When it’s time to make a change in your creative career, how do you figure out what you want to do next? Can you start your own business? What are your deal breakers and dealmakers? Use the principles of design to create a career you love. Teresa Au speaks to Puno, a web designer, content creator, and the founder of online education platform ilovecreatives, for guidance. Puno shares her journey from working on the Call of Duty video game, to taking a “gap year” to explore her creative muse, to building both a design studio and a trade school for digital design. Puno’s practical advice for taking a thoughtful, iterative approach to career building can help you take your next step.

What you’ll hear on this episode:

• Why Teresa loves Puno’s Webby Award Honoree reel “Compressed PDF - Even Cat Can Do It"
• Puno’s marketing degree leads to her first, failed business attempt–which then leads to her first job
• A peek at Puno’s work at Activision on Call of Duty
• What burnout looks like
• The financial aspect of quitting your job before you find a new one
• Why it’s OK not to know what you want to do, and not have a plan
• Analysis paralysis–why thinking is no substitute for doing
• What Puno did on her creative “gap year”
• The importance of skill-building
• Turning your most personal and creative projects into income
• What is a slashie? And how was Benjamin Franklin the first slashie?
• The power of iterative thinking
• Three questions to ask yourself each day
• Puno describes what inspired her to start ilovecreatives, an educational and community platform for digital creatives
• The mistakes people make when quitting a job
• Designing a new career with intention
• How Puno defines success now
• Puno’s one word for 2023

Puno (@punodostres) is the Founder of ilovecreatives (@ilovecreatives), an online trade school where designers, illustrators, and animators can build their skills and find community. She is also Executive Creative Director of ilovecreatives.studio, a boutique design agency. She loves writing and directing funny videos and doing photoshoots with her Persian cat, the Instagram starlet Muad’Dib (Muad'Dib).

Teresa Au (@tautastic) is an executive for community engagement at Adobe. Her career spans diverse creative fields, primarily in New York’s fashion industry, as well as architecture firms, and now Silicon Valley tech companies. She has always prized working with distinctive design and the interesting people behind it–from designer Elie Tahari to start-up CEOs. 

Learn more about this podcast, and find transcripts and links, at adobe.ly/inthemaking. In the Making is brought you by Adobe Express and Adobe Creative Cloud. 

Past episodes of Wireframe can still be found in the show archive within this feed, or online on Behance. 

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