6 ways to make a global impact with your design career

Armed with a Bachelor of Communication Design, he’s currently the Product and Projects Manager at LADbible Group Australia. Speaking at our Design Career Talks event on Ultimo campus, Taylor shared insights on starting your career in design and his experience studying at Billy Blue College of Design at Torrens University Australia.

1. Follow your passion

“I remember in primary school and high school spending a lot more time on the visual aspect of an essay rather than the essay itself,” explains Taylor. “I got a lot of support from my art teacher and ended up cruising into a role that I ended up enjoying a lot more because of that. Design was a natural part of what I used to do, and it’s something that you attach yourself to at a young age. For me personally, the course was the precursor or the ‘dip in the toes’ of what could be a career in the creative industry.”

2. Set goals – but be comfortable with change

“I always dreamt of being a creative director. I always thought that was the pinnacle of what I need to be working towards and I feel like that’s kind of how you approach your early stages of career – you have this goal that you see in articles and you see online. But particularly for me, my role has changed so fundamentally. Things are moving so quickly these days – the role that you thought you aspired to will be something completely different in five, or even two years’ time.”

3. Remember there’s no one cookie-cutter creative

“There’s no one answer to being a creative. You can apply creative thinking to any aspect of a career, and one of the things with Communication Design is you learn a framework for that thinking, a discipline and an attitude. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you should limit yourself to one specific discipline per se, like graphic design. These days a designer needs to work in motion graphics, mixed media, even interiors and things like that. It’s about that flexibility and the framework in which you approach things that is really important.”

4. There’s more to being creative than tools and software

“I’ve been at LADbible since its inception in Australia in 2019. There were three of us that started and now we’re 30 people. That’s two years of massive growth and millions of dollars of revenue generated. We’re launching an office in Auckland, in Melbourne and soon to be in Singapore so huge growth, really exciting times. That’s part of a driver for me: you’re not just a designer in front of a Mac, you’re solving problems with a finance person or you’re approaching a marketing PR release or something like that. There’s much more to being creative than the tools you get taught in university, it's about taking the fundamentals you learnt while studying, growing and adapting to meet the ever-changing needs of the industry.”

5. Design doesn’t need to be aesthetically cutting-edge

“Design can be functional. You can design with a sense of creating something more approachable to a certain audience. Design is a language – multiple languages – so it’s really about kind of learning how to harness that understanding, and when to apply that in certain circumstances.”

6. Design is a collaborative experience

“One of the biggest things I took away from Billy Blue is design is a collaborative experience. You’re doing it with your peers, you're in there solving a problem together. It’s not just you in an echo chamber, trying to figure out a problem. You need to use the resources and the different personalities around you. Billy Blue really encouraged that that kind of collaborative work, understanding different personalities and how they can bring different things to a problem.”

Want more? Here's Taylor's full interview at our Design Career Talks: