Dustin Brenton

PRESIDENT/CREATIVE DIRECTOR
BRENTON CREATIVE, FRANKLIN IN

Dustin Brenton has over 20 years of experience in the printing, marketing, advertising, graphic design, and higher education industries. He started in high school (1998) as an intern, plate-making for a local newspaper, to designing graphics for the local news affiliate, to working at an ad agency, to co-founding a marketing and advertising agency in 2008 that served local, national, and global clients for over a decade. Dustin has an Associate’s degree in visual communications from Ivy Tech Community College (where he currently is an adjunct professor) and a Bachelor’s degree in marketing management from WGU. Dustin has a passion for the world of design and has known that this is what he wanted to do with his life since he was in the 4th grade, when he saw what his older brother was creating in his graphic arts class in high school. After taking a short break from the design world in 2019 and most of 2020, Dustin felt the call of being a graphic designer pull him back. Reviving the passion, Dustin decided to start Brenton Creative officially in October 2020, where he is the President and Creative Director, and the future is looking bright.

Has the pandemic changed your workplace and your workflow? Do you expect to return to pre-pandemic ways of working or will any changes become the ‘new normal’?

When starting my previous agency back in 2008, we worked remotely from our houses. It was seen as a liability. People would ask us where our offices were located and we would give a vague answer. Even before the pandemic, it was becoming more acceptable to be working from home. Now, I believe, this is a new normal. More people will be working from home, even after the pandemic is a distant memory. I believe this is a good thing. Working from home over the past decade has made me more productive and given me more freedom to be with my wife and kids.

What do you expect 2021 to hold for graphic designers and the design business? Have the challenges of 2020 changed the way you think about your job and career or the role of design?

I believe that 2021 will eventually be a great time for designers and the design business. Once the pandemic slowly fades away and the economy rebounds, there will be a boom. People will start to travel more, dine out more, buy more products, and ultimately just begin to live their lives. Companies will want to attract the money that is infused into the global economy and the best way to do that will be through advertising. Hopefully, this will begin to happen in 2021, but it won’t happen overnight. This is a long vision of what is to come. This will continue to spill over into 2022 as well. But I’m an optimist.

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