Today we’d like to introduce you to Sierra Houk

Hi Sierra, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?

I grew up in Ashland, Oregon where I did a lot to theatre tech in my teen years. That, on top of always just being a creative and crafty kid, I felt pretty naturally drawn to the visual arts. When it came to choosing a career path, I decided to go to college in Seattle and ended up at Seattle University for digital design.

After graduating in June 2015 I was very lucky to take about a month to travel that summer and live out my third-grader fantasy of being an egyptologist by going on an archeology internship in Romania—that was fantastic. Along with art and design classes I took a lot of Latin and art history classes so it was a great experience putting those things to work and exploring special interests as well.

Then pretty quickly after that trip I got my first real design job and my first of many contract jobs through a staffing agency. I feel like college laid a pretty good foundation of design principles and art skills; it did an OK job teaching the actual tools like adobe programs; and didn’t prepare me fully for the nitty gritty of what the industry is like. Things like taxes and health insurance and how that changes based on employment type, how to work with staffing agencies or how to run your own business. A lot of that stuff I feel like I was left to figure out on my own at the time.

Of course, I don’t know what that particular program is like nowadays, and also question how necessary the college route is into a design career now or if it’s just one possible path of many. Because student loan debt is no joke! My high school and college education mostly just focused on what’s maybe a more “traditional” American career path of having just a few employers in your career and staying at one place for many years. But in my experience there are a lot of ways to go about being a designer (working in-house at one company, at creative agencies, working freelance or starting your own thing with a few friends, being full-time, part-time, hourly, by the project, etc.).

For the first five years of my career I jumped around across different workplaces trying to find a good fit for me. I did a handful of short (6 months-1 year) contracts through staffing agencies at companies like Amazon, Microsoft, the YMCA, and the cosmetic company Butter London. I also worked full-time at creative agencies M3 Messenger and Rauxa.

Across those different jobs I got a lot of great experience honing design skills, but never fully found an environment where I felt comfortable and didn’t eventually get burned out for one reason for another. I had always flirted with the idea of just doing freelance and had done side projects along the way, so in late 2019 I decided to just go for it.

…And then COVID happened 🤷🏻‍♀️ I was working like part-time hours through June 2020, which for the time was about what I could emotionally/mentally handle anyways. But even though I like working alone and working from home, the overall isolation at that point made me feel like I needed some built-in socializing of working on a team, so I did a contract job creating the social media content for Amazon Photos. That was great for meeting some immediate needs but ultimately sealed in that it’s harder for me to do positive, social-justice minded change on from the inside, plus I really just wanted to work for myself and have that complete ownership over my work and my time.

So since October 2021 I have fully focused on freelancing and especially looking for projects that align with my core values. It somehow always works out that when I put myself out there as a freelancer I find like-minded people fairly seamlessly. In my first real go at it I started working with Equality Equation, an agency which unfortunately was one of the many businesses that didn’t survive the pandemic—but I still work with two of the account managers I met there as they’ve gone on to do their own freelance thing. Nowadays I for a lot of work for an agency M+R where I get to make ads, social content and more for nonprofits like Planned Parenthood, NWLC, Sierra Club, WWF, the IRC, SEIU, some different food banks. It’s really a dream client list for me and I love getting to see my artwork supporting important causes that I care about.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?

I’m very privileged that my partner has had very stable employment through all of this. Going from contract to contract in the staffing agency world meant I was job searching constantly and wasn’t always sure how long the gap in between contracts would be or what jobs would be available. At Amazon for example, a lot of their design roles are temporary contracts where you can work for up to 11 months then have to take a 3 month break before you can get another job there.

In my experience, so many large companies use creative staffing agencies for design roles so that they don’t have to pay a full-time salary and benefits. You can get some ok-ish benefits through the staffing agency, but they you have to stay with just that staffing agency. I worked with three or four as I wanted to explore different types of companies and they all have different client pools. The constant cycle of contract ending and having to start all over again with interviews, updating my portfolio/resume, lapses in health insurance—it got fatiguing pretty fast for me and would have been impossible if I was just living paycheck to paycheck on my own without my now-husband’s support.

Out of college, those staffing agencies helped me break into the industry and got me access to job opportunities that hiring managers wouldn’t have even looked at my resume otherwise. Also right out of school the pay was pretty good compared to the cafe jobs I had before, but there seems to be a ceiling of how much those contract roles pay (a lot in the $25/hr range, higher side maybe $50/hr). Overall, it’s frustrating to see companies pay a middle man to curate a workforce for them to churn through instead of just hiring designers directly and giving them some dang health insurance 🙃

The job market really isn’t protecting workers out there, so going freelance has actually made me feel more secure in my finances. Setting up health and disability insurance and IRA for retirement all as an individual is a lot and not something I was at all prepared for. But committing to all of the work of setting up my own business feels like it has paid off more for me than trying to find my place as a full time employee somewhere.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?

Across my career I have kept up a mix of print and digital projects, but always tend to lean more digital for my typical day-to-day work and then do print projects in my personal art work. I like having a mix working on a screen and working on something by hand, and my favorite projects are ones where I get to make some kind of physical assets for a digital project. Digital projects might be email, social graphics, gifs and video, or web ads. For example I recently made a bunch of collage elements and scanned them to use in an end of the year wrap up email.

I’ve found that for my day-to-day work I like the pace of creating digital assets. They’re usually pretty reactionary, quick-turn and iterative. It’s a fun space to be able to experiment because there’s so much digital content that it’s not going to really last that long, but it also needs to be interesting enough to stand out from the noise.

How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?

If people out there need design work I would love to help and can be reached on my website sierrahouk.com. I like to work with small businesses and nonprofits, so while my standard rate states around $100/hr I am happy to adjust and work on a sliding scale. Or just price by the project if there’s a fixed budget! I work directly with business owners, creative agencies, nonprofits/organizations, even individual commissions. If you want a funky wedding invite or a portrait of your pet, I am happy to chat. I am also happy to connect you to someone else in my network if your project doesn’t sounds like it’s going to fit my style or schedule.

Also if folks want to see occasional behind the scenes of what I’m working on, but mostly pictures of my dog and cat, I am on instagram @sierrahouk

Contact Info:

• Website: https://SierraHouk.com
• Instagram: instagram/sierrahouk