Julie Christie-Clark: Hi, I'm Juls and welcome to the first episode of the Honest Designer Diaries. I know there are already so many brilliant design podcasts out there. I listen to loads of them myself. when I'm out walking my dogs, Nessie and obi, but I am absolutely obsessed with hearing how designers think, how they work, and how they've navigated and built their careers. A couple of years ago, I don't even think I could have imagined wanting to start one podcast. It just wasn't On the horizon at all. I love the idea of listening to them, but actually hosting and doing one myself just felt so so scary. Yet here I am starting one. you don't know me, I'm Juls. I'm a brand designer and design educator based in Glasgow, Scotland. And I've been in this design industry for over 30 years now. I've worked in agencies, I've worked in-house, I've freelanced. Built my own business and now I also create design content and tutorials through Designer in Your Pocket. So I've seen quite a few different sides of what a design career actually looks like. I've worked with some brilliant people. I've had clients I've loved working with. I've had difficult projects, awkward feedback, some real low times through this journey as well, some not so good clients or bosses, times where I felt super confident what to do, and times where I absolutely didn't and wanted to quit this industry entirely. And that's really why I wanted to start the Honest Designer Diaries. Because we are so good at just showing the lovely polished versions of ourselves and our work online that we don't often share the heartache and the struggles and the difficulties that go on in the background. A lot of the best conversations I've had with other designers Have happened away from the online space entirely. It's in DMs, it's at in-person events, it's quietly where you're either having a cup of tea or you're having a glass of wine and you start getting honest about like really what's happening with you right now and your work. Are just those wee chats where somebody actually says, Do you know well, this is actually what's happening to me right now. And you immediately swoop into the support. And that's exactly the kind of conversations I want to have on here. In each episode, I'll be chatting to the designer about an experience or a situation that's happened to them in their career. It might be something difficult, something that's then changed the direction they've went in, something they would handle completely differently now if it happened to them, or even something funny that they still think about years later. We'll talk about what happened, how they dealt with it at the time, whether they'd do anything differently now, and what they would say to another designer who's going through that exact same situation right now. I want to speak to designers at all different stages of their career. New designers who are just coming into the industry. Designers who are maybe ten years in and wondering where they want to go next. Then designers like me who have been basically doing it for decades and are basically lifers now. I honestly can't imagine myself ever not being a designer in some way or another, no matter how stressful this industry can be. I'll be chatting to designers who work in agencies, in-house designers, freelancers. Designers who've built personal brands alongside their careers, and designers who have never posted it online at all. But have all built brilliant careers in their niche. I want it to be a real mix of people that I speak to. Because there are so many different ways to be a designer. And I think that's what I'm most interested in. The real routes people take, the decisions they've made, the things they've had to deal with, and the bits they maybe wish they'd known sooner. So this first episode is me just saying hello, explaining why I'm starting this, and giving you a wee idea of what I hope it becomes. I hope that Honest Designer Diaries feels like an honest, useful and reassuring place for designers to hear from other people in the industry and to realise that they're not the only ones trying to figure it out as they go. I'm still trying to figure out this career of mine thirty years in and I think sometimes other designers are surprised to hear that I don't have it all figured out. Welcome to episode one and so glad you're here with me.