Skillshare

It can write all the resources for you.

It can write the exercises, run your pass test, even build the whole classroom, Udemy, Skillshare type of interface, but it still cannot make you show up, [laughs] okay? So my advice is pick the thing that's been sitting next to your work for years, have it interview you, and then build backwards from what you actually want to be able to do at the end of those six or eight or however many weeks, and then put lesson one on the calendar before you close the tab.

I will talk to you next week.

[upbeat music]

I'm not saying sign up for School of Motion immediately.

But I've bought courses from – People who teach ZBrush from Udemy or Skillshare.

I've gambled my time just being on YouTube.

I have spent so much time outsourcing my knowledge to people who are significantly better than me.

But I quickly learned I'm not going to become an entrepreneur starting business.

So I dropped out of it, started my own business, which was over 10 years ago, which was on Skillshare.com. And there I basically started teaching courses for other people about how to build an audience on Instagram, how to use your smartphone.

to be more productive, how to create a budget with smartphone apps and things like that.

And it was going super, super bad because in the first couple of months, I was only making a dollar or something like that.

I had a mastermind.

We had a group of people and we were all taking it super seriously.

And the cool thing about Skillshare was you've been able to promote products your courses for free to your existing members.

You've been able to send them emails.

The AI-powered brand kit creation tools and platforms like Canva and Loca can take information about your business, your values, your aesthetic preferences, and your target audience, and generate a complete set of brand identity elements, logo options, color palette, typography selections, that are internally consistent and appropriate for your described positioning for small businesses and individual creators who cannot afford professional brand design but who understand that visual consistency matters to how they are perceived these ai generated brand kits provide a working foundation that is significantly more coherent than what most people assemble without design guidance Learning design principles through structured AI instruction is the complement to the tool-based learning that Canva and Adobe Express provide.

Platforms like Coursera, Skillshare, and LinkedIn Learning offer graphic design courses, and the AI tutoring features that have been added to several of these platforms make the instruction more responsive to your specific learning needs than static video courses.

Describing the type of design work you want to do, social media content, presentation design, print materials, brand identity, and your current level of knowledge produces a personalized learning path that addresses the specific principles most relevant to your goals, rather than presenting a comprehensive curriculum regardless of what you need.

the design principles that matter most for social media content are different from those that matter most for print layout and a i curated learning pads account for this specificity the honest thing i want to say is about the specific skill of developing a design i which is not the same as learning to use design tools and which takes longer to develop than tool proficiency the design i the ability to look at a piece of visual communication and perceive what is and is not working with clarity and specificity is developed by looking at a great deal of design with attention and intention not just by producing your own work spending time studying excellent design looking at the work of designers you admire and asking yourself specifically what makes it effective is the practice that builds the evaluative capacity that eventually makes you not just a competent user of design tools, but someone with genuine visual judgment.

I started doing Draw with Carly on Instagram.

I ended up doing a Skillshare class, like with Skillshare that happened during COVID because everyone was home.

And so that was part of-- that was one moment in time.

And I-- when I-- so That was now we're like up to like 2020, and I was living in Los Angeles, but my husband and I got engaged, married during COVID, and then got ha- got pregnant with our first kid and we decided to move closer to family and we moved to Miami.

You do lots of different corporate work in design.

You have your book, which we'll talk about, teaching on the Skillshare platform, one-on-one coaching sessions, and also those beautiful maps that I want to ask you about later too.

First, I'm wondering how you built this very diverse kind of company and practice.

And I can't imagine you put all these pieces together at the same time.

Yeah, it did build over time.

And I think it started just with me being, I mean, it goes back, I mean, where do you begin? But it goes back to, my practice as an illustrator, first and foremost.

And about 10 years ago, I taught a class on Skillshare.

They invited me to try teaching a class, and so I did it.

Yep

... you know, go and, um, uh, you know, go do a night class or whatever, or, or go to YouTube, Thinkific, Skillshare, all these places that teach you, you know, new skills and, and go deep on that.

So you identify which one of those three you want.

Yeah, I think there's o- one thing is kn- know is it PCF, like is it the product, customer, finance, like wha- what's your bias.