Asses Your Work + Find Your Style
Stop showing work that you don’t want to be hired for.
Stop showing work that you don’t want to be hired for.
Just over a year ago, I removed all the work from my website that, although I was proud of, no longer represented the type of work I wanted to do professionally. It felt intimidating to simply delete a body of work that had been paying the bills.
Honestly, I felt somewhat confined by the path of my career. As is usual, one client would refer me to another, or someone would see my work and, being in the same industry, wanted something similar for themselves.
So, to pivot in a new direction, I had to move away from work that no longer represented my goals.
Hence my website re-haul. I stopped posting product shots. I started writing about what was happening with my client work, or what inspired me. I shared images of my travels. And I will be transparent, I am not fully there yet. But I feel better with the changes.
I joke that I want to be ‘paid for my brain’, whatever that looks like. I want to spend time making art, writing, thinking, and sharing. None of which requires me to take photos of bongs. Yes, I have really great work I did for a brand internally and it still lives as part of a case study, but is not anywhere on my website.
Inspired by a podcast, I'd like to share a simple exercise this week. I believe it can be adapted to various types of work, not just visual ones. The podcast discusses finding your style, but for me, it was useful in refining a curated photography portfolio that I'm preparing to send out.
Listen to the podcast if you are looking for more context or inspiration here:
Your Brief:
Collect your favourite (not just best, but the things you also love) work, pick up to 50.
Looking at your work start a list, or as suggested by the podcast a ‘vens diagram’ (ven + lens = vens), there they two buckets over lap is your sweet spot. What to figure out:
What you can repeat
What you want to repeat
The overlap represents your style or the aspect you're trying to determine. In my case, it's about deciding what to include in my photography portfolio and what type of photography work I would like to focus on. This involved removing past client work that I could repeat but have no current interest in replicating.
Change isn’t just about adding new things; it’s often about what we’re willing to leave behind.
Podcast Recommendation
This is the podcast that inspired my recommended exercise.
About: Have you ever longed to have a creative style that is as FULL OF LIFE and COMPELLING as the style of your creative heroes, but when you go to find your own style, it feels impossible or the style you DO HAVE just doesn’t measure up?
If this is a problem you face in your creative practice, THIS EPISODE IS FOR YOU!!!