.
Starting with getting my Master of Science in psychology through helping movie studios market their films and styling and shooting “personality” photography for a fashion brand, it’s been all about communication, verbal and visual. Wholeness. Looking at the big picture, then using a variety of tools and methods (e.g., graphic design, research, writing, photography) to express it.
All this to say that next time you’re feeling down on yourself because you don’t fit the mold, don’t give up. The magic is in the structure of your story.
As Pamela Slim put it, “The quality of your life is directly related to the quality of your stories. You must craft them well.”
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