A creative career without art school

It’s often baffled me that I have made a lot of my career about creative despite never studying art in any formal sense beyond a GCSE in design and a part-time Graphic Design diploma. No foundation year, no degree, no studio critiques, just a long, winding trail of moments that, stitched together in hindsight, look suspiciously like an education.

Making things before knowing what “creative” was

The truth is I’ve been interested in making things since I was small. I read comics obsessively, I once won a school competition for a drawing inspired by Lowry, partly because I was fascinated by the song Pictures of Matchstick Men and partly because I was just having a go, without overthinking it. I built a 3D Pac-Man out of wood when I was ten, which still sits proudly in my office. At school I was good at Craft, Design and Technology and discovered the thrill of designing concert posters and house magazines. It wasn’t art school but it felt like a small doorway into that world.

What I didn’t realise then was that a lot of my taste had already been quietly set by where I’d lived as a child. Growing up between Norway and Germany leaves its mark. You soak up a respect for usefulness, for restraint, for things that are well made and don’t need to shout.

I had no idea who Dieter Rams was and wouldn’t have been able to spell Bauhaus, but the instinct was already there, clean lines, calm spaces, a bias towards “less but better” that has followed me into almost everything I’ve made since.

A gap year with unexpected lessons

My gap year added its own unusual chapters. In Finland I volunteered at the local radio station and somehow ended up with my own weekly music show and I still have the tapes (which my daughter found funny, especially the hair-band rock-skewed playlist). At university I wrote bits and pieces for the Oxford Brookes magazine, mostly gig reviews that cared more about atmosphere than accuracy. I even applied for journalism graduate schemes at ITV and the BBC. They went nowhere, largely because I had no idea how the industry worked and certainly no contacts. So I drifted, as most of us do.

Finding marketing by accident

My first proper job after university was a temp role at Unipart in Oxford, helping to install software and untangle data. It was an unlikely place to be spotted as someone who should be in marketing, but my manager saw something and nudged me in that direction. Suddenly I was helping to shape visitor experiences for what was then a world-class distribution centre. The CEO even sent me to Disneyland Paris to study how they managed theirs. It was my first business trip and I was hooked.

Unipart paid for me to take a weekly graphic design diploma at a local college and it lit me up, and for the first time I felt something click. But Oxford felt small and my friends had drifted away, so I knew it was time to move on too.

The long agency apprenticeship

I chose the agency world, though not in an official creative role, and five years at Photosound, including a move to America, taught me that creativity isn’t always in the title. I helped pitch ideas, shape experiences and reach out to prospects in ways I only now recognise as overtly creative, even if I didn’t have the language for it then.

Jack Morton Worldwide came next. Again, not officially as a creative, although looking back I can see the pattern clear as day; I thrived in the ideation, the chasing of new business and its crafting of creative emails and concepts to attract attention, the problem-solving and the scrappy inventiveness required to keep the work moving.

When a hobby became a creative proving ground

Somewhere in all of this I started a blog, Cheeky Running. It was just a hobby but quickly became a bit of an obsession, especially as the views and comments started coming in, and it taught me far more than I expected about voice, rhythm and what happens when you keep showing up.

A friend approached me to be part-time marketing manager for the New Balance Reach the Beach Relays and that’s when my creative muscles really began to show. Suddenly I was using Adobe tools again, shaping campaigns, bringing ideas to life visually, and freelancing followed, with clients like PUMA and a start-up diabetes community called myGlu that let me stretch creatively in every direction. It was the year that confirmed I wasn’t imagining it; this wasn’t dabbling, this was a creative life forming in real time.

The unexpected pivot to Bain

Then came the curveball: a job ad for Bain & Company, Global Online Marketing Manager. I applied on instinct and somehow found myself in a series of energising, slightly brutal interviews, and I got the role and stepped into a very digital world.

But when a new global head of recruiting arrived six months later, everything changed. I was invited to events, asked what I thought (I was quite critical), and to my surprise my suggestions actually landed. We experimented, improved things and the work flourished, and that led to a new title with the word “creative” in it, the first time those words were formally attached to my name. I’d wanted it for years, and what I didn’t expect was how long it takes to grow into it.

A bit like comedians being expected to be funny at breakfast, people assume creative directors are creative on command. The job forces you to find your footing quickly.

Eventually Novartis appeared on the horizon a move back to Europe, and the next chapter unfolded. Senior creative roles, huge programmes, big swings, bigger lessons.

For years, visualising ideas had been the slower part of the job. The thinking was there, the story was clear, but translating it into something others could see often lagged behind, which meant the most interesting part of the work, the creative exploration, sometimes arrived late, after the meeting, after the decision, after the moment had passed.

And now, with the arrival of GenAI, that gap has closed. It hasn’t replaced anything I know or value, it’s simply expanded the room, it lets me sketch, test and iterate at the speed my brain is already moving, so ideas surface earlier, options get sharper faster, and you can bring people into the thinking while it’s still alive, not once it’s been polished into something safe. For the first time, the tools finally match the way I’ve always thought, and used as an amplifier of creativity, not a substitute, it’s been a revelation.

The education I didn’t know I was getting

Looking back, not studying art never held me back, particularly as painting was never my thing anyway. If anything, it broadened my field of vision. It meant I learned creativity sideways, through comics and wooden Pac-Men, through radio shows and gig reviews, through agencies, blogs, start-ups, global consultancies and teams that let me try things before I was ready; through practice rather than pedigree.

What really builds a creative career

I built my creative career the only way I knew how. By following the things that made me curious, by saying yes before I had the vocabulary, by learning in public, soaking up sounds, smells, words and experiences, by making things, always making things, and by having the fortune to work with bosses who understood and encouraged the craft.

Some of the best people I worked with in the agency world never studied marketing, comms or art formally either, what they had was learned experience, sharp judgement and taste built the hard way, by doing the work until the work did something back. At the extreme end of the spectrum, even Steve Jobs didn’t complete college, he dropped out and later talked about sitting in on a calligraphy class out of sheer curiosity, and that small detour ended up shaping how an entire generation thinks about typography and design.

It turns out you don’t need an art school degree, creativity is a personality type, we can’t all be stand-up comedians either, what you need is a lifetime of moments that shape how you see the world; everything else is technique, and technique is learnable, if you’re willing to put the hours in.