Why designers must cultivate a personal voice outside client work
Portfolio work proves a designer has the chops, but side projects show what they think deserves to exist. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains why he expects designers to have a voice and a vision of their own, and how that habit helps clients who have lost sight of their founding purpose. Drawing on his art school background, he describes how a body of personal work reveals the through lines that define a designer’s point of view. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on side projects, Why Every Designer Needs a Side Project.
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Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl shares the advice he gives designers who ask about portfolios: the work needs to be good, because client work shows you have the chops. But side projects show what you’re obsessed with and what you think deserves to exist, which is much harder to express when your job is to make clients look incredible.
He connects that personal vision to brand strategy. Many companies lose sight of the fire that founded them, and designers who regularly practice finding a vision for themselves are better equipped to help clients rediscover theirs.
Calvin closes with a reflection from his art school background. Seeing a large swath of someone’s personal work reveals the through lines of their vision, the same way you can see what ties an artist’s paintings together.
Highlights
Portfolio work shows skill, while side projects show obsession and vision.
Calvin expects designers to have a voice of their own.
Companies often lose sight of their original founding purpose.
Designers who practice finding their own vision can help clients rediscover theirs.
A body of personal work reveals a designer’s through lines.
Key insights
Side projects reveal what deserves to exist
Client work is about making someone else look great. Personal work is where a designer shows what they believe is worth making.
Vision is a trainable skill
Designers who regularly find and harness a vision for themselves build the muscle they need to do the same for clients.
The answers are often already inside the client
The repetition of day-to-day business slowly erodes a company’s founding vision. A designer with a voice can help bring it back to the surface.
Through lines matter more than looking cool
Seen together, a designer’s explorations show a consistent way of observing the world, even when the work looks different.
Detailed analysis
The clip reframes side projects from résumé padding to a core strategic skill. Calvin’s argument is that the same capacity that drives personal work, having a vision and following it, is exactly what struggling brands need from the people they hire. A designer who has never practiced defining their own point of view will have a harder time helping a client recover theirs.
His art school perspective adds a useful lens. Rather than judging individual pieces on whether they look cool, he reads a body of work the way you’d read an artist’s, looking for the recurring ideas that reveal how someone sees the world.
Conclusion
For Calvin, a designer’s personal voice isn’t a distraction from client work. It’s the thing that lets them become an inspiring, aspirational partner who can lead a client back to why they started.
Transcript
I think that’s why I love this stuff. Going back to when I’m talking with designers and they’re asking for advice on portfolios or things like that, it always is just like, cool, your work needs to be good. Your actual portfolio work is what shows that you have the chops, but your side projects are what show me what you think deserves to exist. It shows me what you’re actually obsessed with. It shows me your vision for the world. And I think that’s much more interesting, because it’s hard to show that personal level of creativity, that touch of personalization, when you’re working with clients. Because our jobs for our clients are to make them look incredible.
I think the other part about it, too, is that I just have an expectation. I expect you to show that you’re curious about the world, but for me, I also expect you as a designer to have a voice and a vision for what you want to make. Especially over the years, as I’ve done more and more brand strategy work and really helped companies figure out who they are, one of the biggest problems companies have is that somewhere along the way they maybe lost the vision for what the original founding purpose for the company was. They’ve lost sight of that original fire that ignited them inside. And so I think if you’re a designer who has regularly trained yourself how to find and harness a vision for yourself, it makes it a lot easier for you to do that with clients.
And I think it turns you into an almost inspirational and aspirational figure for a client, where they’re like, “Yes, you’re right. That is why we originally started. Please take us back there.” And we run into that with clients all the time, where the secrets are within them. The vision was within them, but through the repetition of day-to-day business, that stuff slowly goes away. And then you pull in designers with a vision and with a voice to help them rediscover that.
So, I don’t know. I think, too, maybe since I went to art school—I didn’t study design. I studied painting and sculpture. At first, I always really struggled with what I felt was the problem of designers always just wanting to make something that looks cool. We were just looking at Jared’s work. I think seeing a large swath of work, you start seeing how it goes from liking to make stuff that looks cool to doing explorations of things you observe about the world, and it starts actually defining a vision for that person. A lot of the work may look different, but you start seeing through lines in the same way that you do with an artist when they’re working on paintings. You start seeing all the little things that tie them together, and I think that’s so awesome. All right.