I picked up two Best Brand Awards

Last night, I won an award for my logo design work. But as the results came in, I found myself struggling to celebrate.

Awards are a bit of a sticking point in the design industry. They often cost a fortune to enter, and if you’re shortlisted you might find yourself facing significant fees for a table at the presentation.

I’ve freelanced at agencies who have entire teams dedicated to award entry. And sometimes the design work that is entered is a long way from what was actually used in the end result for the client. Also the ‘peers’ who judge the work often have… questionable experience.

As a freelancer, there aren’t many awards that I can enter. So the decision to enter was not taken lightly. It’s a significant outlay for my business, but I did it because I am still of the opinion that awards are important. They promote innovation and force us to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the design space.

For me, it’s also nice to have my work validated from someone other than my mum! But when you’re printing out your own award certificate for your home office, it does lose a little of the glitz and glamour!

What are your thoughts on this? Have you won an award and did winning actually have a measurable effect on your business? I’ll report back on whether it did for me.

N.B. I picked up the ‘Award of Excellence’ at the Best Brand Awards 2023 for both my work with Nectir and Engage Electrical. I was also awarded ‘Runner Up’ for Kyler Engineering, Uncle Jessy and Gaming Buzz.

How I became Adobe Certified

Do credentials really matter?

On a weekday in June 2023 I cleared my desk of all clutter, unplugged my monitors, left my phone in another room and sat an exam in my office under full test conditions. An online proctor required me to show my surroundings with my webcam to ensure I wasn't able to cheat, and I was recorded the entire time as I sat the 'Graphic Design & Illustration using Adobe Illustrator' exam. I am 38 years old.

Like a lot of people in my industry, I didn't study to become a graphic designer. Yet here I am, nearly 15 years after pivoting into the industry, teaching people how to use programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and giving away my knowledge in the software to new (and sometimes seasoned) professionals.

In a world filled with 'experts' selling online courses and running paid bootcamps, it's important to check the credentials of who you're actually learning from. Reputation, trust and credibility is everything in the education space. And I realised that other than my experience in the industry (even though I've worked for some huge institutions) I didn't actually have any credentials!

So I am pleased to announce that I am (finally) an Adobe Certified Professional. Is it a trifling piece of paper? Maybe. But it does feel good to get a little validation every now and then.

And let me tell you, a few of the questions/tasks in that exam threw even me, so even I couldn't get a perfect score. Although 950/1000 isn't bad. 🥴👍

Address redacted

I'm speaking at Adobe MAX!

How do you like my new headshot?

Last week I found out that I'm going to be a headline speaker at this year's Adobe MAX in LA. Panic-stricken, I had to take my own emergency headshot with a jury-rigged ring light, a tripod and wireless remote.

I re-touched my own image with a little help from Adobe's new generative AI in Photoshop (shameless plug 😘), and now it's sitting on the home page, right next to Aaron Draplin and Chris Do (two of my heroes).

Check out my speaker profile here, and keep your eyes peeled for more information on my talk and where you can watch (if you don’t feel like flying to LA).

I won an award!

In January 2023 I won an award for one of my logo designs. 

Awards are something of a sticking point in my industry. A lot of design agencies refuse to enter awards, usually because they cost an arm and a leg to enter. And if you get nominated you’ll often have to buy an expensive ticket or a table to an awards ceremony.

However, I was recently referred to an award, specifically for logo designers, that is inexpensive to enter, but is still judged by industry figureheads (so if you win it still feels like a big deal).

It’s called the Logo Wave, and six months prior I submitted a few of my logo projects.

The award is judged in ‘waves’ with the top 5 logos for each wave receiving the Logo Wave award, and I was lucky enough to scrape in 5th with my logo for Uncle Jessy. This particular wave was judged by some pretty impressive industry names, including Jacob Cass (Just Creative), Bill Gardner (Logo Lounge) and Jeroen van Eerden.

You can find my entry here, as well as the entire project for Uncle Jessy here.

My first live stream with Adobe

Well that was fun!

I was lucky enough to be asked to run a live stream design tutorial with Adobe over on their Adobe Live page. I’ve run plenty of live streams before on my TikTok and Instagram profiles, but never with a partner and a co-host (Flyn Tracy).

You can watch the two-part replay now where I bring a Jack Sparrow quote to life in the form of a t-shirt design.

Part 1.

Part 2.

How I gained 100K real Instagram followers in two weeks.

Now that the dust has settled on this whirlwind fortnight, let’s pick apart what happened.

That headline is not an exaggeration. Between 10–24 September 2022, I received 101,053 new Instagram followers. My account, which publishes content on graphic design software tips and freelancer advice, grew from ~6K to well over 100K, and is now sitting comfortably at more than 140K followers.

Most importantly, this follower base has turned into real client work. My logo design business is now booked out for the next three months, with clients from all over the world.

I’ve also been offered a number of brand partnerships, where I’ll be teaming up with some notable accounts to create some paid content.

So how did this happen?

Turn that camera around.

If you’ve read my stuff before, you’ll know that earlier in the year I found a modicum of success from posting on TikTok. Back in January, I decided to force myself to get comfortable on camera and started making video content targeted directly to TikTok users. One of my posts went viral, and since then my TikTok account has grown to more than 60K followers in the space of about 6 months.

My focus has been on giving back to my audience wherever possible. I post videos around logo design case studies, software tips and tricks to speed up your workflow in programs like Illustrator and Photoshop. And also advice on running a freelance business; how to win more clients, dealing with negative feedback, etc.

I have posted more than 200 videos to TikTok, and by this point I have a pretty streamlined production process. I can create quality video content extremely quickly using nothing but my phone, a lapel mic and a copy of Premiere Pro. Because of this, I can respond quickly to trends and comments with reactionary videos, and it leaves me enough time in my week to actually focus on client work.

My TikTok success was so good in fact, that around 80% of my new business leads were directly from this app. As a result I was asked to speak at the Designer Boss Summit on my success, and following this I made a short course on building a client base through TikTok.

But my Instagram account had never really caught up with the TikTok hype. I was stuck on around 6K followers for what felt like months, repurposing a lot of the short-form video content that was originally made for TikTok. But those videos weren’t performing as well and the content never seemed to show the same traction it had garnered on TikTok.

Enter Abi.

In early September, I stumbled across a graphic designer called Abi Connick. What Abi has managed to achieve in her short career as a brand designer is simply staggering. She has a diverse income stream from sources like affiliate marketing, online digital sales, YouTube advertising and client work. And her videos around the business of design put mine to shame. Abi has a strong community and her partner works in video production, which means she has the capacity to churn out some seriously great, longer-form YouTube content.

When I found Abi’s social accounts, I found myself spending probably an hour watching all of her content. It’s one of those accounts that is just so jam-packed with great advice and it gives so much value, that you just can’t stop watching. Partly out of jealousy. Because her content is so good and her digital products are so prevalent that her passive income streams must be pretty lucrative.

While watching one of her time-lapse videos of her working in Adobe Illustrator, I spotted her doing something with the pencil tool that made me rewind the video.

If you’ve never used Illustrator before, the pencil tool is used for pretty much what you think; drawing lines and shapes. But it’s a freehand tool, so it doesn’t get much use unless you’re an artist who uses something like a Wacom tablet, or an iPad with a stylus. Using it with a mouse is tricky, but in Abi’s video she used it in a way I’d never seen before. She was manipulating existing shapes and paths by shaving and adding material.

“15 years using Illustrator. Never knew that.”

I stitched her video on TikTok, and did a little “What?” reaction video where I tried to perform the little step she had just done. When it worked, I said, “15 years using Illustrator. Never knew that.”

It turns out that the rest of the design community didn’t know either.

The video got around 60K views on TikTok, but when I posted it to Instagram, it went viral. The video is currently sitting at 11M views. I also posted a follow-up video detailing some settings tweaks you need to do to get the pencil tool to work so smoothly. And this video also went viral, with nearly 2M views.

I’ve talked about going viral before, but one of the most common themes I’ve seen is that unless the content on your account is consistent (i.e. in the same niche) and adds value, then going viral doesn’t necessarily lead to followers.

But in the same way that I couldn’t tear myself away from Abi Connick’s content, people were having the same experience with mine. And the value people were receiving from my helpful, quality content, lead to an immediate follow.

And this is the moral of the tale.

Do. Not. Stop. Creating. Content. That. Adds. Value.

If you build it, they will come.

Sometimes it might feel like you’re shouting into the void when you make a video that nobody watches. And it can feel a bit embarrassing or even demoralising when your video flops.

But you need to reframe your mindset about creating content.

What you’re actually doing is building a brand. That one video that flopped is part of a body of work that is your online presence. And that is why people will follow you. The cream will always rise. It’s about being consistent, and you focusing on giving back value to your viewer, not individual video results.

Keep this up and you too will be like Kevin Costner standing in a field. And when that one video takes off in an unexpected way, you’ll have a plethora of content behind you to encourage that follow.

Another point to note is that you can cram so much great advice into a one-minute video. And this is one of the reasons why short-form video is such an attractive medium to a user.

When you go to YouTube to get a software tip, you’ll often have to sit through more than a minute of, “Welcome to my channel. Don’t forget to subscribe.” plus video titles, before getting to the 30 seconds of content that you actually need. With short-form video there’s no time for that, and by being succinct and to the point, you spoon-feed your viewer into instant gratification, where they feel like they have just grown themselves as a person by watching your content.

And that is why they come back for more.

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Thanks for reading!

If you’d like to know more about some of my video production and content generation tips (specifically for creatives/designers) then I have a short video course and eBook available. It’s geared for TikTok growth, but now that Instagram is pushing reels so hard, the tips totally apply to Instagram too. 👍

Also, my logo design packages are at barnard.co/packages. Please check them out and I’d be happy to talk you through them.

And finally, please follow me on TikTok, Instagram, Medium, Dribbble or Behance.