Overall Signals reads what the creative world is asking for and shows it to you while it is still happening. Nobody edits the numbers by hand and nobody is paid to appear in them. A set of bots checks public sources around the clock and the pages update on their own.
Where the job data comes from
Every half hour the bots read public feeds from creative job boards and freelance marketplaces. Each new post is scanned for the skills it mentions, from illustration and type design to Blender, After Effects and copywriting. A post asking for a motion designer who knows Cinema 4D counts once for Motion Design and once for Cinema 4D.
The share you see next to a skill is the percentage of all posts from the last seven days that mention it. The change compares that share with the seven days before. We compare shares instead of raw counts because job boards have busy and quiet weeks, and a skill shouldn’t look like it’s booming just because a board posted twice as many listings on a Tuesday.
A skill needs a minimum number of posts before it gets an arrow. Two posts becoming six would read as +200%, and that tells you nothing.
What the visitors row means
The second row of rising and cooling skills comes from you. When a story in Experience before identity stays on your screen for a few seconds, when you choose to discover who made it, or when you read an article to the end, that counts as interest in its discipline or category.
We store daily totals and nothing else. No cookies, no IP addresses, no profiles, no record of who looked at what. Bots are ignored, and the same browser counts once a day per item.
Open calls
The open calls list comes from public feeds of residencies, grants, prizes and calls for entry. The bots read each listing, look for a deadline and sort everything by the days you have left. Listings that say there’s no entry fee are marked, so you can filter out the ones that charge you to apply.
Deadline detection reads text written by hundreds of different organisers, and sometimes it gets a date wrong or can’t find one. Always check the organiser’s page before you apply. You can add any deadline to your calendar, or subscribe to the whole list and get new calls in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook as they appear.
Experience before identity
You see the work and the story behind it before you see a name, a follower count or a CV. We think that’s the fairest way to meet someone’s work, and what people stop for when the name is hidden says more than any like button.
Skill pages and what to learn next
Every skill has its own page with a twelve-week trend, recent posts asking for it, open calls and the skills most often requested alongside it. The What to learn next tool starts from the skills you already have and shows which ones employers keep pairing with them, weighted toward the ones that are growing.
What the data can’t tell you
These numbers describe public listings in English-language feeds. They miss work found through friends, studios that never post openly and whole markets that don’t publish feeds at all. Treat them as a compass rather than a map.
If you know a public feed of creative jobs or open calls we should be reading, write to us and we’ll add it.