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+  "text": " Hi, in this bonus lesson we'll be digging into techniques for presenting your work to the world. In today's time, I think it's especially important to put your work out there and maintain an active presence on social media. It's something that has worked well for me and has helped me build a name for myself in this industry. I've gained quite a few clients through my Instagram presence, and you can too. I definitely say this is more important for freelancers, but it can also apply to you if you're an artist on staff somewhere, or if you're working at a different company, that doesn't have anything to do with the motion design industry. Maybe you wanna get a job at a new studio, or you wanna get promoted at your current job. Putting your work out there helps to solidify your abilities to fresh eyes and colleagues alike. What you present to the world becomes your creative voice, and your voice matters. Before building a website or starting a new social media account, Try to carefully think about what work you want to be doing. If I want to be an illustrator who draws cute characters on the day to day, I'm going to put cute character projects on my website, right? It seems simple. And it should be. What you put out onto the World Wide Web is how people will define you, whether you like it or not. When I was fresh out of college, I didn't have a huge portfolio, so I put literally everything that I had ever created on my website. Even things I wasn't too proud of. I was trying to prove my abilities to the world, but people picked up on stuff that I didn't expect. A few companies even thought I was more of a cinematographer because I had stop motion on my website. They didn't think that I was a motion graphics artist or an illustrator. So over time, I slowly learned that I should really begin to curate my stuff online, so as to only present the voice that I wanted to present to the world. Your creative voice is essentially the brand that you show the world. Your voice is basically like your own creative brand. Although I wouldn't go so as far to say as you need to like completely create a logo for yourself and do all of the stuff that you would for an actual brand because I don't want you to stress too much about it. But just think about your creative voice is how you collaborate with your audience. That encapsulates your website and encapsulates your social media. It encapsulates the way you talk to your clients. All of that is your creative voice. It includes your style as well, but when we're talking about presenting your work, that's basically what it concerns. So even if you're not 100% sure what your voice is and you're not ready to define it, Just make sure that you're not putting work on your site that you don't want to be doing professionally. You'd probably hate getting cornered into animation when you're more inclined to illustration or vice versa. Kind of want to show you an example of that. There's this handy website called the Way Back Machine and you can type in a URL and it'll show you snapshots of that website from different years. Some of them work well, some of them don't, some of the fonts are off and stuff, but as you can see, here's my website from 2016. I couldn't even go back to my college website because it just like wasn't working properly. But here's one from when I was working at Gentleman Scholar. And as you can see, like the layout isn't too different from what I have today, but everything was a bit more square, a bit compact. All of the edges were touching. So everything was feeling very clustered and chaotic, in my opinion. And also if you scroll down, you see I have more things like branding and I have some stop motion. And I even incorporate some type in here. There was a lot more type in this one. I was still working on my illustration style. I was still improving, so it's totally fine. And I'm still happy with this website when I look back on it. But even my type on the top left, everything just kind of doesn't feel like me when I'm looking back on it now. And I can totally see how someone would have looked at my website and immediately thought, type designer or stop motion animator, we'll get a bit more into actually creating a website later on and what's good and what's not for that. but this kind of just shows you a different voice than I have now. If we jump ahead to 2017, I revamped my website a little bit, so I kept the same layout, but I tried to change my logo to something more clean because I wanted to appear a bit more professional, but it's still kind of like squiggly and a little too ornate for me. But you can see I started adding more illustration. I actually put most of my stop motion stuff at the bottom so it wasn't completely visible. But now, if you look at my website, it's a lot bigger, it scales with the window, so it's more intuitive, and everything's a bit more clean and separated. I created these custom thumbnails, and then I also got rid of all of the stop motion stuff, so I basically only have illustration and animation work on my website right now, which is exactly what I wanna be portraying to the world. And then if you look from there on my Instagram, you kind of go back and forth, You can kind of see some consistency in color, consistency in the way I'm talking and the way that I'm sharing my work. I'm showing process everywhere. And on my website, I've intentionally gone in and tried to show a bit of process as well. So that's just kind of part of my creative voice. I wouldn't say I have anything that's, you know, out of the ordinary. I just have like a simpler logo than I used to and I try to keep everything very clean and have everything labeled properly. One thing I noticed my old stuff is I didn't even label these so nobody actually knew what they were clicking on. So that's something else we can get into later on in this bonus lesson, but I kind of figured out what I wanted to do. And this will evolve with you as you grow, so no worries if it's exactly what you want right now. I also want to show you an example of an artist who I really admire who has an amazing creative voice. Her work is very consistent. So you know, that adds to the fact that she has a very cohesive voice on the internet. But her website is very bold, and she's got this big type everywhere. So that's kind of like her own brand. I can see that she does that with her work as well. We kind of look everywhere at what she's got posted in here. She's got lots of bright, fun colors. And then you can just tell she's a very like playful person. And if you look at her about page, hi, it's your buddy Meg. And she's got this like fun cursor and everything. There's a lot more to her brand than just her work. And then if you look at her Instagram, still feels very consistent, but she's got a lot more like silly things on here, which I love about her. She posts dancing videos all the time. She posts fun quotes to kind of amp everyone up and keep everyone happy. She's a very happy personality. She's got these fun bold patterns. She even has photos of her house in here and her products that she sells online. You can see here that even though she's doing illustration, she's doing cartography, she's teaching classes, she's creating artwork and creating her own home space, she's super consistent. And if I see something somewhere that's from her, I almost instantly know it's her, especially by the way that she talks about everything. So even just like silly stuff like this, just little tidbits on her website make me think of her immediately. She's also got this really fun online course called Full Time You, and I think I might have mentioned this already in this course, but it's really consistent with her brand as well. So when I look at it, even if I didn't see a photo of her, I would know that it was made by her. So great example of a creative voice. You don't need to go crazy with it, just kind of define what you want it to be. So for me, it's I'm an illustrator. I enjoy working with fun colors, characters and bold shapes. And I like to keep everything really professional and clean. And I think that all kind of comes through in my website and through my Instagram. So hopefully that's coming across to people who come to my pages. And your voice is something that you can start trying to implement in your own social media and websites moving forward. [?]. After you've defined your voice, you can begin compiling your work into a website or portfolio. Building a new website is actually one of my favorite things to do. You guys already know that I love organizing and putting things together, so this is a really good place to let yourself shine. You can make it as simple or as fun as you want, but most importantly, just try not to distract too much from your work. Don't go overboard with a pattern background that clashes with your projects. You want your projects and your illustrations to shine the most out of anything else on your website. Here I'll go over a few portfolio sites that you can use and some key elements that you should definitely include. So your website and your portfolio is a big one. I could create a whole long lesson on this, especially about how to create your own website and everything, but really here, I just kind of want to show you what your options are. I think a lot of you may already know these options, but it doesn't hurt to go over them. I also want to point out three main things that you should do every time that you're creating website, things to look out for when you're making sure that your websites are client ready. So in general, your website is a huge marketing asset for you as a person. Obviously there's social media, which we'll get into, but especially clients that are more corporate or want to see professional work are going to look at your website and they're going to judge your work and you're about page and your contact info, they're going to judge all of that off of your website. First of all, you could use Behance. Behance is basically a portfolio site where you have your contact info on the left and then you've got all of your projects on the right. The other thing about this is it's more like a social media network because you can favorite people's stuff. People can interact on there and follow you. Obviously there's appreciations and project views and followers on here. So it's more in the social media category, but it's much more efficient as a portfolio website than any other social media network. So clearly you can go into a project and you can see frames, you can write what you want in here. I actually don't have a B-Hance so I'm not exactly sure how you can set it up but I know it can be really custom. And then as you can see people can comment on it, etc. But you can have your own banner at the top so it does feel custom. But in my opinion, if I was going to send my portfolio website to a client, I would rather send them my own website rather than a B-Hance page. just preference, but I personally find that a personal website is a bit more professional. And as I said, I pretty much have only ever used Squarespace, especially in the most recent years. So I don't know too much about these websites, but I know they exist. We've got WordPress, so it seems pretty easy. All of these are really template-based. They can look really professional. They all have kind of like different price plans, so you can kind of to choose what you want. Most of them are around $8 to $10 a month. So it's not too bad, especially if you don't have a billion projects you want to put on your website. Some of them have commerce, so you can sell your work on your website if you want as well. So this is kind of one option of what a WordPress website could look like. There's a lot of flexibility with it. And honestly, when I look at websites, I can't tell which website builder they used. I can't tell if they're custom, if they're created with WordPress or something. So WordPress or Squarespace or any of that, they all kind of feel similar. It just really depends on you. One that feels a little bit different is Cargo. A Cargo website is one I actually had when I was in college and it was nice because they had a free version. I only had to pay for the URL and not the actual subscription plan. I'm not sure if that's the case anymore, but they're a lot more customizable. It's easy to go in and adjust the HTML if you're into that. If you like coding websites, this might be the one for you because you can make them a lot more custom. You can tell that all these kind of have images sporadically spread throughout the page. They're a bit more unique looking. They're less basic portfolio website looking websites. You can of course create that if you want, but you'll have a lot more flexibility here. But my issue with my cargo website was that Anytime I wanted to update the look and feel of it, it was a little bit harder because I had to actually go in and adjust that HTML. I'm sure they've made it a bit easier now. It was just a little bit more complicated and less user friendly. There's also Wix, which is one I had a long time ago when it was a Flash-based website and it's no longer that. It's a lot more professional feeling now. It can feel like a Squarespace website. It can feel like a custom website. So this is a great option as well. And then to my favorite, we've got Squarespace. So I'm just gonna use Squarespace as an example because I know the most about it, but most of these websites have templates and they're really great because they're usually split up based on the content of your website. So for us, we'd probably go to portfolios and then you can probably recognize this Avenue page from my own. I've customized mine a little bit but my original website was using this Avenue page. The other great thing about this is you can preview them. So they'll actually take you to a working version of the website and you can click on stuff. And then if you actually start with that design, it'll come with all this content preloaded in it and you can adjust it to your liking. So say I wanted to start with York. You can have multiple web pages under the same account. So this is just using my regular login, but it just comes preloaded in here, which is great. And you can go to the project page and it already has the stuff in here. Kind of gives you an idea of how you could potentially set your own up, which is super nice and makes everything look instantly professional. And once you're in the website builder like this, you can go to pages and that's how you can adjust all of your pages. You can look at the settings for each page. It gives you the page description. You can choose the URL slug. You can add SEO features. You can change the image here. It's really, really simple. It looks like a lot of information at once, but it's not really too bad. You can also change the menu items at the top. So right down here, there's a secondary navigation and you can adjust that as well. So if I wanted to change that to say like, hello or about me instead of about, I could easily do that. You can connect your social media accounts. And then if you actually wanna start changing the design, you can go into the design section. So this will be more like the visual and you can go to site styles. And this is where you actually would change like what font you want and how much space you want between things. And the great thing about Squarespace that I love, and this could potentially be on other website builders as well, but you have the options on the side here. So I could go in and change those and read what all of them are. Or you can click on what you want to adjust. So if I click on this title, it actually has all this here for me. So I can change the font by just clicking on that section. And I can change the size. It's super flexible and easy to work with. It's really easy to upload new projects. It's just honestly my favorite thing and they've improved it a lot over the years. So it's great. And if you are on your website, it's kind of got this thing where you just go to your website and press escape and then that will take you into the website builder. And so you can see, got all these pages here. I also have a lot of stuff that I've turned off. As you can see, I used to have a tab up here on the right where my secondary navigation was, and I had a whole motion tab. I used to actually have animation on my website because I wanted to get some animation work as a staff employee, but now I know that I don't really want that anymore, so I turned it off, and that's kind of part of my creative voice. I also have pages that are still live, so if someone wants to look at them, I can send them the page, but they're not linked anywhere on my website, so nobody can actually find it by going to my website. I'd have to give them the URL. So yeah, that's Squarespace in a nutshell, and I really love it. So I'd highly recommend using it. It's really easy to create something that's very clean and beautiful and professional. Now, there's just three things that I really want to point out as you're creating websites. And this is for presenting your work to clients. So just having your web presence, I think these three things are really important. So number one is just to clearly communicate and label things all over your website. So that means your work page or however you want to say it, you could write a portfolio, you could even have a section that says illustration, and then you could have another section that said motion depending on what you want to put on your website. You can have those two different sections. You can also have an info tab like I have, which has my contact information, has like a weird photo of me, it has some press information as well, a little bio about me. And this page is extremely important. You wanna be super, super obvious, especially if you're a freelancer. It has to be super obvious how to contact you. So that's why I kind of have my contact information in such a giant, bold frame here. And especially it's clickable, so it's easy to contact me. I used to not even have my email on my website. I had like a contact form, and some people don't like that. So especially now that I'm a freelancer, I like to make it super obvious and clear. I also like to say exactly, Hey, this is my name, this is what I do. I think that is also very key. And then keeping it kind of concise is also really great because you don't wanna overwhelm them with all this information about you. They're probably not gonna read it all. You can also have a little extra tab with your process or your sketches almost. Like for me, I have this tidbit section which is basically things I have on Instagram that I didn't wanna put on my main page. I also have a shop. So yeah, number one is just clearly label everything. Number two is kind of a subset of what I just said, but clearly label your projects. So since I have mentioned that I am an illustrator on my page, I've just named these projects, but I know some people like to say, illustration, Serenity, animation project, Adobe, like they like to label what it is. And I actually ran into this when I was in college. I sent my portfolio website out to a bunch of companies and Serofsky actually got back to me and they're like, why didn't you write what each of your projects was on your main page. Like I didn't have even these titles here. I just had pictures and that's because I liked showing them but it made more sense to have a little bit more information there. So clearly communicate your project type. And then three is just don't overload the viewer with content. Like I have a lot of stuff on here but everything's super clean. I put things at the top that I want people to look at and I put the things that I'm less excited about on the bottom. And then I just try not to put too much crazy variety in here because I don't want people to get confused. I don't want them to be overwhelmed. I want them to have a very clear picture of what I do. There are websites I've been to that have like a hundred projects on them. And while that's really cool to go through all of them, I could see a client being a little bit put off by that and not sure what this artist does or not be able to spend the time even to look through all their stuff. So just try not to overload. So those are really the three things. Clearly label all the parts of your website. Two, clearly label your actual projects. And even within those projects, kind of like talk about what each project is instead of just dropping your image in there. That's part of it as well. And then three, just don't overload the viewer with content. Keep it clean if you can. I also wanted to show you a couple examples of different websites. So first one I'll start with is Buck because I actually love their website. They're super consistent. I always know what to expect when I go to their website because they always have the animation at the top and then they have credits and a little bit of information about it. And then they have style frames. And they have other things like look development. So these are frames before it actually got turned into animation and concept art. So there's all these extra pieces in here with so much process, even some behind the scenes stuff, which is amazing. And almost every single one of their projects is like that. They really take the time to go through and add all this extra stuff. So that's why I love their website because if I'm looking for inspiration, I can almost guarantee you that Buck will have a character lineup or something in their concept art from the project. And then I wanted to show you a couple websites that I'm pretty sure are Squarespace. So here's my friend's website, and I know this is Squarespace just because of the way it's set up. I love her website because she's pretty consistent with her colors, it's very clean, and then she has a description for everything. I know exactly what her project is for each of the illustrations, so I can kind of read a little bit about it, but it's not too overwhelming, so that's a fun one. I'm not sure if Colin Bigelow's website is Squarespace, but I know there's a website template that's really similar on there. And I love his website because he's so versatile and he kind of just shows all of the elements of every project, which is super nice and just very clean and concise. His contact page is very clear. Just there it is, his name, his website, his phone number. So that's a great one. And then I also wanted to show you a couple custom websites. I'm pretty sure these are custom. I know Reese's because I talked to him about it, but he's got that little loading thing. and then his website is clearly different than a lot of other ones I've been to. It's a lot more custom and playful. I love the branding and thought he put into everything. I love how every time you go over one of the projects, he's got this little loading animation, which I don't know if you'd even be able to do that on Squarespace. So just these nice little extra touches that he's added into everything makes it feel very much like a creative voice. And I like Jay Koirish's website as well. He's got all of his project images isolated as characters or at least an object from each piece, which is really fun. It really stands out and makes his work look different. So yeah, those are just some websites that I think are really successful. And I really hope that you can take a little bit of what I've taught you here and apply that to your own website in the future. Ah, the magical world of social media. This can be a tough one, but also extremely rewarding. Today it feels like everything has to do with social media. I constantly am even uploading work to my Instagram before I even think about uploading it to my website. It can definitely be a challenge, but using social media platforms to get your work noticed is definitely extremely effective. If you use the proper channels and interact often, people will be much more likely to find your work out there than on your own website. Think of social media as a stepping stone for people to make their way to your website. It'll help your content reach far, far corners of the world that you never even thought you'd be able to reach. There are hundreds of places you could share your work out there through different apps, forums and websites. But the most prominent ones are Instagram, Twitter, Dribble, LinkedIn, and a couple other platforms I'll briefly discuss. Social media is great because it provides you with ample opportunity to connect with your peers and colleagues, opening doors in a more social and friendly manner, rather than a formal message to your email address. And in addition to people reaching out to you, you can reach out to others. You can reach out to artists you admire and maybe even gain a mentor. Each of these platforms allows you to drive traffic to your website as well, which is key since that's where all of your process and client-friendly projects will be. The main thing to keep in mind across all platforms is stay genuine. Use your creative voice to be honest and open with your audience. Don't create a fake creative voice just to show yourself to the world as something you're not. Trust me, being genuine will be greatly appreciated by other users. Instagram is my main social media platform, but it doesn't have to be your main social media platform. I just find it to be the most effective platform for visual creativity. And now that there's the carousel feature, like we see here, you can put multiple images or videos in one post. It's really easy to show process, which people love. Since I primarily use my Instagram to show off my work, I have both a private personal account and a professional one. My professional account here, Wonderful, is what gets the most visibility. It's also the account I remain the most active with. I personally would suggest that if you're going to push your illustration work, it's beneficial to keep your personal account separate. That mainly includes personal photos and opinions on things that aren't about your work. But what I actually did was I took my personal account and turned it into my professional account. Since I already had people following me, it was a lot easier. You can also still share a ton of personal stuff on your Instagram account through Instagram stories. So I've got a lot of information about my life in here and just silly things that happen throughout my day. I share almost all just my work on this visual grid right here. It's really aesthetically pleasing to me to just have a nice grid of colorful illustrations that people can scroll through rather than having photos mixed in. It's personal preference, but I think it has helped me gain a following. It's really up to you. I slowly phased out my photos over time when I was figuring out my own creative voice, and it's really worked to my advantage. So really use that creative voice here to curate your brand story, which will drive clients and colleagues to your website. What I've learned from using Instagram is definitely just stay consistent and post often. If you don't have anything quality to post, don't post, but keep your followers engaged by posting Instagram stories in the meantime. And make sure that all of the work you're posting is quality and that you're posting it with quality captions as well. And what I mean by quality content and quality captions is that what you're saying does mean something to people. Not only is that your creative voice, but you're revealing the concept behind your work or being transparent about your process or struggles and others will relate to that. So here I kind of talked a bit about my imposter syndrome and how it inspired me to create this illustration. And then I also went through and showed my reference photo and I showed some process. So this is a really good example of what you can do when you're sharing your work on Instagram. I already mentioned this, but fill in the gaps with your stories. Instagram stories will let you show off your personality. You can be silly with your followers. really like a peek into your life and you can show as much or as little as you want to. This is where you'll most likely make the most human connections, which is really intriguing to a lot of people. That's personally why I follow a lot of people. I love their work, but I also think they're funny or they have something really compelling to say. And a note on hashtags. A lot of people get noticed through hashtags and I think they can be very effective. I personally was really stubborn when I first started and I thought they looked ugly so I didn't use any. The way I got my following was through a ton of hard, consistent work over the course of five years. I'll just go down and kind of show you where all of this started. If you go really far back in my work, you can really see where I started to add more illustration in. And I had a lot of personal photos in here as well. It's a really broad range and mix of things. But throughout the whole process, I was really stubborn and I didn't use those hashtags. I really just had to put in a ton of hard consistent work over the course of these five years. At first I followed artists I admired and made sure to consistently like and comment on their work. I also reached out to new artists and commented a lot on their stuff and just made sure to like people's work and interact a bunch. There was also a point when I was first starting where I tried to post something every single day. And now since I've already built my account up, I don't really have to post as much, maybe two to three times a week. So I think the key thing is mainly just remaining consistent with your activity and being extremely patient. It took me five years to get where I am and my original intention was not to gain a following, per se. It was more to share my work with the world and look at other people's work. I think that genuine interest in interacting is more important than just wanting to have a bigger number in your profile. And we also have Twitter. Twitter is more of a social network for voicing your opinions on life, the industry news, etc., and even retweeting other people's opinions. It's wonderful because it connects you with an extensive community and opens doors for communication and discussion about current industry happenings. Besides motionographer, this is where I learn a lot about what the industry has to offer at the moment. So it's less about sharing your work and more about chatting with others. It's also great because a lot of people who have tons of followers on Instagram may only only have a few followers on Twitter, so that's an easier way to get their attention or chat with them because they're receiving less notifications on this platform. Standing out on Twitter is much easier in my opinion, especially when it comes to interacting with people you admire. And when I say standing out, I don't mean getting a bunch of followers, I mean just having direct interactions with people. So Twitter can be wonderful, but it can also be really telling if you are someone who likes to voice controversial opinions. Your work on Instagram could say one thing, but when a client comes to your Twitter, they I could see a whole other side of you. This is usually fine, but sometimes it can be off-putting to a client. So just be careful about what you post here because someone is bound to find it, especially if it's linked back to your other pages. [\"The Last Song of the Year\"] And here's Dribble. Dribble is an invite-only social media platform for designers to share work and their work in progress. You can only get invited if another user drafts you in, which means it's a bit more exclusive. I have a dribble that I haven't touched in years. You can see my last post was from August, 2017. So I'm a little late there. I haven't really played with it at all. I felt like I was honestly posting all the same stuff on my Instagram just with a different format. So a dribble isn't square like Instagram. It's a little bit more rectangular. So I just kind of had to reformat everything. It was a little bit of extra work. And I had more followers on Instagram. So I didn't think it was worth it to keep this up for me. It just caused a little bit of stress to keep posting all the same stuff everywhere all of the time. But the more visibility you have on different platforms, the more people will see your work. I don't think it hurts to share the same work everywhere because it will reach different audiences. I just personally didn't pursue this one in particular. And here's my feed. Dribble is unique in that users are more open to giving feedback than with other platforms where people typically just say great work. There's a lot of that here, but you can get a great critique if you ask for it. I actually don't know too much about it, but I know that companies will often look at Dribble to hire and there's a job board on this website. Overall, I would say it's less effective for motion design than for product, UI, UX, and graphic designers. There's a huge community for that here, but less for animation. Obviously, I follow a lot of illustrators and animators, so that's what's on my feed. But if I just look on the popular page, it's a lot of websites and UI, UX design, which isn't as interesting to me and also means that their community is bigger and they're probably not gonna be looking as much as illustration as other UX stuff. So it doesn't benefit me as much. I think it's great to have visibility, but personally I don't use Drabble a lot. It's still an awesome platform, so if you use it, that's amazing. But I think that there's more opportunity elsewhere. I often laugh when I think of LinkedIn as a social media network. I hardly touch it except for when I need to update my current employment information, But the truth of the matter is, people still look at LinkedIn to see where you've worked in the past. It's essentially the modern replacement of a paper resume since most people don't hand those out anymore. There's a lot less personal interaction, but I know for a fact that producers still use it to browse contacts and potential freelancers. I know a lot of clients will use it, so this is also a good place to link back to your website and present your work that way. I've also actually gotten quite a few job inquiries from LinkedIn, especially after I went freelance. People can back up your skills, which is nice for clients to see. Like here, these endorsements. And you can also get recommendations from top notch talent. I don't actually have any of those personal recommendations, but we can look at someone who does. So here I'm looking at TJ Kearney, who is a producer. I used to work with at OddVelves. He used to be EP and now he works at Work & Co. But he's got tons of recommendations and these are like personal notes written from people from different companies that enjoyed working with him. and have great things to say about him. So this is a great place as well to get those achievements put out there into the world. I would say set up a LinkedIn, make a few connections. I wouldn't say go over the top and spend multiple minutes a day working on your LinkedIn, but I think it's definitely handy to have and you should have it to show the world what you've worked on and what projects and companies you've worked with in the past. It seems less and less people are using Facebook these days. My grandma and dad probably use it more than me. And younger generations tend not to even have a Facebook account. So while School of Motion and other larger companies have Facebook pages for their work and company, I don't think it's necessary for you as a motion designer necessarily. You don't need to have a business account for your page unless you get a lot of your traffic through Facebook. I have a personal account, but I only use it for personal things. It definitely won't hurt you to have a business account set up or a fan page or something, but you'll get way more views and interactions on a platform like Instagram or Twitter, in my opinion. But honestly, I just live in the US and that's my skewed knowledge of Facebook. It could be popular in other places. So just really the key thing about social media is using what works for you and what community you want to interact with. Medium is a blogging platform where you can create professional looking articles. People from all different fields use medium. I personally never used it, but I think it can be a great tool and will expose you to different audiences. You can write think pieces or you can create practical blogs that outline ways to improve your work or share tips for drawing, et cetera. There's a lot of articles on here that actually help me when I'm looking into things about my creativity or even some resources for learning a bit more about drawing. There's tutorials on here, there's in-depth case studies, there's a lot of cool stuff on here. I personally don't really use it much, but I think a lot of people have success with it. You could even use Medium to showcase your work in an in-depth case study on a project and send that out to potential clients to keep them up to date on your recent projects. Pinterest is technically a social network, but I don't really use it that way. You can actually upload your own work for people to pin as well, which I also don't do very often, but I think it's a great way to get your work out there. The one thing I like about it is if I'm sick of looking at my own boards or my own feed, I can look up a friend's name, a friend who has creative taste that I trust and I can browse their boards. Then I can pin their favorites to my boards as well. And it's a great tool for creating mood boards to share with clients because you can make them private and then you can also make them accessible for other people to look through. They can also add pins themselves depending on how you adjust the settings. So I have like probably, I have probably like 50 private boards on here because I just use them for everything. If you looked at my boards from a public account or someone else's account, you wouldn't see all those private boards, but I just have so many, even just stuff for my house. It's really useful, but I wouldn't say it's gonna work like Twitter or Instagram. It's not gonna be a direct reflection of your work. more about your creative taste and your creative voice. Now, Patreon is a bit different because it's a website that allows your followers to help support you monthly by providing actual funds. It can be really cool and successful, but in order to get a good amount of monthly funds to support your projects, you have to remain really active and potentially even create tutorials and free content like brush packs monthly. So basically someone's becoming a member of your own community and helping you keep that community alive by paying you a little bit. I think Magnus Magnuson is a great one. He's got a lot of patrons. He has people who are paying him certain amounts per month and he gives them different amounts of content based on what tier they're in. So he's kind of creating blog posts. He's creating little tutorials. He's creating pre-made brushes and pre-made AE files that you can work with. So obviously a lot of this is locked and you have to be a member of his community to look at it. But there are a couple of free things you can see on here. I honestly have never tried it, so I'm not even sure what it's like being a Patreon person and having your own community. But to me, it seems like you'd have to advertise it a bunch to drive users to your page. And then after that, you'd have to put in a lot of time and effort to keep them there. Since I'm a simple gal and I like to make most of my social stuff on one platform, it's unappealing to me personally, but it may be super beneficial to you, especially if you like teaching people and having people be a part of your community, it might be worth it for you. These thoughts are my own, shared from my own personal experiences with social media. This is really just the tip of the iceberg though. You could potentially create a social media content strategy, setting up a calendar to plan when you're going to post certain things. You can even create draft posts on certain platforms to save them and post them later. So you can prep your stuff in advance. You could also efficiently plan 30 minutes out of every day to seek out new content and connect with other users to make sure you're getting a good amount of work in there with your social media accounts. There's a lot of great helpful information out there on how to build a following and how to define your creative voice, which you should seek out for more technical aspects if you need that. All in all, there's just about a billion ways that you can present your work to the world. It can even be a little overwhelming at times. But what's most important is just making that little bit of effort and putting your work out there. your work, sell some prints, reach out to other artists that you admire. Join an online community and join a group of colleagues for support. Really, the opportunities are endless here because almost everyone is on the internet and social media these days. Hence, why this is one of the best ways to present your work to the world, where it's the most visible. Well, that's all for this bonus lesson. See you next time!",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " Hi, in this bonus lesson we'll be digging into techniques for presenting your work to the world. In today's time, I think it's especially important to put your work out there and maintain an active presence on social media. It's something that has worked well for me and has helped me build a name for myself in this industry. I've gained quite a few clients through my Instagram presence, and you can too. I definitely say this is more important for freelancers, but it can also apply to you if you're an artist on staff somewhere, or if you're working at a different company, that doesn't have anything to do with the motion design industry. Maybe you wanna get a job at a new studio, or you wanna get promoted at your current job. Putting your work out there helps to solidify your abilities to fresh eyes and colleagues alike. What you present to the world becomes your creative voice, and your voice matters. Before building a website or starting a new social media account, Try to carefully think about what work you want to be doing. If I want to be an illustrator who draws cute characters on the day to day, I'm going to put cute character projects on my website, right? It seems simple. And it should be. What you put out onto the World Wide Web is how people will define you, whether you like it or not. When I was fresh out of college, I didn't have a huge portfolio, so I put literally everything that I had ever created on my website. Even things I wasn't too proud of. I was trying to prove my abilities to the world, but people picked up on stuff that I didn't expect. A few companies even thought I was more of a cinematographer because I had stop motion on my website. They didn't think that I was a motion graphics artist or an illustrator. So over time, I slowly learned that I should really begin to curate my stuff online, so as to only present the voice that I wanted to present to the world. Your creative voice is essentially the brand that you show the world. Your voice is basically like your own creative brand. Although I wouldn't go so as far to say as you need to like completely create a logo for yourself and do all of the stuff that you would for an actual brand because I don't want you to stress too much about it. But just think about your creative voice is how you collaborate with your audience. That encapsulates your website and encapsulates your social media. It encapsulates the way you talk to your clients. All of that is your creative voice. It includes your style as well, but when we're talking about presenting your work, that's basically what it concerns. So even if you're not 100% sure what your voice is and you're not ready to define it, Just make sure that you're not putting work on your site that you don't want to be doing professionally. You'd probably hate getting cornered into animation when you're more inclined to illustration or vice versa. Kind of want to show you an example of that. There's this handy website called the Way Back Machine and you can type in a URL and it'll show you snapshots of that website from different years. Some of them work well, some of them don't, some of the fonts are off and stuff, but as you can see, here's my website from 2016. I couldn't even go back to my college website because it just like wasn't working properly. But here's one from when I was working at Gentleman Scholar. And as you can see, like the layout isn't too different from what I have today, but everything was a bit more square, a bit compact. All of the edges were touching. So everything was feeling very clustered and chaotic, in my opinion. And also if you scroll down, you see I have more things like branding and I have some stop motion. And I even incorporate some type in here. There was a lot more type in this one. I was still working on my illustration style. I was still improving, so it's totally fine. And I'm still happy with this website when I look back on it. But even my type on the top left, everything just kind of doesn't feel like me when I'm looking back on it now. And I can totally see how someone would have looked at my website and immediately thought, type designer or stop motion animator, we'll get a bit more into actually creating a website later on and what's good and what's not for that. but this kind of just shows you a different voice than I have now. If we jump ahead to 2017, I revamped my website a little bit, so I kept the same layout, but I tried to change my logo to something more clean because I wanted to appear a bit more professional, but it's still kind of like squiggly and a little too ornate for me. But you can see I started adding more illustration. I actually put most of my stop motion stuff at the bottom so it wasn't completely visible. But now, if you look at my website, it's a lot bigger, it scales with the window, so it's more intuitive, and everything's a bit more clean and separated. I created these custom thumbnails, and then I also got rid of all of the stop motion stuff, so I basically only have illustration and animation work on my website right now, which is exactly what I wanna be portraying to the world. And then if you look from there on my Instagram, you kind of go back and forth, You can kind of see some consistency in color, consistency in the way I'm talking and the way that I'm sharing my work. I'm showing process everywhere. And on my website, I've intentionally gone in and tried to show a bit of process as well. So that's just kind of part of my creative voice. I wouldn't say I have anything that's, you know, out of the ordinary. I just have like a simpler logo than I used to and I try to keep everything very clean and have everything labeled properly. One thing I noticed my old stuff is I didn't even label these so nobody actually knew what they were clicking on. So that's something else we can get into later on in this bonus lesson, but I kind of figured out what I wanted to do. And this will evolve with you as you grow, so no worries if it's exactly what you want right now. I also want to show you an example of an artist who I really admire who has an amazing creative voice. Her work is very consistent. So you know, that adds to the fact that she has a very cohesive voice on the internet. But her website is very bold, and she's got this big type everywhere. So that's kind of like her own brand. I can see that she does that with her work as well. We kind of look everywhere at what she's got posted in here. She's got lots of bright, fun colors. And then you can just tell she's a very like playful person. And if you look at her about page, hi, it's your buddy Meg. And she's got this like fun cursor and everything. There's a lot more to her brand than just her work. And then if you look at her Instagram, still feels very consistent, but she's got a lot more like silly things on here, which I love about her. She posts dancing videos all the time. She posts fun quotes to kind of amp everyone up and keep everyone happy. She's a very happy personality. She's got these fun bold patterns. She even has photos of her house in here and her products that she sells online. You can see here that even though she's doing illustration, she's doing cartography, she's teaching classes, she's creating artwork and creating her own home space, she's super consistent. And if I see something somewhere that's from her, I almost instantly know it's her, especially by the way that she talks about everything. So even just like silly stuff like this, just little tidbits on her website make me think of her immediately. She's also got this really fun online course called Full Time You, and I think I might have mentioned this already in this course, but it's really consistent with her brand as well. So when I look at it, even if I didn't see a photo of her, I would know that it was made by her. So great example of a creative voice. You don't need to go crazy with it, just kind of define what you want it to be. So for me, it's I'm an illustrator. I enjoy working with fun colors, characters and bold shapes. And I like to keep everything really professional and clean. And I think that all kind of comes through in my website and through my Instagram. So hopefully that's coming across to people who come to my pages. And your voice is something that you can start trying to implement in your own social media and websites moving forward. [?]. After you've defined your voice, you can begin compiling your work into a website or portfolio. Building a new website is actually one of my favorite things to do. You guys already know that I love organizing and putting things together, so this is a really good place to let yourself shine. You can make it as simple or as fun as you want, but most importantly, just try not to distract too much from your work. Don't go overboard with a pattern background that clashes with your projects. You want your projects and your illustrations to shine the most out of anything else on your website. Here I'll go over a few portfolio sites that you can use and some key elements that you should definitely include. So your website and your portfolio is a big one. I could create a whole long lesson on this, especially about how to create your own website and everything, but really here, I just kind of want to show you what your options are. I think a lot of you may already know these options, but it doesn't hurt to go over them. I also want to point out three main things that you should do every time that you're creating website, things to look out for when you're making sure that your websites are client ready. So in general, your website is a huge marketing asset for you as a person. Obviously there's social media, which we'll get into, but especially clients that are more corporate or want to see professional work are going to look at your website and they're going to judge your work and you're about page and your contact info, they're going to judge all of that off of your website. First of all, you could use Behance. Behance is basically a portfolio site where you have your contact info on the left and then you've got all of your projects on the right. The other thing about this is it's more like a social media network because you can favorite people's stuff. People can interact on there and follow you. Obviously there's appreciations and project views and followers on here. So it's more in the social media category, but it's much more efficient as a portfolio website than any other social media network. So clearly you can go into a project and you can see frames, you can write what you want in here. I actually don't have a B-Hance so I'm not exactly sure how you can set it up but I know it can be really custom. And then as you can see people can comment on it, etc. But you can have your own banner at the top so it does feel custom. But in my opinion, if I was going to send my portfolio website to a client, I would rather send them my own website rather than a B-Hance page. just preference, but I personally find that a personal website is a bit more professional. And as I said, I pretty much have only ever used Squarespace, especially in the most recent years. So I don't know too much about these websites, but I know they exist. We've got WordPress, so it seems pretty easy. All of these are really template-based. They can look really professional. They all have kind of like different price plans, so you can kind of to choose what you want. Most of them are around $8 to $10 a month. So it's not too bad, especially if you don't have a billion projects you want to put on your website. Some of them have commerce, so you can sell your work on your website if you want as well. So this is kind of one option of what a WordPress website could look like. There's a lot of flexibility with it. And honestly, when I look at websites, I can't tell which website builder they used. I can't tell if they're custom, if they're created with WordPress or something. So WordPress or Squarespace or any of that, they all kind of feel similar. It just really depends on you. One that feels a little bit different is Cargo. A Cargo website is one I actually had when I was in college and it was nice because they had a free version. I only had to pay for the URL and not the actual subscription plan. I'm not sure if that's the case anymore, but they're a lot more customizable. It's easy to go in and adjust the HTML if you're into that. If you like coding websites, this might be the one for you because you can make them a lot more custom. You can tell that all these kind of have images sporadically spread throughout the page. They're a bit more unique looking. They're less basic portfolio website looking websites. You can of course create that if you want, but you'll have a lot more flexibility here. But my issue with my cargo website was that Anytime I wanted to update the look and feel of it, it was a little bit harder because I had to actually go in and adjust that HTML. I'm sure they've made it a bit easier now. It was just a little bit more complicated and less user friendly. There's also Wix, which is one I had a long time ago when it was a Flash-based website and it's no longer that. It's a lot more professional feeling now. It can feel like a Squarespace website. It can feel like a custom website. So this is a great option as well. And then to my favorite, we've got Squarespace. So I'm just gonna use Squarespace as an example because I know the most about it, but most of these websites have templates and they're really great because they're usually split up based on the content of your website. So for us, we'd probably go to portfolios and then you can probably recognize this Avenue page from my own. I've customized mine a little bit but my original website was using this Avenue page. The other great thing about this is you can preview them. So they'll actually take you to a working version of the website and you can click on stuff. And then if you actually start with that design, it'll come with all this content preloaded in it and you can adjust it to your liking. So say I wanted to start with York. You can have multiple web pages under the same account. So this is just using my regular login, but it just comes preloaded in here, which is great. And you can go to the project page and it already has the stuff in here. Kind of gives you an idea of how you could potentially set your own up, which is super nice and makes everything look instantly professional. And once you're in the website builder like this, you can go to pages and that's how you can adjust all of your pages. You can look at the settings for each page. It gives you the page description. You can choose the URL slug. You can add SEO features. You can change the image here. It's really, really simple. It looks like a lot of information at once, but it's not really too bad. You can also change the menu items at the top. So right down here, there's a secondary navigation and you can adjust that as well. So if I wanted to change that to say like, hello or about me instead of about, I could easily do that. You can connect your social media accounts. And then if you actually wanna start changing the design, you can go into the design section. So this will be more like the visual and you can go to site styles. And this is where you actually would change like what font you want and how much space you want between things. And the great thing about Squarespace that I love, and this could potentially be on other website builders as well, but you have the options on the side here. So I could go in and change those and read what all of them are. Or you can click on what you want to adjust. So if I click on this title, it actually has all this here for me. So I can change the font by just clicking on that section. And I can change the size. It's super flexible and easy to work with. It's really easy to upload new projects. It's just honestly my favorite thing and they've improved it a lot over the years. So it's great. And if you are on your website, it's kind of got this thing where you just go to your website and press escape and then that will take you into the website builder. And so you can see, got all these pages here. I also have a lot of stuff that I've turned off. As you can see, I used to have a tab up here on the right where my secondary navigation was, and I had a whole motion tab. I used to actually have animation on my website because I wanted to get some animation work as a staff employee, but now I know that I don't really want that anymore, so I turned it off, and that's kind of part of my creative voice. I also have pages that are still live, so if someone wants to look at them, I can send them the page, but they're not linked anywhere on my website, so nobody can actually find it by going to my website. I'd have to give them the URL. So yeah, that's Squarespace in a nutshell, and I really love it. So I'd highly recommend using it. It's really easy to create something that's very clean and beautiful and professional. Now, there's just three things that I really want to point out as you're creating websites. And this is for presenting your work to clients. So just having your web presence, I think these three things are really important. So number one is just to clearly communicate and label things all over your website. So that means your work page or however you want to say it, you could write a portfolio, you could even have a section that says illustration, and then you could have another section that said motion depending on what you want to put on your website. You can have those two different sections. You can also have an info tab like I have, which has my contact information, has like a weird photo of me, it has some press information as well, a little bio about me. And this page is extremely important. You wanna be super, super obvious, especially if you're a freelancer. It has to be super obvious how to contact you. So that's why I kind of have my contact information in such a giant, bold frame here. And especially it's clickable, so it's easy to contact me. I used to not even have my email on my website. I had like a contact form, and some people don't like that. So especially now that I'm a freelancer, I like to make it super obvious and clear. I also like to say exactly, Hey, this is my name, this is what I do. I think that is also very key. And then keeping it kind of concise is also really great because you don't wanna overwhelm them with all this information about you. They're probably not gonna read it all. You can also have a little extra tab with your process or your sketches almost. Like for me, I have this tidbit section which is basically things I have on Instagram that I didn't wanna put on my main page. I also have a shop. So yeah, number one is just clearly label everything. Number two is kind of a subset of what I just said, but clearly label your projects. So since I have mentioned that I am an illustrator on my page, I've just named these projects, but I know some people like to say, illustration, Serenity, animation project, Adobe, like they like to label what it is. And I actually ran into this when I was in college. I sent my portfolio website out to a bunch of companies and Serofsky actually got back to me and they're like, why didn't you write what each of your projects was on your main page. Like I didn't have even these titles here. I just had pictures and that's because I liked showing them but it made more sense to have a little bit more information there. So clearly communicate your project type. And then three is just don't overload the viewer with content. Like I have a lot of stuff on here but everything's super clean. I put things at the top that I want people to look at and I put the things that I'm less excited about on the bottom. And then I just try not to put too much crazy variety in here because I don't want people to get confused. I don't want them to be overwhelmed. I want them to have a very clear picture of what I do. There are websites I've been to that have like a hundred projects on them. And while that's really cool to go through all of them, I could see a client being a little bit put off by that and not sure what this artist does or not be able to spend the time even to look through all their stuff. So just try not to overload. So those are really the three things. Clearly label all the parts of your website. Two, clearly label your actual projects. And even within those projects, kind of like talk about what each project is instead of just dropping your image in there. That's part of it as well. And then three, just don't overload the viewer with content. Keep it clean if you can. I also wanted to show you a couple examples of different websites. So first one I'll start with is Buck because I actually love their website. They're super consistent. I always know what to expect when I go to their website because they always have the animation at the top and then they have credits and a little bit of information about it. And then they have style frames. And they have other things like look development. So these are frames before it actually got turned into animation and concept art. So there's all these extra pieces in here with so much process, even some behind the scenes stuff, which is amazing. And almost every single one of their projects is like that. They really take the time to go through and add all this extra stuff. So that's why I love their website because if I'm looking for inspiration, I can almost guarantee you that Buck will have a character lineup or something in their concept art from the project. And then I wanted to show you a couple websites that I'm pretty sure are Squarespace. So here's my friend's website, and I know this is Squarespace just because of the way it's set up. I love her website because she's pretty consistent with her colors, it's very clean, and then she has a description for everything. I know exactly what her project is for each of the illustrations, so I can kind of read a little bit about it, but it's not too overwhelming, so that's a fun one. I'm not sure if Colin Bigelow's website is Squarespace, but I know there's a website template that's really similar on there. And I love his website because he's so versatile and he kind of just shows all of the elements of every project, which is super nice and just very clean and concise. His contact page is very clear. Just there it is, his name, his website, his phone number. So that's a great one. And then I also wanted to show you a couple custom websites. I'm pretty sure these are custom. I know Reese's because I talked to him about it, but he's got that little loading thing. and then his website is clearly different than a lot of other ones I've been to. It's a lot more custom and playful. I love the branding and thought he put into everything. I love how every time you go over one of the projects, he's got this little loading animation, which I don't know if you'd even be able to do that on Squarespace. So just these nice little extra touches that he's added into everything makes it feel very much like a creative voice. And I like Jay Koirish's website as well. He's got all of his project images isolated as characters or at least an object from each piece, which is really fun. It really stands out and makes his work look different. So yeah, those are just some websites that I think are really successful. And I really hope that you can take a little bit of what I've taught you here and apply that to your own website in the future. Ah, the magical world of social media. This can be a tough one, but also extremely rewarding. Today it feels like everything has to do with social media. I constantly am even uploading work to my Instagram before I even think about uploading it to my website. It can definitely be a challenge, but using social media platforms to get your work noticed is definitely extremely effective. If you use the proper channels and interact often, people will be much more likely to find your work out there than on your own website. Think of social media as a stepping stone for people to make their way to your website. It'll help your content reach far, far corners of the world that you never even thought you'd be able to reach. There are hundreds of places you could share your work out there through different apps, forums and websites. But the most prominent ones are Instagram, Twitter, Dribble, LinkedIn, and a couple other platforms I'll briefly discuss. Social media is great because it provides you with ample opportunity to connect with your peers and colleagues, opening doors in a more social and friendly manner, rather than a formal message to your email address. And in addition to people reaching out to you, you can reach out to others. You can reach out to artists you admire and maybe even gain a mentor. Each of these platforms allows you to drive traffic to your website as well, which is key since that's where all of your process and client-friendly projects will be. The main thing to keep in mind across all platforms is stay genuine. Use your creative voice to be honest and open with your audience. Don't create a fake creative voice just to show yourself to the world as something you're not. Trust me, being genuine will be greatly appreciated by other users. Instagram is my main social media platform, but it doesn't have to be your main social media platform. I just find it to be the most effective platform for visual creativity. And now that there's the carousel feature, like we see here, you can put multiple images or videos in one post. It's really easy to show process, which people love. Since I primarily use my Instagram to show off my work, I have both a private personal account and a professional one. My professional account here, Wonderful, is what gets the most visibility. It's also the account I remain the most active with. I personally would suggest that if you're going to push your illustration work, it's beneficial to keep your personal account separate. That mainly includes personal photos and opinions on things that aren't about your work. But what I actually did was I took my personal account and turned it into my professional account. Since I already had people following me, it was a lot easier. You can also still share a ton of personal stuff on your Instagram account through Instagram stories. So I've got a lot of information about my life in here and just silly things that happen throughout my day. I share almost all just my work on this visual grid right here. It's really aesthetically pleasing to me to just have a nice grid of colorful illustrations that people can scroll through rather than having photos mixed in. It's personal preference, but I think it has helped me gain a following. It's really up to you. I slowly phased out my photos over time when I was figuring out my own creative voice, and it's really worked to my advantage. So really use that creative voice here to curate your brand story, which will drive clients and colleagues to your website. What I've learned from using Instagram is definitely just stay consistent and post often. If you don't have anything quality to post, don't post, but keep your followers engaged by posting Instagram stories in the meantime. And make sure that all of the work you're posting is quality and that you're posting it with quality captions as well. And what I mean by quality content and quality captions is that what you're saying does mean something to people. Not only is that your creative voice, but you're revealing the concept behind your work or being transparent about your process or struggles and others will relate to that. So here I kind of talked a bit about my imposter syndrome and how it inspired me to create this illustration. And then I also went through and showed my reference photo and I showed some process. So this is a really good example of what you can do when you're sharing your work on Instagram. I already mentioned this, but fill in the gaps with your stories. Instagram stories will let you show off your personality. You can be silly with your followers. really like a peek into your life and you can show as much or as little as you want to. This is where you'll most likely make the most human connections, which is really intriguing to a lot of people. That's personally why I follow a lot of people. I love their work, but I also think they're funny or they have something really compelling to say. And a note on hashtags. A lot of people get noticed through hashtags and I think they can be very effective. I personally was really stubborn when I first started and I thought they looked ugly so I didn't use any. The way I got my following was through a ton of hard, consistent work over the course of five years. I'll just go down and kind of show you where all of this started. If you go really far back in my work, you can really see where I started to add more illustration in. And I had a lot of personal photos in here as well. It's a really broad range and mix of things. But throughout the whole process, I was really stubborn and I didn't use those hashtags. I really just had to put in a ton of hard consistent work over the course of these five years. At first I followed artists I admired and made sure to consistently like and comment on their work. I also reached out to new artists and commented a lot on their stuff and just made sure to like people's work and interact a bunch. There was also a point when I was first starting where I tried to post something every single day. And now since I've already built my account up, I don't really have to post as much, maybe two to three times a week. So I think the key thing is mainly just remaining consistent with your activity and being extremely patient. It took me five years to get where I am and my original intention was not to gain a following, per se. It was more to share my work with the world and look at other people's work. I think that genuine interest in interacting is more important than just wanting to have a bigger number in your profile. And we also have Twitter. Twitter is more of a social network for voicing your opinions on life, the industry news, etc., and even retweeting other people's opinions. It's wonderful because it connects you with an extensive community and opens doors for communication and discussion about current industry happenings. Besides motionographer, this is where I learn a lot about what the industry has to offer at the moment. So it's less about sharing your work and more about chatting with others. It's also great because a lot of people who have tons of followers on Instagram may only only have a few followers on Twitter, so that's an easier way to get their attention or chat with them because they're receiving less notifications on this platform. Standing out on Twitter is much easier in my opinion, especially when it comes to interacting with people you admire. And when I say standing out, I don't mean getting a bunch of followers, I mean just having direct interactions with people. So Twitter can be wonderful, but it can also be really telling if you are someone who likes to voice controversial opinions. Your work on Instagram could say one thing, but when a client comes to your Twitter, they I could see a whole other side of you. This is usually fine, but sometimes it can be off-putting to a client. So just be careful about what you post here because someone is bound to find it, especially if it's linked back to your other pages. [\"The Last Song of the Year\"] And here's Dribble. Dribble is an invite-only social media platform for designers to share work and their work in progress. You can only get invited if another user drafts you in, which means it's a bit more exclusive. I have a dribble that I haven't touched in years. You can see my last post was from August, 2017. So I'm a little late there. I haven't really played with it at all. I felt like I was honestly posting all the same stuff on my Instagram just with a different format. So a dribble isn't square like Instagram. It's a little bit more rectangular. So I just kind of had to reformat everything. It was a little bit of extra work. And I had more followers on Instagram. So I didn't think it was worth it to keep this up for me. It just caused a little bit of stress to keep posting all the same stuff everywhere all of the time. But the more visibility you have on different platforms, the more people will see your work. I don't think it hurts to share the same work everywhere because it will reach different audiences. I just personally didn't pursue this one in particular. And here's my feed. Dribble is unique in that users are more open to giving feedback than with other platforms where people typically just say great work. There's a lot of that here, but you can get a great critique if you ask for it. I actually don't know too much about it, but I know that companies will often look at Dribble to hire and there's a job board on this website. Overall, I would say it's less effective for motion design than for product, UI, UX, and graphic designers. There's a huge community for that here, but less for animation. Obviously, I follow a lot of illustrators and animators, so that's what's on my feed. But if I just look on the popular page, it's a lot of websites and UI, UX design, which isn't as interesting to me and also means that their community is bigger and they're probably not gonna be looking as much as illustration as other UX stuff. So it doesn't benefit me as much. I think it's great to have visibility, but personally I don't use Drabble a lot. It's still an awesome platform, so if you use it, that's amazing. But I think that there's more opportunity elsewhere. I often laugh when I think of LinkedIn as a social media network. I hardly touch it except for when I need to update my current employment information, But the truth of the matter is, people still look at LinkedIn to see where you've worked in the past. It's essentially the modern replacement of a paper resume since most people don't hand those out anymore. There's a lot less personal interaction, but I know for a fact that producers still use it to browse contacts and potential freelancers. I know a lot of clients will use it, so this is also a good place to link back to your website and present your work that way. I've also actually gotten quite a few job inquiries from LinkedIn, especially after I went freelance. People can back up your skills, which is nice for clients to see. Like here, these endorsements. And you can also get recommendations from top notch talent. I don't actually have any of those personal recommendations, but we can look at someone who does. So here I'm looking at TJ Kearney, who is a producer. I used to work with at OddVelves. He used to be EP and now he works at Work & Co. But he's got tons of recommendations and these are like personal notes written from people from different companies that enjoyed working with him. and have great things to say about him. So this is a great place as well to get those achievements put out there into the world. I would say set up a LinkedIn, make a few connections. I wouldn't say go over the top and spend multiple minutes a day working on your LinkedIn, but I think it's definitely handy to have and you should have it to show the world what you've worked on and what projects and companies you've worked with in the past. It seems less and less people are using Facebook these days. My grandma and dad probably use it more than me. And younger generations tend not to even have a Facebook account. So while School of Motion and other larger companies have Facebook pages for their work and company, I don't think it's necessary for you as a motion designer necessarily. You don't need to have a business account for your page unless you get a lot of your traffic through Facebook. I have a personal account, but I only use it for personal things. It definitely won't hurt you to have a business account set up or a fan page or something, but you'll get way more views and interactions on a platform like Instagram or Twitter, in my opinion. But honestly, I just live in the US and that's my skewed knowledge of Facebook. It could be popular in other places. So just really the key thing about social media is using what works for you and what community you want to interact with. Medium is a blogging platform where you can create professional looking articles. People from all different fields use medium. I personally never used it, but I think it can be a great tool and will expose you to different audiences. You can write think pieces or you can create practical blogs that outline ways to improve your work or share tips for drawing, et cetera. There's a lot of articles on here that actually help me when I'm looking into things about my creativity or even some resources for learning a bit more about drawing. There's tutorials on here, there's in-depth case studies, there's a lot of cool stuff on here. I personally don't really use it much, but I think a lot of people have success with it. You could even use Medium to showcase your work in an in-depth case study on a project and send that out to potential clients to keep them up to date on your recent projects. Pinterest is technically a social network, but I don't really use it that way. You can actually upload your own work for people to pin as well, which I also don't do very often, but I think it's a great way to get your work out there. The one thing I like about it is if I'm sick of looking at my own boards or my own feed, I can look up a friend's name, a friend who has creative taste that I trust and I can browse their boards. Then I can pin their favorites to my boards as well. And it's a great tool for creating mood boards to share with clients because you can make them private and then you can also make them accessible for other people to look through. They can also add pins themselves depending on how you adjust the settings. So I have like probably, I have probably like 50 private boards on here because I just use them for everything. If you looked at my boards from a public account or someone else's account, you wouldn't see all those private boards, but I just have so many, even just stuff for my house. It's really useful, but I wouldn't say it's gonna work like Twitter or Instagram. It's not gonna be a direct reflection of your work. more about your creative taste and your creative voice. Now, Patreon is a bit different because it's a website that allows your followers to help support you monthly by providing actual funds. It can be really cool and successful, but in order to get a good amount of monthly funds to support your projects, you have to remain really active and potentially even create tutorials and free content like brush packs monthly. So basically someone's becoming a member of your own community and helping you keep that community alive by paying you a little bit. I think Magnus Magnuson is a great one. He's got a lot of patrons. He has people who are paying him certain amounts per month and he gives them different amounts of content based on what tier they're in. So he's kind of creating blog posts. He's creating little tutorials. He's creating pre-made brushes and pre-made AE files that you can work with. So obviously a lot of this is locked and you have to be a member of his community to look at it. But there are a couple of free things you can see on here. I honestly have never tried it, so I'm not even sure what it's like being a Patreon person and having your own community. But to me, it seems like you'd have to advertise it a bunch to drive users to your page. And then after that, you'd have to put in a lot of time and effort to keep them there. Since I'm a simple gal and I like to make most of my social stuff on one platform, it's unappealing to me personally, but it may be super beneficial to you, especially if you like teaching people and having people be a part of your community, it might be worth it for you. These thoughts are my own, shared from my own personal experiences with social media. This is really just the tip of the iceberg though. You could potentially create a social media content strategy, setting up a calendar to plan when you're going to post certain things. You can even create draft posts on certain platforms to save them and post them later. So you can prep your stuff in advance. You could also efficiently plan 30 minutes out of every day to seek out new content and connect with other users to make sure you're getting a good amount of work in there with your social media accounts. There's a lot of great helpful information out there on how to build a following and how to define your creative voice, which you should seek out for more technical aspects if you need that. All in all, there's just about a billion ways that you can present your work to the world. It can even be a little overwhelming at times. But what's most important is just making that little bit of effort and putting your work out there. your work, sell some prints, reach out to other artists that you admire. Join an online community and join a group of colleagues for support. Really, the opportunities are endless here because almost everyone is on the internet and social media these days. Hence, why this is one of the best ways to present your work to the world, where it's the most visible. Well, that's all for this bonus lesson. See you next time!"
+    }
+  ]
+}