Somebody designed the road signs
Most creative work is invisible because it worked. In the late 1950s two British designers, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, were asked to redesign the country's road signs, which had become an unreadable mess. They built a new alphabet that could be read at speed, tested it by propping boards in a car park and driving past, and drew pictograms including a cow based on a real one from Calvert's childhood farm.
Their work is on every road in Britain and has been copied worldwide. Nobody notices it, which is exactly the measure of a DESIGNER having done the job properly.
Almost all of it is commercial
The romantic image is a PAINTER alone in a studio waiting for inspiration. The reality of creative work is overwhelmingly applied: somebody drew the cereal box, chose the colour of the shampoo bottle, wrote the words on the ticket machine, designed the font this sentence is set in, and decided what noise a car makes when the door shuts.
That is where the jobs are. An ARTIST may illustrate medical textbooks, an ANIMATOR may work on adverts, a WRITER may spend years producing instruction manuals. It is still creative work, and it pays a mortgage.
Made by a crowd
A single animated film needs hundreds of people: an ANIMATOR for movement, a DESIGNER for how the world looks, a COMPOSER for the music, a WRITER for the script, an EDITOR for the timing, a DIRECTOR to hold an opinion about all of it.
Even work that looks solitary usually is not. A novel passes through an EDITOR who argues with it, a designer who covers it and a proofreader who catches the day the writer typed the wrong name. The lone genius is mostly a story publishers find convenient to tell.
The money is lumpy
Creative careers are unusually freelance. A PERFORMER, a FILMMAKER, an illustrator or a MUSICIAN typically works job to job, with long negotiations, late payments and months that produce nothing at all followed by months with too much on.
Many people therefore build what is politely called a portfolio career: some paid commercial work, some teaching, a little of the thing they actually want to do, with the ratio slowly shifting if things go well. Knowing that in advance is far more useful to a hopeful teenager than being told to follow their dream.
The makers with their hands
One group in this grid works in a tradition rather than an industry. A POTTER, a SCULPTOR, a JEWELLER and a TAILOR are making single objects with skills that take years, and they are working in trades that have existed for millennia.
Those crafts have had an unexpected revival, partly because everything else is mass-produced and identical. A hand-thrown bowl sells for what it does precisely because a machine did not make four thousand of them, which is a reasonable thing for a young maker to bear in mind.
The selling is now part of the making, too. A modern POTTER or JEWELLER is likely to run their own shop online, photograph their own work, answer their own messages and post the parcels themselves — so the skills that turn a craft into a living include several that have nothing to do with clay or silver.