10 years a maker: Part two.
my recent years as a working artist
I’m back this week to share my story as a graphic designer: how I got started, the early challenges, the weird middle years where I still didn’t really know what I was doing, the growth and highlights of late, and the best lessons learned about design and designing a life. If you missed it, go back and catch Part One here.
Like I said last week, I’ve been a maker all my life, but 10 years ago, I started make a living out of it. These days I’m an artist who writes (or a writer who makes art), but my professional job is freelance graphic design. I’m a small business owner, entrepreneur, sole proprietor. A freelance artist. An independent contractor. People like me don’t have HR calling them with kudos on work anniversaries. It’s not announced in the employee newsletters. There are no plaques or bonuses or banquets. It’s a milestone no one would ever know if I didn’t bring it up, but I think it’s worth celebrating and making a record I can look back on in the years to come.
Thanks for celebrating with me, y’all!
I had become interested in learning photography. I’d owned a good camera for a few years that I’d used often for travel photography. But a constant challenge for me in my publication design work with non-profits was not having high-quality, beautiful images to work with. I began dreaming about traveling to take some of the shots myself for these specific uses. I hoped this would open up not only new streams of income, but also broaden my storytelling abilities.
I decided to use a portion of my AmeriCorps scholarship money to enroll in a digital photography class at Community College of Aurora, where Lane was a full-time student (although we were unfortunately on different campuses.) Over the course of the semester with the expert instruction of my professor Stacey Stormes, I grew confident in my shooting abilities and learned to say what I meant with a camera in ways I couldn't with other mediums.
For a class project, I created a series called Crushing Walls. It was a photo series inspired by my travels to Palestine in 2015. I’d made a set of digital photographs shot of live tabletop miniature sets. My creative process involved reflecting on that experience and my place in working toward building that better world with Palestinians. With the series, I wanted to offer us ways to explore and reflect on themes of freedom, reconciliation, and hope.
At the end of the course, I entered work into the student exhibition and won second place in the juried show for my Crushing Walls photos. I was invited to display the series at the Confluence Conference and was able to share it with the public. It was a formative experience that would lead to excellent photo opportunities for me.
I worked with Project Helping and Treasure House of Hope, two Denver non-profits, to photograph a local bread-baking initiative. Then I was hired to shoot an Operation Homefront Holiday Meals for Military program event. Just like I’d hoped, I was able to capture images to use in print publications I’d be designing, including the cover of the 2018 Annual Report.
Around this time, I also began the journey of connecting with the advocacy and peacemaking community in Denver to find a place to invest and commit. Eventually I was encouraged to meet the executive director of Beirut and Beyond, who was known and respected for giving her life to serve Palestinian refugees. Her work focuses on relationship, relief, and reconciliation in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan.
I introduced myself to her as a professional graphic designer and photographer, which led to volunteering for Beirut and Beyond photographing events and providing graphic design for fundraising campaigns. This was only the beginning of this creative relationship.
While I focused on growing in photography, some aspects of my design business were crying out for some attention. I’d never attempted to market or showcase my work. My business didn’t really live anywhere on the internet except in my email inbox, so I launched a website to serve as a landing spot to share my design portfolio and photography with prospective clients.
My borrowed laptop from Operation Homefront also wasn’t cutting it any more. I could do design work well enough, but my photo editing really suffered from the low quality display on the HP laptop that wouldn’t run without being plugged in. I took a big leap into the Apple world and purchased a refurbished 2017 MacBook Pro. Not only was it my first tech purchase for my business, it was essential for future travels, collaborations, and growth ahead in both design and photography.
Later that year, the executive director of Beirut and Beyond asked me to join her in the Middle East for three weeks as a volunteer storyteller. I sold photographs from Crushing Walls and my first trip to Palestine to raise over $3,000 in support to fund my trip. I’d not only learned how to fundraise, I learned the importance of building community for this kind of work.
The trip itself was highly rewarding and taxing for me. It was a trip of a lifetime professionally speaking, but I learned much about myself through this experience both as an artist and as a person. In the process, I captured thousands of images and use them to this day on B&B digital campaign graphics.
Through the experience of this trip and my work with Beirut and Beyond and Operation Homefront, I'd found my sweet spot. I would work to help nonprofits who were making an impact tell their stories in a holistically visual way with great design and meaningful photography.
I do imagine you know where this one’s headed: straight into a global pandemic. I already worked from home and my work itself wasn’t affected much, but this season had its way with me, my household, my friends, and my community. I wrote a reflection on the earliest days of the pandemic from a work perspective here. But that’s not what I want to focus on right now.
2020 was a year of reckoning for me. In leading in my community. In work relationships. In personal relationships. It broke down so much of what I’d built (or rather, it exposed really unstable foundations that already existed.) I’d hoped 2020 could be the year I realign with my values, rebalance my physical and mental health, and keep growing my business. The year had other plans, as you know.
I also wasn’t in great mental shape when the lockdowns began because I was still recovering from burnout and exhaustion related to church ministry and my trip to the Middle East. I was stretched too thin trying to lead and be a human with the wild and unjust state of the world. I had to put one foot in front of the other and take it one day at a time. Ultimately, it took a very long time to reemerge from this particular dark period.
I’ll admit it now that 2021 was year I really wanted to quit my job. I was burned by not one but TWO really bad clients. I didn’t have enough work as it was and I couldn’t see a way to get out of these terrible work situations.
Lane finished school and was launching a new business (bad timing, we know) and I had to carry much more of the weight of providing for our family. This meant I couldn’t take much risk or turn down work that wasn’t a great fit. Work that paid was the only fit at the time, and that was a hard position to be in when nothing else in life was my ideal. The threat level of illness, further loss, and insecurity was at an all-time high.
While work did eventually evolve into something life-giving again, I struggled like so many others with burnout. In the near-decade since graduating college and starting work, I hadn't taken a week off that didn't get filled by even harder work away from home. It was easy for me to work while I traveled and moved around. Because I could work anywhere, I did just that.
I made a big decision: I was going to take a sabbatical. That AmeriCorps scholarship would be expiring soon and I decided I had to do it. Now or never. I had to find a radical way to cure the burnout or my business and creativity would soon be toast.
I spent two weeks horsepacking in the Wyoming mountains with NOLS where the only screen I ever saw was my camera display. I worked on a diverse team, developed leadership capabilities, learned backcountry skills, and overcame significant adversity in the Absaroka Mountains in Wyoming. It was a lot of hard work, but it was formative and the right, tactile kind of work.
Then I spent two more weeks in Oregon with my best friend and at home doing whatever else I needed to renew. It was a magical journey, and I knew I’d have to take a month-long sabbatical as often as I could manage it.
On the other side of sabbatical, I dreamed up writing a newsletter, which would eventually become Wandering Home. I made changes to how I run my business to include taking Jeanne Oliver’s Creatively Made Business online workshop, hiring a CPA for self-employed tax prep (who would help me through an audit scare later on.) I also sought out practice negotiating scope of work, costs, and contracting at a much higher level. These changes allowed me to continue to deliver on my promise of good design and fostered great working relationships with equitable pay.
Despite the extreme challenges of 2020-21 and taking a month away for a sabbatical, I managed to diversify and increase my number of clients. I took on projects I hated and projects I unexpectedly loved. Beirut and Beyond needed several fundraising campaigns worth of graphics, and I was able to use images I’d shot in refugee camps in 2019. CFK Africa hired me to design a 125 page cookbook, my largest publication to date, and a product that I’m so very proud of. Operation Homefront needed to tell the story of overcoming the severe hardships of the pandemic years in their Annual Reports, and they’re some of the best publications I’ve ever produced.
Here we are, 2022. The year’s over halfway done, and I’m here to report I had a very full first two quarters of the year.
We published an Annual Report at Operation Homefront where I expertly married the OH brand and identity with distinct Comprehensive Campaign visuals and messaging while executing a new vision for this critical and highly regarded marketing piece. This report was on top of producing a dozen uniquely impactful Partner Impact Reports for their most generous donors, redesigning and refining cohesive OH national and program collateral, designing engaging graphics for digital and social media campaigns, partnering with various teams to produce effective and compelling in-person event materials, building out logo packages and improving accessibility to the large library of OH national logo and 20th Anniversary logo packages for all its users, and continuing to effectively support important internal marketing initiatives like branding and managing the new online print shop storefront.
That’s just one client.
This has been the busiest workload I’ve had in 10 years. It’s also the most global. With the addition of my new 2022 clients, I’ve worked with clients from – or that directly impact communities in – a dozen countries all over the world. I couldn’t have anticipated this when I began freelancing from Portugal all those years ago on a borrowed laptop and borrowed confidence. But I’m proud of it now. I seek it now.
In 2022, I also took on three exciting new partnerships to design lengthy print reports and marketing collateral. And along the way, I launched Wandering Home, where I’ve written over 25 letters weekly and shared my voice and art with the world. We learned (the hard way) about what it costs in self-employment taxes to run TWO businesses from my household. I launched an Etsy shop where I sold nearly $1,500 in artwork to support my much-needed sabbatical. None of these are small tasks. I’m still learning and expanding, and have much to look forward to. There’s good stuff ahead.
What began as a contract-by-chance became an intentional mission to bring great design and images to great organizations doing great work all over the world.
It’s been hard work, but every pixel has mattered.
It has been since fall 2020 that I took my last sabbatical. So when a creativity and connection retreat in Tuscany with one of my favorite writers landed on my radar, I knew it would be a good fit for a break this year. I bookended the retreat with visits to Northern Italy and Rome where I’ll spend some time with old friends and some time alone. My sister’s bachelorette weekend in Texas kicks off my out-of-office stint, and it concludes with a week home reconnecting with my husband and integrating the time away into my life and work at home.
I treat sabbaticals with the same reverence as work: I don’t break commitments I have (mostly to myself), I prioritize the things that matter most, I give myself complete permission to do what it takes to make it happen, I allow myself to take creative risks – all traits I employ in my job. I also found a neat way to ask you, my community, to join me in making my sabbatical a reality by offering for sale my photographs and fine artwork.
To honor a decade of my design business and to get me closer to my fundraising goal of $2,000 before I leave in just under a month from today, I’m opening my Etsy shop for one week only (8/22-29) and offering a sale discount.
Tune in next week for details on how you can support my sabbatical and future work.
Read Part Three here.
Three cheers for ten years,
