I happened upon One Minute Briefs around two years ago when searching for ways to merge my love of design and copywriting. My journey to it started back in 2020, when I lost all three of my events-based part-time jobs overnight. Suddenly faced with a yawning stretch of time at home (semi-comforted by a thin blanket of furlough before I was eventually made redundant), I spent those first few weeks deciding how I could use this time fruitfully.
I had always wanted to learn design but could never justify the cost of the software when I couldn’t guarantee I’d ever have time to use it. This, it seemed, would be my chance.
By the end of March I had forked out the eye-watering amount to download Adobe for the first time, and spent the next year giving myself an intensive youtube/Skillshare-based education.
Having spent so much time learning in isolation, I became hooked on online competitions to validate my efforts. Bottle covers, T-shirts, notebooks, posters – if there was a design competition, I would enter it. But there was never any sense of community in these one-off brand events. My fellow competitors remained faceless and often only the winning entries (of which mine was never one) would see the light of day.
It's easy to become disheartened as a beginner, as all the successful people you see seem to be in an unobtainable league of their own. You forget that all of them started somewhere, and that this awkward fumbling stage is a rite of passage.
What I didn’t know I needed was less pressure to be perfect and more opportunities to play.
This, I believe, is why I instantly clicked with One Minute Briefs. It’s such a welcoming, non-judgmental community where every idea is given equal consideration. It feels like creatives from all over use it as a kind of mental-gym where they can give their imagination a daily workout. As all entries are reposted, they’ve created this beautiful symbiotic relationship where the community inspire, and are inspired by, each other.
After a few months of entering, I could see both my ideas and my ad design style improving. A few months after that I had my first prize win. Skip ahead to today I’ve had two more prize wins from Kind and Woolmark, both with concepts I’m extremely proud of. Given every prize brief has around 200 unique entries, to make it to the top 3 feels like a huge achievement and is never something I will take for granted.
Even now I can never tell which ideas will get the best reception – often the simplest ones that come to me just before the deadline end up doing well. It’s shown me that I actually thrive working to a deadline as my mind literally starts racing to get to that good idea. My silly, pun-based entry that ended up winning me a month’s supply of Kind bars came to me, inconveniently, just before I had to leave the house and was one of the fastest mock-ups I’ve ever made.
Ultimately though, it’s the support and encouragement of the people who enter OMB that has helped me overcome my imposter syndrome. My design and copywriting skills have come so far since 2020, and I’m insanely thankful that there is a space like OMB where I can get a chance to practice and showcase them. Though I can’t enter as much as I would like (in the intervening years I also trained to become a primary school teacher, a profession that leaves famously little free time) on the occasions that I do, I invariably feel creatively fulfilled.
OMB has introduced me to incredible people, sparked other opportunities and given me the confidence to imagine a more creative future for myself. For that, I will be forever grateful.
