Tom Muller at Glasgow School of Art

Last night I had the pleasure of hearing Tom Muller, of Kleber design, speak at the Glasgow School of Art.

The talk covered the many different aspects of his career; from being a small boy in his dads workshop right through to present day. He spoke about the goals he set himself when he was younger, joining his first real creative agency, suffering from a creative drought (although a very boring and obvious question, I wish I had asked how he overcame that), joining Kleber and finally to moving on and doing his own thing.

Most of you will know Tom for his work on the web but what many of you may not know is the fact that he can turn his hand to pretty much anything he wants, with his most recent client work being for DC comics, something which he admitted himself that he has always wanted to do.

I have to admit to being a bit of a fan-boy, I remember sitting in College some five years ago and seeing Klebers website and client list and being totally blown away. Since then he’s still managed to remain consistently in my bracket of favourite designers. I’ve been to many design talks and conferences and none have left me as inspired as this one. I love how honest, open and modest he was.

He touched briefly on a piece of advice he got when he was just starting out, something which I have also recently been told:

Come into work from 10-6 and use the money you earn there to do your own projects in the evening; staying up until 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning.

When Tom was speaking about this I instantly thought back to a recent publication of .net magazine where Jeffrey Zeldman said:

do cool free stuff that doesn’t make you any money. It will totally grow your brand and get you clients.

Tom also told the audience to embrace social networks with forums in particular being the best place to pick up new clients. This is all solid advice, which perhaps people are only starting to take notice of now with social networks like twitter coming to the fore.

I’ve also asked if Tom would consider putting up his slides for others to view, if he agrees I’ll drop a link to them on this post for you to view. You won’t be disappointed.

May 7th, 2010