Meet Fe Amarante and Brandi Parker, the dynamic team behind Zero Waste Creatives (ZWC). While they both have independent creative practices, they bonded over a shared mission and joined forces to seek solutions for a sustainable future within the creative industry. As part of their project, Amarante and Parker have launched a survey to uncover and help them articulate the realities of burnout and other stressors in the creative industry. Their goal is to hear directly from those who make a living from their creativity, whether in-house, agency, or independent.
Creative Humans: How Are You Really Doing?
Take part in the annual Creative Voices Heard survey. ZWC is collecting responses until August 12 and results will be shared this fall.
Left: Brandi Parker; Right: Fe Amarante
The survey is open to a broad spectrum of creative professionals, from UX researchers and production artists to writers, photographers, art directors, designers, copywriters, and strategists. Amarante and Parker are eager to gather insights from every corner of the creative world.
Why This Survey, Why Now?
Amarante comes from the creative and design side of the industry, and Parker hails from realization and production; they have noticed a significant gap in the dialogue surrounding sustainability and long-term career viability for creatives. They aim to bridge this gap by providing a platform for creative professionals to share their experiences and feelings about industry practices.
Creativity is often seen as a subjective and mysterious process but is actually grounded in the objective conditions of everyday professional environments. Through this survey, Amarante and Parker hope to illuminate how creative makers are truly faring and how the dynamics of teams, workplaces, and client relationships either support or hinder their craft and well-being.
As a creative, I was curious about their endeavor and reached out to ask a few questions. Our conversation follows (edited slightly for length and clarity).
As the foundation for this survey, what does a sustainable creative career mean to you?
Fe Amanarante (FA): A sustainable career— especially a sustainable creative career, in my case—is a career with longevity. An effort that can be sustained over a prolonged period, as we work for many years and many hours every week. If the pace at which I produce work doesn’t prevent me from living through other aspects of my life, I consider that a sustainable career. When considering the sustainability of my creative career, I see my creativity as a resource that can both propel and be propelled by other aspects of my life, creating integration between my work and my life (at a pace and intensity I can sustain). Brandi and I see this sustained pace as one that has ups and downs (obviously, we have busy times) but also offers space to recover and recharge.
Brandi Parker (BP): I echo Fe. I believe that sustainability means something that fits into your life holistically: a career that works for you versus something solely for someone else (e.g., your employer). In creative careers, we must take extra care to preserve our humanity, our unique, sole source of creativity. It’s easy to overwork and over-deliver on your creativity because our culture trains us not to see or believe its limits. But limits are real, and we’re talking about that on ZWC.
It’s easy to overwork and over-deliver on your creativity because our culture trains us not to see or believe its limits. But limits are real, and we’re talking about it.
—Brandi Parker
What are the most significant challenges you’ve faced as a creative professional in today’s industry? How have these challenges shaped your approach to your work?
FA: Some of the most significant challenges I’ve faced have to do with the depletion of the key resources creativity requires. As a creative professional, I tried many times to “hack” the system to continue to work without one or more of these resources. This led to burnout every time. There is no hack: nobody is limitless in their energy or time.
There’s also a lack of truth-telling as the basis of communication between team members, which comes in many shapes: when we obscure our real opinions, when we don’t believe there’s a safe space for honest dialogue, and when we withdraw from real connection.
Also problematic are the obstacles to our ability to experiment and find flow in the work in today’s fragmented and overstimulating work environment. Finally, that we revere creativity as “magic” prevents us from talking about being a creative professional in objective terms. Creativity isn’t abstract. Our bodies need certain conditions to produce creative thinking. Our teams are made of interdependent relationships between creatives and clients, all of which need those same conditions to truly create anything—a connection between concepts, a thought, an idea.
That we revere creativity as “magic” prevents us from talking about being a creative professional in objective terms.
—Fe Amarante
BP: Among the biggest challenges I’ve faced are overpromising myself and understanding my creative limits. Even once I’ve recognized them, I’ve found it difficult to acknowledge that these are not character flaws and my power to demand a break or to say “no.” Especially as a junior creative. At the beginning of our careers, we’re told we must “do our time” to get to a reasonable work scenario versus coming up with the idea that we all deserve “reasonable” all the time.
Beyond these listed, I’d have to say that I have realized that exercising my right to say no includes saying no to certain projects or clients. And I don’t mean because you don’t like them or don’t want to do the work, but because they go against your ethics or moral compass. Early on in my career, I’d worked with a big tobacco client at an agency. Further into my career, I worked at an agency that actually gave us a choice to work on that account. This was my first moment of awakening that this was possible— that we could draw our lines in the sand. Sometimes, your line might mean the risk of losing your job, but perhaps that wasn’t your job anyway. Some of the biggest teachers in my career were the challenges, and I’m more confident because of them.
Considering the current landscape of leapfrogging technology and remote/hybrid work, how do you see these trends influencing the future of creativity as a resource, and what is their impact on career sustainability as you define it?
FA: There is no shortage of tools, technology, and resources available for creatives to make truly anything, physically and digitally. Yet, our biggest issues are still related to our human-to-human interactions and connections. The future of creativity, in my humble opinion, isn’t dependent on the trends and tools we have and will continue to create. The future of creativity depends on our ability to collectively address the conditions creativity requires to exist amongst the humans doing it for a living and the humans needing it to solve a problem. The neck-breaking speed with which we see new tech and new tools means we’re inundated with a bazillion high-tech pencils—more tools are available to us than we know what to do with. In the midst of the overwhelm, we forget that these tools are not here to fix or replace the much-needed human-to-human interactions and connections that create the conditions in which creativity can be nurtured and applied.
BP: The best part (for me) has been my ability to move home to my rural hometown, be closer to family, and still keep the career I’ve been working on for over two decades. The biggest benefit I see is the potential for replenishing the country’s rural areas with diverse people and skills who can survive because the future of work doesn’t depend on a place.
Historically, this has been a huge barrier to small-town survival—being dependent on young folks returning to keep the town alive, with limited opportunities offered for said young folk. For young creatives, living somewhere with a less expensive cost of living is only mutually beneficial. On one hand, remote work presents a big challenge to creatives and the nature of collaboration. On the other hand, it forces us to be “creative” in how we collab, and it increases the value of human-to-human contact immensely, which bodes well for making special arrangements and opportunities to meet face-to-face. Likewise, it also means that if you can make the effort to meet in person, it’s appreciated even more. Pre-pandemic, I believe we were approaching an era of taking face-to-face for granted. I can remember (more than once) traveling cross-country and back within 24 hours for a single, one-hour meeting. The energy! The carbon footprint! Holy shit, what a goddamn waste. This would be a highly unlikely scenario today, and we, as an industry, desperately needed that change. I think that’s a great example of prioritizing humanity and the Earth.
What do you believe are the essential elements for fostering a sustainable creative career? Have you observed any practices that contribute positively or negatively to this goal?
FA: Between giant holding companies with hundreds or thousands of creative firms under them and large companies with in-house creative functions, creative professionals often see shifts and changes coming at the scale these players can command, for better or worse. Contributing negatively to the development of a sustainable creative career are the multi-layered hierarchy levels occupied by creative professionals who grew up—literally and metaphorically—within an industry that has praised overwork and the neglect of one’s personal needs in exchange for a promise of career progression and success. Of course, not all large organizations are bad, and not all small and independent firms are good; it’s not black & white, but we cannot deny the power large organizations hold to drive an agenda of change if they desire. There is a lot of positive movement in independent creative professionals and firms showing up with a more human dialogue that sounds inspiring but needs to be matched with practices that truly deliver it as a new way of working for the people involved. With Experimenta, my very small and young creative consultancy, I’m proposing a different approach that expands the design thinking definition of human-centricity to include the humans working on the creative challenge at hand, with practices behind it delivering on it beyond a buzzword or a “proprietary process.” And Brandi and I connected so strongly over the concept that the resources behind our humanity are as finite as the resources we see on Earth, and sustainability starts right there.
We cannot deny the power large organizations hold to drive an agenda of change if they desire.
—Fe Amarante
BP: Something I always talk about in the broad subject of environmental sustainability is the concept of a “multidisciplinary and humane” approach. I like to focus on the concepts of non-linear processes, multidimensional teams, and human-centric solutioning (a few of the points that Fe and I came together on initially). If you look at nature, few things we describe as organic can also be associated with straight lines— looking at root systems, our neurons, or veins in a leaf— they all branch out or reconnect back or branch out many times. These concepts are also directly applicable to our lives and our embarking on our careers. Don’t feel like you have a singular, linear path from education to work, or that you should only have one career, or that it be singularly focused, or that you have one set of skills in your repertoire that you can focus on at a time. There are so many benefits to combining seemingly unrelated skills or interests! Why? You’ll never be so specialized that you feel like you can’t transfer to a different job, and you’ll always have ways of reinventing or evolving your role so that you never stagnate. These are the things that support a sustainable creative career beyond relying on your employer, client, or colleagues to play the supportive role.
There are so many benefits to combining seemingly unrelated skills or interests! Why? You’ll never be so specialized that you feel like you can’t transfer to a different job, and you’ll always have ways of reinventing or evolving your role so that you never stagnate.
—Brandi Parker
What changes to the creative industry could enhance the overall experience for creative professionals? How do you see your survey contributing to this evolution?
FA: If every creative leader in every in-house, agency, and independent team learned more about what humans actually need to engage in authentic creativity (and not just perform on a stage of “shoulds”), the future could be so bright. We see a lot of possibilities, given that conversations and concepts around mental health have become more common and that young creatives coming into the industry are demanding a different attitude from their peers and bosses. As a millennial, I’ve said a few times to Gen Z peers, “It’s not that you’re the first generation to want better work conditions; it’s that you’re the first generation being clear and vocal about it consistently.”
Brandi and I have received a huge amount of feedback since we started our podcast, and this gives me so much hope that people crave this discussion. I’m really grateful for what I was able to do in my career, but my physical and mental health suffered greatly from the depletion because nobody was talking about these things.
With the results of this survey, we hope to give everyone datapoints and information to de-mystify what creative professionals need to do this whole creativity thing for a living. Making this better means the work gets better, clients get better work for what they’re paying for, and the humans working on it can do more without running out of juice, like so many of us did, so often, as if it was the only way through this career. It’s beyond time for a new standard. We hope that Zero Waste Creatives becomes a piece in the giant puzzle of making a difference.
BP: Let yourself find that “aha!” moment and run with it— this is advice for the entire industry. And, to get to ‘aha,’ I believe you have to start approaching things differently. For me, it’s been about developing all the ways that seemingly disconnected things—like creative burnout and wasted earthly resources—are actually very connected. Understanding this led me to seek out experts from a much broader set of industries I needed to learn from to define my flavor of sustainability. And, as a result of all of this, my creative tank is continually refueled. Exercising creativity with challenges and unexpected connections can be regenerative. With our abundance of accessible information, AI, the speed of tech, etc., it’s easy to paint doomsday consequences for these things, overlooking the possible benefits— like the incredible speeds at which we can draw connections, learn about specialized subjects, and combine these forces for good.
As a young creative, I always focused on the idea that creativity’s output was solely about something original that you could produce in some tangible way, versus what I know now, which is the idea that creativity is a part of problem-solving, thinking, and way of moving through the world. By creating this survey, Fe and I want to get at the heart of what people are experiencing and how they are really doing. Creatives were a great place to start because Fe and I know them best. Through greater understanding of the results, we can apply our own lived experiences, wisdom, and creativity toward changing the industry and peoples’ experiences in it. Which is a fancy way of saying, “forcing the industry to do things differently in the most organic way we can imagine.”
Let your creative voice be heard! Take part in the ZWC’s annual Creative Voices Heard survey. The survey is open until August 12 and results will be shared this fall.
PRINT will start syndicating the Zero Waste Creatives podcast in our PRINTCast Studio soon, but in the meantime, check it out here.