95. Leaving a comfortable job in graphic design to become a freelance illustrator, with Meredith Schomburg

The Creative Boom Podcast

Our next guest is Meredith Schomburg, a Brooklyn-based illustrator originally from North Carolina. Today, we'll be hearing about the interesting twists and turns of Meredith's career thus far. Like many of us, she was told as a child that art wouldn't make a living, so she went down the more "constructive" graphic design route.

After graduating in the field from North Carolina State University in 2015, she secured an internship at IDEO in Boston, which led to her first full-time job at a small creative shop before landing the role of Experience Designer at Airbnb in San Francisco a year later.

In 2019, she joined Koto in LA as a senior designer. It was during her time at that studio when the pandemic hit, which proved to be especially difficult for Meredith but also valuable. She realised she really did want to pursue a career in art, turning to illustration as her full-time gig. Well, it's been almost a year since she went freelance, all is going well, and she's just been signed by the agency, Jelly.

In this episode, we talk about Meredith beginning her journey as a fully-fledged illustrator, having previously worked in-house at some of the world's leading brands and design studios. We hear more of how she found herself in a bit of a bad patch during lockdown and why she decided to move away from a full-time design role. And then we get to grips with how she made that happen, how she found her optimistic and colourful style, and how she kept going. And how her voice has finally taken shape.

We even talk about all that practical but necessary business stuff. Because, as a freelancer, no one really tells you what it takes to work for yourself, so she was keen to share what she's learnt on that and much more.