Transform your creativity into a career
“Make a living from what you love”. It may sound like a pipe dream but design can be the pathway to turning your creative passion into a career. There are many established and emerging jobs for design graduates. You might find yourself working in an award-winning design and strategy agency like For The People, or driving design thinking in a global consulting firm.
Others have developed the entrepreneurial spirit and determination to start their own business, whether it’s a cloud-based app for the construction industry or world-renowned fashion label. This is all underpinned by the School’s close connections to industry and major players like Westpac, Fairfax or Westfield (not to mention the many design agencies that employ our students and graduates). We also work closely with government and not-for-profit groups like the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre and the Art Gallery of NSW.
2016 Integrated Product Design End-of-Year Show (Ohh Snap Photography)
Creative vision, start-up culture
For UTS Visual Communication Graduate Olivia King, a gig at AGDA Award-Winning agency For The People was the culmination of years honing her creative skillset in an industry context. She was one of the facilitators at the recent Start-Me-Up Lab – a collaboration between UTS, For The People and Adobe. If you’re curious about how designers can help support start-up culture, watch Olivia and her collaborators’ story.
Cindy Chen: SMU Labs is something that Jason Little and his team came up with and it's the first of its kind that we've done around the world. It’s almost a retail experience where you pick all the elements of the brand that you want, like in your colours and your name and business card, pitch deck, all the things, all the elements you need at the very foundation of your business and basically create a brand in an hour.
Jason Little: One weekend, I had this realisation that why don't we design the whole thing for Adobe based on giving back to or helping startups, really beneficial to students and people going through the Hatchery which is so often, designers can … We get caught up in the aesthetics and how we make things work for us rather than understanding why for other people and that's a great education for them.
Cindy Chen: We ran a workshop with them to teach them the basics of Adobe XD and in 40 minutes, they created these amazing apps and beautiful prototypes.
Sam Yu: Yes, I came to the Hatchery to pick up on my entrepreneurial skills. I'm working with a very diverse bunch of guys and we got IT students, business students and then me from a design background and we've come to the labs just to get our branding down, determining what the company might need in terms of branding.
Olivia King: Since I graduated UTS VisCom with honours in 2013 and then I got approached by Jason, he said, “Why don't you just come and join and be the first employee?” which was very daunting but also an amazing opportunity. .What I love about VisCom is that it is very much the groundwork and the foundation about how you visually communicate in the world. Really, there are so many opportunities.
Emily Kraljevic: One of the reasons I wanted to be involved in this is because it's an external client and I haven't worked with external clients before. I chose UTS because I believe UTS gives, offers the best design programme especially visual communications.
From product design to construction cloud
When Sam McDonnell started his degree in industrial design (now Product Design), he could hardly have imagined that it might lead to a start-up, tech company. But during his degree he would co-found cloud-based app company Construction Cloud. Thanks to his entrepreneurial spirit and passion for user-centred design, Construction Cloud is already on its way to being a global company.
Sam McDonnell: Are we rolling?
Crew: Yep, good.
Sam McDonnell: Oh, okay. I'm like hmm, I'm ready to go. What would you like to ask me about me, today?
Interviewer: [inaudible 00:00:11]
Sam McDonnell: Construction Cloud is a mobile and web platform for construction teams working on the biggest projects in the world. We help them by allowing them to monitor and manage production, quantities, safety, workflows, side diaries, and shift reports all in real time. A typical work day for me ... There's no such thing as a typical work day?
Interviewer: [inaudible 00:00:33]
Sam McDonnell: Taking all the calls from the customers if they're having issues or anything like that, building prototypes to take out into the field, and talk with our customers face-to-face and get their feedback, and a whole bunch of other little dribs and drabs of tasks that you inevitably have to perform as working in startup.
So the founding team of Construction Cloud came together at UTS. We all met at university and we entered a business plan competition here at UTS, and we worked through that as team, got to know each other. We did really well, we actually won the competition, and moving on from that we developed our system and launched it in early 2016.
So the biggest thing that came out of studying from UTS was the fact that I met my colleagues and we founded a company together, and then they're able to support us with office space, and a little bit of funding to get us running in the very early days.
The most rewarding part about working at Construction Cloud is the creative freedom that I have. I'm always working on things that actually impact the business, not just you know a small cog in a mega corporate machine.
I can't forecast the future, but we are getting better and better at what we do, and I don't see any reason why we couldn't become a global company within the next five years.
The advice that I would give to any aspiring student or up and coming entrepreneur would be to get really aggressive about reading, get maniacal about learning, making mistakes, and taking action that's the most important thing.
Opportunity is not walking around in a collared shirt, it's walking around in overalls. It's going to come back to bite me that one.
How will you transform your creativity?
