A Message to Young Designers

Stepping into my 7th year as Creative Director of FULLSTOP Indonesia, many often ask me the most difficult part in building a branding agency. And all the years, my answer remains the same: attitude building. To build the same vision in your agency team, to work as a solid team with different type of people, to create “WE CARE” attitude.

Over and over again I need to remind my team members the bigger picture in the industry:

• Instead of talking about ideas, start to actually take your first step
• Instead of calling it a dream, make a plan for it
• Instead of thinking that you are creating something big, learn to commit and persist to work hard.
• Instead of claiming you are unique and different, be humble enough to listen and learn from the others.
• Instead of looking for opportunities, be sincere and do every little thing with persistence.

I am still a strong believer of progress. No good leader is born in a day, nor  a good marketer, nor a good creative thinker. Believe in the process, endure and you shall go far.

The tasks may get hard but working is always simple. It’s take it or leave it. If you’re in it, then you’re in it. Don’t mix personal life with business and vice versa. Take a good care of your professional relationships, networking is important. Do not cross the border.

HAVE GOOD WORK ETHIC. This is my very first working principle. If you’ve been following our blog, you would have known parts of my journey with FULLSTOP. There are ups and downs. We met all kinds of different clients, we had to divorce some of them, we also had different kinds of projects we pulled through and also many that didn’t quite work out. But I keep going. We keep going. Positive attitude is the key. And as desperate as this may sound, I find positive attitude very, very rare. Young designers (or workers in general) need to think less of themselves and actually BE part of the team.