Daily Inspiration: Meet Lydia Schmidt

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lydia Schmidt.

Hi Lydia, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My interest in art started very young. As a child and throughout high school, art gave me the opportunity to explore ideas and worlds that were not accessible to me. The idea that art can connect people and expand someone’s experience of the world has truly been a driving factor in my work and why I continue to work in the creative field today. When I was about 3 or 4 my sister and I would spend afternoons painting watercolors of each other or other family members and watching art videos for kids. I picked up a camera at 12 years old and began experimenting with photography, photo editing, and even some elementary forms of graphic design using plug-and-play programs like Picmonkey. In high school, I became fascinated with what was described as conceptual “fine art” photography, with narratives and visuals only possible through compositing and heavy photo editing. My mom took note of this interest and bought me Photoshop Elements for a birthday present. That is really when I dove into photography and visual design on the computer.

By the time I was ready to start college, art had become such an integral piece of my life that I had already decided I was going to study art with a photography concentration. Throughout school, I was able to learn (and fall in love with) other art mediums and processes and continued to expand my knowledge of editing and design software. I began to feel very burnt out with my photo work as it started to feel forced and I lost a lot of the passion I had for it starting out. In a practical sense, a career in photography seemed to be getting further and further out of reach due to various circumstances in my life after college. My shift into visual and graphic design really started when I began working in Printmaking at school. Printmaking gave me the opportunity to experiment with non-representational imagery that held a concept or story and allowed for a lot of cross-medium creative processes and I fell in love with the ability to design something on a computer and then translate that into a physical print with a variety of different manual processes. After school, I dove headfirst into visual design and began to really develop my career, both at a traditional job and doing freelance work. My work in visual design is sort of a confluence of my experiences in art and my continued interest in connecting with people (and connecting people to the world) through art. Currently, I am continuing to work in a freelance capacity alongside my regular day job. I am particularly interested in brand design and working with people to find ways to tell their stories and represent themselves and create a full brand identity through design. I am hoping to continue to expand my freelance work and eventually lead a creative studio with a continued emphasis on human connection, storytelling, and beautiful design.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The hardest thing about a creative career for me has been keeping myself motivated. Since art and creativity were such an outlet for me personally growing up, it was a struggle for me to monetize it because a lot of my motivation came from that singular vision within. When you’re working with clients you don’t have all the creative control anymore and I had to learn how to still feel good about my work when I didn’t have the control I wanted. I also struggled with maintaining my creativity… there have been ebbs and flows. But I realized that when I can keep myself in a creative mindset, it’s a lot easier to collaborate with others to help bring their vision to life.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a visual designer and I do a lot of different things. In my primary job I do design for marketing campaigns and mostly work on social media ads, paid banner ads, etc. in the digital landscape. In my freelance work, I also do some social media marketing graphics, but I also dabble in visual brand design (logos, etc.), posters, website UI design, and art. I have some experience in print and signage as well so my work has a wide variety of applications. I feel like I’m so early in my career I haven’t had a chance to really set myself apart from other designers in the same field of work, but I am proud that I have been able to maintain and continue to improve my design skills and that I have begun to get recognition for the work that I do. Even though I came from an art background, the world of design is huge and there are a lot of complexities to communicating effectively through design. I am proud of myself for being able to dive into it and learn from experience without having formal training to prop me up. I think I have grown a lot from when I first started out and I want to keep pushing and challenging myself to expand my skillset.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I think there’s always some amount of risk when it comes to dedicating yourself to something. Whether that be a career or just a hobby… there’s always a risk of failure, or the inability to measure up. I don’t think I would describe myself as a risk taker, and I wouldn’t say I have taken a lot of risks in my own life and career, but I think deciding to let go of a career in Photography in favor of a design career was somewhat of a risk for me! I spent a lot of time trying to develop a skill that I ultimately gave up and I had to figure out how to adjust on this new path. Any choice you make as a human involves some amount of risk, because when you say yes to something you are ultimately saying no to something else… and it’s scary to think you might have chosen wrong. When it comes down to it, that risk is worth it when you have an awareness of what you want and where you’re hoping to be in life.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lydiaschmidt.myportfolio.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lydischmidia/