Creative connection

Graphic Designer Tess McCabe talks publishing, networking and creative inspirations.

Words and photography by Tanika Gondhali

Creative Minds Publishing is an apt name for Tess McCabe’s first business, a fact that becomes very apparent by the end of our interview. She can remember pouring over magazines, books and stacks of CDs from the age of 15. Intoxicated by each of their covers, she intuited the storytelling power of graphic design and followed her interests. After studying graphic design in Brisbane, Tess went on to work with John Wiley & Sons, an educational publisher based in the same city. “That was a really fantastic learning ground for under-standing how taking design to print worked, how doing designfor typesetting worked. It spoke to my love of designing for print and information design and how to really communicate concepts that could be tricky in a really visually engaging way.” After a two-and-a-half-year stint at Wiley, she decided to travel around the world a little before settling down. But even then, it was freelance jobs in Australia that sustained most of her travels through Canada and the US. “A friend will have a play they’re putting on or someone wants to start a side business, so you do their logo and so I was always doing bits and pieces like that and building up my folio,” she says. A freelancer’s income is wholly dependent on new and returning clients. But building that initial roster of clients can be challenging for the best of them. For Tess, it was years of experience-driven paid and unpaid projects that helped build this list. “When I was fresh out of uni, projects that I’d done for uni filled most of my portfolio. I was trying to gather as many projects that were real, even if they weren’t paid, where I could demonstrate that here was the client – the client could’ve been a family member or a best friend – and here was the problem and here’s how I solved it. I was just trying to gather as many of those projects and build my portfolio in diverse ways. Building that initial stable of clients really came through word of mouth,” she says. But once you’re a few years out of uni and doing steady work, “What’s next?” is a question on everyone’s mind. A flight back to Australia and a move to Melbourne was in the cards for Tess. In the new city, a variety of interests led her to communities of people with shared interests. “Through those communities in Melbourne, particularly the blogging communities, people who had these diverse making back-grounds were starting to connect together online and starting to come together at in-person events,” says Tess.

“It’s not just the women you always hear about in various industries who are doing extraordinary things but people maybe at the beginning of their career and how they got into it and what their hopes are.”

One of the communities she joined was the Creative Women’s Circle (CWC), a community on which Tess has had a lasting impact and one that has also had an impact on Tess.

“So, I was tasked with creative events; women in creative industries would come and talk about their work. And as you start to see the same people every time, you start to build that community around you,” she says. As we talked about her life and career choices, I realised how different threads in your life can lead you down certain paths and how they can sometimes unexpectedly meet. After a few years of working part-time in Melbourne, Tess decided to freelance full-time and this gave her the time to work onher own projects. “Running events with CWC was very Melbourne-centric. As word of these events got out  beyond Melbourne, I had people from Sydney and Brisbane say, ‘Are there events like this here?’ or, ‘How can we do something similar?’ Having the background in print design and loving book design and always wanting to produce a book for myself, I thought you could quite easily translate an event into a book.” That’s how her first self-published book, Conversations with Creative Women came about. It’s a book of interviews that featured women in different creative industries.

“My aim was getting that kind of diverse range of people’s backgrounds. It’s not just the women you always hear about in various industries who are doing extraordinary things but people maybe at the beginning of their career and how they got into it and what their hopes are.” From this book, Tess’s interest in publishing took shape. “At that time, I had my first son, so I was doing much less client work. I was focusing more on my personal projects. It was something that I could work on in my spare time and it made a little bit of income or paid for itself. I felt the publishing side of things was a really good balance to the client side of things, but I wasn’t relying on it to pay the bills.” She published a second volume of interviews with creative women. But then she saw the need for a very different book Graphic

Design Speak. “I realised that there’s a lot of knowledge that could be useful for creatives doing their own little thing around graphic design and image production or working with graphic designers. I’d written a few blogposts about some basic graphic design things that I thought were helpful for non-graphic designers who work in creative industries and small businesses. I put together a little publication about graphic design stuff called Graphic Design Speak.” What’s special about this book is that it was first published in a digital format in 2013. It was only the year after in 2014 that the print book was released. “That book has gone through a few iterations. I’m currently updating it again. It’s very to the point, very tip-driven; it gives you that understanding about things that you sort of knew about, but not really. I tried to write it in a really easy-to-digest kind of way.” And the experimenting doesn’t stop there…“Because it’s so small, it’s a really good way to test a few different methods of production. First as an ebook, then I did a small digital print run a couple of times and this time I’m going to be experimenting with print-on-demand,” Tess says. But the next project was quite the opposite. A massive undertaking, Tess worked on this book throughout 2013 and 2014. “Owning It came about through a CWC connection, Sharon Givoni. We had done some events for creatives about copyright law. She’s an intellectual property lawyer, specialising in creative industries, and she works with a lot of creative small businesses. I understood from her that there was a lot of misinformation and myths and people just not knowing what they should be doing to protect their creative work. We realised that a lot of this misinformation could be remedied through some kind of resource. The law is extremely complicated and quite diverse and so it took a long time to put together, mainly because we wanted to capture lots of industries that have been forgotten in that conversation about intellectual property protection.” But could a book about the law ever be interesting? “We didn’t want it to be like a really dry, boring textbook. We wanted it to be beautiful and have lots of beautiful imagery and appeal for that audience. A lot of visual examples of people’s work and what they were doing right and how they were taking measures on their own to protect their intellectual property. It’s a lovely record of the creativity that we have in Australia. It’s very Australian focused but touches on how our laws here relate to overseas markets.”

This book also inspired Tess to establish her own publishing company. “That’s when I set up Creative Minds Publishing as an actual business. One of the things I learned through the book was that a proprietary limited company – even though it’s still just me – offers a level of protection that just being a sole trader doesn’t,” she says. While Tess works as a graphic designer and runs Creative Minds Publishing, she also works on other projects as a hobby or an interest. One such project is the The New Normal podcast that Tess hosts with friend Emma Clark. “A podcast about parenting but, at the same time, it is related to the idea of building community and networks in a very authentic way. My co-host, Emma, is a writer and we have great conversations about things. We just really liked the idea of having our own platform to meet people and have interesting conversations.” The New Normal has become a part of Tess’s public identity. While all her projects define her professional identity, passion projects like this really add to it and create a brand.

“The brand will not only help you stand out, but it will find you that community and find people that are interested in what you’re doing. That is what you need to sustain a business

for yourself. In terms of marketing, I don’t do a lot of social media, but I say yes to opportunities so I can meet new people. I like to share my experiences with other people.” With a strong sense of responsibility and the wish to impart knowledge gained from her experiences, Tess had a few words of wisdom before we parted. Words on a topic that, perhaps is the hottest issue among emerging creatives today. “In the graphic design industry, there’s a lot of talk about not working for free, which I definitely believe in. There are people out there who will take advantage of you. But at the same time, the things that you learn, the contacts and the community that you make will have benefits in the long term. There is currency in saying yes to opportunities where there might not be a financial benefit. I’m definitely an advocate for volunteering, putting yourself out there, for just getting involved in projects and communities that you’re really passionate about,” she says.

“For the work experience that I did, I still carry the things that I absorbed being in those spaces and the things that I learnt from observing other people who were more senior or what the founders and bosses of the business do and say. I think if you are going into an internship or some work experience, knowing what you want to get out of it, really observing and absorbing will help you. You might be sweeping the floors, but you could be overhearing a lot of conversations while you’re doing that. “And use it as a class. Go home at the end of the day and take notes, ‘What did I learn? What did I think about that kind of thing? What didn’t I understand that I want to follow up with?’ Because, I think internships, if it’s a good one, they expect you to have that. If you say at the end of the week, ‘I’d really like to sit down with you for an hour and just ask questions.’ The good places will be more than happy to do that kind of thing. And it’s also about going to the panels, going to the talks, going to the events. Even if it’s not in your industry, there will always be something that you pick up on.” T

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