Marcus Wendt on why the next creative career is the one you invent yourself

Marcus Wendt, Founder and Chief Creative Officer at FIELD.IO

The next creative career is the one you invent yourself. It’s never been easier to build a brand, a digital product or your own platform, and over the next three years I expect more young creatives to take that opportunity. I’d start with general creative thinking, paired with what you know outside “the design industry”. Being involved in a particular subculture gives you a sense of what people care about and what’s missing. Those interests can be the beginning of something worth making.

There are countless tools to help you turn an idea into a product or service. They aren’t perfect and need creative pushing to get past the “AI slop” accusation, but you can overcome that and build incredible things by patiently iterating. Figuring out what and why to create matters more than becoming perfect at how. You should still be able to explain what you’re making and why anyone would want it without mentioning the software. I wouldn’t get too attached to calling yourself an “AI creative” or an “anti-AI designer”. Choose the tools that help you develop the idea, and trust your own brain, taste and intuition: not everything has to be made with AI, and there are good reasons not to use it.

Doing it yourself also teaches you what it takes to build a product and run a business. You have to understand what clients and audiences want, how to speak to them and how to keep the work going. That includes paying attention to what you depend on. Subscription prices and features can change, so keep ownership of your work and files, and, where it matters, of the tools themselves.

At FIELD, we’re interested in young, general creative minds who can adapt to a wide variety of challenges. Some of our designers and creative leads move across several disciplines, with storytelling, communication and design principles guiding their choice of tools. Our executive creative director builds his own products in his spare time, but that appetite for experimentation is something we value at every stage of a career. We’re interested in what people pursue out of curiosity and how it influences the work we make together. Someone just starting out can bring knowledge of a culture or a way of making that is unfamiliar to the rest of the team. Following an interest seriously can give you something valuable to contribute before you have years of professional experience.