We recently connected with Shannon Conway and have shared our conversation below.
Shannon, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?
Corporate America not only treats artists as machines, but constantly goes against the artist’s process and thoughts. I worked a corporate graphic designer job for the first 5 years of my career. They worked me down to the bone with projects. It’s constantly crunch time and then they disregard burnout as being weak. I remember the days of being a sole graphic designer at our facility working with 20+ sales people who then had 5-10 clients each. At times all of them would hit at once and I would end up having 50 projects on my board that had due dates of “yesterday.” I worked through lunch breaks for months on end, getting in hours early and leaving hours late. They refused to hire another designer or even an assistant. The kicker of the job? The types of clients. They would ask for my “professional opinion and creativity” only to revise the project so much to the point where all the creativity was gone. I soon discovered this was just a normal thing in corporate life. The designer ends up being the tool that account managers and sales people use for their own ideas. If I had a dollar for every time I heard “I would do it myself, if I just knew how to use Adobe!”…
It got to the point where I felt like if I stayed in the corporate world I would be drained of every ounce of whatever made me an artist.
The worst part? This wasn’t the case for only me. My designer friends in other companies often say the same. The conditions for designers in corporate jobs are often like this, so much so, most big corporations have started to not even rely on in-house designers for creative work, but outsource to agencies. So, that’s exactly what I did. I left and created my own business and work hand-in-hand with agencies on creative projects. I’m the same person as I was working in the corporate world, working with the same types of sales people and clients, however, now that I am established through agency work, people actually listen to me and my ideas.
Outside of the working environment, Corporate America 100% gets wrong what it means to be an artist or designer. It used to be you’d pick a path as an artist – graphic designer, illustrator, photographer, web designer, etc. Now they want to hire one person who wears 500 hats and expects each hat to constantly be in tip-top condition. I see job listings on LinkedIn and Indeed asking for a graphic designer who not only is an expert in every single Adobe product, knows Canva, photographs and owns a fancy camera, but also knows how to draw, animate, build websites from the ground up, and can manage every single social media platform. They are looking for unicorns and then working them until the sparkle is gone.
I used to think that being a designer in corporate America was the goal, but now I believe it’s a graveyard for designers. It’s only become that much worse since AI has emerged, but that’s a conversation for another day…
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Shannon and I got into the creative industry because there was never anything else. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to illustrate and help bring ideas to life with other creatives.
When I was 18, my friends and I started a band in the local Chicago punk scene. We released a few EPs and merch designs and that is how I started creating album covers, posters, and t-shirt designs. Other bands we would play with would ask who designed our stuff and that’s how I started doing commissions for local musicians. Our band ended up fizzling out, but some of the bands I worked with grew bigger or members went on to work with larger companies and record labels within the industry. The networking opportunities that came with that were immense and I was able to grow my own business through it and eventually quit my corporate day job. I always tell artists starting out to treat each project with respect and dignity no matter how small or big the client is because you never know what opportunities might come from that in the future.
Currently, most of the work I do is for bands and beer companies. One of the musicians I had worked with in the past, Aaron, was in marketing for a local Chicago craft brewery. He asked me one day if I wanted to illustrate a beer label and of course I said yes. I had never done one before and all the labels coming out of craft breweries had insane artwork on them. I started with that one label and now four years later, I just finished my 100th beer can design for craft breweries.
To be honest, all I want to do is draw. I don’t think it matters if it’s for a band, a brewery, a company, a single person…I love drawing and anytime I can create something from it is a win in my book. I love working with other creatives, bouncing ideas off one another, combining band’s music with visuals, and bringing a product to life through art.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
“Don’t do it until you’re ready.”
Complete BS. Perfectionism and being ready is a disease that can paralyze any creative. I grew up thinking that everything had to be perfect to show to the world. I had to wait until I was ready to do what I wanted to do. There was always something that I wasn’t enough of yet- my line-work wasn’t clean enough yet, I wasn’t old enough yet, I wasn’t ready for something that big yet, my ideas of colors weren’t strong enough yet. I wasn’t professional enough yet. I thought I had to have my college degree in order to sell art in order to be professional enough. After working in the corporate world and creating professionally for years now, I realize professionalism is a scam. Being “professional” used to seem like a goal to aspire towards, but once you work closely with it, it’s really just taking the human element out.
It’s perfectly okay to do things when it’s not perfect, when it’s not ready yet, when you’re not ready yet. It’s actually the quickest way of learning. The first version of anything isn’t going to be perfect. Doing something over and over again is what makes the 10th or even 100th version seem perfect to the outside viewer. You’ll always see the imperfections though, no matter which version it is for you. I had to learn how to let past projects go as well. Frequently, I learn something new and feel the want to redo all the things I’ve done in the past now knowing the new thing. Once something is done, I have to learn to let it go and use whatever I’ve learned to create the next thing. As long as you’re still growing, past imperfections don’t matter anymore.
I see a lot of younger artists not wanting to post on social media because their skills aren’t “there yet.” Post your art! It’s not always easy because people on the internet can be savages, but you’ll learn so much by doing so. Use the past posts as a way to see how you’ve evolved and gotten better as time goes by and use that to keep fueling your craft.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
When I landed a design job at a corporation, I thought I had made it. This was it: the goal. I had gotten a college degree in Visual Communications and had the title of graphic designer. I sat in traffic for 3 hours a day to get to my cubicle to rearrange brands’ artwork in Illustrator and then print it, on repeat, for 10 hours a day. I had the occasional PowerPoint to design, logging work in Excel spreadsheets, and daily meetings that could’ve been a 3 line e-mail.
The art didn’t matter, only the money did. It didn’t matter if something had passion behind it, if it invoked question or thought, or if it made somebody feel something. I realized this didn’t matter because I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I had a degree in visual communications and my job was to communicate effectively. That was it. I had a lot of information that needed to be on prints and packages and my job was to convey that information clearly and effectively. The art didn’t matter, only the amount of production mattered.
As an artist, I wasn’t meant to be a machine. When a creative person isn’t able to create bad things happen. Depression can set in pretty quickly when somebody who is meant to create isn’t able to. When I realized this type of design wasn’t for me, I had to change my mindset. It sucks because although artists need to create, we also need money to survive. I used the corporate job to fuel my side job until the side job was enough to become the main source of income. The years having to do both really sucked. I still have to do some visual communication work sometimes to bring in income if I want to spend a lot of time working on personal projects, but having the capability to say yes or no to projects makes all the difference.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.shancon.art
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shanconart/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shanconart
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanconart/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/shanconart
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn1ddAFz72Kpe5isH2Aacpg
Image Credits
Ryan Barragan Photography