TEDx Talk- Design, Getting Free & Getting Paid In Burritos

Aaron Draplin is a designer based out of Portland, Oregon, in the US. If you check out his website, he doesn’t appear to care much for the web, but he is an awesome graphic designer, and he has worked in various design roles in the Midwest and elsewhere over the years before eventually going freelance in 2004.

He gave this TEDx talk in Portland last year and it’s a really inspiring watch. His delivery style is really informal and funny as he uses strong visuals to rattle through his story of struggling through “meetings about meetings” and “emails about emails” in the corporate world, leading up to where he “got free” and started the Draplin Design Co. It’s a terrific personal account of what’s important to him in his career and his life, including choosing his clients, not being at the mercy of budgets (“One [job], I got paid 25 grand; one, I got paid a burrito.”), and not wearing pants.

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