The commercialisation of the working-class creative
Home, to me, has always smelled faintly of glue.
One of my most vivid early memories is of my forearms sticking to the kitchen table as I battled to twirl my spaghetti Bolognese – six-year-old me adhering to the family home in the form of a ubiquitous spray-mount film.
The table wasn’t just for meals. It was a workspace, a studio, a production line for whichever mock-up was needed that week.
My parents, both graphic designers, met at Preston Polytechnic (now UCLan), where I’d later study too. Both the youngest of five, both from Northern working-class households, they were the first in their families to attend university, thanks to a government-funded scheme for people just like them.
The energy of our home was shaped by that story – a steady rhythm of making, a quiet hum of work, and an underlying gratitude for being able to do it at all. The unspoken rule in our house was that creativity had to serve a purpose.
It was welcome, as long as it earned its keep – and design was the perfect example of that.
“Art” on the other hand, was something that happened elsewhere. Galleries were for school trips – rushed affairs in which I perfected my five-second head-tilt per painting, just enough to pass as engaged before heading straight to the gift shop to deliberate which keyring to add to my collection.
As far as I was concerned, artists fell into one of two categories – rich and stuffy, or dead enough to constitute being embalmed in a keyring.
I understood design to be the only acceptable face of creativity – useful, employable, and, crucially, bill-paying. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I realised how much the commercialisation of creativity had taken, not just from me, but from the North itself.
My own journey – Pentagram and the pivot
During my studies at UCLan, I was surrounded by hardworking, resourceful students. Many of us were juggling night shifts at Nando’s or living at home just to afford materials.
Our tutors were seasoned industry professionals – passionate about ideas, whilst consistently aggravated by the university’s box-ticking.
From Valentine’s Day ketchup packaging to branding Blackpool’s annual pigeon homing festival, most of our briefs veered towards real-world employability.
Which client, company, or sector is this idea for? Who is the target audience? And is it viable?
The celebrated ideas were the ones that appealed to a wide audience of consumers, communicating quickly and effectively. Anything too abstract, too slow, or too self-referential, was gently steered back on track.
I didn’t question this at first. In fact, I embraced it.
The belief system I’d grown up with was being reinforced daily, which was comforting and made me feel like I was in exactly the right place.
I graduated in 2017 with a first in graphic design, along with three D&AD Student Awards, concrete proof that I could make creativity work for me. Until it didn’t.
“Too many working-class creatives never get the chance to explore the full wilderness of their imagination.”
My success as a student landed me a job at Pentagram in London – the pinnacle for many designers. But even in that rarefied air, something gnawed at me. My instincts were sharp, my ideas polished – but somewhere in the process, my voice was getting lost. Or even worse, sold.
One afternoon in 2019, I skipped work to join a climate march. I threw together a placard in 10 minutes. Nothing polished, just a cardboard outburst, but something shifted.
For the first time, I used creativity for expression.
This spontaneous act changed everything. It pulled me away from design and towards performance – a reckoning with everything I’d edited out to make my work acceptable.
Performance let me be loud, emotional, and wrong. It gave me space to say things that didn’t need to sell.
None of this is to say commercial design is bad. It’s a skill, and often a lifeline. But for many working-class creatives, it becomes the only path. Not because of preference, but because of pressure.
North vs South: The institutional divide
Now, as a designer-turned-artist who guest-lectures across institutions, I see the divide more starkly than ever.
In the North, students are taught to consider client needs early. There’s a strong (and sometimes necessary) push toward “real-world” design.
Southern schools, by contrast, can afford to be vague. Students explore abstraction, make mess, fail gloriously – and often, expensively.
The differences go beyond teaching style. There’s more money in the South. More funding, more name-droppable guest lecturers, more of the vague but powerful “access” that helps a graduate get noticed.
In the North, students often self-police their creativity, afraid of wasting time or resources on something they can’t monetise.
One version builds resilience. The other builds confidence.
The trade-offs
There are advantages to early commercialisation. Northern graduates are often quicker on their feet. They know how to present an idea, take feedback, survive.
They secure jobs in agencies and learn quickly. These are superpowers in an increasingly unstable creative economy.
But the downside is this – too many working-class creatives never get the chance to explore the full wilderness of their imagination. They learn to make good work, not necessarily brave work.
On top of this, because security is the underlying end goal, these graduates tend to stay in the same jobs far too long, translating their generational trauma into the familiarity of being underpaid, under-appreciated, and having to just “stick it out.”
All while their middle-class peers are encouraged to “find their voice,” when really they’re just trying to find a foothold.
What’s lost isn’t just individual potential – it’s cultural depth. If we’re only making space for those who can afford to experiment, we’re limiting the range of voices, aesthetics, and ideas that shape our visual world.
What needs to change
Design education needs to acknowledge these classed dynamics more openly. Not with guilt or platitudes, but with actual, structural shifts.
Working-class students need real funding – not just for tuition, but for time. Well-paid internships, material bursaries, residencies that don’t assume family financial support.
We need to give these students permission to experiment without risking everything.
All these students graduate together. They compete for the same opportunities.
But only some of them can afford to take the underpaid placements, the internships in cities they can’t afford to live in, or the “impressive” cultural jobs that quietly rely on someone else footing the rent.
This isn’t about talent – it’s about time, access, and stamina. And when one group can afford to wait it out, they’re the ones who end up shaping the industry.
Equally, students of middle- and upper-class institutions need to be prepared for the labour of creative work. How to answer a brief. How to balance a side job. What it means when creativity doesn’t pay.
Because if working-class students are learning too early to monetise their ideas, many “privileged” students aren’t learning it at all.
Both are a cruel injustice. One strips creativity of its freedom, the other of its realism.
And somewhere in the middle, the future of creative practice is thinned out, polarised, and deeply unequal.
We need to start valuing working-class creativity not only when it aligns with branding or commercial outcomes, but when it dares to be messy, poetic, political, or completely unmarketable.
If we only celebrate working-class design when it behaves, we’re not celebrating creativity – we’re rewarding compliance.
Design has long been the working-man’s art: clever, efficient, and proudly useful. But it deserves to be more than that.
Working-class creatives deserve to take up space beyond the pitch deck – to experiment, to fail, to dream without a price tag attached.
If we want a truly rich, representative creative industry, we must stop confusing access with opportunity, and start creating space for those who were never told they could just make art.
Harriet Richardson is a performance artist based in London.