We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shadab Wajih a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Shadab, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
For me nothing fuels creativity more than inspiration. I am sure if I were to be placed in a vacuum for a while it will eventually start diminishing my ideas.
Every movie I watch, video game I play, song I listen to directly contributes to my ideas. It doesn’t even have to translate to the same medium.
So the more I watch and experience, the more I get inspired.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I am essentially an Associate Creative Director and Digital Artist right now. I work on various creative briefs for clients like McDonald’s, Walmart, Grubhub etc. I like to come up with ideas mostly centered around gaming. It allows me to consider all those hours I spend playing video games as “research”.
I also in my own time do a lot of digital art, mostly illustrations and collages. I have done a lot of work and projects related to football (soccer). Most of my personal work revolves around the music I listen to, the movies and shows I watch etc.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Hard to pick just three but if I had to it would probably be patience, practice and consistency.
It took me quite some time to get to a place where I was creatively content.
It was also very important for me to practice. You have to try different things and find ones that stick and ones that don’t work.
Consistency is also very important. Have to keep trying new things and be constantly in motion. If not then you will get stuck in a loop of recycling the same ideas and thoughts. You have to have consistent growth.
Focussing on these three, amongst a few others, helped me the most in my career so far.
Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
I think it’s very important to find your niche based on your strengths. These can be based on either topics you’re interested in, which for me are mostly gaming and football, or it can be based on things you find easy, like illustrations or Photoshop.
However, you can’t really choose either path if you want to grow creatively. I believe you have to get better at your strengths so you can be the expert in those fields while exploring other directions to grow in. For example most art directors nowadays have side skills which makes them even better as a total art director. You can’t just be good at Photoshop, it’s almost essential to know as much of other creative fields like photography, 3D, Vector design etc as possible.
Contact Info:
- Website: shadabwajih.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/snikt13
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shadab-wajih-7999848a/
