Creative Slash

Most creatives have heard the advice a hundred times. Pick a lane. Niche down. Be known for one thing.
But what happens when the thing you're known for is just you? Doodles one day, glossy dimensional lettering the next, hot pink whenever the brief allows it, and a pencil hair clip you designed because you wanted one to exist.
In this episode, we talk with Jess Goldsmith, the Brooklyn-raised lettering artist and illustrator behind Chick of All Trade and the founder of Women of Type. On the surface, it's a conversation about clients, pricing, and portfolios. Underneath, it's about deciding how you want to work, then holding the line, whether that means walking away from a Super Bowl job or asking a client to tell you the budget.
It's part pricing masterclass, part cheese debate, and part Bob Lazar rabbit hole we didn't plan to fall into.
In this episode, we talk about:
Why your portfolio works like a menu and how showing work you hated doing is the fastest way to get hired for more of it.
Walking away from a Super Bowl job, including the five-figure project Jess turned down, and what she did with the idea afterward.
Why she tells friends exactly what she got paid especially after a friend landed a job she'd quoted at $10K and did it for $2,000.
"You are the niche" and why the worst advice Jess and her friends ever got was to niche down, even when your many styles start to look like one person.
Business cards nobody throws away from pretzel snack bags to a spinning-wheel-of-death plush with an NFC chip in its hand to a crayon-box matchbook for Adobe MAX.
Whether you're still building a portfolio or you've been freelancing for twenty years, this one reminds you that the work you choose to show, and the jobs you choose to turn down, shape the career you end up with. Also, the cottage cheese has to be four percent. Jess was very clear about that.
ABOUT THE CREATIVE
Jess Goldsmith is a Brooklyn-raised, NYC-based illustrator, lettering artist, and creative entrepreneur who works under the name Chick of All Trade. Her work is color-drenched, often pink, and moves freely between styles. She's a Webby Award winner, an Adobe ambassador, and an Adobe MAX speaker.
She's also the founder of Women of Type, a community that uplifts and amplifies women and nonbinary type and lettering artists, and the creator of the self-published Women of Type book, featuring work from around 130 artists worldwide.
Her newest project, Soft Skool, is a six-week program that helps creatives build the soft skills that turn talent into a paying career. It's open to everyone, and the next cohort is planned for January.
Website
https://www.chickofalltrade.com
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/chickofalltrade
Women of Type
https://womenoftype.com
Women of Type on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/womenoftype
Soft Skool on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/softskool
Join the Creative Slash Newsletter and Get the 5-Part “Off the Record” email series FREE
Click here to get the five-part “Off the Record” email series
Note: If you're looking for hard-earned advice, resources from top creatives, and the products they can't live without, you're going to love this.
Brad Woodard
Brad is an illustrator and designer behind Brave the Woods, a full-service studio working with clients like PBS Kids, Ford, Target, and USPS. His bold, playful style and heart-led storytelling shine through everything from brand campaigns to children’s books.
View Brave the Woods
Dustin Lee
Dustin is the founder of RetroSupply, a shop for retro-inspired brushes, textures, and digital tools used by tens of thousands of creatives from indie artists to major studios. He shares what it’s really like to run a creative business while keeping it small, weird, and intentional.
View RetroSupply
Credits
Audio/video editing: Clara Wright
Cover art: Brad Woodard
Intro animation: Seth Austin
Intro music: “Snakes and Fire” (Instrumental) by Pär Hagström

Illustration is supposed to be a solo sport. One person, one style, one desk.
So how does a studio at the bottom of Africa keep a whole team of illustrators working under one name for fifteen years without the egos getting in the way?
In this episode, we talk with Clinton Campbell, co-founder and creative director of MUTI in Cape Town, South Africa. Clint tells us how MUTI grew out of a streetwear label he started with his brother, and why the early internet mattered so much when your clients are half a world away. Underneath it is a story about building a creative business that actually works, both financially and as a place talented people want to stay.
Part studio tour, part cooking show, and part three people trying to talk over a very long internet delay (don't worry, we edited the delays out).
In this episode, we talk about:
How a streetwear label became MUTI and what those early years taught him about making creative work that also pays the bills.
The rule that kept plants, toys, and photos off every desk at MUTI until a talented new illustrator brought in his wedding photo and the floodgates opened.
Redesigning Scattergories, including the “just have fun” pitch he was surprised the client picked, and why so many classic brands keep getting redrawn.
Why in-person conferences feel like the antidote to a design internet that has gotten more competitive, more critical, and more anxious about AI.
The chef's presses a friend carried over from the States plus Christmas cards that arrive in July and Churchill, the internet-famous studio cat.
Whether you run a studio, want to start one, or just like hearing how good creative places actually work, this one reminds us that the best teams run on trust, not rules. Even the rule about plants.
ABOUT THE CREATIVE
Clinton Campbell is an illustrator, creative director, and co-founder of MUTI, a creative studio in Cape Town, South Africa. He grew up in Durban, studied graphic design in Stellenbosch, and started MUTI in 2011 with Miné Day. Brad Hodgskiss joined as the third founding partner in 2013.
The studio's illustrators and designers make everything from lettering and icons to digital painting and animation. Their clients include Google, Nike, Apple, Airbnb, Uber, TIME, and National Geographic. When he isn't drawing, Clint is probably cooking. He cooks at home, and his favorite kitchen gear includes a set of chef's presses and some made-in-the-USA baking trays.
Website
https://studiomuti.co.za
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/studiomuti
Join the Creative Slash Newsletter and Get the 5-Part “Off the Record” email series FREE
Click here to get the five-part “Off the Record” email series
Note: If you're looking for hard-earned advice, resources from top creatives, and the products they can't live without, you're going to love this.
Brad Woodard
Brad is an illustrator and designer behind Brave the Woods, a full-service studio working with clients like PBS Kids, Ford, Target, and USPS. His bold, playful style and heart-led storytelling shine through everything from brand campaigns to children’s books.
View Brave the Woods
Dustin Lee
Dustin is the founder of RetroSupply, a shop for retro-inspired brushes, textures, and digital tools used by tens of thousands of creatives from indie artists to major studios. He shares what it’s really like to run a creative business while keeping it small, weird, and intentional.
View RetroSupply
Credits
Audio/video editing: Clara Wright
Cover art: Brad Woodard
Intro animation: Seth Austin
Intro music: “Snakes and Fire” (Instrumental) by Pär Hagström

The dream we were all sold was going out on your own. Your own clients, your own hours, your name on the door.
But what if freedom looks different once you've lived that dream for a while?
In this episode, we talk with designer and CROP founder Matt Dawson about his first-ever CROP Field Trip to Cleveland, his guitars and records, and a band that sounds like Weezer and the Pixies had a baby. 
Underneath it is a bigger story. After seven years of running his own thing, Matt realized his priorities had changed. He wanted more time with his family, evenings that actually ended, and room to get excited about design again. 
He began to see that freedom can mean a lot of things. Sometimes it's your name on the door. Sometimes it's a steady in-house job, a team that logs off at five, and the choice to say yes only to the work you actually want.
It is part gear talk, part record-store hang, and part permission slip to stop curating yourself.
In this episode, we talk about:
Choosing a day job on purpose after seven years on his own, and why real freedom turned out to be saying yes only to the work he actually wants.
Letting go of the logo-only feed and how posting records and guitars has led to better conversations with clients.
Taking a group of designers on a field trip to Cleveland including a behind-the-scenes tour with the Guardians creative team and what to do with 10,000 bobbleheads that came back not quite right.
A Kurt Cobain Jaguar he hopes to be buried with plus Dustin's Strat versus Silver Sky showdown and why Fender picked now to defend the Strat shape.
A mystery question from Jason Craig that ends with a hotel door, an orange, and a running text thread between two friends.
Whether you're freelancing, in-house, or quietly wondering if your priorities have shifted, this one is a reminder that careers don't run in a straight line. As Matt puts it, you can't lay your career on tracing paper over somebody else's and expect it to match up.
ABOUT THE CREATIVE
Matt Dawson is a designer and creative director based in Austin, Texas, and the person behind Stay Gray Ponyboy. His work centers on brand identities and logo systems, for clients that have included Disney, Jeep, Adobe, Under Armour, the Atlanta Braves, and Toyota.
He is also the founder of CROP, a creative conference he runs with his wife in Austin. For the past decade CROP has brought creative people together, and this fall it added Field Trip, a smaller, hang-out-first event in Cleveland. The next CROP conference is April 29 and 30, 2027.
When he isn't designing, he might be creating something on his Jaguar, playing with his band LCLS, or checking another ballpark off his list.
Website
https://www.staygrayponyboy.com
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/staygrayponyboy
CROP
https://www.cropcons.com
Join the Creative Slash Newsletter and Get the 5-Part “Off the Record” email series FREE
Click here to get the five-part “Off the Record” email series
Note: If you're looking for hard-earned advice, resources from top creatives, and the products they can't live without, you're going to love this.
Brad Woodard
Brad is an illustrator and designer behind Brave the Woods, a full-service studio working with clients like PBS Kids, Ford, Target, and USPS. His bold, playful style and heart-led storytelling shine through everything from brand campaigns to children’s books.
View Brave the Woods
Dustin Lee
Dustin is the founder of RetroSupply, a shop for retro-inspired brushes, textures, and digital tools used by tens of thousands of creatives from indie artists to major studios. He shares what it’s really like to run a creative business while keeping it small, weird, and intentional.
View RetroSupply
Credits
Audio/video editing: Clara Wright
Cover art: Brad Woodard
Intro animation: Seth Austin
Intro music: “Snakes and Fire” (Instrumental) by Pär Hagström

Most of us were told the same thing. Make something every day, share it, and the people will come.
But what happens when you do exactly that for years, the numbers stall, the platforms change the deal, and the thing you love starts to feel like homework for an algorithm?
In this episode, we talk with illustrator, teacher, and author Tom Froese about building a very public career as a self-described introvert. It starts with camera presence and resting dad face, then turns into a bigger conversation about owning your audience, scaling back, and why any of us spend our lives making commercial art in the first place.
It is part career audit, part wardrobe therapy, and part airport-gate conversation that wanders into ghosts, aliens, and faith.
In this episode, we talk about:
Why Tom is pulling everything under one roof after years of spreading himself across Skillshare, YouTube, Patreon, Instagram, Substack, and a podcast, and why every channel now has to point somewhere.
Why he moved his daily drawing practice off Instagram and onto Substack to protect it, especially once the joy started to erode.
Resting dad face, eyebrow pencils, and the plaid shirt uniform and why being on camera means playing a slightly stylized version of yourself.
Why "if you build it, they will come" may not hold anymore including what Tom thinks actually works now, and Dustin's case for owning your list instead of renting an audience.
Aliens, ghosts, and the spiritual realm and a candid conversation about faith, doubt, and doing your work for a reason bigger than money.
Whether you draw every day, quietly wonder if social media is still worth it, or just want permission to make the one-brush version of your thing, this one comes back to a question Tom asks his own students. You're spending most of your adult life making commercial art. Why?
ABOUT THE CREATIVE
Tom Froese is an illustrator, teacher, and writer based in British Columbia, Canada. His work borrows from printmaking, with limited colors, overprints, and letterpress-style texture, and it shows up in maps, editorial work, and picture books.
He is one of Skillshare's top teachers and has taught more than 150,000 students. His book Drawing Is Important: How to Start a Lifelong Daily Drawing Practice came out this spring from Rockport. It is not a how-to-draw book. It is a why-to-draw book.
Website
https://www.tomfroese.com
Drawing Is Important
https://www.tomfroese.com/book
Classes and Drawing Club
https://www.commercialartistry.com
Substack
https://mrtomfroese.substack.com
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/mrtomfroese
Join the Creative Slash Newsletter and Get the 5-Part “Off the Record” email series FREE
Click here to get the five-part “Off the Record” email series
Note: If you're looking for hard-earned advice, resources from top creatives, and the products they can't live without, you're going to love this.
Brad Woodard
Brad is an illustrator and designer behind Brave the Woods, a full-service studio working with clients like PBS Kids, Ford, Target, and USPS. His bold, playful style and heart-led storytelling shine through everything from brand campaigns to children’s books.
View Brave the Woods
Dustin Lee
Dustin is the founder of RetroSupply, a shop for retro-inspired brushes, textures, and digital tools used by tens of thousands of creatives from indie artists to major studios. He shares what it’s really like to run a creative business while keeping it small, weird, and intentional.
View RetroSupply
Credits
Audio/video editing: Clara Wright
Cover art: Brad Woodard
Intro animation: Seth Austin
Intro music: “Snakes and Fire” (Instrumental) by Pär Hagström

Most people see a slackline, a motorcycle, or a recurve bow and think, “That’s not me.”
Chris DeLorenzo sees the same things and signs up for lessons. He taught himself to slackline one summer. He has a motorcycle license he has never used. For a while, he wondered if he was quietly training for the apocalypse.
In this episode, we talk with Chris about his years as lead designer and art director at Johnny Cupcakes, his move into illustration for places like The New York Times, and the 500-foot mural that now greets people flying into Boston. But the real conversation is about curiosity, what happens to it when life gets busier and more settled, and knowing when your work is already good enough to stand behind.
It is part career history, part client-wrangling masterclass, and part three guys talking about French chore jackets for longer than anyone planned.
In this episode, we talk about:
Why you should ask a designer for all their working files and how digging through Clark Orr’s messy Illustrator files taught Chris more than any class.
How Johnny Cupcakes kept everything limited and still made payroll, including the tiered system that split the collectors from people who just wanted a good shirt.
Why the same drawing is worth more on a wall than on a T-shirt and how mocking up the work you want to do got Chris an email from The New York Times.
The time Chris told Dustin the RetroSupply logo was better the first time and why a little confidence in the pitch can save everyone a round of revisions.
Whether drawing flowers is a cop-out, especially when the thing people already find beautiful is the thing you keep coming back to.
Whether you are a designer drifting toward illustration, an illustrator with too many hobbies, or someone who keeps saying “that’s not me,” this one is a good nudge. Curiosity is a practice. You are allowed to try the thing before you decide who you are.
ABOUT THE CREATIVE
Chris DeLorenzo is an illustrator based in Massachusetts, known for simple, bold work built on line, flowers, and hands. He spent about six years as lead designer and art director at Johnny Cupcakes before going out on his own, and this year marks ten years of working for himself.
His work has appeared in The New York Times and The Atlantic, and it shows up all over Boston, including a 500-foot mural at Logan Airport. He also designed RetroSupply’s original logo, which is still in use today.
Website
https://www.chrisdelorenzo.com
Shop
https://www.chrisdelorenzo.com/shop
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/chrisdelorenzo
Join the Creative Slash Newsletter and Get the 5-Part “Off the Record” email series FREE
Click here to get the five-part “Off the Record” email series
Note: If you're looking for hard-earned advice, resources from top creatives, and the products they can't live without, you're going to love this.
Brad Woodard
Brad is an illustrator and designer behind Brave the Woods, a full-service studio working with clients like PBS Kids, Ford, Target, and USPS. His bold, playful style and heart-led storytelling shine through everything from brand campaigns to children’s books.
View Brave the Woods
Dustin Lee
Dustin is the founder of RetroSupply, a shop for retro-inspired brushes, textures, and digital tools used by tens of thousands of creatives from indie artists to major studios. He shares what it’s really like to run a creative business while keeping it small, weird, and intentional.
View RetroSupply
Credits
Audio/video editing: Clara Wright
Cover art: Brad Woodard
Intro animation: Seth Austin
Intro music: “Snakes and Fire” (Instrumental) by Pär Hagström