Understanding my role in the creative industry.

During my time as an intern at Karma, I learned a valuable insight that has entirely changed the way I look at the creative industry. Interestingly enough, the insight didn’t come from working with our esteemed cultural clients, but it came to me incrementally while working with one of our most trusted clients, a chemical company with an emphasis in the production of hydrogen peroxide. What really stuck with me wasn’t the creative work itself, but instead it was the function of creative work. Even though they were fairly simple jobs, the reaction to my work was exuberant. To me, it was a simple illustration for one of my many jobs, but to them it was their creative vision becoming tangible. Dave Trott put it really well in his book one plus one equals three: “Creative makes the magic.”

It’s easy to feel like I am not fully expressing myself as an artist when I commission my design work, but the truth is that I’m expressing other people as artists. There’s nothing more creatively fulfilling than hearing someone say that what I did was exactly what they had in mind, or even better than they had hoped. Every day, we assume hundreds of different identities in this field and creatively express from oblique perspectives to our own. That’s why I love what I get to do, it’s a constant stimulating creative exploration.