OUGD402 - Austin Kleon Speech - South by South West March 2014

I personally found this particular speech by Austin Kleon not only very informative but also relatable to personal experiences in my own life. He talks about being a open with your skills and ideas as a creative person by not concealing yourself, hoping that you will preserve your own genius and keep your ideas private. By being part of a helpful creative network, you can share your skills and therefore raise awareness and interest in your own artwork with other designers and artists. This lead me to realise my personal connection with a similar issue.

My friend Ste Bradbury is a fellow graphic design student at Salford University who focuses on manual typography and calligraphy design. Instead of hiding his process he has started a youtube channel to share his skill with other designers. This channel now has around 50 thousand subscribers in such a short space of time and has boosted his personal professional profile massively, this has even caught interest from 'Letterform' who has done an exclusive interview with him. This is a prime example of exactly what Austin talks about in his speech. I personally find it incredible how his career has taken off at such a young age just from informational tutorial videos on youtube.

By keeping in contact with him and sharing artists, designs, ideas and personal work, I can hopefully start to build bridges to my own personal creative network. This can help to create other contacts that could lead to collaborative work at a later date in my career.