One Door Closes, Another One Opens

Hey friends 

I’m writing part of this week’s newsletter from the driver seat of my car parked in a random parking lot in my hometown of Covina. 

I visited my best childhood friend who has a kid now and I’m feeling very nostalgic. I’m 25 now so It’s so crazy to have known some people for over 20 years now since I was a little kid.

Really makes me proud of myself, my above-mentioned friend, and everyone I keep in my life have come. Not trying to get all cliche but life’s a trip for sure.

Blues Legends

If you have been following along with my content for the past few months or so you have probably seen some of my blues legends posters.

This idea all spawned from my love for blues music as well as my wanting to experiment more with layout, typography, and image manipulation.

I always strive to create a bunch of personal work because I think Personal projects are SO IMPORTANT for designers these days.

However, as some of you may know, sometimes coming up with ideas, a brief, or even just a simple prompt can be the hardest part. So this is where a nice series comes in.

It was relieving to have the structure of knowing “okay this has to be a poster featuring a famous blues artist” from there the structure of the concept allowed for more creativity and exploration in the execution of the actual design.

I created a total of 20 of these posters and actually compiled them all in a Behance project if you wanna check it out HERE.

I am equally relieved to be done with this fun little poster series and stressed out about what this next endeavor is going to entail.

As they say “When one door closes, another one opens”

So what’s next?

After finishing up the blues legends project I sat in my office for a bit contemplating what I wanted to work on from a personal standpoint next.

Then I remembered I had just boughten this small book called The Graphic Design Idea book. Basically, this book has small topics/ideas/prompts whatever you want to classify them as from 50 different talented designers.

For example, a few are: Color, Typography, collage, blur, parody, etc

So that sparked a perfect idea in my head. I am going to try to create a new design based on each of the 50 prompts. I don’t think it will be limited to just square or portrait orientation posters either. I want to experiment with formats as well.

The challenge is daunting and since I won’t be creating them every day it will probably take a while, but I am excited to pepper in this series with some of my other content.

I finished up the first one the other day for the prompt 1/50 COLOR.
Here is a little sneak peek below before I send it out anywhere else in the world.

Also going to attempt to make some process short-form content around each of these but we will see how that pans out lol.

Speaking of that I wanted to talk about YouTube Shorts.

YouTube making moves

So on Feb 1st, the new youtube shorts ad revenue sharing model went live. If you are unfamiliar with how youtube ad sharing works basically companies pay for ads and when ads play on youtube videos the money is split between the YT platform and the creator.

This is an amazing system compared to most platforms because it is in theory infinitely scalable. Youtube is now introducing this model for YT Shorts. I wrote about this a while back too in an old newsletter but now it’s here.

“Creator Funds” like Instagram and tiktok use for example are a set amount of money in the “fund” so the more creators make content the less each creator makes. That is also how YouTube shorts worked until now.

“Why is this important for you or other designers Jesse?”

There aren’t too many designers who make long-form content on YouTube. However, Myself and so many other designers create short-form content and I think it is very undervalued by these other apps. Since a lot of you have a giant back catalog of short-form content I highly suggest you start posting those to YT shorts.

Let’s say you’ve made 100 reels in the past. Just start posting a short every day or every few days until you get through your back catalog and by that point you’ll probably have reached the monetization requirements and can start earning money.

The one caveat is this is still new, so I haven’t seen how well it pays but it couldn’t hurt to try it out. Also if you can’t be bothered to make more content or post all your stuff on YouTube that’s fine, just wanted to throw this out there.

Lastly, I think if you ever had any interest in starting a youtube channel, this is a very low barrier of entry to get started and maybe after posting shorts for a while you try out some long-form stuff.

I have been seeing more and more designers pop up on YouTube lately but still think the niche as a whole is only at the beginning and I would love to see more graphic design/art stuff on YouTube from y’all.

Stuff to Check Out!

• More on YT Shorts

• Colin and Samir new creator support channel

• Twitter getting ad revenue system too

• Cool video by Jack Gordan (really like his editing style)

• Nice Branding by PJ Scowden

• Dope branding and super flushed out presentation

• Using Friz Quadrata a lot lately

• Amazing mech keyboard artist I found

• underrated artist I like

• Tweet of the week below

  Sebastian Curi @sebacuri

  Friday at the studio 👀

  

  

Closing Thoughts

Feeling very grateful for my life these days and seeing all my hard work manifest this way is undeniably rewarding. Growing up I never thought I would feel this unanxious and thankful.

Much Love, Glue.

Weekly Wrap Up

Perfectionism Is Destroying Designer’s Creativity

First ep of redesigning albums series. Episode 2 drops tomorrow:)

Glue @permanentglue

The Three Aspects of Reality that nobody can avoid

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support is to share this newsletter with a friend and/or subscribe to my Patreon!