Behance Blog | The Most Defensible Thing You Can Do for Your Career: Build an Audience

Decouple Your Professional and Personal Brands Cultivate Your Work Identity Foster Brand Consistency Position Yourself as a Thought Leader Maintain Your Authenticity Curate Your Social Media

the further your work will spread. Of course, you have to be good, but being good is not enough. Skill gets you in front of the right people, but network magnifies your reach. Creative success, then, is contingent on your ability to connect well with those who can vouch for your work. It doesn’t take a lot of people—just a few friends, as Hank said

Our narrative was that technology needed to empower creative people to make ideas happen. By uploading their portfolios, creatives could get more exposure and attribution for their work, resulting in more job opportunities. We called it “creative meritocracy,” the idea of creative people getting opportunity based on the quality of their work rather

To recruit and retain top professionals, you must instill in them a belief that their time and energy is contributing to the pursuit of a greater goal that transcends standard business measurements and personal achievements and enriches their lives.

If you want to be independent, you probably need to own assets, or a reputation. If you want to be financially well off, you probably need to deliver enough value to the right people that they will happily pay you for it. If you want to be proud of your work, you probably need to avoid racing to the bottom and denigrating the culture along the way.