Collaboration 1.2

So my friend and I have had another video update and shared some more ideas. He is currently ‘pivoting’ as they call it, he has about 3 or 4 project ideas on the go but suffers from plancrastination as we have named it, making lots and lots of plans, but never executing them, or running into small issues and then bringing the project to a complete standstill. He, as many of us do, also suffers from the ‘imposter syndrome’ where you think you’re not good enough to create art, or products and that someone else’s are always better and yours are not up to scratch

This is something a few sales can soon put into the background as stated before, the buzz and thrill you get from your initial sales especially can knock any such insecure thoughts for six so I’d definitely recommend getting your head down and ploughing for those initial sales, then refine and improve your product, as they say just get started! Then improve by iteration, this is the same as any product on the marketplace and as an example Apple are brilliant at this, the iPhone and all other products get started, maybe the tech isn’t quite there or the market, but they put it out, believe in it, then iterate upon iteration evolves into the sophisticated Augmented Reality and GPS enabled device that it is today

Now I’m not suggesting you go into competition with Apple or that we’re anywhere close but the same principles apply. Just get started, then improve by iteration, change your product as I have, I went fro the larger images t the smaller ones to improve and speed up the manufacturing process, to move them into the £25 or less impulse buy and gift friendly price bracket. I remove the border and change from and A3 to much easier to supply A4 image size. Again this took a few years and went against what I initially wanted to create, I wanted to create and emulate the large ‘double royal’ size posters the LNER used to create. But this isn’t what the public wanted, it wasn’t practical or easy to scale financially so I changed and improved my product

As I create my images in Illustrator which uses a vector format I can scale these images up and down as required without loss of quality. If I used a standard image format like JPG and edited with Photoshop or similar App I’d have a much harder task, maybe with the AI tools now emerging it may be a lot easier but I prefer the vector format for this work as it not only gives me the flexibility mentioned above but it also suits the minimalist style a lot better too

So I presented my updates and changes to my friend and he presented his to me, we discussed and critiqued each others progress and future plans. I encouraged him to aim for 3 or 4 projects, I find this number to be a good amount, you need more than one, if your one project has a blocker, due to technical, creative or resource issues you are stopped in your tracks, it is also good to have I think a few different projects but no more than 5 or you can get overwhelmed and find it hard to juggle so many. If you can move one or two to passive or close to passive projects then fair enough have more as those require a lot less involvement

I also like to have a mix of online and local, or practical, physical projects. Although most now have an online element, either for commerce reasons or advertising I like to have a mix with at least one if not two predominantly physical projects which are my creative outlet and the part I enjoy, the bit that allows me to get messy, they’re mindful and aid my mental health as any hobby does