Doubt is normal, detours are expected: Unlearned shares the personal career reflections of top creatives

Digital design tool Readymag has long supported young creatives since its launch in 2012, and its latest project – the editorial project Unlearned – aims to shed further light on just how to find the right path after design school. It takes the form of 13 written perspectives from influential names across the industry, all at different stages of their careers, sharing advice, reflections and insights to their career journeys. The list of authors includes Cherry-Ann Morgan, Christina Worner, Erik Kessels, Freddie Öst, Harriet Richardson, Jarrett Fuller, Liza Enebeis, Mario Carrillo, Raissa Pardini, Sarah Boris, Shantell Martin, Stefan Sagmeister, and Zipeng Zhu.

As Readymag puts it, “Design school promises clarity, while reality, shaped by real constraints, brings questions.” Every creative who has faced post-graduation life will relate to this statement, and this project offers catharsis and support by way of personal tales and reflections, from designers and artists many young creatives look up to. As addressed across Unlearned’s essays, it takes time to build one’s practice, and practitioners need patience in navigating the doubts and detours of the creative scene.

Liza Enebeis, partner and creative director at Studio Dumbar/DEPT®, for example, speaks to the difficulty of transitioning between an educational and a professional work environment. After getting a job at Pentagram following her master’s degree at the RCA, Liza says that while it was an amazing learning experience, at first she found it overwhelming. “I wasn’t used to having people around me all the time looking at my screen,” she writes, adding that she sometimes found respite in the bathroom just to be alone. Eventually, though, she acclimatised. In learning to navigate new environments and trusting the process, she found acclaim and success – something she says wouldn’t have been believed by young graduate Liza. 

On the subject of patience, artist Harriet Richardson also advocates a slower pace of creative practice in figuring out exactly what type of designer you are (if any). In her story, which is characteristically candid, she writes about how her values and priorities have changed since university. Since graduating and entering the creative scene, Harriet has been no stranger to rightly commenting on and critiquing its arguably antiquated practices. After four years at art school and five years in industry, Harriet came to the conclusion that it wasn’t design she loved but having a medium to express herself. Cut to today, and Harriet is best known for her wonderfully radical performance art, impassioned writing and comedy shows. “If I could tell my younger self one thing,” Harriet writes, “it would be this: give yourself the grace, time, and kindness to figure out who you are outside the institutions.”

Snask’s founder, Freddie Öst, shares a similarly personal story about his transformative realisation post-graduation. Whilst at university and immediately following, he believed “the world was working against me – and that it was my job to fight back”. In the face of the elite, commercial, corporate design scene, to act against it was the truest form of design progress. What Freddie found, however, was that he was seeing enemies that weren’t really there. “A rebel without a cause,” Freddie writes. What Freddie had to unlearn after the degree was the ingrained dogma that protest was the only way forward, when, in fact, it might be love. “Free, open love refuses rules, challenges power, and builds new worlds,” he writes.

Across many of Unlearned’s pieces, certain shared insights come to the forefront, notably, how nebulous a creative career can be; that despite people telling you there is a right way to do things, like at school, it’s far from as fixed as it appears – and there’s far more to learn beyond institutional teachings. Perhaps what young creatives and established ones alike can learn is to let go, to hand over the control we seek over creativity in favour of awareness and recognition that there are no rules set in stone. Only attitudes; attitudes that can be unlearned.