![]() At the same time paid ads decreased by an estimated 35%. In 2020, the average American social media user increased their social media usage by 16%, spending their government-imposed time at home looking for connections online. When covid happened, these budgets disappeared overnight, but millions more people took to the platform to kill their spare time. Before the Covid-19 lockdown, marketers were spending big money on “influencers” to promote products that nobody really wanted. ![]() In order for that shift to happen, Instagram had to go through a bit of a metamorphosis, one driven by rising user engagement and evaporating marketing budgets. There are still the pseudo-celebrity “influencers” out there, but they aren’t as prevalent as they once were. Now chefs rub shoulders with craftspeople, fine artists with extreme sports personalities, and the platform is richer for it. While Chiao and Morris have always seemed like the perfect fit to be Instagram success stories (visual creatives producing work that's instantly at home on the platform) the last few years have seen a dramatic rise in the number of users in fields that aren't inherently visual using its storytelling capabilities in new and exciting ways. When her day job "started going south" at the end of 2021, she was able to seamlessly leap from one career into the next, "because I had this art career that I'd accidentally built with galleries that had picked me up and big clients coming my way." Because of this, I was able to put out a steady stream of good work." I could turn down bad projects because I didn’t need the money, and I was able to draw whatever I wanted because it didn’t matter. "It allowed me to only do the art I wanted to do on the side. "I was happy as an industrial designer." But putting out work in this way gave her the freedom to explore her artistic practice without the pressure of making a living from it. "I never wanted to do art full-time," she says. ![]() At the time she was working as an industrial designer for IDEO by day and tinkering with her art on evenings and weekends. But I'm a very private person," she says, "and don't love sharing my day-to-day, so I ended up just posting art."įelicia’s regular posts of foul-mouthed birds, intricate architectural drawings and anxious androgynous characters led to her amassing about 60,000 followers almost by accident. Unlike Morris, fine artist Felicia Chiao had been a devotee of Tumblr before switching to Instagram in 2015, initially "just to keep up socially. "It was just so much more visually attractive than anything else available to me, and it felt like I could finally connect with people on the same wavelength." Now she has over 35,000 followers who reliably snap up her original work and boost her profile, which in turn feeds into a regular stream of freelance commissions. "I've been on Instagram for well over six years now," she says. Like me, she'd been told that a portfolio site was a must, but it wasn't until she started sharing her work on instagram that her freelance career really started to take off. Rosanna Morris graduated from an illustration degree at University of the Arts a year after I did, and over the next few years built up a portfolio of stunning linocut illustrations for a varied list of socially conscious clients. Later, when instagram blossomed from a place to share digitally degraded holiday snaps into something more akin to the platform it is today, it quickly became clear that people making visual work for a living could use it much more successfully than Tumblr to promote themselves and build real communities around their work and interests.īut the landscape is more complex now than it was then, and Instagram is a much more commercial platform than it was a decade ago, which means the way that creators and brands are using it has changed. By the time I'd started freelancing, Tumblr was already a hotbed of strange visual subcultures and amazing creative talent, and this more social and reciprocal way of discovering and sharing creative work superseded the portfolio site for good-here’s my eight-year-old website if you need proof that a website ain’t all that. ![]() But it only took a couple of years for that advice to become redundant. When I left university back in 2011, the tutors on my illustration degree were all insistent that I'd need a portfolio site to make any kind of career for myself. ![]()
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