Making time for art

Balancing Personal Work, Clients, and Creating Just for Fun

Jun 01, 2025

Hey friends,
How’s everyone doing? Hopefully, everything is all right in each of your little worlds.

Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about balancing personal work, content, and client stuff.

I’ve always been a big advocate for doing personal work (concept work, art, whatever you want to call it.)

I built a lot of my career opportunities, audience following, and skills as a designer by doing tons of personal work when there weren’t opportunities for me to work on actual stuff.

As I get busier and busier working on YouTube videos, brand deals, and official client design work, there’s less room time wise and space in my head wise to work on fun personal design projects.

It’s weird because I think I got so used to doing those personal projects all the time that even when I’m busy with actual work, I still feel drawn to them.

I want to do them, and I want to express myself through graphic design without a brief or a client telling me what to do.

The funny thing is, most graphic designers I know start doing concept work or personal work as a way to showcase their skills, share things they’re passionate about, and gain more clients.

Ideally, you’re so busy with official projects that you don’t even have time to do personal work.

Right now, I’ve kind of been at that point in my career, which is something I should be grateful for.

But it’s one of those classic dilemmas where the grass is always greener.

Sometimes I get so wrapped up with real projects that I feel like I need to aggressively take back some of my time and set aside a whole day just to work on personal work.

The other day, I was just sitting in my office and was like, fuck it. I want to design something just for me.

So I whipped up this little poster design for Cuesta Studio, and threw it back a little bit to one of my old techniques — where I used different colored paper, printed on it, and cut out the shapes for the containers.

I also thought, you know what? Let’s try it as a little merch mockup — that might look pretty cool too.

And I was pretty happy with the results!

This may not even become anything that actually matters or gets printed or whatever, but just the act of creating from start to finish and making something in one day feels good every once in a while.

And I’ve truly been slacking.

I used to be proud of the level of work and amount of work I would produce each year.

I think in 2023, I created an insane amount of personal pieces — somewhere between 80 and 100.

Even in 2024, I’ve created over 50 so far.
A majority of those were from my hardcore alphabet series, but still.

This year, we’re already in June, and I think I’ve made 12 or 15 things.

So if we’re lucky, I’m on par to make maybe 30 max.

I’m trying to turn that around a little bit and make some more stuff.

It’s all just a balance, though.

I’m also trying to do more leisurely stuff, do more things outside of design, and balance making videos and client work.

It’s always just a weird situation in general when you work for yourself and have to balance all the different things you want to do each day.

The latest installment of personal work I was doing was this fun little concept for the Title Fight album Shed

Shed is ne of the best albums of all time, in my opinion.

I realized it came out during one of those periods when we weren’t doing the retro love for vinyls, and cassettes were kind of dead.

So I noticed there was no cassette version for this.

And lately, I’ve been really getting into collecting cassette tapes.

So I thought, you know what? Let’s make my own little concept.

I’ll probably throw that up on IG sometime in the next week or two, but I wanted to share it with you all first.

I appreciate all y’all who read the newsletter.

You’re the core real ones.

And it feels nice to have an outlet to share stuff with you all that isn’t dictated by algorithms or what tech billionaires think you should be seeing,

but rather, what I want to show you.

Anyway, before I go too far off on a tangent about that, we’ll end it there.

Hopefully y’all have a great week ahead of yourselves and get the opportunity to make something for fun.

Much love,
Talk soon ❤️