Reinventing Creativity - An Evening With Von Glitschka Vector Logo Design

Key Takeaways

hey guys welcome back this is a evening with Bon glitschka and we're doing a live stream on Facebook and YouTube we have a live audience here and we're also going to be answering your questions on YouTube and Facebook thanks for giving that amazing talk and I didn't know what to expect and I I really enjoyed your talk so thank you very much for doing that no problem maybe if you're just tuning in right now let's go back to the beginning and talk about how you got into doing art design illustration in the first place when was that first moment that you started to explore things um as a child the first moment I actually came to the understanding of Commercial Art was uh my dad was waxing the car and he just bought a new product called armorall and I saw the cartoon of the the character brand character the Viking and I'm like so somebody had to draw that and they're using it on a product you know so that's the first time I kind of understood how art could relate to Commerce of sorts how old were you I was like 12 okay something like that and you said that your mom was an artist too yeah she growing up she did she's kind of Martha Stewart type creativity so she's doing crafts and she'd do toll painting it was called and what is that like buy a antique wooden box and then paint it to look like it's the Japanese style artwork on it and do black lacquer and so it's pretty cool so growing up in a in an environment where your mom's creative did you feel encouraged or pushed in One Direction or the other um no I was always it's interesting because as your kids grow up you look at them and you can't help but think back when you're the same age and what was I doing are they at the same level especially when it came to drawing I did that with my uh daughter Savannah and I I she's the one that turned me on the manga like years ago when she was like eight or nine or something she said she came to me and said you need to watch this movie called Spirited Away and I'm going what's that what's a manga and I'm like I want I'm not into that and I watched it and I was hooked it's like and so she's um when I was a little kid I I really gravitate is when Japanese animation first started coming to the states so there was like Speed Racer of course and um but there is other more obscure ones like Marine boy and Star Blazers was one of my favorites and um so I used to draw that all the time and of course Star Wars came along and that pretty much captivated me for a few years is everything everything anything Star Wars so yeah yep and I see that there's some I guess fan art you you've done some icons for Star Wars or something like that I remember seeing that on your site yeah I've created like just for myself just created some stickers and did a couple cotton Bureau t-shirts with that theme MH yeah uh do you ever run into issues with the the copyright police all that kind of stuff well when it comes to Fan Art if you've ever been to a Comic-Con it's a growing great gray area that would technically fall under um I mean it falls under two areas of copyright actually I that's what I'm down in California for this week because I did a course for LinkedIn learning on copyright for Creative so uh this would I purposely avoided this though because it's the one area of copyright law where it comes down to not just who can make the best argument but who has the bigger wallet right and I I think when it comes to the growing gray area of fan art uh when it comes to copyright if you created it you own the copyright by default so I own all the artwork I created but I don't own the intellectual property it's based on and so if Disney starts cracking down on that then they it's like they would be blowing their own their own value up it's like they' run into problems so and I don't make money off it I just do it for fun yeah yeah so I give away even though stickers are for sale on my site I think I've only sold four sets uh but I mailed them I actually mailed them to a cve director at Disney that I've worked with so hope I in hopes that hey maybe those will get put up and they'll go hey we should just buy these off of him so right yeah so you're you're doing it from the fan point of view and so you're hoping that you don't get anything more than just a cease and assist if it ever comes that and I want a cool shirt that I designed that's Star Wars theme yeah okay it's a little self- serving yeah yeah okay um do you guys have any questions just coming out of the the talk he just gave on on kind of Reinventing Your creativity does anybody oh already okay excellent Derek so I'm Derek Elliot um so one question I had you mentioned getting into a creative flow um do you think to get into that flow requires Focus or can that be damaging like if you are trying to be creative um do you think that's damaging or is it best to just um let those aha moments happen yeah well I'll you to answer that I'll give you an example from the context of like designing a logo let's say um I have a certain protocol I go through if it's my own client if it's coming from an agency then I just kind of align with whatever their process is but if it's my own client I'll initially give them a creative brief they fill it out give it back I respond with any more questions and then once they provide that I do my own research just to gain more information but I take it all in and then they think I'm sure the clients always think this that oh V's working on it well act after I do that I just sit on it and I usually sit on it for a good week sometimes few days before concepts are due and I do that because I think like that quote I quoted in the talk with Einstein that plays the highest form of research you have to give for me you have to load your chamber with all these points of information facts and otherwise and then give your mind the opportunity to let it all Steep and then that's when your mind's naturally going to make some associations and that's where one idea is going to Leap Frog to another idea and um at that point when those ideas start naturally forming that's usually when I'll start thumbnail sketching or writing information down and and nothing is finalized at that point but that's usually in the process of doing that I'll discover oh that would work I didn't even think of that because it only came about because this one point you know related to another Point that's kind of the you encourage happen stance when you take the time to let uh your brain play with things and it's not so systematic that um Step One do this step two do this step three Bing you have an idea it's like there's a lot of kind of give and take and sometimes it even comes after I first present a round of ideas and the client comes back and says something to me that he didn't bother to tell me even when I was soliciting those kind of points of information from to begin with and then that reveals an idea in and of itself and so I'll go down that path so um as much as I try to make the Crea process systematic it's um it can be messy at times but that's okay you know it's like as long as you know how to direct it um you'll be okay so I think I answered your question right do you have a followup to that um yeah kind of um how how do you record when you have an aha moment uh how do you record it um you know sometimes I think I've got a idea I'll remember later and then you it just never you don't remember later um I usually just write it down with whatever I have or if I'm outside the studio I'll just open up like I use my notes on my iPhone to capture ideas so so I have I'll come up with ideas I develop content for LinkedIn learning so um somebody will ask me a question they're not asking me how do you do this or that they'll ask me a question it'll give me an idea and so I just go onto my phone and just add it to my list I did that for I have all kinds of lists I have you know good books somebody will mention a good book I'll put it on my list check it out later links you know if I hear a conversation um and they use a word I've never heard before I'll like put that word on my word list just because I like discovering these words I've never heard before so I I do that a lot I capture as much as I can uh whether or not I ever use it it's another thing but at least I don't lose it so um I think that's the important part is having a system in place to capture those moments of inspiration even like I said even if you don't understand how or if you'll ever use them but uh you'll definitely lose them if you don't have the system in place to capture them so for me it's just as simple as the notes on my iPhone or just writing it down on a pad of paper thank you thanks for that question Derek before I hit you up with a question that's coming in from the live stream I just want to give the people who are tuning in at home little context for Von you graduated 1986 you started your company glitch studios in 2002 y you have one employee your daughter who's doing design and artwork with you right yes okay you do a lot of work with clients direct and you do stuff for other agencies as well like Landor you had mentioned yeah do you know how many logos you've designed in that career of yours I know approximately how many I've uploaded the logo Lounge since 2003 about thousand Maybe yeah so he's a pretty prolific Creator a thousand logos so that's just the ones you've uploaded yeah to logo Lounge yeah that that so if I do one project and I did eight directions they only picked one if I like the other six of the other ones they didn't use I'll upload those too so yeah they're not all the final used ones so you are you have four books still in circulation and you have a couple more and I was looking you up on Amazon and I was happy uh and surprised to to realize I own a couple of your books so that was really cool you mentioned LinkedIn learning you're a pretty prolific author and you you create tutorials and courses on using illustrator teaching people how to draw with Vector right uh build mostly not so much draw vors yeah and uh there's client work that you do you you create tools for creatives Creative resources that you also sell through retro Supply Company what else are you doing doing or what aren't you doing um I I kind of I'm always working on my own projects on the side just because I think it's important to do that and for no other reason having fun I've owned an iPad Pro for about a year but it's only within the last three or four months I actually figured out a way I can use it for actual client work um I kind of felt guilty that I bought it because it was just sitting there mocking me every day cuz I wasn't using isn't it and Adobe finally updated their drawing app where you get really nice kind of a ink pin quality of the line so I've been doing what I call a psycho Mosaic style and I get that's what the posters I gave you all about yeah so I draw it on the iPad and push it to the desktop and then colorize it are you also using the iPads do your parody logos do the $5 cheap yes but that's on an old first generation iPad Air using the very first app that adobe came out with called Adobe Ideas M um and I've locked it down so the iPad can't update otherwise that app won't work anymore so I only use it for five minute logos yeah it's BEC the reason why I did that is because you can email a PDF from that app and when they updated it they remove that feature and make you have to have a Creative Cloud account oh I see yeah so and you don't have a Creative Cloud account no I do but you still can't email it to people so yeah that's a bone of contention for me so I still use the old software let's do this let's take one more audience question and then we'll go to the Internet okay so my name is Andrew uh my question is well you were talking about uh different ways to sort of stimulate creativity like drive a different path to work take a walk remove yourself from your work environment do you have a particular checklist like okay I can to do a logo I need to take a walk to stimulate my ideas or like is it different every time what do you do I I actually not to keep going back to a logo for an example but to use that same methodology of and applying it in a different way so instead of by the way when I came up with that I just drive a new way to work because I used to do that when I worked in California at Upper Deck i' get off the highway and I'd just do the back roads all the way to work and so I think I should put that in there and then I decided Well I need to do that locally where I live now in Salem and when I did that I didn't know there is a stop sign somewhere and so I didn't stop and I got a ticket I'm going okay this is great you know I w't I won't put that in the talk so obey make sure you're paying attention to the signs when you do that um but the local tedx and Salem they asked me to design the logo for one of their events and it was called fearless and the whole premise of the talk was um you know pursuing your dream pursuing whatever that idea is that you've always thought about but you've never done and they said we we want you to Brand it and so I was thinking okay I need to approach this as a logo project in a way that I'd never do or have never done and so I forced myself I couldn't do it in Vector I had to paint it by hand so I got some temper paint brushes and just started painting letter forms on paper and you know my whole floor my studio was covered then I cherry-picked the ones I like the best and then at that point I scanned him in and created the type but the whole aspect of forcing myself to step out my comfort zone and do that not only came up with a cool logo I would have never otherwise even pursued that kind of Direction in the process of painting I forgot how much fun that was I had painted a paint or an illustration traditionally for like 20 years and so I started doing these brush Strokes I'm going God these look really cool and so that gave me an idea I wonder if I could vectorize these and so I started experimenting with it and it led to discovering a new style of illustration and I was able to Adobe saw it and said we want you to do an illustration for for us and that style and and then those became the brushes that Dustin is selling on his his site so one thing kind of leads to another like that that's kind of what I noticed is um if you don't overthink things and I can trace everything I'm doing now back to one decision I made about 9 years ago and it was the local chair of the design program at the local College called me and said would you come in and for 2 hours and audit our program you know in my head I'm going I don't want to do this this like that's I got so much to do that's a waste time I don't want I was trying to come up every excuse I could not to do it and then I just decided I just need to do it and I did it and I actually enjoyed myself um I met some other people I'd never met in the local area who do the same thing run their own agencies and um because I did that I eventually she started following my newsletter a year later asked me to teach I'd never done that I decided okay I can do adjunct so I started teaching and all of that led to the books I wrote with uh being invited to speak at a conference writing a book being uh somebody at the conference hearing that asked me to write a book and then writing the book another author seeing that and said hey can you do my cover I did his covers he became the head of design content at LinkedIn he asked me if I'd be interested in and doing that and at that time I was getting ready to sign another book contract and books are fun once they're done but as you're working on them you're like going this is like I never want to do this again you know uh kind of experience and so when I was approached by LinkedIn I turned down the book and focused on that and it's all because I decided to say sure I'll do that even though initially I really didn't want to do it so so auditing class is that meaning you go and sample each one of the classes well it was it was auditing their program so where a student starts and how they come out at the end and is there anything we're missing that they should be trained or proficient in so they're employable when they come out so what kind of recommendations or observations did you have I'm curious well they had no drawing component whatsoever MH so I said you need to make them take live drawing mhm they they need something in there so especially if you want me to teach I'm not going to come in and teach illustration not talk about drawing right has nothing to do with the tools that you know I mean sure that's part of the process but you know if you're going to be an illustrator you it's kind of important to know how to draw right so yeah anything else um yeah the other the other aspect was having uh we also suggested they should take like a basic writing composition class just so because they're going to be expected to write proposals or um you know even crafting uh uh other type of documents where they have to be able to put together a coherent sentence you know and I mean there's Services out there that can help you if you're not the best with grammar like grammarly and stuff but still it's like you know you need to be somewhat of a proficient writer to to handle certain aspects of running a business right yeah okay now here's a question there's two questions from the internet there basically the same question which is where do you go for a creative boost music books nature other artists whatever where do you get your creative inspiration from well I'm a big believer that inspiration comes from perspiration what I mean by that is the very Act of just doing it just starting even if you don't feel like doing it just starting um that's what's going to sustain your it's going to sustain your inspiration if if if you're always looking for inspiration then it's you're always being affected from the outside in and I think it's important to get in the mindset of pursuing your own things uh because when you do that it's you're not it's not that you will never be inspired by things you see or people you interact with you will but that should be a secondary form of inspiration it needs to come from you know your own process and if if you can refine that and focus on how to do that well that's going to inspire you and and the other stuff that comes in is just you know adding fuel to the fire okay any other questions from you guys or should I just go down my list okay we're going get you a [Music] mic hey so I'm Gary um V I have a question for you you talked earlier about um drawing daily and it touches like the four senses or something like that you mentioned um and so I don't really like like to draw so much but I've always heard you talking about like how important that is to um just to kind of massage massage your mind and stuff like that what do you have any recommendations for maybe doing that on a um getting in a good habit of doing that like in a certain time like daily yeah 7 o'clock every day or or like in the morning or something like that do that make sense um I wouldn't even make it that rigid that would be hard to sustain that even for myself I I just make access to drawing as easy as possible so that can come down to being an the notepad I keep next to my desk right where I work so if something pops into my head or somebody call client calls me and I'm talking to them I'll be doodling so when I say drawing a lot of people will read into that a different meaning of what do I mean by drawing and they a lot of people tend to think like very um precise drawing you know know like if you're going to draw a horse you know and and I think every illustrator at some point goes through this where especially when they're younger and they start drawing you have the idea that everything's a still life everything needs to be proportionate and perspective but as soon as you get to that point where you can draw that well you realize that's not the point and it's like and that's when they start developing their own style and so I think it's really important for you not to worry about how good or bad you think you are and it's not about you ever becoming a full-blown illustrator it's just it's drawing of any type and that could be just simply doodling and there's a lot of great um illustrators I know who you look at the style that they're known for and it's essentially um glorified doodling but it's really cool because that's what they've revealed because they stuck they they stayed with it so um I wouldn't worry about um you know dead like if I don't draw every single day you know I try to draw as much as I can but there's days where especially now that I have my daughter as employee it's like I'm doing some management stuff that I'd never done before I'm still getting used to that but um there's days where I look back on a week sometimes I go wow I only Drew that one thumbnail for that thing I had Savannah work on you know so um you have to be somewhat realistic with it but just any amount of drawing on a consistent basis you're only going to get better it's our industry is one of the few Industries where you know you have pro athletes that come out of college and they're amazingly talented but sometimes they need to be crafted a little bit so they send them to the minor leagues for instance in baseball just to get some Basics integrated into their their core skills and then they go up to the big leags and then they perform not all of them are superstars but their skill level tends to rise it Peaks and then it declines and they retire and so with drawing you never Peak and the only time you decline is after you're dead you know but you're always improving your skills as as you go along um so that's the best part it's it's kind of like wine the longer it goes the better it gets so just stick with it don't worry about the style um if you stick with it you'll naturally your style will just come out um over the years I I keep a I used to I've kind of gotten out the Habit over the past few years but I used to keep a doodle binder I have a hangup I can't draw sketchbooks it my daughter she can fill up sketchbooks left and right and she's great at it I get hung up on it like well what if I screw up then I have a page with a screw up in it and if I rip it out then the bugs me so I use notepads so if I screw up I just rip it off throw it away I don't worry about it and so it's I need that that's so I have a lot of notepads that I get printed uh for that very purpose but I keep all my doodles I cut them out put them in a manila envelope and I used to I haven't done this in quite a few years but one once it got full I'd paste them up on pages put them in binders and and slip sheets and so I have a couple doodle binders that go back to the mid 80s that you can look through and you can distinctly tell for some reason it's like I used to like to draw noses a certain way and at some point I decided I'm going to draw them this way and then everything from that point goes that way and it it's interesting to see how you Morphin change and I think that's natural that happens whether you're doing drawing or design you know I look at designs I did 10 years ago and it makes me cringe I'm going I I don't even want to look at this anymore you know why did I why didn't I align this or that and so you're always growing you're always improving so as long as you can keep at it that's that's all that matters can anybody see this doodle book do you share this anywhere on yeah if you came to my studio I'd show it's on my shelf but it's not online will it be one day you think probably not there's a it's pretty obscure it's kind of Fringe I mean there's some strange stuff in there so okay old co-workers I work with back in the late 80s that I draw characters of and make fun of them that kind of stuff so yeah just just for you it's kind of a document of where you were in that time in space yeah it definitely is it's like uh it's like a photo album basically it's just drawn MH you know okay so here's a different question I want to Pivot slightly here you're in a very enviable position you've got books you're doing Linda you got merch you've got a whole bunch of different things going on you're doing you're still very prolific do you have any advice for people that want to be where you're at today and they're just getting started especially if they're interested in Vector art yeah I I'm everything I'm doing now is only because I saw an opportunity and I just I didn't question okay can I do this as good as somebody else or whatever I just just did it and sometimes it's it's worked out uh sometimes it hasn't so I've done I've done a couple things for I did a font for the Dustin's store a couple years ago i' had been right before os10 came out I'd done six fonts when I worked for this agency in uh Oregon um and then when OS 10 came out fontographer went away and so I just stopped creating fonts and finally I got around to doing it again a couple years ago and I had been building up this file every time I do an illustration and I needed typography to go with it I'd do it in the same style and then I just copy those into this one file until I had enough for a font and did it and I might sell one font month through there so it wouldn't be what I call successful so actually selling through Dustin stores made me real you kind of learn what designers really like and what they gravitate towards and one thing they really like is they really like brushes they really like the ability to give a handd done quality to you know Vector art is known for being very precise very clean and in my opinion can be really sharp um to the point of being you know too sharp you know and so I think uh that's why I use a lot of plugins I use because I kind of can give Humanity to it where what used to be caused by limits of reproduction with stat cameras and Optical um effects because you're enlarging stuff um you know I'll go in in round corners just to give that same aesthetic you know now even though it was only because reproduction was poor in the past but people have gotten used to that so right that's kind of giving it a more lowii look right taking the sharp edges off yeah yeah like if as if you've copied it a couple times yeah but in in the marketplace today I mean it's very different than it was when you and I were first starting out it's really saturated there are sites that make it these marketplaces where design an illustration and art can be exchange for very little money how does somebody stand out how does somebody break out of that so they're not they're not doing work for five bucks um it the reason why I started doing stuff for Dustin and I told you before we started recording that I had read really good book by Ed catmull one of the uh co-founders of Pixar called creativity Inc and in it he talks about uh other people's audiences and how they partnered with Disney not because Disney had animation effects that they needed it's because they had the audience they didn't have and Disney didn't it's not because Disney needed more audience they needed the animation capability so they partnered and both of them benefited from it and so when I met Dustin um I was just beginning to think about launching my own creative market and I go one I don't want to manage another site and Dustin is marketing Savvy smart he has a mailing list of 30,000 people already it's like this is a no-brainer I'm just going to let him take it and go with it and so I've just I I try I went out of my way at the end of last year to call them and say what's something you want in your store that you don't have that you know people would probably want and then he told me what he thinks that should be and I said okay well that's what we'll work on and I now that I have Savannah I don't always have to do it so I'll outline what we're what I'm thinking what we're going to work on and had her set forward on it and she created this really cool um kind of it's for people who aren't illustrators but they want the flexibility of composing their own illustration so it's a it's basically like a character builder type set and so she like some kind of vector pack so you can build your own character yeah and then we'll just release more assets for it so maybe they have sidekick pets or whatever that kind of thing so so is your advice for some of these people to find their Dustin and start to figure out tools that they can create and resources for other people um I think that's one way of doing it yeah and um the only way you build an audience the only way Dustin built an audience is he had the uh the benefit of Just Happening to start his store right when creative Market first came out and so there's a little benefit to that but um it comes down to increasing your potential for exposure and discoverability when it comes to social media so um there is no there is no secret with social media it's it's the law of averages so if you're not po in on a consistent basis then there's less chance somebody's going to see something um that you're doing that they could use or they could see the potential in using um the truth is it used to be promotion and I have an art rep so we've talked about this many times as promotion has changed over the last seven eight years where an art rep used to actively go to agencies and say Here's the book of everybody I represent here's what we can do for you um or send out promotions that kind of Market the same message but it's now changed where that face to face he still does it which I really like but that's been very diminished because of escalated timelines even for big agencies all um so what I've discovered is that cve directors art directors are becoming younger and younger so all the old guard that I used to work with with um a lot of them have just retired or become VPS and don't work at that level anymore and most of them are just looking at the same curated services that we all look at and so if you're just consistently posting your work there then eventually somebody's going to see it or see it and go oh this would be perfect for so and so and then refer you and just to give you an example there's a a lady that runs her own design firm out of Boise Idaho um she saw some work I did hired me I created a logo for um her client for her project and she liked working with me and so she had lunch with a creative director friend of hers and she gave him my name and I've been doing all this packaging for him and it only came about just because um she had been following me on Instagram saw something that connected with her and um but if I wasn't consistently posting then you know those opportunities won't be there so it's it it's like traditional advertising of sorts where you can't um advertise once and expect and and it doesn't work and then just give up on it you know it's um I forget the Henry Ford quote but it's something like uh uh the man that stops advertising uh to save money is well I'm not going to quote it because I can't remember the quote Auto get on that find us the quote Henry Ford yeah on Advertising it's in another talk I gave but I don't have that talk memorized so you reminded me of something about this art rep and I was a little surprised to learn that you have an art rep so I want to talk about that a little bit sure how does it work how do you get one and how has it been instrumental in you getting new work um my the first art rep I ever had I was working I wasn't out on my own yet I was working at an agency had designed for in Oregon and we were getting their promotions the the agency the repping agency was called three in a box out of Toronto uh Canada and I just like the samples that came in since there's a variety of illustration these are pretty cool and and then my friend who works with me said you should email them or send them a letter and see if they can rep you and I said okay so I pulled together some samples sent it off and basically Bally uh a week or so later I got a email back and it it basically said thanks but no thanks and so I'm going so I'm like okay what year is this 1994 maybe something like that this is a well before you started your studio yeah okay yeah quite a bit so they said thanks but no thanks and then yeah it was kind of like I felt like it was a Dear John Letter type thing going no if we're interested we'll contact you thanks but no thanks I'm like okay so I just okay they're not interested and then a couple weeks later I get in letter from them and they're saying well you haven't sent anything else into us I I thought you said you didn't like anything and they said no we didn't mean that we just meant you know we don't think it's going to work exactly the way you had it so I just went in changed some stuff and then they asked me if they could rep me and I go well sure and then right after I signed with them I moved from Oregon down to California and I started working at a company called upper deck that does sports memorabilia type stuff and I was on their baseball team but um so I was my first freelance gig that I got through that first rep I had was it was for the Nagano Olympics so I had to do a spot illustration for the Wall Street Journal every day they needed it by 1:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time and they would send me their little blurb story they you go with every day like at 11:00 a.m. in the morning so I had to do it at lunch at work in order to get it so I had to like crank it out as fast as I could it was that was like really stressful you know and then you know I didn't ask anybody okay if I do this on my lunchtime you know at work so that was a little little um crazy but U my rep now Scott um I went to an illustration conference uh so in 2002 I started glitch Studios and then a year later uh when I was in 2002 I was just leaving three in a box I'd been with them for about 5 years or so and it was I just wanted to find a different rep and as I was leaving my friend Paul H Walt that's how I met him he would just coming in to three in a box as his rep and so we got to know each other and we became friends and a year later he sends me an email hey you should go to the illustration conference with me and so that was in Philadelphia I went and when I was there um I met Scott Hull another rep and I'd always liked his promotions too but like I always remind him of this is like he totally like blew me off when I went up to him the first time and and then it was a year after that I got his email though and so I put him on my mailing list and then a year later he contacts me and ask if I'd be interested in being reped by him then I had to remind him he blew me off and then but we we become friends so that sounds like a theme with you the first time you knock on the door of the rep like no thanks yeah well that's but they come around um you have to be I was pretty I pursued him quite a bit he he's he's been a he's been a good rep I've always looked at reps in this manner though that um I never like thought okay I'm just going to sit back and they're going to bring me work it's like I I always looked at it as um residual income if they bring me work great but I'm not going to wait I'm going to go out and promote myself and pursue my own clients and um and but anything he brings me he gets 30% 30% yeah and then if he brings a certain amount of work over a given year um if it goes over that threshold then it kicks up to like 35 or 40% so he has like a performance incentive mhm do you mind sharing with us what that number is I believe it was 20,000 okay so if he gets you $20,000 of commissions yeah above that then his thing goes up yeah is there another Benchmark he hits then it goes up even more maybe I've never gotten G there um with that one I I should point out like I was saying the last eight years things have really changed and even he's gotten frustrated because what used to be Ironclad in terms of promoting in terms of a proven way of doing this that you'll get a certain pretty much guaranteed amount coming in this way right it's all been tossed up Source books are on the way out yep you know um it used to be I did Source books for eight years and it was back in 2011 that you know I was still kind of I was worried when the economy kind of Tanked back in 2008 2009 that okay if I can make it through this then I'll be okay and then when it came time to renew my workbook page okay $2,500 for WB page and they were never able to give me analytics to show me how effective it was because I wanted to make an informed decision so I just decided I'm not doing it this year and then I was kind of worried okay what if that's going to affect my cash flow only to find out by the end of the year that it didn't affect anything and um so I haven't been doing it since 2011 well I just want to clarify for some people especially our broader Global audience they probably have no idea what the heck we're talking about so please allow me to clarify and if I get some of it wrong just correct me sure so you have a rep which is an art representative and they represent several different kinds of artists maybe they're just illustrators or maybe they have illustrators photographers and designers that kind of thing they go out to agencies most likely and they try and procure work on your behalf and they don't get paid unless they help bring in a job now I'm if your rep is like my friend's photographer rep they also negotiate the thing for you do they invoice for you as well yes yes okay so they do a little bit more so some of you guys are freaking out uh that it's 30% I think the audio is a little loud there I'm starting to hear an echo there I don't know if you changed it Mark yeah okay um that 30% is a lot so for every dollar that's coming in you're giving out 30 cents um but I think you have a very healthy strategy about this you don't see them as your single source of income and so you're self-reliant so whatever they get it's kind of like icing on the cake right I forc exactly I forced myself to think it's 70% more 70% of something I would have otherwise never gotten to begin with right and it is a real kind of just beating down the doors and shaking the trees and so to speak to try and get this work from the commercial agency world right yeah and there there's certain agencies because of their own protocol is they would just rather work with an art rep because it makes the process go smoother rather than working with a independent creative person right because you can imagine there's thousands of people trying to work with that agency and to make time to review the work and deal with each person separately it's a lot yeah come in with an art rep who's pretty objective shows you the work I like this I like that that might be good for this what else you got yeah right and they can work with them to to guide what kind of artists they have that might be a good fit for their project yeah a lot of a lot of reps there's a bunch of reps out there and most of them are usually picking artists to represent to cover a gamut of styles so if a certain project comes in they want this style okay this person is the person we rep that does that um Scott's I'm a little different with Scott in that I can work in a variety of styles he knows that and but there's certain design Centric stuff that I can do that uh usually isn't part of what an illustration rep represents and that is more brand Centric type work so right yeah okay all right so that's the art rep thing so projects that you procure on your own he doesn't get any percentage job no okay great how long you been with Scott since 2003 okay the other thing that you said which I want to clarify for the audience too is that workbooks Source books we used to get these all the time I look forward to getting them you would thumb through them they're beautifully printed bounded that kind of stuff and what you might not realize is the artists the illustrators and their reps pay for ad space in the book and then they give them away to agencies for free but if you go to the bookstores you have to buy them which is kind of an interesting concept cuz I used to buy them and then once I got them all for free I was like why did I ever buy this they just send it to you right and then you're saying that in the way of the world things are changing um the art directors the your clients are getting younger a book might be oldfashioned they want immediate things they might find you on Instagram they might find you on Pinterest or some other source or behance whatever and so the books become less relevant yeah there there's better ways to handle it in my opinion you can um especially if you're an independent unlike uh a larger design firm or Ad Agency um I always call independent creatives or like speedboats and larger firms are like cruise ships so it takes about 12 miles for a cruise ship to completely turn around and engage in the opposite direction speedboat can do it on a dime pretty much so I think there's a lot of flexibility with creatives in terms of marketing themselves where in workbook you'd have one page and that's what you were marketing for at least that year they've tried to remedy it by uh producing two different books in one year but still it's a finite amount of you know visual reference that somebody's going to see whereas your website you can be changing it left and right so on my website I always have a part on it that says if you want more examples of any of these categories um email me here and I'll provide a download uh tear sheet download so you can use them in your pitch you know because most of the creative agencies that's what they're usually they don't even technically they're supposed to ask permission even to use in a pitch usage is usage but they never do um good example of that is Nike a friend of mine worked at Nike I went he invited me up to have lunch with him one day on campus and we're walking through the sports graphic Division and it was right before the Olympics so Nike is working on uh the Chinese uh team uniforms and they were playing off of a tribal style and I go by these mood boards they have up on these uh displays and they have one board and it's all of my tribal designs up on the this mood board I'm going what I'm like 20 minutes down the highway you can't like invite me to come in and I want to work on this you know it's like but a lot of agencies do that where they'll they'll just cherry pick they a lot their favorite place to go lately has been uh Pinterest they go on there and just cherry pick put together a mood board put together a pitch board this is kind of the feel tone we're going for and then if the client happens to like that Direction and you're part of what sold that then they tend to come back to you and okay so I have a lot of questions here because I might be guilty of some of the things that you may or may not like but I just want to get some clarification it doesn't bug me it doesn't bug you so what V is talking about is he's cruising to Nike and part of the work he's done is on that mood board and the idea is if somebody likes that and they prove and sell it through more likely than not Nike is going to call you to commission you to do the work if you're available and all that kind of stuff right that's a good thing okay one day you'll get that call but the the thing to understand here is if you make your work impossible to find impossible to pin what are the chances that of that happening it's like less than zero and so I always find it very very frustrating when certain photographers and maybe all of them are like this when they have a photography site and they lock their images so that it it makes it very difficult to pull down so then you have to go and do the screen capture and I was thinking I don't know what kind of backwards World they live in it's 2017 you want people to share your images so many many years ago we deliberately turned off all the Locking features on our Quick Time movies for the commercials we produce because we want you to download we want you to share it cuz we're not afraid that you're going to be able to produce that without us and so that's just something I'm going to throw out there there's a lot of this idea but this is mine and I'm going to hold on to I'm lock on to it and guess what nobody can find you nobody's talking about you and nobody cares yeah right I totally agree with that so we're now here's the quote that you were referencing a man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time exactly that's Mr H that's it that's our factchecking department here thank you okay all right let's turn it back over to our audience here live um do you guys have any other questions you want to dive back in let's let's go up here first right here hi Von hi um I'm Elsa Taran just a quick question how do you go about staying creative or pushing creativity if you have a client that's maybe not so open-minded um I've the old open-minded bad client question and anyone's going to come out the internet's asking the same question and you've got it there's I always I almost when I collect information some of the questions I solicit from them are one specific one I've added is are you willing to accept a design that you might not personally like but your audience but will be completely appropriate for your audience uh whether it's a product service or a company and branding for example if if a logo let's say again is appropriate for that audience of that product service or company but yet the company president doesn't like it do they have the capacity to realize that and to understand that and it also gives you a good um uh kind of red flag if they say well if I don't like it I'm going to have a hard time improving it you know so you might know there's going to be some aesthetic challenges when you start uh working out ideas so I always try to give in the mindset it's not about um creating something that necessarily you like it's something that's really going to be effective for your audience that you're trying to communicate with it's easier said than done um one of the best Treatise I've ever read on the topic was done by Charles Anderson it's in this little bound book he did years ago and it was about his talk with um uh Jerry French of French paper the the owner and founder and um basically Jerry French told him I don't like what you guys do but it works so he's gotten his client to the point where his client doesn't necessarily like what they do for him but he he fully is aware that the audience that they're doing it for does and they benefited from it so getting a client to that point where they'll trust you on that level um it's a little hard until you prove it on some level and usually that's only if you can talk them into um getting to a point where they let you move forward like that and so an example I'll give you is last year I believe it was in June um a company contacted me and they had gone through 99 designs to get a logo for their company and when it was all said and done they were disenfranchised they didn't like the work they got and I told them I go before I give you any information or anything I want you to go back 99 designs and just ask them for a refund and tell them everything you told me and just demand that they give you a refund he did he got his money back and then I said so what I'm going to do for you is I'll use the same budget I usually charge a lot more but I'll do the same budget cuz um I'll prove to you I can do it and he was like okay we'll we'll we'll do that and they had ironically watched uh the logo development course I did for LinkedIn learning so well we just hire this guy so know what he's doing and so when they contacted me I said I'll work with your budget they came back the next day and they had Buyers remor Say oh we're still not sure they're like gunshi still and I said look I'll agree to this if whatever I do you don't like you don't have to pay me anything so you have nothing to lose and they were saying okay we'll do that and so I created uh we Rebrand well the first part I did for him part of their problem was their name uh his name is Dan Foss the owner and it was DF mechanical and I'm like how many people if you just said you that name to what would they know would they even be able to figure out what you do no uh and I said so we need to address your name we need to come up with a brand name for your business and so part of my information I gathered uh revealed that he he had said in it that his clients would refer to him as a One-Stop shop and I really like one One Stop he's not really a shop so I didn't care about that but I focused on one stop and then doing some name exploration usually when I do it I I'm writing stuff down and I have usually GoDaddy open because if I can't get a domain that I don't even want to consider it and I'm just okay nope that's going to be taken I type in onetop pro.com nobody owns it like on the phone I call them I go okay this is your name we're not discussing this you're going to trust me this is your name this is what we need to go with uh this is franchise quality name here he bought it we branded him uh everything launched in about August did vehicle wraps uniforms everything for his whole team and I found out in December that he's on target to double his Revenue this year and then I just got an email from him yesterday and he's his company has grown so much that he's now bought two more vehicles for their Fleet now what he only had two vehicles so part of my strategy for him I go let's slap some numbers on them like seven like you have seven Vehicles d