470 - Design Your Holiday Sale and Steve Wolf Designs Interview

It's time for the unthinkable to be accomplished with this Double Episode from Adventures In Design featuring some Tough Love and an interview with designer Steve Wolf. With the holidays creeping up Mark takes a moment to give everyone out there some Tough Love on what it takes to make some money and move ahead as a creative. From reverse engineering your timeline to developing a strategy to be heard above the all the noise this is a jam packed Tough Love segment for anyone who wants to step into generating their own income. Steve Wolf has built a career off his keen eye for typography and and strong vector work. Traversing art and commerce, Steve Wolf treats his type as the middle ground between art and communication to evoke responses from his work. We find Steve at a turning point in his career as he is on the brink of launching Artists For Education, a whole new website for himself, and the non stop client work that has been pouring in. Buckle in for a big episode filled with actionable advice and career building strategies.

Talking Points

The changing Holiday World around you.
Reverse engineering the magic in your calendar.
Accounting for production times and reacting to the market in real time.
Going from sixty eight days to two weeks of actual design time.
Taking good product photos to increase consumer trust in your dream.
Structuring your narrative.
Prepping your webstore and determining shipping rates.
Strategizing your social media and recruiting your community for promotion.
When are people spending money and the hard release dates for your products?
Planning for a purchase at first sight and the perfect time to strike for the Not-Knowns.
Use. Your. Calendar.
Be ready for wholesale when picking your price point.
Strict math that build a business around what people want to buy.
Treating yourself like a client and using your creative skills to pick your product.
Finding raw building blocks.
Loving the most intricate and least heroic part of design.
Treating type as functional art.
A million an done restrictions on the limitless possibilities in front of you.
A day in design as a day in high school.
Correct answers in typography and Miyagi-esque exercises.
Making type that talks.
Interest. Balance, Composition.
Redefining your bag of tricks until you die.
Mid-Century design aesthetics and the laziness of the decades to follow.
Symbiotic poster elements.
Finding the flow and fixing your logo batting average.
Proving yourself right with multiple ideas and seeing your work with fresh eyes for perspective.
Overcoming mind funk and overcomplicating the focus.
Falling in love with the long game of industrial design.
Inspiration we've taken with us from toy packaging to candy wrappers.
The challenge in design and having pride in your career.
Shit jobs that shape your DNA as a worker.
Artists For Education and giving back to the people that shape us.
Using design to make a difference.
Exposing kids to more than Cooper Bold and making a modern "Hang In There Baby" poster.
Transitioning from Nebraska to Austin.
Where is that "store" button and the torturous undertaking of building a new website.
Creating the relationship between your art and its boundaries.
The structured system of Steve Wolf.
The long, long haul to creative success and understanding what hard work really means.
The obsession in finding forensics to build a creative atmosphere you can dig into.
Do social media numbers translate to bigger budget jobs?