Is it possible to be a successful surface pattern designer without using social media? (02/11/2026)
Having been away on a wonderful break with my husband, youngest son and our dog last week I returned to my studio this morning and sat at my desk. Mondays are the days when I work on the visibility of my surface pattern design business. Up until now this now involved spending a whole day dedicated to creating eight social media posts for the week to post over Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
Today I sat at my laptop doing everything to avoid creating the posts for nearly half an hour. I sat there thinking about how social media sucks the life out of my work and puts it into a system that I don’t really understand and that I actually hate. There, I said it out loud, “I hate social media”. I spend a whole day every week, that’s about 400 hours a year building content to bring my best artwork and surface pattern design creations out into the world so that someone can spend one millisecond swiping past it on a tiny screen. Is it really worth it? Nope, not at all, not really, and I don’t want to do it any more. It is actually more stressful, time consuming and challenging than creating my artwork and patterns which I think is bonkers in itself.
So, this morning I made a fundamental business decision that I am ditching social media as a business tool (it has never been an actual social thing for me - I don’t want to know what everyone had for lunch thanks) and doing it my own way. I don’t know what that way is yet. But, what I do know is that I can’t get banned from it like I was from Facebook for life when all I was trying to do was set up a business page and I won’t be bending to the rules and regulations of Meta and worrying whether someone is stealing my art from social media platforms to train AI models. Social media has consumed too much of my time and I would much rather spend it making meaningful relationships with real people and creating real and fun art and patterns.
I’ll let you know how it turns out!
