Yes, I’m a Designer started as a blog in 2010 by Martin Perhiniak when he relocated to London, UK to work as a full-time Adobe instructor and graphic designer. He started sharing his experience online besides teaching in classrooms and working on graphic design, UX and illustration projects.
From a humble beginning of a few loyal fans on his blog, he turned Yes I’m a Designer into a well-known and established brand and source for quality educational content for creatives. It took 8 years of hard work creating 1,000+ video tutorials, 30+ online courses and hundreds of seminars delivered around the world.

Yes, I’m a Designer has been growing rapidly when Martin decided to focus on his online educational content and stopped doing classroom training in 2017. Around this time he released a series of online courses called MasterClass for Adobe applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, and they quickly became best-selling materials on sites like Udemy with over 100k students enrolled from over 200 countries.
The biggest impact to his popularity as an instructor can be traced back to a fateful email from a fan who attended a live seminar Martin was presenting in London called Learn to Draw Anything in Adobe Illustrator CC. He asked whether there was a recording of that lecture and suggested to upload it to YouTube.
Martin was not planning to share this video as he only recorded it for his own reference, and because of the poor sound quality, he was reluctant to upload it to his YouTube channel. After some further encouragement from his fan, he finally decided to release the video, which went viral immediately. Within days it reached 100k views and by now it gathered well over 50k likes, 1,500 comments,  and 2 million views:

 
It just goes to show that sharing your work as a creative is crucial and sometimes the least expected piece will bring the biggest exposure and recognition.

In 2017 Martin’s team started to grow as his wife Shumi officially joined – also a graphic designer and illustrator, who has always been great support from the beginning – along with recent graphic design graduate Emily and video editor/pro skater Barnabas.
Their small but ambitious team decided to take on a crazy challenge to release a creative tutorial each day on their YouTube channel for the whole of 2018. They called this the 365 Days of Creativity series and it is now complete and free to watch on their channel. This was a huge project and involved all three of them working on it for the most part of 2018 and taught them lots of invaluable lessons. Take a look here:

Committing to long-term projects is hard, especially for creatives, but they have a huge impact when completed successfully. Take for instance Vasjen Katro aka Baugasm’s 365 Posters project, or Jake Parker’s Inktober concept.
Find yourself a goal like drawing characters or designing a poster daily and commit to doing it for a longer period of time, like a month or a year and if you are persistent enough you will be able to reap the rewards of your invested time and effort eventually.

Everyone at Yes I’m a Designer is using Wacom products on a daily basis and it is helping them to produce quality training content both for their weekly YouTube videos and for their online courses.
Martin started using a Wacom Intuos tablet while he was studying product design at university in 2004 and since then he owned and worked with over 10 Wacom products including 4 Cintiqs of various sizes. Currently, his setup includes two workstations. He has an Intuos Pro connected to his iMac Pro where he is mainly editing his courses and working on graphic design projects, and he has a Cintiq 27QHD and an Ergo Stand on a standing desk where he is working on his illustrations and digital art.
Shumi and Emily are both using various Intuos tablets on a daily basis for their designs and illustrations. Shumi also has a side-gig called HerDesignWorld creating and selling illustrated cards, notebooks and art-prints both online and in high-street shops.

Martin and his team are all also actively working on various creative projects besides producing educational content and some of their recent clients were Viacom, Disney, Accenture, Toni&Guy, Ben&Jerry’s, Transport for London.
Both for their creative and educational projects they use several resources to stay inspired. They are all big fans of Behance and besides having their portfolios hosted there they also frequently visit it to find inspiring projects from other artists and designers. You can get your daily feed of curated inspiration on Yes I’m a Designer’s Instagram account or on their Pinterest account where they organise their inspiration into boards. You can also read about other artists they admire or collaborate with on their creative blog.
Books like the Messy Middle by Scott Belsky (founder of Behance), Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) and magazines like Computer Arts and ImagineFX are also helping team YES to stay up-to-date on tech and industry changes.

Their team has a diverse taste in music varying from orchestral and world music to 90’s boy bands and Bollywood songs. You can follow Martin’s concentration playlist he is listening to on Spotify while working or check out their favorite creative podcasts; Overtime and Design Break.
Team YES also love traveling, which luckily they get to do quite a lot since they are invited to present at creative conferences often. They recently hosted workshops at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles, where they also met up with fellow creative YouTubers like Dansky and Chris Do and his Futur team.
After the event, they embarked on a 3 weeks-long road trip covering well over 2000 miles from San Francisco to Albuquerque, New Mexico and had lots of adventures like a close encounter with a bear in Yosemite National Park and a drone-related accident near Mount Whitney. Luckily they all made it safely back to Bournemouth, the UK where their studio is based.

Yes, I’m a Designer is planning to constantly improve their tutorials for their 155k+ subscribers on their YouTube channel and their growing numbers of members who participate in their exclusive live streams, giving insight into the challenges of working on the real design and illustration projects. They are also working on new online courses, planning to release a course each month in 2019.

Watch more videos on the Yes I´m a Designer YouTube page.

Lesson of the day: Hard work, pays off. Keep on rocking until the people ask you if  you are a designer, so you can answer:

YES, I’M A DESIGNER