Frankie Ratford, founder of The Design Kids, with Vince Frost

Design Your Life podcast E017 with Vince Frost in conversation with Frankie Ratford, founder of The Design Kids.

Frankie always wanted to be a designer in Australia. Following a family holiday to Oz as a child, she made it her goal to study and work here and at 18 made the move from her homeland England to study design in Melbourne. After seeing Vince Frost speak at a design event Frankie became “obsessed” and was determined to land a role with Frost*collective. A few years in, she came to the realisation that full-time studio work was not her dream and decided to travel and reflect on what her creative purpose could be.

Almost 10 years later Frankie has become one of the world's leading experts on the Graphic Design industry. Having founded The Design Kids; a global online/office resource bridging the gap between studying and working in design across 33 countries, Frankie has spent over six years on the road building a global design community of 140,000+ people from the ground up. Her new coaching arm takes advantage of all the knowledge she gained, looking at each of the nine business elements from a client perspective and industry perspective. She works with studios as an outside perspective to help get the right clients, position the studio where it needs to head, improve their digital presence and most importantly, their bottom line.

In this episode, Frankie relives the moment when she walked away from her successful studio career to make discoveries about what she really wanted and was capable of. Here, Frankie shares her journey from the terrifying but deliberate choice to take the road less travelled and not follow the prescribed career trajectory she’d been told to follow, and how it made her realise the problems in the current state of design education.

Stay tuned for Episode 018 featuring Artist and Designer, Gemma O’Brien.

frankieratford.com
frostcollective.com.au

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