What should you post

- Using social media to share your design work and experience is a great resource to have as a professional creative. It gives you immediate access to a potential global audience. So you need to choose wisely when deciding on what to post share, retweet, like or comment on. If you want to keep your online persona restricted to business only content that's fine, but it should still retain an engaging personality in its tone, or you run the risk of coming off cold, detached, or even impersonal. Once again, consider each platform you use and determine the voice you want to portray on it. No one likes the phony. So be genuine in your use because it'll serve you well, regardless if you want to be casual or more business oriented when sharing your content. Many corporate brands and marketing plans have absolutely failed when it comes to using social media, because they try to use it like traditional advertising. And they've quickly seen the tables turn on their promotional efforts and become a new internet meme. Business and individual personalities are as diverse as life itself. As long as you aim for authenticity, demonstrate empathy, share inspiration, and take the time to encourage those you follow in their creative pursuits you'll figure out what works best for you. Let me share with you several examples of different ways I've posted on social media. So here's the social media post that I did on my LinkedIn account. And this is all about kind of revealing how me and my daughter worked together. We're just a two person studio. And my daughter is now worked with me for about three years. And when we approach a creative project, I'll usually do some thumbnail sketches and I'll hand them over to her and she'll do more worked out drawings, and then I'll art direct that. And then when it gets to the point, we need to move to vector and build it out she'll either build them or I'll build them. In this case, she built the primary one that's locked up with the type here. And these were designed directions for a marketing firm down in Oklahoma called Magenta Fox was one of the name explorations we came up among several others, and I just really like how these brand marks came out for this exploration. And so I just talked about me and Savannah working together. So that's one type of post I'll make. In this case, I made it on LinkedIn. I also shared it on a couple of the other platforms. Here's my Twitter account and this a good example of sharing my work on Twitter. In this case, it was specifically to share one of my DVG lab episodes, my weekly creative series, and this one was a fun one to create, and it was about creating based off of historical mythology. And so I kind of took a little bit of a humorous approach to it and called it efficient ship shack. And I have a friend Derek Gilbert, I have known him for about 12 years now. He used to be a top 40 DJ. He's a host of a satellite kind of news reporting program. And he's written a few books on historical mythology. So when he saw this, he loved it and asked, "Hey, can I get, "get that on a tee shirt?" So I created a t-shirt design of it, uploaded it to Cotton Bureau. And then he tweeted back about a month later, and this is what he tweeted back. So he really likes us. He goes to specific conferences where he talks about mythology and stuff, and this is a good conversation starter. So I just wanted to share with you how when you share and you put stuff out, you never know how people are going to respond. And this was kind of a fun interaction with Derek. Here's my Instagram account. And the way I tend to use Instagram at times is as I'm working on a project, all posts create a progress on that project. So you can see this original drawing here, by the way, my inspiration comes from everywhere and anywhere. I was actually listening to a podcast about scary camp stories, and I heard kind of a mythology about Washington state. I grew up in Washington state, I had never heard before. It was about when Mount St Helens exploded. Somehow it fused a Sasquatch with a bat and create a Batsquatch and I'm going, that's a fun story. I want to create that. So that's why I was doing this. And this is my original drawing that I first posted. And people saw that and said, hey, the ear on his right side of his head looks a little weird. And I looked at it and I'm going, you know what it does. So I actually changed it, uploaded again, this is a separate post. And then I'm now drawing it out more precisely so I can build from it in vector form in this post. And then this one, I print out the black and white and I shade on it. And then I shared the final art here. If we click into this, you can see the final Batsquatch and how I locked it up with type. So this is how all share my creative process in this case, over five different posts, and people tend to follow those along and enjoy seeing that insight behind your creative process. So you could do this on other platforms like Twitter, but Instagram, since it's visually oriented is ideal for doing this type of posting. Let's go to Facebook. This is my business Facebook page. And once again, I was at the best conference in the universe, in my opinion, Creative South. It's held in Georgia in a really small town called Columbus and goes back several years. But they brought in a Bentley, a mint condition, brand new Bentley. They wrapped it in matte vinyl, and then they let two teams battle it out, one side, one team, the other side and other team. And so somebody captured images of me drawing on it. So this just shows me drawing on the hood and other areas. And this was a lot of fun. So everything on the left, I drew. Another artist I got to know why we were drawing, he drew the right side. We both kind of came up with the idea, hey, let's do a skull. That'd be a nice symmetric thing we could do with the hood. And I agreed, love drawing skulls. And this shows the hood a little better. And I love my friend, Dylan Manga said, "Hey Von, make us go all those two eyes." And I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. So that was a lot of fun. And so that's the type of insight I'm posting on my Facebook page here in this case, but it's not business centric, but it's creative. It's the kind of insight into what I do and what I don't always do. This is the one and only time in my life I'm probably going to ever drawn on a Bentley. So definitely have to share those type of creative memories. Let's take a look at one more. Here's my Drawing Vector Graphics Facebook page. And again, I focus on process here a lot because it's centric to the skill based courses I produce for LinkedIn Learning. I want to help other people and facilitate their creative skills. And so this one I'm reinforcing the importance of drawing thumbnail drawing, and then once you start rough, doesn't have to be perfect. You just refine and keep simplifying and trying and exploring until you get to something that's looking good. And then I usually draw it out again in a more refined form. And this is going to be the image that I'll scan in place into illustrator. And it will be a roadmap for building my vector art. So the common denominator between all of these posts I've showed you is that they actually reflect who I am and what I do. I love working on brand identity projects. I like history and archeology. I love to draw. I'm passionate about the creative process. And these are attributes that let people understand me on a deeper level and give others insight into how I work, which might help them as well. And all of this leads to more meaningful conversations. Most people tend to gravitate towards those subjects they're passionate about and enjoy. You know best what that is for you. So share your pictures, comments, thoughts, fears, failures, humorous insights, videos, et cetera, that reflect your passion and your personality. The more you use social media, the more you'll discover your own unique and distinct voice. And that will connect with others and attract new followers because it's the genuine you.