Brent is a United States Marine Corps veteran who, after serving 5 years in the Marines and a deployment to Iraq, decided to change his career, pursue a bachelor’s degree in psychology and become an artist engineer/photographer/videographer/musician/video editor/audio video system designer/social media marketing consultant!

We had an amazing chat about his life, which is more than interesting and full of experiences, and about the creators economy new era, and the changes it brings to creators and the way they communicate with their audience.

He talked about

– how he achieved such a great success in Instagram,

– which social media platform he thinks is the best for creators to use,

– what the power of Tiktok for musicians and videographers is

– how he ended up working on documentaries with Forbes Magazine

and so much more!

It’s a very inspiring and motivating chat, so give it a listen

Available now on Spotify, Apple podcasts and Google.

Follow Brent on IG

==========================

Follow us on IG
Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on Twitter

Also, if you want to listen to more real stories, and get useful tips on how to stay creative and build a successful business, join the Creator Economy Network here

Tokenization, along with other technologies like Blockchain, Smart contracts, NFTs and Crypto will transform creators to own nation states. Their state, their rules.

So far, the power of traditional platforms has been the aggregation of the eyeballs (in other words, the audience) and the algorithmic sharing of them. Creators got onboard in order to gain exposure to large audiences and create a fan base. And so they did.

This came at a cost though. Artists got locked in those platforms not being able to move their followers and fans elsewhere. Their full empire has been built in rented land, and they can get kicked out at any moment. 

The decentralisation of the fan base

That’s where the decentralisation of the fan base will come into play. It will soon be possible for the creator himself to be the aggregator of his fans.

Let me explain.

Today every creator has multiple usernames / handles in multiple platforms. Tik tok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook etc. This is a broken way to have an online presence. Firstly, because it is not owned by you, since every platform can kill your account at any time, and secondly it’s extremely cluttered as an experience for the end user.

A single ID on the chain

What creators need is a single unique identity on the chain that their fan base can follow and that will aggregate everything they do no matter where they do it. Not only will it be platform agnostic – it means that creators will be their own platforms.

That’s why I strongly believe that the next entrepreneurial force will come out of the creators. Using that power the creators will become entities like corporations. They will control and own everything they do and share.

Crypto, NFTs, Blockchain and Smart contracts will kill the middlemen forever, enabling creators talking, selling and providing to their fans directly. But that’s not going to happen right away. It’s a step by step process.

The value will be held by the creators and the infrastructure and services that support them. That’s where we come in.

Giving everyone ownership over the value they create.

The current status quo will adjust. We already see the big platforms trying to create a layer that will accommodate the creators in every way. The Facebooks of the world are releasing tools and services tailor made for creators so they keep them on board for as long as possible. But the real issue here is centralisation. This won’t work unless it’s decentralised.

Web platforms 3.0

Imagine platforms built, operated and owned by the users. This is a true revolution. The tools are here, what we need are the rules and the initial risk takers. The first movers that will create the protocols and set the foundation for everything else.

We can be them.

CopyrightsWorld as a leader

We have set our bet. We are on the side of the creators and I strongly believe this is the right bet for us. Our services have one and only purpose. To best serve the people that create the initial value. The creators. My vision is to evolve into a decentralised platform that will set the foundation and the rules for the next day.

Our team is creative at its core. But we need to engage that ecosystem more, be part of it and live in it. Everyone by himself and all as a team. Otherwise we will soon become irrelevant or late. Because if we want to serve the Creator’s Economy we need to be part of it. We need creators. We need people that live and breathe that reality as part of our team. 

Companies will change, and so do we. Creators need skin in the game, and, I strongly believe, deserve to be part of the process and the decision making. Companies will need to share tokens, equity, and ownership to their communities. Truly creators-first companies must reflect that on their cap tables.

Keep in mind though that business logic and best practices will still apply. Creators will do their part by providing the initial value. We should do the rest. I do not believe they will be the first to create the pipelines and the ecosystem that will support the change. Not yet at least.

With tokens being basically packets of value anyone can own, the distribution of that value can be real, transparent and worldwide. As a result people that are true followers of artists will be able to invest in some way and accumulate part of the value generated, as creators will give a shared stake on their projects.

What do you do? I’m a fan. 

Being a fan can become a full-time job, like being a creator. Exchanging time for money won’t cut it. People need to do things they love, things they are passionate about and be able to live out of them. Fans can be a new type of investor.

And finally, this is now possible.

And we can be there, with you, dear reader, leading the way.

Let’s do this! !

The real purpose is to provide tangible proof of how you add value to the company and contribute to the team, and there are lots of ways of doing that. From showcasing your best work and client testimonials, a portfolio can document your accomplishments in a way that makes new clients want to work with you. Bring all your creativity to the table and create the best online portfolio, to spread the word about your creative business.

Here’s everything you need to know about designing a killer portfolio that sells your services.

Think like the client

A portfolio is not just a showcase of your best work. It highlights your value for the client or the employer. Good, creative images are not enough to convince them to work with you. What you have to aim for, is that the images reflect what the customer wants to see. It’s going to be different depending on the type of people you’re showcasing your portfolio to and your design career.

This means you’ll have to do some brainstorming. Here’s the list of questions you need to ask yourself:

• Does my client have a preferred art style?
• Are there any current trends in the niche I’m applying to?
• Is the design process important to my client?
• Is teamwork important?
• What kind of person would I hire if I was them?

Matching client expectations is the key to getting hired, regardless of the type of job you’re looking for. If your target audience is couples or families for your photography business, your portfolio may contain wedding photos or family photoshoots.

Do you want to get hired by a fashion magazine? Showcasing a behind-the-scenes shoot at an important event may show not only your skill but also the ability to get to the right place. This is probably what your employer would believe to be a plus.

If you’re stuck with figuring out what your potential employers want to see, look up artists they’ve already worked with. Look at a couple of portfolios and try to figure out what key features, except for sheer artistic beauty, may have attracted that employer. Next step is to find what can put your portfolio into action. If you Google for “best website builders” you will find a never ending list. So explore at least two or three website builders and the features they offer, to find what you are exactly looking for.

Find the perfect match for your portfolio

That perfect match is a modern and easy to use website builder.

Creating a website to host your portfolio is a more advanced option than just posting it on Behance or ArtStation. While you can significantly reduce the cost of building one with Pixpa, you still have to pay for hosting and the domain name.

Pixpa’s all-in-one website builder gives you a seamless experience to put your thoughts into action. The platform solves three major challenges for anyone planning to build a website:

1. Get everything you need: Build a strong foundation for your digital presence with a website that never restricts you. Even if you started with just a strategy to build a few pages and later on want to include an e-commerce store too. Switching platforms is an arduous process every time there is a new idea in mind. Pixpa gives you full power to build a complete website with a plethora of customization options.
   
2. No technical expertise required: Creative individuals need not to possess technical expertise to limit them to build a website. Pixpa is all about that – a seamless no-code experience with humane technical support 24X7. This helps new and even regular users to explore the platform entirely without any hesitation.
   
3. A long list of dedicated themes: You might have something in mind while brainstorming about the design of your portfolio website. Pixpa offers a wide range of themes with deep-dive customization options to really make it your own. When it comes to website design, UI/UX comes into the picture which directly affects the attention of the user viewing digital content. Pixpa’s theme catalogue takes care of that – just choose a theme with which you feel most content and get started! 

A website is also harder to find than a Behance portfolio. You can counter that by respecting some basic rules for writing on the web and by improving your SEO skills (e.g., doing guest blogging) to get exposure. If you have a following on social media, there are some relatively easy ways to make the most of your reach (e.g., use freebies, teaser videos, or even paid ads).

Despite some downsides, a portfolio website offers benefits no other media does. You can give the employer a much more interactive way of viewing your portfolio. Showcase different portfolios for different clients. You must test your website on multiple platforms, to make sure it works on mobile devices too! Only looking at the desktop version is a big mistake.

Also, nothing beats the authority you show when linking to your website instead of a Behance page. Take inspiration from these awe-inspiring website portfolios.

Physical copy matters too!

Printing your portfolio to show during the interview may not be the best choice for all design careers. However, if you’re an architect, a product development artist, or a photographer who offers printables, you must consider this option.

Showcase your best work, nothing less

This is a no-brainer, but it doesn’t hurt to remind you about this. Your portfolio should showcase the very best of your works.

And remember to copyright protect the best of your work, and all your work actually, in case someone tries to steal it.

Leave the half-baked projects and sketches for Instagram posts. If you’re showcasing a page or a website to a potential client, it has to present the best you’ve got. What if you don’t have that much art you’re proud of? Create one. Take inspiration from these illustration and mixed media art portfolios and create art that will sell your services. Don’t forget to think about what your clients want to see when doing that.

What if you’re a UI/UX designer with no work worth showing? One way you could handle this is by asking for permission to showcase group projects mentioning the other members of the team. If you want to shine alone, do a redesign of a popular website or an app.

This artist did just that with The Irish Time.

Source: Emil Bagirov/Behance

Here’s where you can find inspiration for a UX redesign:

• Popular websites like Buzzfeed or Bored Panda.
• Social networks like Twitter or Facebook.
• Find a local small business and redesign its websites.
• Browse review platforms like Yelp or TripAdvisor and redesign a part of the website.
• Reimagine popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Telegram with new features.
• Take a look at the best live chat software and redesign both the app and the website.
• Be bold and redesign the employer’s website.

Explain your choices

This tip may not be helpful for design careers that lean towards creative arts, but this is extremely important for product and website designers.

Both the Behance page and the website allow you to comment on your work. Use that opportunity to your advantage and comment on your thought process. This agency shows how they used the concepts of simplicity and purity to redesign a bottle for a bottled water company.

Source: After Brands Consultants/Behance

This agency shows the problem laid before them when redesigning an app and how they arrive at their current result.

Source: NextPage Agency/Behance

What this does for your portfolio is it shows the client or the employer how you approach problems. It also illustrates that you base your design on facts and don’t just create one that looks good even if you’re doing an unofficial redesign. State what you think the app or the website lacks and why you redesigned it the way you did.

So, how do you approach the problem, and what creative steps do you take to solve it. This is how Aaron Porter does it.

Source: Aaron Porter

Another tip you can take from Aaron is showing the iterations your design underwent. 

Source: Aaron Porter

This would show that you can be creative and present a critique of your own work to pursue an ideal design. Instead, you understand what really matters in your design and are focused on solving a problem with it, not just coming up with something that looks nice.

Employers would love this.

Give context

You may think that this tip is only appropriate for product designers. It’s primarily directed at them, but all designers can use it. This designer showcased her poster in a natural setting, a place where it would be displayed. This works so much better than seeing the poster alone.

Source: Malena Ramirez/Behance

Here’s another work of hers. It’s from the same set of artwork for event promotion. It shows an invitation card the way it would look when printed. Again, this comes off as more interesting than seeing this design in Photoshop with bleed, margins, and all.

Source: Malena Ramirez/Behance

Try to do this with your portfolio. If you’re a photographer, show your works hanging on a wall at an exhibition or standing on a work desk in a nice frame. If you’re an illustrator, show your design on a book cover or on an Instagram post. more attractive

Another way to give context to your portfolio is to segment it into categories. Show each part of the portfolio one by one, providing each part a heading.

Source: Nicholas Ødegaard/Behance

If you design a portfolio website with Pixpa, you can go even further. Sort your portfolio by genre or theme, and provide users with navigation. Here’s what a Pixpa website looks like.

Source: Amit Sharma

To show off your artistic side, you can take inspiration from Aaron Porter and do what he did on the website. It’s minimalist and only has two options. When you click on one of them, it cues the video, and you see Aaron coming towards you as new options reveal on the screen.

Head over to his website to check it out.

Take a leap forward

The helping guides, like this blog, will always be there for you to assist if you find yourself stuck somewhere in the process. However, the best way to start building your winning portfolio is to start – NOW!! Take a leap forward, try something new and creative which at the least will make sure you and your creative business are present in the digital world. Creative professionals are obsessed with getting the perfect design, product or service. So, why limit yourself – do aggressive “hits and trials” with theme customizations, website content, content alignment, etc. If you are still confused, build one end-to-end iteration of your portfolio and share it with your peers or relevant audience to get genuine feedback. Learn, unlearn and learn again to see what suits best to your creative personality. 

You had to build your own servers, buy a special fast and super expensive internet connection, maintain and scale the infrastructure and data centres yourself. And all of that, before even thinking about creating a product or even attracting customers in some way.

But during those years all of these hugely expensive and time consuming tasks have been transformed into services that can just be turned on and off and plugged into your own world.

Services like AWS, Salesforce and Hubspot have made the building of a company so much easier that it used to be. And that’s awesome.

Today, if you truly know what you are doing you can assemble a stack of services to support your vision and then concentrate on what matters. Your product, your customers and your strategy.

As I follow the start-up world and the creative world very closely I see some similarities arising.

Creators a few years ago, needed to invest in websites and marketing in order to host their creations and attract eyeballs. Today platforms like Youtube, Instagram and Facebook have made that so much easier for them.

But again, creators did not have the tools to monetise their work. Then Gumroad, Patreon and Fullscreen popped out and tried to solve this problem. And they did, in a big way. Creators can now support their craft by creating and charging for it.

Today there are Youtubers making hundreds of thousands of $ per month and influencers and podcasters making millions per year. A few years ago, this was just fiction.

As a result the number of creators that have become full-time has exploded in the last 2-3 years. It’s a revolution in progress. And the pandemic only accelerated that process.

And that’s something the big distribution companies have now come to realise. They want to get in the game by providing paying solutions and better content hosting services for the creators.

Youtube launched Channel memberships, Twitter Super follows and Facebook Fan subscriptions.  TikTok, Snap, Twitch, Substack, Onlyfans and Clubhouse are doing the same as we speak.

They want to make it easy and more accessible for creators to share content and get paid. And of course they want a piece of that pie.

But we are only scratching the surface here.

There are thousands and thousands of new companies that are created for the creators. Services that can accommodate every creator need and help them become full-time on their craft. This could be the “job” of the future.

NFTs are changing the game once again bringing the value of the “authentic”, “original” and “one of a kind” creation to the online world. A single image was sold for 69M and Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for 2.9M just some weeks ago.

Some info on NFTs: NFTs’ actual ownership is blockchain-managed. They are unique, rare and indivisible digital assets. Non-fungible tokens contain permanent metadata – like a certificate of authenticity for a rare painting. Also, developers have the power to limit the number of rare NFTs, making them scarce and desirable. Finally, NFTs cannot be split into smaller denominations – you can only trade them as a whole.

This is crazy (but is it?) and it’s only going to get more and more interesting.

The new Creator Economy is booming. Only in the USA creators earned a baseline of $6.8 billion just on the nine top platforms in 2017. 

We could be living Renaissance 2.0. This is really big and it’s only going to get bigger as time goes by.

The internet was created by people for the people and now the same people can live out of the internet not by building a business online, but by tunnelling their creativity into it. Like fuel.

The possibilities are endless here. NFTs, VR, AR, Blockchain and many more technologies embrace the dreams of creators and are used to implement service for the creators era.

The era where people’s job will be just to express themselves and share those expressions with the rest of us. 

A beautiful era.