Chase Jarvis, CreativeLIVE: New Models Of Creativity

Chase Jarvis has spent much of his career going against the advice of those around him, and so far has done well as a result. Speaking at PSFK CONFERENCE SAN FRANCISCO, Jarvis elaborated on the importance of a creative education, and how our current education system is broken. As a young and struggling photographer, he vowed that if he was ever in a position to help young budding creatives like himself, he would do so. Several years later and after working with some of the largest brands in the world, Jarvis set about doing just that by sharing all of his trade secrets with anyone and everyone. Not surprisingly, he gained many critics.

However, the result was a huge audience of young creative individuals receiving the information they needed to further their career for free though Jarvis’ blog and YouTube channel. He decided to take this one step further and expand his audience beyond simply photographers, and try to bring out the potential of people who would not otherwise consider themselves as creative types. At the time, Apple had just released the first iPhone, which Jarvis saw as an opportunity to transform average users into photographers. He created an app called ‘Best Camera,’ which allowed users to take a picture with their phone, add filters and adjust the image, and then publish that image directly to social media sites. It was a model that would later become huge through apps such as Instagram and Path.

As Jarvis explains, this experience gave him an idea of exactly how technology can be used to scale creativity. From this came the idea of CreativeLIVE, an online teaching space bringing together some of the top creative leaders in their industries. Not only are the classes taught live and accessed for free, but the lessons provide in-depth knowledge by following the teachers around for hours if not days on end. If the user likes the lesson, they are then given the option of purchasing the video for future use. CreativeLIVE has just recently raised $7.5m in funds from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Jarvis sees this growing access to creative education resources as not just an evolution, but as a revolution that will help overturn outdated education practices.