January 20, 2024

By Afzal

e/acc can change the world, e/very days can change your creative life.

Back at writing after 3 months, in this, I’ll be sharing a bit of personal story, the next chapter, and the importance of sharing your craft every day.

Story:

January 20 2024 the day I’m publishing this writing I turn 22 and It’s been 5 years since I started my creative journey. And if you ask me am I successful or did I make it? My answer would be a big no, while I’m aware of how important it is to enjoy the journey and the process, the human in me can't help but feel frustrated by the stagnation in my creative growth.

In 2019 I started my creative journey with the aspiration to be a successful content creator and entrepreneur realizing it would take time to get stable or make money I also started freelance graphic designing, and I dropped out of school around the same time. A year or two in I thought it would be better to focus completely on freelance graphic designing because I was seeing graphic designers making an audience by posting the freelance work as content, time went by but nothing changed I struggled to get clients even if I got any most of the projects were never completed, I realized I wasn’t cut for it.

Around mid-2020 I discovered Naval Ravikant and Jack Butcher both of their writings changed my mindset completely, they made me realize what true wealth is and how you can leverage the internet and build once but sell twice. I slowly realized no matter how much money you make by being employed or a freelancer, it can never be as fulfilling as having an audience who is willing to pay you for the craft produced by your intuition. Many people believe that freelancing is also a way of owning your time but I don’t think that’s true I believe an employee has one boss but a freelancer has 10 bosses.

At the end of 2020, something happened that truly blew my mind Apple announced custom icons for iPhones, and Traf a designer who created an icon pack got a shout-out from MKBHD and the sales of the icon pack just skyrocketed and made almost $100k, this was the moment that made me realize how badly I need to build a digital product, I started wondering what can I build with the graphic design skillset that I have and fixed my mind that I will create and launch a font. I started working on my font Aextract but realized it would take time so meanwhile I also released some freebies to gain some audience after this I made up my mind to stop freelancing and started looking for jobs and thought I would quit the job once the product sales are stable but that didn’t happen.

It took me more than a year to launch Aextract and around this time I got employed too and had almost quit freelancing, at the start of 2021 I got to know about NFTs which had my complete curiosity, Aextract didn’t work so I launched some more fonts but they had an NFT attached with them but again nothing much I spend the end of 2021 to the start of 2023 with font NFT projects.

2023 got very tough I got a bit depressed I’m not sure if that was depression but never in my life I had experienced that level of sadness before, I used to be frustrated with the fact that all of my projects were font-related and why I was attached to the type design niche in some way or the other, I created Aextract because I wanted to build my first digital product but knowingly or unknowingly my every other project became that only, type design is very specific niche but I wanted to design or create stuff with more liberty maybe that’s why I wasn’t very happy during that time thanks to Eli Heuer a great type designer and OG of font NFTs who advised me to shift my focus completely towards NFTs as I haven’t completely become a type designer yet.

Fonts + NFTs is a rare niche, I thought it would work but I was wrong or maybe I’m wrong in saying this.

Next chapter and e/very days.

Okay, so as mentioned above from 2023 I shifted my focus completely towards digital art projects and NFTs. After that decision, I started working on a generative art project and a couple of Opepen sets which are still WIP, and that’s the problem with projects they take time, while to sustain and build an audience you need to share something on a routine and I was doing that by designing and posting stuff randomly whenever I had an idea but from today I want to change that I want to be more consistent.

So this is what I’m going to do next, I will make art or design stuff and post it every day. Yes, you read that I have realized one thing that I rant a lot about my failure to build an audience but at the same time I feel like I haven’t done much work too, and I want to change that. To talk about an example of how powerful everydays can be what better example there can be than the legend Beeple himself? My everydays will be called e/very days not much meaning behind the name just to make it sound memetic like e/acc.

The way e/acc can change the world e/very days can change your creative life. I’m still employed and have stopped freelancing but my dream of owning my time is still on, now with e/very days I want to take a chance every day. Shoot more to get lucky and what can be better than shooting everyday. If you are creative too I just want to say one thing let’s create every day.

Follow Aex Designs on X and IG to join my e/very days journey.

Thank you!

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