Creating a unique creative style and voice can help your work stand out and get noticed. It can differentiate you from the thousands of other creatives and make you more desirable in the job market. Developing this personal style can take time and does not happen overnight. It took me many years and mine is still developing and evolving! I’ve read biographies of successful creatives who took decades to find theirs, so don’t be deterred if you don’t find yours right away. Your creative style and voice will likely reflect a mix of your personality, inspirations, memories, and experiences. I’ve broken down six steps that I believe helped me in developing my style and voice.
Step One: Creative Exposure
Expose yourself to a wide variety of inspirations from different creative disciplines, not just from your own field. Look at film, music, art, photography, fashion, design. Become a collector of things that you find beautiful or that resonate with you on an emotional level. In time, you will notice patterns and themes within your collections of what you resonate with. These patterns can hold clues to your own passions, key experiences or emotions, and styles you gravitate towards—all of which can be used to develop your unique style & voice. Over time, you may find the inspirations you gravitate toward change, and it’s interesting to track how these inspirations evolve as you do. I suggest keeping records of these inspirations either digitally or with a physical scrapbook or diary.
Step Two: Learn the Rules
It helps to have a solid understanding of the history of your creative field as well as the contemporary scene so that later when you are working on developing your unique style, you understand its context. This will help you judge whether what you're making is unique enough or whether it’s too referential from a past or current creative’s work. I suggest learning as much as you can about those who came before you and those who inspire you most in your field. Learn about their philosophies and styles of working and who their own mentors were. As a student, it’s okay to copy the styles of the top creatives in your field, as you need to learn the basics, traditional techniques, and rules of various creative disciplines before you can move on to creating something unique. As long as this work is never being used for commercial purposes and only for practice, and you’re always honest about your sources when sharing, copying can be a great way to learn the rules when you are just beginning.
Step Three: Break the Rules
Devote time to experimenting with various styles and techniques, and play with new tools and materials within your medium. Try using nontraditional tools or techniques you’ve never seen used before. What happens if you try to paint a portrait with only tools you find in nature, like rocks or branches? Or use only the juice of a pomegranate with your calligraphy brush to draw typography? What happens if you try using 3D software to create the base of dimensional forms but then mix textures from your own film photography over them? What happens if you create a dress only out of materials you find at a supermarket? What happens if you try to make an analog sculpture that looks very digital? Allow yourself the time and space to play and try strange things without the frustrations or fear of failure that is imposed by clients or deadlines. You have to make a lot of bad work before you get somewhere good. Somewhere within this experimentation process, you will discover something new. Somewhere within this experimentation process, you will discover something new. You will discover what kind of styles and mediums you like working with most and what outcomes you gravitate towards aesthetically.
Step Four: Create Your Own Rules
Try creating random creative rules within your work. Rules can help create a memorable and ownable style that people can begin to know you for. The more unique the rules are, the more distinct the style will be, which can help get more recognition. It’s a technique often used in writing. For example, Dr. Seuss had a rule only to write his books with 30-120 different words, but he could repeat them, which gave his books a strange and unique vocabulary style people grew to love. Maybe if you’re a painter, try using a different tool besides a paintbrush or paint to paint with; what happens if you paint using only bottle caps or feathers? If you’re a graphic designer, challenge yourself to make a poster using only items from a dollar store. If you’re a fashion designer, what happens if you design a dress using only AI and limit yourself to words you find on page 34 of the last book you read? The rules can be random, and can inspire new experimentation!
Step Five: Find Your Voice
I think it can be useful to explore yourself and understand what makes you unique as a human. What makes you most angry, what brings you joy, what sets your soul on fire, what are your vices, what do you love most in this world? Who are you beneath the mask society has taught you to wear? Write down your personal story and history, the things that make you laugh or tick, and through this creative journaling, you might find themes you are passionate about that you want to explore or talk about through your work. You can use these unique experiences and emotions or stories as a way to make meaningful connections with audiences through your creative lens.
Step Six: Share Your Voice
At a certain point, after experimenting enough, you’ll start creating work or projects that excite you and begin to feel, well, you. Share them on social media or on Behance, Dribble, or other platforms to get feedback. See what other people connect with or relate to. Keep making things and keep sharing things. Not every project or piece you share is going to get a huge response, especially at the beginning. However, in time if you keep making things and sharing things and seeing what people connect with, it might help inform your future work and areas you want to focus on developing! If you keep at it long enough, you’ll eventually create work that has your own unique style and spin to it. Remember, persistence is key! Many great famous artists only found their unique style when they were 60 or 70 years old, so don’t be deterred if it takes a while.
