How to Find Your Creative Style: Creativity Tips for Business Owners
Developing Your Own Unique Style in Your Small Business
Whether you’re first starting out in your creative career, or you’ve been in business for a while, finding and developing your own unique style can be a challenge. If you’re an artist or an indie maker, it’s especially difficult when you’re looking at your own work, because often you’re too close to it to be able to see it with fresh eyes. It’s a struggle that lots of creatives face for sure, but why is it important to find your voice in your work? A few reasons are:
It helps make your brand more cohesive, which helps build trust with your customers.
Having a clear visual style makes your business decisions easier, because you have a framework to work within.
Clarity and cohesion helps prevent confusion for potential customers, which is great because confused people don’t buy.
The visuals around your brand should help your dream customers imagine your offering in their life. Having a unique style that speaks to you and to them will help build excitement around your work.
If you’re struggling to see the wood for the trees in your product designs, branding and content on social media, then here are a few tips to help you refine your visual style:
Get in touch with your influences and inspirations
Sometimes we are so worried about being totally 100% original that we forget to feed our brain with inspiration for fear of copying. But actually, drawing on your inspirations and influences is essential for creativity.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman in his documentary The Creative Brain, says that “Creativity doesn’t mean inventing something out of nothing, instead it’s about refashioning something that already exists”. Creativity isn’t just coming from one part of our brain, it’s actually the connections we make between our experiences, our influences and the things that inspire us, which is why our unique blend of influences is so important.
So what’s the difference between drawing on your influences and outright copying? A few ways to get in touch with your inspirations intentionally are:
Drawing from a wide range of references and influences, instead of just one or two.
Looking outside of your business niche for inspiration.
Look for inspiration everywhere, in unexpected places.
Don’t rush it.
True creativity is the unique connection between all of your influences, inspirations and experiences, and that’s what makes it so special. So take some time to get back in touch with what inspires you, and you’ll be surprised at the insights you get.
Practice and create a volume of work
One of the main reasons small business owners get stuck, with their creative content especially, is that they tell themselves they’re not very good at it. Even makers who are by nature very creative beings, often have blocks around certain things and tell themselves things like “I’m rubbish at video” or “I can’t make graphics look good” or “my instagram feed looks a mess”.
When it comes to creativity, there’s a quote by Ira Glass that sums up this feeling perfectly:
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” Ira Glass
So what does this tell us about creativity? Firstly, it’s not just something you’re born with. Yes you can be naturally more creatively minded, but it’s also a muscle that you build, not something that is finite and unchangeable. Secondly, when we’re perfectionists about the visuals in our business, we’re robbing ourselves of that vital ingredient of creativity. We’re not practicing enough.
The key to finding your style can often be as simple as showing up consistently to your craft, and practicing enough so that it naturally develops.
Creative experiments and playfulness
Along with practice and creating a volume of work, something else that helps you arrive at a unique creative style is to experiment and be playful in the way you create. This is often something that gets left out of the process when you start to turn a hobby into a business, but keeping the spirit of experimentation alive is so important for creativity to flourish.
A great way to start finding your style in your work is to set yourself a personal project, that has no outcome except to experiment. Some people like to commit a little bit of time each day or week, or set a list of prompts. Whatever you choose, a personal project can be a great low pressure way to develop your creative work.
For more prompts to help you with this, download my free creativity reset guide!
Get clear on your ideal customers
Obviously one of the most important influences for your creative style should be YOU and all the references, experiences, and passions that make you unique. But once you have a view of that, the next level up to help you develop as a brand is to get really clear on your ideal customer, and learn where your style and their tastes overlap. Some tips for understanding or defining your ideal customer could be:
Speak to your past or current customers, especially those you really enjoyed working with.
Is there anyone you know in real life, such as a friend or family member, that could fit your ideal customer profile? Use them as inspiration!
Look at your work, and the problem it solves or the “want” it fulfils. What type of person would benefit from it?
Is there anyone you follow online (eg. an influencer), who fits the type of person you’d like to attract with your work?
Once you have a better idea of who your dream customer might be, there are a few questions to ask yourself:
What brands do they admire?
Which instagram accounts do they follow?
What are their personal values?
What style of clothes do they wear?
Which magazines do they read?
What does their house look like?
Some of these questions can give you insights on what your dream customer’s visual taste is like, which when combined with your own unique style, is golden information.
Remember, progress over perfection
Finding your style as a creative is a continuous process, and not something you arrive at overnight. It takes patience, practice and persistence to develop a style, so if you’re not there yet then you’re not alone! Treat each experiment and each project as a chance to learn and develop in your creative practice, and as time goes on you will naturally start to see patterns forming. Keep going, and create the work you want to see in the world!
Want more of this sort of content from me? My group training, Be the Art Director of Your Own Brand, is coming up soon! Sign up to the waiting list here to find out when the doors open again.
