The economy's stumbling, an enormous bailout is looming, and you're just a lowly creative professional, looking for work. Well, it could be worse; you could be a mortgage broker in Phoenix.

Job hunting in the creative professions, whether for a junior just out of school or as part of a career move, has always been a long, thankless slog, whose success often hinges on circumstances entirely beyond the hunter's control. A volatile economy is one, yes, but designers get hired and fired because of changes in management, business fads, new technologies (just ask those lucky few with interaction design training), even a rise or fall in certain kinds of media coverage. The good news, as far as it goes, is that the Creative Economy seems to follow a trajectory largely detached from the rest of the job market. Bad times for auto workers and shop keepers, for example, don't necessarily translate into lots of graphic designers out of work; on the other hand, good economic times don't always mean more creative jobs either.

One explanation for this detachment is that businesses react in a variety of ways to tough economic times, and one of those reactions is to invest in innovation. Investment in innovation means jobs for creative professionals, whether freelance, in a consultancy, or at a corporate office. On the other hand, that unpredictability means that the whereabouts of those jobs remains an obscure and dimly lit bit of information.

As a site that posts job listings in the creative professions, Coroflot is in an unusually good position to look for patterns in this area, both chronologically and geographically. And in these uncertain economic times, we thought it might be nice to share some of the things we've noticed.

In examining around 450 jobs posted between June and August, a few patterns start to emerge, some of which turn out to be unexpected. For one thing, the creative job market, from Coroflot's perspective, doesn't appear to be in any trouble. And secondly, those jobs are often in some surprising places.

July, August, and September saw jobs posted at roughly the same pace as in the few months before the sample, but more than at the same time last year. In other words, the market had been steadily growing, not at a dramatic rate, but consistently. Given the behavior of the job market in general over the past few weeks, that's good news.

Geographically, things get more interesting. As a North American based site, Coroflot gets the majority of its job listings from nearby, with only 10% or so coming from outside the US and Canada. This fraction is up from the previous year though, and will almost certainly increase in the future, especially considering that a significant portion of Coroflot's traffic originates outside of the US.

That said, it should come as no surprise that the metropolitan areas posting the most jobs are all American. Here are the top six:

1. New York - 50+ postings
2. San Francisco Bay Area - 50 +/- postings
3. Los Angeles - 25+ postings
4. Boston - 25+ postings
5. Seattle - 15+ postings
6. Chicago - 15+ postings

This supports the widely-held understanding that there's not necessarily a direct correlation between the size of a city and the size of its creative economy. Los Angeles is considerably larger than the Bay Area, for example, but ranks lower; Houston -- the nation's fourth largest city -- doesn't even make the list, but Seattle, at less than half the size, does.

Eleven other metropolitan areas posted at least five jobs during that period: Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Minneapolis, Portland, Philadelphia, San Diego, Toronto, Washington DC, and the Stamford/Norwalk area of Connecticut. A scattering of cities in western Michigan made the list as well, when taken collectively.

For those who follow such things, the presence of many of these towns can be attributed to some obvious and specific industries: Target is responsible for several of the Minneapolis listings, much of the Bay Area's primacy is due to web and interactive media companies, and western Michigan rides on the presence of furniture companies like Steelcase and Herman Miller.

Overall, the spread is surprisingly broad. No single urban area hosted more than 20% of the total, an unexpected result considering the conventional wisdom that concentrates creative work in a few mega-centers.

In addition, it should be noted that those metropolitan areas are physically enormous. A number of the jobs in the Boston cluster, for example, are shoe design positions in Lawrence and North Andover, 30 miles to the north. Seattle's count includes a posting in Bellingham, an hour's drive away, and the Bay Area listings stretch from San Jose to Emeryville to The City itself, a span of nearly 50 miles.

This gives lie to the image of the creative professional working in a busy downtown studio; the more likely setting is an office park surrounded by a parking lot on the outskirts of town. Given the increasing mobility of the modern workforce, this shouldn't be surprising. The fact that high costs force many offices out of urban cores has been mentioned in Creative Seeds before ("Small Pond, Smart Fish"), and in times of economic uncertainty, this becomes even more significant. So don't look for a surge in job openings at central urban locations anytime soon.

The converse of this trend, of course, is that urban settings will always hold a strong pull on creative professionals, and can constitute a competitive advantage in trying to attract the top applicants. Several acquaintances of mine who work as designers in New York held junior positions early in their careers at a large housewares company on Long Island, more than an hour by train from New York City. While the company has certainly secured some great employees over the years, they've also had difficulty retaining them, due largely to the fact that nearly all their designers lives in Brooklyn. In casual conversation I once asked a senior at the firm if there'd ever been talk of setting up a satellite design office closer to home, and was told it had been suggested multiple times, but always failed for financial reasons.

While it's true that finding a warm body to fill a creative position will probably never be difficult--we love this stuff, after all--finding the right workers and hanging on to them is considerably tougher. It's no secret that creative professionals are more mobile than the average worker, so even when jobs are tight, the best still go where they want to go.