Small Pond, Smart Fish: Why Young Designers Should Avoid 'Design Capitals'
January 25, 2008 | Posted by: Carl Alviani
Automakers have Detroit, investment bankers have New York, and film actors have Hollywood: the bright shining centers of their respective industries. For those seeking a career in one of these fields, going to the Capital City is often a given, whether to get a foot in the door, or build an existing career. The creative professions have their Meccas too, and the gravity they exert on designers and other creatives is strong indeed; perhaps too strong.
The cities to which I'm referring are probably obvious to most readers: San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston and Chicago, domestically; London, Berlin, Copenhagen, Milan and Barcelona in Europe. While it's true that a lot of design work goes on in these places, a lot more of it does not, and plenty of young careers are hobbled by failing to acknowledge this. We're all complicit, of course: creative professionals seem to have an enormous capacity for self-deception regarding how necessary living in a Design Capital is to finding work.
Graduating from design school in Brooklyn a few years back, I assumed a challenging but workable identity: young, well-trained, and looking for a job in New York. Unfortunately, so did literally thousands of other recent graduates, from all over the U.S. and all over the world, and we all seemed to want the same few junior positions. The competitive landscape that resulted is familiar to young creatives starting out in any of the above cities, where top consultancies and corporate studios are bombarded by dozens of portfolios a day, many from recent arrivals from far afield. They often respond by establishing two, three or even more temporary internships or contract positions for the lucky few, rotating them out every few months. Their recipients go deeper into debt, grateful for the opportunity of adding something useful to their resume while taking low-paying freelance jobs to pay the rent.
What finally inspired me to look beyond New York was a pair of realizations that hit in rapid succession. The first was that many freelance clients were remote, or might as well have been. Some were in other time zones, found through digital word of mouth; others were just a few subway stops away, yet we met in person perhaps once or twice in a year, exchanging files electronically and conferencing over the phone. "If it doesn't matter where I am physically," went the reasoning, "why am I living in the most expensive city in North America?" The second realization was that all of the Senior Designers I knew in New York--not just most, but every single one of them--had gotten their start somewhere else. Usually somewhere less sexy: Pittsburgh, San Diego, rural Connecticut.
These days, the reason seems obvious: in a tightly packed market, it's nearly impossible for anyone but a bona fide prodigy to get meaningful experience in a creative studio. Wages are low and turnover high, so inexperienced interns and juniors are handed small pieces of pick-up work, not major projects that they see through from beginning to end. In order to develop the sorts of solid, concept-to-market pieces that make a portfolio shine, a young designer needs to work somewhere that needs them, not one eyeing them dubiously until the next hungry grad takes their seat.
I did finally leave the city after a year and a half of scratching, and judging by the status of most of the fellow alumni I'm in touch with, this is a typical progression. We're scattered across this country and a few others, with those remaining in New York often held by reasons unrelated to professional necessity.
It was a fine decision, I'm happy to say. Upon arrival at my new job in the gently hip but definitely second-tier design destination of Portland, I was placed in charge of the largest single project in my new employer's docket. It was a massive undertaking, and required learning literally dozens of new skills and processes. It was, in other words, precisely the kind of project a recent graduate needs in order to learn how to be a real designer, and precisely the sort he or she would never get as a junior in San Francisco or Milan.
This truth is not hard to come by. A few months spent talking with designers at professional or social events and some careful reading of online discussion boards will lead most students to the conclusion that Design Capitals are rarely the best locations to start a career. And yet they come in droves, from all over the world, mumbling something about "having to go where the jobs are," while resolutely ignoring the hundreds of studios and corporations doing remarkable work in unfashionable places: the cutting edge furniture companies in Michigan and Denver, the brilliant game design studio in Orlando, the American design headquarters of a global electronics brand in Atlanta.
What they're really coming for is The Creative Professional Lifestyle: as strong a recruiter for the field as the AIGA or IDSA could ever hope for. It's an overwhelmingly urban image, of course, and the more urban, the better: nobody imagines moving to London to take a design job and ending up in a dull suburb working at a cubicle, even though that often turns out to be the case. Companies that employ creative professionals are constrained by finances just like everyone else, and frequently that means locating somewhere other than the centers of the world's most expensive cities.
The good news is that The Creative Professional Lifestyle exists in plenty of unexpected places. Detroit is full of high-ceilinged live-work lofts converted from derelict factories and warehouses--maybe more so than New York these days. Omaha, Austin and Portland have indie rock and art scenes that garner national attention. Minneapolis is building fantastic modern architecture with fervor, and holds one of the world's great modern art museums.
All of these places have creative professional communities as well. Not as large or dynamic as in the more recognized design cities, but viable and active, and more importantly, supportive of young designers. With the level of competition turned down slightly, creative professionals beginning their careers often find it easier to build lasting networks with more experienced colleagues, and impact the community around them rather than just react to it. This experience, coupled with expanded opportunities to get their hands dirty on real projects, is often pointed to by established designers as the bedrock of their professional career. With a solid foundation like that, moving on to a Design Capital later becomes a real possibility. In reality though, many successful creatives find they want to stay put, and get busy building the next Capital themselves.
Edited by our resident creative employment guru, Carl Alviani, Editorial Director of Coroflot.
Thank you very much for this post. I t is really getting frustrated trying to find a design position after graduation. I will start looking at other locations rather than the meccas and capitals.
Posted by: Shamar Milton | January 26, 2008 03:58 PM