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In 2026, there's a version of success that creatives are quietly walking away from. You know the script: posting on socials every day, maintaining a presence on every platform, filming your process, showing your workspace, sharing your wins, putting on a show for an audience who may or may not care.
It's exhausting to describe. It's exhausting to do. And, as a growing number of creatives are discovering, it might not even work.
In that light, a recent thread on The Studio, Creative Boom's private network, threw up something rather refreshing: the collective wisdom of designers, illustrators and consultants who've stopped performing visibility and started practising it.
A gateway to IRL
Perhaps the most striking contribution to this discussion comes from designer and art director Kosho Sugiura, who neatly sums up how a lot of creatives are feeling about online right now.
"I use the internet not so much as a place to build relationships, but rather as a gateway to meeting people in person," he explains. "I don't really showcase my work either. That's because I'd rather people discover me for who I am, rather than for my past achievements.
"By communicating with this approach, people reached out to me saying, 'I'd like to meet you sometime'," he adds. "I had the opportunity to actually meet them, and before I knew it, I found myself working on the backgrounds for an animated film. It wasn't as though I was actively trying to get noticed. But I suppose you do end up meeting the people you're meant to meet. Quiet visibility isn't such a bad thing, after all."
Working on an animated film without actively seeking attention: that's not a lucky accident. It's what happens when your presence, however modest, is consistent and genuine.
Connection, not extraction
Designer and illustrator Sam Hawkins of Firecatcher arrived at a similar conclusion via a different route. During a reflective session about her approach to new business, she was asked a question that reframed everything: "What is the discomfort, and how can you use it?"
"I'm uncomfortable with outreach because I don't want it to feel transactional," she explains. "I'm much more suited to relationship-led, trust-based, slow-burn business development, and that shift in perspective has helped me show up much more honestly. Reframing those uncomfortable, awkward parts of myself, the ones I used to see as negatives, has been a big part of that."
As a result, the only platform she's on now, besides The Studio, is LinkedIn. "I've stopped treating it as a place to win work and started using it more like I would in real life: getting curious about people, building connections, and supporting others. It feels a lot more natural. I think I'm just wired more for connection, not extraction."
That last line deserves to be read over and over again. It captures, with four words, the difference between visibility that performs and visibility that resonates.
Something worth saying
All of this contrasts sharply with modern content culture. As Vicky Ghose, new business director at Art & Graft, puts it: "There's a lot of noise out there, without much substance. Personally, I like only saying something when you've actually got something to say."
Suu-Min Ang, illustrator at Fox & Velvet, raises the related pressure to broadcast your personal life alongside your work. "I've always struggled with the whole 'share every part of your life' approach," she complains. "I don't think I should have to share everything about my personal life for people to see my work. It also takes a lot of time to film, edit, choose music, etc, for those kinds of posts."
Her alternative? A blog currently in progress: a space to explore the creative process, art history and the crossover between art and science. "I'm throwing it out there and hoping to find my people," she says.
Quality over quantity
So what does this look like in practice? Daniel Poll, founder of Noramble, recently made a concrete change. "I went from posting seven days a week to now three days a week, and I only post things only I can post. So it might be a case study, a story or an experience. It's shifted from quantity to personal quality. Not just regurgitating whatever everyone else is talking about."
The phrase "things only I can post" is a useful filter. If anyone else could have written it, should you have bothered?
Brand and marketing consultant Denise Strohsahl, who's been blogging for over 12 years and sending a regular newsletter for three, has recently changed tack too. "I've started moving away from what I think people want to hear," she says, "and more towards what I think needs to be said. Mostly by trying to write the way I talk. Less curated, more me."
Give yourself permission
There's a theme that runs through all of this, which doesn't get said often enough. You don't have to do it the way everyone else does. The algorithm rewards volume, yes... but your career doesn't have to.
The people in this thread choose specificity over scale, depth over reach, meaning over momentum. Some are figuring it out in public. Some are writing newsletters once a month. One ends up working on an animated film without really trying. None of them sounds like they're performing. And ultimately, that might be the whole point.
