“The only subject I was ever good at was art. At everything else I failed miserably,” says Carson Ting.
Listening to the Rethink Communications art director talk about his school years, you’d never guess the photography and illustration buff has the drive of an entrepreneur.
“Coming from a traditional Chinese family, my parents always pushed me to become a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer,” says Ting. “But that never happened because I never had the academics to see it through.”
That’s a humble self-description from someone who was named one of the world’s top 200 illustrators by Lurzer’s Archive magazine and now owns a photography and illustration business, Chairman Ting Industries.
It’s not that he’s unsatisfied with his creative opportunities at Rethink.
The graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design says he loves working across different media and with different subject matter in his professional life.
“I knew fine arts wouldn’t pay the bills,” he says. “I actually wanted to be an animator, but it looked really tedious. I didn’t want to be animating hands all day. But then I took an advertising course and totally fell in love with the whole program.”
The ad industry has reciprocated that love, awarding him at the Digital Marketing Awards, London International Advertising Awards and Advertising & Design Club of Canada Awards, to name a few.
Chairman Ting, on the other hand, is more about taking projects of personal interest.
He’s been accepting assignments for about a year, but only recently made Chairman Ting an official entity.
“We just registered it as a business. It’s more of an experimental kind of thing. We wanted to do a lot of personal projects.”
The “we” is Ting and his fiancé, Denise, who manages the business side of things. They’re planning to get into merchandise, and are going to expand the business to Hong Kong next year.
Ting already gets plenty of attention oversees. Shanghai’s Urban Look magazine has interviewed him about his work, and he’s photographed feature magazine spreads for the U.K.’s Computer Arts Magazine. One of the magazine’s editors saw Ting’s photos online and called him out of the blue.
“I’ve got a lot of contacts on [photo sharing site] Flickr,” Ting says. “I’m on it almost every day. I’ve got almost 4,000 pictures now.”
Aside from his upcoming illustration show in Hong Kong, his next big project is a branding assignment for a start-up California social media company.
Poor students take note: you don’t need a good transcript to be successful. Carson Ting is building a global reputation on talent and determination.
To view the original profiles of all five finalists and to cast your vote for your favourite, visit CreativeFaceoff.ca.
