Don’t let frustration stop you - Illustrator James White (Signalnoise)
James started freelancing in 2010 after spending a couple of years building a name for himself online. He was still working for an agency during that first couple of years. He’d spend his days working on whatever landed on his desk, and his evenings creating exciting things for clients like MTV. Eventually, the balance tipped and James went freelance full time.
By working on his own projects and putting that work out there, James was attracting clients who wanted to pay him for the things he loved doing. And it’s gone that way ever since.
“When I was younger, I had an immense frustration with not having my own style,” James says. “That frustration was necessary. If you’re complacent, you’re not evolving. The more you do, the better you get. Don’t let that frustration stop you.”
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Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Illustrator James White (Signalnoise) and Steve Folland
Steve Folland: Let's get started hearing how you got started being freelance.
James White: I've been drawing since I was four years old, like all the way through elementary school, junior high, high school, and upon graduation of high school in 1995... I'm 42 for context. Upon graduation of high school, I enrolled in a one-year graphic design course that was at a local community college. It was real cheap, kind of a real one 101 kind of thing, and graduated from that. Went on to do something called interactive technology in 1997 and '98, which taught me the... I guess the highlights of that was how to make a website and how to use flash. They also taught us really useful stuff, like how to make a CD-ROM kiosk using Director.
Steve Folland: Yes. Oh, my God. I had to use Director to make CD-ROMs. Similar time.
James White: Yeah, and it's awful. The lingo was horrible. Going through all of that, graduated in 98, and was scooped up right out of school at a company called Internet Solutions in Halifax, Nova Scotia designing websites and some branding for companies, that kind of stuff. I worked in the agency land for 10 years. Then I started making a name for myself personally through the Signalnoise Studio, my personal brand. I started making a name for myself in 2008, and then in 2010 is when I officially went freelance. The client jobs that I was attracting on my own time was outweighing the stuff that I was doing by day for the agency job. I ended up leaving and going freelance, and I've been freelance ever since. This is my 10-year anniversary this year.
Steve Folland: Oh, yeah, I'm touched we're here to celebrate together. After college, you joined an agency. What was it then in 2008 then made you start creating your own stuff and doing freelance work? You mentioned Signalnoise. What was it?
James White: Well, I've always been, throughout my life basically, I've always been working on side projects and just drawing mostly. I was into comics and stuff. Me and my buddy Mike Field, my childhood best friend, we were always drawing when we weren't supposed to be drawing in school and stuff. Even when I got into school, I'd do my schooling for graphic design, but I'd always be working on my own stuff, so I would take... If we learned Photoshop during the day, I would, at night, book out some time in the lab at school and work on my own stuff in Photoshop just to see how I could push it to better myself to sharpen my skills.
James White: All the way, even when I got into agency land, I was a young guy, single, living on my own, so I had all access to my full evenings, full weekends, and whatever. I would work on my own stuff. I would work on my own websites, my own illustrations, my drawings. I had a load of different projects that I wanted to do all the time. I've never really stopped doing that. That's built into my circuitry.
James White: When it came to 2008, that's when I really started putting the pressure on myself to build my own name outside of the client work that I was doing. I used signalnoise.com which I registered in 1999, almost 10 years prior, and got a blog going thanks to the help of my buddy Chris Toms back home in Halifax, and started pushing my stuff on Flickr. Then the rise of social media certainly helped with Twitter and Facebook and things. The stuff that I was putting out on my own time, that ended up attracting clients while I was working at the agency. That's really when the... I was really cautious about monitoring when the scales tipped and I was able to go freelance, and it was right around that time.
James White: It was hilarious working on websites during the day for local spas and gas stations or whatever, and then going home and trying to meet a deadline for MTV. It was a really weird... The duality of it was mind bending. I picked my time, and I thought, "I have enough client work and enough exposure right now to take matters into my own hands and go freelance full time." I did that in 2010, so there was a little bit of overlap between when I made a name for myself and when I actually went freelance.
Steve Folland: But when those freelance clients are coming to you in that transition period, I mean, you mentioned putting yourself out there, as it were, but how were they finding you? There's putting photos on Flickr, but were you being proactive? Were you emailing people, or did you simply wait to see if the world would come to you?
James White: I kind of waited. Before I tell this story, I'm well-aware that the world is very different now, so there's different technology, there's different outlets for promotion, that sort of thing, but when I was putting stuff out, it was 100% on a personal level. I wasn't in pursuit of getting big name clients or anything like that. It was just for my own enjoyment. It was just so when people Googled James White, they would get my artwork. I was known for something.
James White: I would push it out... Essentially, how the thread goes, I had my blog, which I was posting on multiple times a week with new artwork talking about how I made it, that kind of thing, and on Flickr, I was putting my art in Flickr pools. That's something... It's a pool that's run by people that run other blogs, but a lot of other people can contribute to the art that's being put in there.
James White: I started putting my art in those things, and other people that ran big blogs started basically reposting my artwork and asking me to do interviews. The most notable one was Fábio Sasso, who went on to do the mighty Abduzeedo. He was doing... Abduzeedo was just getting its legs at the time. I was the second interview on the website. Little did I know that creative directors from all over the world were going to Fábio's website on a daily basis, so when I got that interview, I got a call a couple of days later from Saatchi & Saatchi in LA asking me to do a campaign for Toyota. I thought it was one of my friends playing a prank on me. I thought like, "This is... Who is this? Dad, is this you?" but no, it was legit.
James White: That's when I kind of... That was the outlet at the time where it was the blogosphere. Blogging was huge in the time. This would have been early 2008. That's essentially how everything started for me and my studio. Honestly, Steve, it just hasn't stopped really since then. I've been riding the wave of keeping my personal projects, my work fresh, keeping it out there. Do you know, I'm very... and again, it's not lost on me that I'm very fortunate in my position. It was a hell of a lot of luck that got me the necessary exposure at the right time with the right style, but I've been riding that ever since and just trying to keep the work fresh and just keep putting it out there.
Steve Folland: That's great. But when you got those phone calls, how did you react, like from a pricing, from a business side of things, you were quite happily just doing your side projects for the love of it, you were quite happily taking a paycheck from a company that... Were you prepared for suddenly running a business?
James White: Well, just one correction there. I don't know if happily would be the word I would use. I was getting a paycheck, and it was in the design field, and it was creative, but ultimately... and I don't want to speak for any other creatives, but I think ultimately we want to be doing our own thing. If there's any amount of artist in us, we want to achieve our own goals and not help other people achieve theirs. Ultimately, I guess that's where I am. That's the creative person, the artist in me, I suppose.
James White: To answer your question, when the companies started calling, I was freaked out because I didn't know how the hell to price anything. Up until that point, I had only been doing rave flyers for a local events company and charging them like 300 bucks a pop, so I didn't know how to really price anything. I got a hold of my buddy Joël, Joël LeLièvre, who lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. I contacted Joël because 3D guy, 3D effects, 3D animator/modeler, but he had worked with Hollywood quite a bit. He worked on Sin City, the Hellboy movie. I figured if there's anybody in my life that knows how to price things properly, it's Joël because he has experience with these larger clients.
James White: I got a hold of him, and he gave me some really good advice around that time. He said, "Don't assume that if you go in low with your price that the client will be happy because if you go in low, they might have the impression that you're not professional." He said, "Try to find the middle ground trying to get it in that window of what you want and what the client will accept, and don't intentionally swing low in hopes of just landing the job because they may not take you seriously."
James White: That's something that advice has stuck with me throughout my career. To answer your question, it was a strange time, and accepting this work while being at an agency was really, it was weird as hell. Trying to try to meet deadlines for Toyota on my own time while not telling my boss at the agency that... It's like, "The work we're doing here ain't that great. I'm going to go home and work on VH1 stuff." It was weird.
Steve Folland: What was the, I guess, the tipping point when you decided to leave?
James White: It was all monetary, really. I just tried to figure out how many clients do I have on the go, how much am I bringing in, and do I want to roll the dice on that. At the time, I wasn't happy with the day-to-day job, as I mentioned. It wasn't so much about the people or whatever. It was just the work. Ultimately, when you're at an agency, you have no control over what jobs are brought in. It's just it gets plunked on your desk, and you have to deal with it.
James White: That was the one of the main reasons that I knew that I didn't want to do this, I didn't want to do this kind of work. The jobs that I was bringing in at my own time were very much... I mean, these clients were hiring me to do what they saw me do on Fábio's blog, which was my personal work, which is what I want to do, so it was the perfect storm of being hired to do work and get paid for it, but it's also the kind of work that I would just be doing on my own time anyway. That was the tipping point.
Steve Folland: How did you then change to... Up until this point, a lot of clients who have just been coming to you. Did you just let that continue, or did you start to be more proactive?
James White: I just continued being me online, really. I know it's hip to say, "Just do you," or whatever, but it really was just that. I mean, I figured that if I were navigating the Internet the way that I was doing it, and it was working, then I wasn't going to change it, but it did allow me more time, which was good, so my output went up, and I could explore different things. I started doing the Signalnoise Broadcast back in, I think it was 2008 or 2009 on Ustream, so it was very early online streaming. I would do a weekly hour-long show just kind of talking about what I was working on, maybe showing some process stuff, and also doing a live Q&A with the chat room so people can ask me about either specific software stuff, effect stuff, but also just how to navigate the industry.
James White: It also, by way of the broadcast, it allowed me to get on stage at design and arts conferences and things and have an hour-long talk to not only present my material and show my work, but also help out fledgling designers that are trying to navigate this wilderness of the creative industry. Going freelance allowed me to do a lot more of that. I've never been... If there's anything that I can say I inherited directly from my parents, it's the inability to sit still.
James White: When I went freelance, I would be mortified. The last thing I wanted to do was sit by the phone and wait for it to ring, so I would make projects for myself. I never had a dull moment. It was always 9:00 to 5:00, and I would just fill my time with promotion. I guess to answer your question, I did maybe slightly change things in order to promote myself in a different way to potential clients, but it was probably a result of just having more time to analyze myself, analyze the industry, and analyze where people are finding me, and just try to take advantage of that more often.
Steve Folland: You were doing Ustreams. That was like an earlier version of I guess what would be something like Twitch or-
James White: Exactly. Yeah.
Steve Folland: ... YouTube Live now.
James White: Yeah.
Steve Folland: Is that something that you kept doing and evolved?
James White: I had 84 episodes before I stopped doing it, and I stopped doing it... I can't remember exactly why. It was a time, I had a time thing or whatever. I had moved to another place, and I just didn't have the opportunity to keep it going to the extent that I wanted to, but 84 episodes, which is a lot of content and a lot of the same... like I have friends now online that I know through the broadcast, like names I would regularly see in the chat room, and I still maintain contact with these guys. It was really cool. It was like a little kind of community building exercise before Twitch was a thing, before Facebook Live or YouTube... YouTube was in its infancy I think at the time. They certainly didn't have live streaming, so it was really cool.
Steve Folland: Is that something... Okay, you didn't keep that going, but have you tried lots of other things to keep putting yourself out there over the past 10 years?
James White: Well, actually, it's good timing for that question because I'm actually going through the process now of filming stuff for a YouTube channel that's going to be not the same thing. It's going to be a little bit more expanded upon. One of the things that I've missed, and it's kind of weirdly the antithesis of social media, I find social media to be very antisocial, and the contact with your audience seems to have been reduced in my experience. One of the things that I miss is direct contact with the people, whether that be live or through comments or whatever, and creating content on a regular basis and putting it out there.
James White: The broadcast is going to be coming back real soon, and it's going to be on YouTube. Coupled with that, I started releasing a quarterly art zine called OFF THE GRID, which is a lot of my artwork throughout the years. I have an extensive archive of all my drawings going back to 1988, and I'm one that I kind of hoard my own digital files, so I have an unbroken stream of creativity going back three decades or something. I'm diving into that material in order to not only show off modern work and whatever, but to tell stories, to enlighten those that might be early in their career trying to find their creative voice, and to offer inspiration. It's a quarterly art zine that acts as the diary of a nerdy creative kid that grew up to be a nerdy creative adult.
Steve Folland: This is an actual printed zine, right?
James White: It's a physical thing, man, like print is forever. I'm getting kind of tired of having all my work reside on hard drives and buried in social media posts and stuff, so I want to get my work into people's hands so they can hand it to a friend or I could leave it in a coffee shop for somebody to discover. You can have look at it when you're flopped on the couch instead of scrolling through your phone. I want to kind of bring back that tangible and collectible quality that I enjoyed when I was a kid. I was into comic books and Nintendo Power magazines and stuff when I was a kid. I want to try to capture some of that tangible quality, and I'm having a great time doing them.
Steve Folland: Nice. Earlier on, you said working a 9:00 to 5:00, but do you actually work 9:00 to 5:00?
James White: I try to as much as I can. Yeah. Yeah. I know when we go freelance and our schedule is that our own disposal, it's easy to slip off of that, but no, I try to keep a pretty regimented 9:00 to 5:00, so I can still enjoy my evenings, I can still enjoy my weekends, and just concentrated time. There's no real reason why as creative people we can't get the day-to-day done within that frame if we have concentrated time. That's cutting out social media. It's just turning off the phone, putting on headphones, and just getting the stuff done. I try to keep it as regulated to that time as I can.
James White: If I want to do some fun stuff in the evening, whether that's drawing or doing some recording for the YouTube channel, I could still do that, which is, to me, that's play time. That's not really work because, as I said earlier, I'm always working on side projects and I'm always doing stuff on my own time anyway, so I'd like to keep that evenings and weekends freed up for the potential to draw a comic book if I want to.
Steve Folland: Do you do any of your side project work during your work day?
James White: Yeah. Sometimes. If I know that a client deadline is four days away, and I know that I can probably sneak one day out of that time and still meet the deadline, then I'll do that because, ultimately, everything that I do plays into Signalnoise. If I release a new art piece, it may not be for a client and I may not make any money from it. It still serves as promotion for my studio and myself, and it gets some visibility online, heightens the awareness of my studio and my name to people. Might garner some more followers. Who knows. It's always worth it in some degree.
Steve Folland: You mentioned speaking that came off of the original broadcast. Did those people come to you because they saw them?
James White: Yeah, the speaking thing is really fun. Initially, I had to approach people to let them know that I wanted to speak. Initially... I mean, I'll give them shout-out. Shawn, Shawn Pucknell at FITC was the first guy to really roll the dice on me and get me on a stage in Toronto in 2009 I think. That was something that sort of evolved in an unexpected way. I never thought that I would be a professional speaker. I still hesitate to say that. But it kind of evolved into a realm that I could... This is another method of getting my name out there, and promotion, sure, but also, and most importantly, helping other people find their creative voice. That's always something I've been interested in personally, so to try to spread that around is always a priority.
James White: After I did one talk... and this is something I learned about the speaker circuit is that people that run conferences watch what other conferences are doing and who they're having. When I did that one talk, I started getting emails from other people asking if I wanted to speak at their events. I think conference promoters are always on the hunt for new blood. When I was new blood, I got a bunch of requests to go to their events and tell my story, really, which has been great. I'm still doing it to this day.
James White: I got some dates lined up in Georgia over in the states, Creative South, that's April 4th or 2nd. Sorry, Mike, if I messed up your dates. OFFF in Barcelona, I'm going back there to hang out with Nathalie and Héctor. That's a late April. I'm taking the stage with my buddy Gavin Strange, JamFactory. We're doing our Hustlemania event, and then we've got a couple of other dates that I'm not allowed to announce yet, so that's the end of that.
Steve Folland: Wow, that's pretty jet set. At what point did you up sticks from Canada and come to the UK?
James White: Oh, yeah. Well, after I married my wife Naomi. She's from Newcastle, and we got married in, oh, boy, 2018. I ended up moving over here the middle of August just last year, so I've only been here for, what's the math there, four months or something? Four and a half months?
Steve Folland: Has that made a difference to the way you work, or was everything remote, it didn't really matter where you were anyway.
James White: It didn't really change the client stuff all that much, but there is one thing that changed a lot by moving over here, and that's... Well, Canada's really big. It's a big country, so print-on-demand stuff is really... it doesn't really work. There's still print shops in every city or whatever, but the print-on-demand thing that's available here in the UK is at a much higher quality than back in Canada because the country is just so damn big and shipping is too much to tangle with.
James White: But being the United Kingdom being a smaller place, I have a lot more access to things within the United Kingdom than I had access to in Canada, so that helps the Signalnoise promotion side of things and helps my personal art side of things tremendously. I wouldn't have been able to do OFF THE GRID, the art zine, back home because the time needed in between print runs would have been way higher than needed here. I can send something to print and have it in my hands in three days. You can't do that back home. It's inconceivable. It changed a lot. It changed not so much the style of my work. I could just do more of it now at a quicker clip, which I really appreciate.
Steve Folland: Interesting. When you're creating art zines, you're posting them all out and doing all of that yourself?
James White: Well, I have a fulfillment company that deals with the shipping side of it, but when it comes to everything else, that's all me. I lay everything out, I send it to the print company, they send it to me, and then I have to assemble them. Because I'm such a sucker for making way more work for myself, I have to put all the zines in sleeves, and I have to put a trading card and a sticker inside of it because I'm a big fan of Wizard magazine from back in the early '90s, and they always shipped with like a stupid trading card or something, so I'm trying to add my swag and a little upsell item, little gift into all these things. I have to assemble all of these things, me and Naomi, and then package them all in the shipping envelope. Then box them all up, then shipped them to the fulfillment company, and they handle shipping them all out to everybody else.
Steve Folland: Wow.
James White: It's a lot of work, man, but it's super fun.
Steve Folland: Do you have help or collaborate with anybody in any other way?
James White: Other than Naomi, not really. No. I mean, Signalnoise has always been a one-person show. I've never had any employees or whatever. I have an agent, my buddy Alex, Alex Suchet down in London at Mystery Box. He brings in work for me. He manages the work that he brings in, and we collaborate on a lot of stuff. We've been working together for... Oh, sorry, Alex. This would've been... Oh, man, 2011 I think is when we started working together. Alex would be my number one collaborator, I suppose, in the industry over the years. It's an invaluable service because up until this point, and me and Alex had talked about this, trying to do the work and bring in the work and manage the work and deal with the financial stuff and contracts and whatever, that's a job for like... At agencies, four different people do those jobs.
James White: I needed somebody there just to manage that side of it so I didn't have to. If I were to do all of my emails and keep them up to date all the time, I'd have zero time to work during the day because that is literally all I would do is just email. Getting that task off my back has proven to be invaluable. Alex is awesome. He handles things much the same way I do. It's been great. It leaves me more time to do what I do best, which is messing around in Photoshop.
Steve Folland: How do you manage your workload because it sounds like you're on top of it, 9:00 to 5:00, evenings off, weekends, all sounds good.
James White: Yeah, it's not bad. Managing the workflow has... It's taking the 10 years to really figure out the ebb and flow of that. It's not something that I picked up straight away, and it's certainly not something that I would even say I'm on top of all the time, but 2020, and this is one of my resolutions, along with Naomi's, was to sort out our schedule and financial stuff and whatever this year.
James White: I'm trying to keep myself on a really strict day-to-day. The day before, I have a spreadsheet that I made that basically has Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and weekends divvied up, and I can build my schedule the day before so I know what client work I have on the go, I know what personal work I have going. I'll just try to map out, like I usually split my day between mornings and afternoons. I'll work on something in the morning, have lunch, and then switch to something else in the afternoon.
James White: This evening, I'll map out what my tomorrow looks like and just try to keep things moving forward and keeping track of those deadlines that are down the road. I'm also the kind of designer that likes to keep clients very up to date. If I work on something during the day, odds are, at the end of that day, I'll send them an update of where I am. That way, I can get some, a little feedback if they have it the next day. It solves... Being an illustrator, and it's a very linear process, so if I send work to clients as I'm working on it, it's a lot easier than having to do a big change down the road that we could have caught two weeks prior. Having that back and forth really helps. Keeps everybody happy. It keeps me in the know of what they're thinking. It works for the schedule. It keeps everybody on track.
Steve Folland: Do you work from home?
James White: I did until... A lot of changes in the last six months, Steve. I did work at home, but Naomi... As soon as I moved here... It was funny. As soon as I moved here, being this life altering change moving from Canada to here, like the following week, Naomi said, "We're going to start looking at office space." I was like, "Oh, okay." It was totally the right move. In November, we moved into our own office space.
James White: Me and Naomi... Naomi is my wife, and she also runs Branded By Naomi. She's a graphic designer, branding designer/specialist, and impeccable at her job. We both have the same schedule, and we both obviously are involved in sort of the same industry, so we split office space. It's great. We have it all decorated up. She has all her sophisticated art prints, and I have all my He-Man toys. It's great.
Steve Folland: So the two of you leave the house and head off to the office?
James White: We do. Yeah. Yeah. She's actually at the office right now. I'm at home right now because I'm goofing off with you. There's one thing I miss, like getting back to working at agency life and that sort of thing. The one thing that I miss the most... Well, there's two things. Number one is working around people. We have our own office, but it's within a building that there's a number of different offices, so there's always people around and there's bustle out in the hallway and stuff. I miss being around people. That's why I work really well in coffee shops and pubs and that kind of thing.
James White: But the other thing I miss, and it's probably what I miss the most, is the transition from home to office at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. If you work at home, you can't wait to get out the door at 5:00 because you've been sitting inside all day. At the end of the day now, it's a pleasure to come home and sit on the couch and have a wine if we want and just unwind after the day. That is something that I miss, and I ended up, we both ended up valuing our home a lot more after moving into the office space during the day.
Steve Folland: Yeah. Nice. What would you say is the biggest challenge for you of being freelance?
James White: I would probably have given a different answer if you asked me that a year ago or two years ago or five years ago, so this is a constantly evolving thing. The biggest challenge I would say, because Signalnoise is known for a specific thing, like I make loads of 1980s inspired artwork with chrome and lens flares and rainbows and Tron grids and all that kind of stuff, and I developed that style or I started working in that style in, like I said, 2008, 2009, and I think the biggest challenge for me is to not so much keep that style relevant, but try to keep myself relevant while keeping myself interested in the work that I'm doing because the 1980s style, it got caught up with the synthwave scene. I love synthwave music, and so I got my style that I... or not my style, the style that I was working in got swept up in the synthwave movement in around 2013 or 2014, which has been great, but I guess my biggest fear is the 30-year trend when it comes to the past.
James White: If you were to go back 30 years when I started developing, well, when I started working in this 1980s style, that would have been like 1980 almost on the nose in the 30-year cycle. Now it's 10 years later. We're moving into the 1990s, so we might start seeing more... We're seeing more Nirvana shirts around and alternative rock, and maybe rave culture, heaven forbid, is going to start rearing its head again.
James White: My biggest challenge is to try to stay relevant and stay fresh while doing the kind of work that I want to do. It's done out of concern and fear and whatever else. Last year, I mean, I'll be completely honest, Steve, last year was probably the lowest income year that I've had since starting freelance. There might be a number of reasons for that. It could be economic ups and downs in the world, it could be the trend phasing out. There's any number of reasons. It could be maybe I didn't promote myself properly. I don't really know. But that's the biggest challenge is to try to come up with ways and work that keeps myself relevant, sure, but also keeps myself happy, and hopefully being able to support myself and pay bills along the way. That'd be nice. The things that are born out of that challenge or that concern is the OFF THE GRID zine, the YouTube channel, the comic that I'm working on.
Steve Folland: Yeah. Well, other than letting the fact that you won't let last year get you, you're like, "Okay, well, what else can I do?"
James White: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There was a lot of concern before arriving at that situation, but trying to build the Signalnoise universe has to be what I do to keep myself relevant and keep myself interested. It's almost looking inward at my own story rather than looking outward toward what might be a trend, if that makes any sense. A lot of my colleagues in the industry are writing books and that sort of thing. I just don't want to spend two years writing a damn art book. I want to do stuff and get it out there into people's hands in the nerdiest way possible. All of that stuff that I'm doing now is definitely born out of that worry, that concern and that challenge.
Steve Folland: Cool. Have you found... A lot of people will toy with having a company name using their real name. How have you found that? You traded Signalnoise.
James White: Yeah. Yeah. That's a weird one too because I don't really think... I've been asked this quite a few times as well, like from younger designers asking, "Do I come up with a name, or do I just use my name?" There's no real right answer to it. If you become known for a specific thing, whether that's a style or kind of work or whatever, and you make a name for yourself, your name will be the one that you selected back then, so there's no real right or wrong practice to that. There's also a middle ground, like Naomi, my wife, she trades under Branded By Naomi, which is kind of the middle ground between it's a company name, but it's her name. There's no real right and wrong to all of that. The people that are into the Signalnoise work inherently know my name. It's the same with my buddy Chuck, Chuck Anderson over in Chicago. He goes by NoPattern. That's his personal design studio, but if you know NoPattern's work, you know it's Chuck.
James White: I don't think that's something that's... There's no right and wrong. There's no recipe to that. It's just you just pick one, and you start doing your work. The work is always going to be more important than the name you pick, and you can... It's not like you can pick some baller name, and that's going to really super help you in your career like that, whatever. It's the work. The work is always going to be number one, so you just pick what you think is best and just roll with it.
Steve Folland: Now, if you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
James White: Tell my younger self. As I said throughout this podcast, I've always been one to not sit still. I always have my own projects on the go and exploring my own comic book characters or what have you, website design animation. Growing up specifically in high school and in my early career, I had an immense frustration with not... I defined it as not having my own style, which is a common thing for specifically younger artists and designers to talk about. "I need to find my own style. I needed my own style."
James White: What that is, is your creative voice and vision. It's not necessarily a specific style. It's just the kind of work that you want to do that you want to excel at. In my early career, I was really frustrated that I didn't have my own creative voice. If I could go back in time and tell me something, it would be that the frustration that I was feeling is necessary because that means you care about the thing that you're pursuing and you want to achieve that goal.
James White: I would say, "You're on the right track, and frustration is good," because if you're complacent, that means you're not evolving. Frustration leads to evolution in the creative sphere in my experience. I would go back and say, "Let that frustration in, and let that drive you to exploring whatever it is you're going to explore next, and don't let it debilitate you," because I see that a lot. I talk to a lot of people that are just getting into the end of their career or have been in their career and haven't found what they truly want to do because it's such a wide path that we could go down in the creative industry.
James White: It's about not letting that kick you down and not letting that stop you from creating things because as creative people, we should be making things all the time if we want to get better. You're not going to go to the gym once and get ripped. You have to go over and over and over again, and over time, you slowly see a change. That's exactly how it is in the creative arts and design as well. The more you do, the better you get over time. Time is everything. That's what little snippet of advice I would give myself is don't let that frustration stop you. Thankfully, it didn't, but I'd reassure myself that. That frustration is needed. It's got to be there to help us move forward.