We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Conor Hunter. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Conor below.

Conor, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

It may not be an undeserved community in the traditional sense of specific marginalized groups, but I have made a big part of my mission to give back and help young designers just entering the field. I find that young designers may have technical abilities or have been inspired creatively in school, but are often not given the real world skills that are required to succeed in the business of Graphic Design. That’s not to say that entering the professional world needs to be intimidating, but requiring junior designers to “pay their dues” is often a thinly veiled attempt to exploit their creativity and leverage their passions against them when it comes to entry level wages and opportunities.

The easiest way I can give back to young designers is to provide collaboration opportunities to them specifically. For at least 3 projects per year I make a point of working with 1 current student, 1 recent graduate, and 1 entry level freelance designer on the packaging design for a 16oz beer can. It provides them with a platform to do whatever they want within the brand guidelines, and I Art Direct the project (light on direction). Upon completion, the young designer now has a portfolio piece that lives in the real world, new technical abilities for getting files to print (color separations, metallic, etc.), and I give them my check from the brewery client for their work. Being involved in the process is reward enough, and collaborating new design peers pays off tenfold.

This first started when I noticed a lot of businesses using social media to do “design contests” where they ask the public for free spec work, with no creative guidelines, and a subjective mission statement that is basically saying “As a business, we don’t know how to respect the time and skills of creatives, so send us some stuff and maybe if you win, you get a FREE! t shirt.” That’s not how business works, and it is an immediate sign that this company probably doesn’t know what they are doing creatively, or ethically.

In response I created an “Anti design contest design contest” ( https://www.instagram.com/p/CNKnL0nFbz4/?img_index=1 ) where I take portfolio submissions, pick winners, pay them a real wage, but also offer a portfolio review to anyone who submits and would like to talk about their work. Essentially I saw this trend I didn’t like in my industry, so I did what I could to correct it in a public way, and also let companies know that exploiting creatives is not an acceptable business practice.

I want young designers to be excited and stay excited about their choice to enter this field… It is the career I always dreamed of, and if you find the right people it is full of generous and inspiring individuals.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Like so many of us creatives, I started as the little kid who doodled in class and was always in trouble for not thinking before they spoke, basically that wonderful mix of ADHD and weirdness that fuels many of us at a young age (and probably still today). Graduating from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and entering the field of Advertising, I designed corporate branding, storyboards for motion graphics, and collateral for print campaigns. After several fast paced years in Corporate Advertising, I went to being a freelance designer and haven’t looked back. Currently I specialize in branding and packaging for beverage brands (with a focus on craft beer), and I have had the fortunate opportunity of designing hundreds of beer cans over the past 7 years. The medium allows for a huge range of styles, printing techniques, and finishes, and to me it feels like the contemporary version of album cover design in its heyday. Some of it is intended to exist one single release, and some is meant to endure for years, staying visually relevant in a rapidly changing market. Creating cohesive branding, packaging, and advertising is what I love to do, and doing it in partnership with independent startups, and real people is awesome. I feel grateful to be trusted with the concepts people feel passionate about creating, and I look to reciprocate their excitement and passion while creating a brand. It took years to carve out a niche, but having the ability to pick and choose clients, is as valuable as a client having the ability to choose a designer, both sides benefit from having a mutual faith in the idea, and being invested beyond an hourly rate. I like to create long lasting relationships with clients who believe in their concept and brand culture, it makes it so much easier for both sides to be passionate and stay excited. My advice to perspective clients regarding myself or any other designer, is to be transparent about your budget, and give designers the freedom to design (based on your faith in their body of work). Certainly don’t leverage peoples passions against them to pay less, but we love designing for passionate clients… a good idea is hard to resist, especially when it has room to grow. Just ask, god knows I’m a design nerd who will gladly talk shop with anyone who shows they value time and opinions based on my body of work. In my spare time, I make collages, protest fascism, and wear a Dodgers hat most days. Cheers!

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I’m not reinventing the wheel by saying it… but I think that one of the most obvious yet underutilized resources for designers is the public library.

As a member of the millennial generation, I was given the gift of online research, and for a long time it was a wealth of information for us, but at some point the content online became an AI copy, of a copy, of a copy, and our ability to do proper research and sourcing online became muddy. An example I come across regularly is when I do research for “Vintage Sports logos” you used to be able to find imagery of timeless hand drawn logos, ticket stubs from the 30’s, merchandise, and more… now that same search is nothing but derivative copies done digitally, or by AI in the past couple years.

I started to see myself even using these subpar references, and thankfully I also existed in a time where computer research wasn’t the only means, so I reverted. Now I’m going to the library and finding design and image references that either don’t exist online, or are so buried by the algorithm that I would never find them. Yellowed art books from the 70’s, independently published brochures on watercolor techniques that has never been digitized, newspaper ads from the 30’s, there is a wealth of design inspiration outside of the digital realm that at some point will just disappear forever.

We all can be better designers by leaving the office and touching grass…but also being under weird florescent lighting in a building that smells like old paper.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

My biggest pivot was a few years ago, but has become my current specialty, and I’m so glad I did it. I graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (countless years ago) and immediately went into studio work. Corporate branding, motion graphic story-boarding, and concepts for commercials… what seemed like a dream job, but after a couple years of this, I started to burn out quickly. Crazy workloads, mixed with a disconnect from creative and conceptual ownership of what I was making, really took a toll. I found myself working on a pitch for the Coal industry, which involved a hero shot of a firefighter in a boxing ring (I still have no idea what the connection was and I can’t even reverse engineer a script in my mind), and I think that’s when I checked out. Corporate advertising clients were financially reliable, but morally and spiritually difficult to reconcile at times. Losing that job was a blessing in a terrifying disguise, but it gave me the time to try something new after being in a brutal hyper formal setting.

I had been tangentially involved in the Los Angeles beer scene for years, and always had “Designing a beer bottle/can” on my bucket list of design projects, so when a friend who owned a brewery offered a bottle project I was incredibly stoked. After that bottle, things just started to build momentum, and within a year, I had branded multiple breweries, and beer branding/designing beer cans became my bread & butter. This bucket list item has now become my focus, and for the last 7 years, I’ve had the fortune of designing hundreds of beer cans for more than a dozen different breweries. I don’t even drink, but this medium provides me with a space for creative expression, and the room to create ephemera, or take a shot at creating timeless brands. I feel very fortunate to be doing exactly what seemed like a dream project (at best) a few years ago.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itscalleddesign/
• Other: My social media footprint is relatively small right now and I’m trying to figure out the next step. Ne desire to use Twitter, left FB this year, and Linkedin has been relegated to email reminders that I still have an account. Basically as a 40 something designer, this is the year where I figure out what social media is actually working for me and my business, and doesn’t just devolve into another time suck for my ADHD.

Image Credits

No image credits needed