If you start your career at a corporate bank, the path to success is usually presented as a clear progression of incremental promotions, straightforward skill requirements, and predictable time lines.
For those of us hell-bent on pursuing a creative career, there is no luxury of a well-trodden path.
Achieving big league success in a creative field can seem like an elusive confluence of meeting the right people, pushing your work into the right hands, and stumbling into the right room at just the right time. It's grueling, inexact, and more than a little dependent on luck.
While there's never going to be a simple, tried-and-true road map to creative success, there is value in speaking to people who have forged their own path in a creative industry, and learning from their experiences.
To start demystifying the path to creative success, we turned to Vanessa Holden, the newly-appointed executive design director of Sub Rosa, a strategy and design practice based in Manhattan.
If anyone's "made it" in a creative field, it's Holden. Her expansive career includes creative leadership roles at some the world's most highly-regarded lifestyle publications and brands, including West Elm, Williams-Sonoma, Martha Stewart Living and Weddings, Vogue Living, Real Simple, and Marie Claire.
In her new role at Sub Rosa, she'll be leading the agency's design team, guiding the direction of multi-media projects for clients like Adobe, Comedy Central, and GE.
Below, Holden discusses her unique path from freelancer to agency leader, how she evaluates creative risk, and the absolute best career advice she's ever received.
Vanessa Holden Talks Creative Success
What advice would you give to someone at the beginning of their creative career?
Holden: I started out freelancing because I wanted to try a lot of different things. I have always throughout my career toggled between full-time and freelance or consulting roles. I think there's no better way to start your career than to freelance and ask questions. Be a person who's really looking to learn, and you'll gain a lot over just a few short projects or only a handful of clients.
One thing I would caution people about is that although the fluidity of freelancing is really appealing and there's plenty of that work, committing to a full-time position and building something over a two or three-year period offers its own unique opportunities for growth.
Don't take on freelance projects passively. Do it actively. Then, when you really want to learn more about yourself, commit to something for a longer chunk of time. Because there is a big difference between designing things or producing things on a project by project basis, and building a career. Creative people build careers over decades and every project you take on should be actively shaping your career in some way.
Do you still use any of the connections you built as a freelancer today?
Holden: Absolutely. No question. There are people that I call on now 25 years later who I can work with as easily today as the day that we first worked together. My network at this point is truly global.
Certainly the other thing about freelancing is that you get a marketing mindset, because you're always reconfiguring your narrative. Who are you as a designer? How are you positioning yourself and your network and your contacts? There's tremendous cumulative value to maintaining those relationships over time, not least because they're super energizing and it's exciting, and it's fun being creative and working with people for 20 plus years and growing together.
Wherever you end up -- for me starting in Sydney and having friends now literally everywhere across the world, or even just knowing a bunch of people in agencies or different kinds of creative roles across the city -- there's nothing more valuable than building your network. I'm actually right in the thick of having these conversations with my daughter. It all happens right there in the beginning. It does.
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