Why I stopped trying to go viral

As much as I am a designer, I’m also a creator.

I’ve been posting content consistently since 2020 across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and these emails.

And saying that content has changed my life and business would probably be an understatement.

It’s helped me:

• Build a waitlist of clients who specifically want to work with me

• Charge significantly more because prospects already understand how I think before we ever speak

• Help thousands of other designers simply by sharing what I was already learning and doing

Over the years, I have gone from “chasing clients” to “chasing virality” to chasing comments & DMs like:

But underneath all of that, I’m still a designer first.

The community of designers, brand collaborations and the opportunity to help someone a few steps behind me have all been incredible by-products of creating content.

But when I started, my goal was much simpler.

I wanted potential clients to find my work, understand the value behind it, and eventually fill out my enquiry form.

And today, I think I’ve found a pretty good balance between creating content that helps designers without turning my profile into something potential clients can’t connect with.

Which brings me to a question I received a few weeks ago:

“How do you balance both audiences (designers and clients)? I want to avoid attracting designers and make it easy for clients to see my thought process behind designs.”

It’s a good question.

Because if you’re creating content as a freelance designer, you probably don’t want your entire audience to consist of other designers.

You want clients watching too.

So whether you’ve been thinking about creating content to attract more clients, or you’re simply curious about how I’ve approached it, that’s what I want to break down today.

I’m always aware that two audiences are watching

When I first started posting consistently, I realised pretty quickly that there were two groups of people paying attention to my content:

Designers, and potential clients.

Interestingly, I originally started YouTube purely to attract more client work (which worked really well).

But those same videos also started attracting designers who liked the work I was sharing and wanted to understand how I was creating it.

As I kept posting my audience continued to grow. More designers were watching my stuff and more prospects enquired to work with me.

And eventually I ran into a pretty nice problem to have:

I could only work with so many clients at once.

I didn’t want to build a huge agency just so I could keep taking on more projects, so once my client pipeline became consistent, my content naturally started shifting more towards designers.

I began sharing more of what I was learning behind the scenes.

Things like:

• How I approached strategy.

• How I presented work.

• How I managed projects.

• How I made certain design decisions.

• etc etc.

You guys (designers) started asking more questions, which eventually led to me creating products and courses to help solve some of those problems.

And that’s pretty much how I ended up here.

Today, designers are the primary audience I create for.

But I’m always aware that potential clients are watching too.

And I actually like that.

I still want businesses discovering my work, following along and eventually thinking:

“We need to work with Abi.”

So when I create content, there’s one thing I actively avoid and another I’ve become much more intentional about.

And I think the difference between the two matters a lot if you want your content to attract clients.

I avoid most tutorial-style content

Earlier on, I created much more tutorial content.

There are still some old YouTube videos floating around where I’m sharing Adobe Illustrator tricks, shortcuts and quick design hacks.

And if I’m being honest, I probably kept creating this content longer than I should have because it often performed really well.

But over time, I realised they were attracting people for the wrong reason.

They positioned me as someone who could teach people how to use design software, rather than someone businesses could trust to solve their branding problems.

They also attracted a much more beginner-level design audience, which wasn’t really who my services or products were built for.

And think about it from a client’s perspective. The “perfect client” (if that exists) doesn’t care that I know ten clever Illustrator shortcuts.

They care whether I can understand their business.

Whether I can identify the right problem.

Whether I can think strategically.

And whether I can make good creative decisions because of it.

So gradually, I started creating less content about how to use design tools and more content showing how I approach design problems.

And there’s an important difference between these two types of content.

A lot of tutorial content is information-led, and information is everywhere now.

Someone can probably find fifty different tutorials showing them how to create a particular logo effect before they’ve finished their morning coffee.

But your experience, your judgment and the way you look at a problem and decide what matters is much harder to replicate.

And that’s what gives potential clients (and even other designers) a reason to pay attention.

Which brings me to the thing I now do much more intentionally.

I share the thought process behind the design

“Show your thought process” sounds obvious.

Most of you reading this have probably heard some version of that advice before.

The problem is you might not know what that looks like in practice. So let me show you how I approach it.

As you may know if you follow me on Instagram, one of the most consistent series I’ve created is built around a simple idea:

This logo breaks X design rules. Can you spot them?

For this, I use my old design work or sometimes a student submission from one of my cohorts.

But the structure of the content is generally the same.

I show the logo.

Identify what isn’t working.

Explain why it isn’t working.

Then show how I’d improve it.

And if you look closely, there are a few things happening underneath the surface.

Start with the problem, not the design

Nobody really cares about your solution until they understand the problem.

So I almost always start there.

Maybe the logo is difficult to read.

Maybe it feels too generic for the category.

Or maybe the visual idea has absolutely nothing to do with what makes the business different.

Whatever it is, I diagnose the problem before showing the fix.

For follow designers this teaches them how to look at their own work more critically.

For a potential client, it signals something different:

I don’t just open Illustrator and start making things look good.

I understand what the design needs to do first.

Explain the reason behind each change

This is where you show judgment.

Instead of saying: “I changed this because it looks better.”

I can connect the decision to a strategic reason.

That could be readability, differentiation, audience perception, positioning or the story behind the brand.

This shows people the thinking behind my decisions, not just the final design.

Show what I’d reject, and why

I think this is one designers often overlook.

Being a talented designer is just as much about knowing which ideas not to pursue as it is about generating ideas.

Showing the routes you rejected, the problems you noticed or the trade-offs you considered gives people a much clearer picture of how you make decisions.

Potential clients can see that those decisions aren’t random and other designers can learn from that process.

Connect creative decisions back to the business

Now this is kinda the biggest one.

For example, in this recent reel I posted, the butterfly isn’t simply a more attractive logo mark.

It connects back to the word “Wild” and gives the brand something more distinctive and ownable.

Similarly, in this older reel, the barn isn’t there because I thought: “Barns look cool.”

It represents a differentiating part of the business.

Those little explanations matter because they show that I’m not only thinking about what the brand looks like.

I’m thinking about what the design can help the business communicate.

Use the finished design as proof

After doing all this the before-and-after becomes much more powerful.

By the time someone sees the finished design, they already understand the original problem.

They’ve seen the decisions and they know why certain things changed.

So the final result becomes proof of the thinking that came before it.

Not just another aesthetic logo floating around Instagram.

To sum up…

The question at the start of this newsletter was really about control: how do you attract the right audience without accidentally pulling in the wrong one?

And the truth is, you can’t completely control who follows you.

But you can control what your content signals.

If all you post are Illustrator shortcuts and logo tutorials, you’ll probably attract people who want Illustrator shortcuts and logo tutorials.

But if your content shows how you spot problems, make decisions, challenge ideas and connect design back to strategy…

You start attracting people who value the way you think.

That could be another designer who wants to learn from you.

Or it could be a potential client thinking:

“This is how I want someone to approach my brand.”

And you don’t need a huge portfolio of client projects to start doing this either.

Before I had enough client work to constantly talk about, I’d create a passion project and break down my thinking in exactly the same way.

Or I’d walk past a shop, notice something interesting about its branding and think about how I might redesign it.

The project just gives you something to show.

It’s your thinking that makes the content worth following.

And over time, that’s what has led to potential clients comparing other designers against my work before we’ve even spoken:

While at the same time giving designers a reason to keep following, learning and applying some of that thinking to their own work.

That’s the balance I’ve been trying to build.

Talk soon,

Abi 😊