I began freelancing as a designer as I wrapped up my last year at Art School. Finishing up a degree in film had given me a lot of interdisciplinary creative and technical experience, but I knew that I wouldn't be venturing off to the two big cities that filmmakers flocked to, and that the job market of 2003 still hadn't recovered from the dot com crash. I reasoned that starting my own business would be the best way to start after school, so I started before school ended. That gave me a chance to get exposure to and begin learning all the craft I'd need but hadn't focused on in school – typography, graphic design software, web design, etc. By the time I received my diploma, I had somewhere around 7 active clients and could afford to pay my rent.

As Chief Design Officer, I'm responsible for all things design at Newfangled – our creative team, our design services, our product design, and our design consulting offerings.

The main "difficulty" is the opportunity: despite a continual growing awareness and experience of design in the marketplace, and a growing experience with design tools, designers and buyers of design services still lack a fundamental knowledge of what design is, how it works to capitalize on human attention, and how to apply it alongside brand expression. I spend as much time teaching the fundamentals as I do helping people navigate the new things.

As for new things, they are a challenge. The pace of change is only accelerating, and it is a serious challenge to designers to determine how much time to spend keeping up. There is always a new tool or technology to try or learn. But then there is the work you were already doing before that thing came along. The vast majority of the new things are rightly rejected, but it takes time to discern the useful from the distraction, and the one thing we haven't gotten more of over the course of my career is time.

I always start on paper, and teach that to any designer I encounter. Once the idea is solid on paper, I bring it into software. Figma is the best design tool I've adopted in my 20+ years of working, and I have very few complaints with it. But once I'm in the software space, I always start in "protoype mode" – greyscale, wireframe layouts always come first for me, so that I can work out my layout choices and ensure that they present information in a clear and prioritized way before I apply visual language tied to a brand.

Spend less time worrying about what other designers think.

I regret how much time I spent in my 20s and 30s on activities tied to my reputation as a designer. I was very active in speaking at conferences and writing for websites, magazines, and a book, and while it was all educational and positively impacted my career, it was time I didn't spend making things. The truth is, though, that craft is more satisfying and enduring than networking and performances.

I love talking to other designers and looking at what they make. But above all, making art of my own keeps me inspired.