Design Sight creative entrepreneurs' event in SF

September 09, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

And under the heading of network-building, readers in the Bay Area with an entrepreneurial bent should give Design Sight a look. An ongoing series of dinner events organized by the SF chapter of the IDSA, this is a novel approach to the typical networking/schmooze event. Held in a restaurant rather than a bar or conference hall, tables are filled with an unusual mixture of designers, entrepreneurs, and experts on some of the non-design fields that enable design work to proceed: marketing, PR, intellectual property, and so on. All very civilized.

This Thursday's event features heavyweights from Astro Studios, The North Face, SFSU and Peclers Paris, as well as (in a much smaller capacity) myself -- a potentially fascinating mix that makes me curious to see what gets talked about. Details are here; if you're in attendance, drop by and say hi.

2009 Designer Salary Survey is O-P-E-N

September 08, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

You're a designer, you get paid, you take the Coroflot Designer Salary Survey. Come on, it's only fair.

Now in it's 9th year (true!), this is the longest-running survey on the web that's specific to designers, and has gotten far larger than we could have guessed when it started up way back in 2001: last year's netted over 4000 responses, covering graphic, interior, interaction and industrial design, design management, illustration, web, and all the other creative endeavors found in Coroflot's portfolios. So whether you're senior staff or newbie freelancer, we want to hear what you do and how much you make doing it. As before, results can be viewed once you've entered your own info, sortable by country, region, job title, and education level, and a full analysis published after polling closes.

Survey will be open through the end of October -- rise up and be counted while the counting's good

Guest Post: Assessing creative freelancers, by Terra Dehnert of Aquent

August 28, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

In addition to the afternoon panel discussion and networking session, the San Francisco installment of the Creative Confab will offer something new: a pair of morning workshops aimed specifically at skill-development for both creative jobseekers and employers new to the creative talent search. While I will be conducting the first, we've secured the services of some of the Bay Area's most qualified creative staffing pros to cover the second.

Terra Dehnert and Corey O'Brien are Account Managers at Aquent, Inc., where they interview and assess hundreds of creative professionals a year, for placement in an extraordinary range of positions in web and interactive design, copywriting, graphic design, design management and more. As a preview of their workshop "The Subtle Art of the Creative Talent Search," Terra has put together a set of pointers on interviewing and portfolio review based on her experiences.

When my clients approach me looking for creative freelancers, they tend to come at the last minute for unique and highly skilled individuals -- of which 5 exist in the universe. Today one of my top retail clients praised the work of a designer I sent out for a 4-hour project. Another needs a proofreader and a production artist to put the final touches on their annual report, one of the most highly visible projects they produce each year. Obviously, I can't send creative talent to these clients that would make even an inkling of a mistake. Luckily for me the company I work for has developed hands-on assessments that make sure our talent head out the door, armed with skills to impress… and usually a pretty stylish outfit to boot.

As more and more of our business focuses on temporary creative positions, more and more of our energy is spent assessing the candidates hoping to fill them. Over the years we've worked out a formalized process for doing this, which has the freelancer completing a timed project with the software or programming language they will be using on the job, whether they're a Powerpoint Designer or a Flash Developer. The assessments are structured so that even Aquent employees who are not fluent in these programs can easily grade the results, giving a score and detailed feedback to both client and candidate.

Now, in reality you can't "test" every skill. I've had great success placing Copywriters, Creative Directors, Art Directors and Project Managers -- all specialties where we don't have a set assessment. So if you've never built out a creative team and don't have the resources to develop software assessments, don't fret; there are plenty of other areas that can be covered during the interview process to ensure you're making a strong hire.

Conducting a solid portfolio review:

Every designer, copywriter, creative director, even some project managers, should arrive at an interview with their "book," be it paper, website, slideshow or other. Here's what to look for:

1. First and foremost, what type of work has this person done? Is their book only filled with catalog samples? Only one page collateral pieces? Very simple websites with no animation? Basic sites with tons of animation and no content? Marketing emails? Only online banner ads? Think about what you want to accomplish with your creative team and make sure the people you interview are showing this type of work. In terms of copywriting, the types of industries they have written for is crucial. For project management, the number of projects they can handle at one time (I'd say anything under 12-15 would scare me away based on the clients I work with).

Continue reading "Guest Post: Assessing creative freelancers, by Terra Dehnert of Aquent" »

Guest Post: A portfolio doesn't speak for itself, by Jim Best of Pensa

August 21, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (3) [Permalink]

Brooklyn-based Pensa Design is sort of an archetype of the ideal small product design studio. They take on a broad range of projects, from medical devices and thermometers to umbrellas and kitchen gadgets, they do much of their own prototyping and technology development, and they've got an incredibly cool office under the Manhattan Bridge. Consequently, they get inundated with portfolios from hopeful designers from across the globe.

Much of the responsibility for sorting through these documents falls to co-founder Jim Best, who has formed some pretty strong opinions about what a good one looks like since he helped start Pensa in 2005. Luckily for us, Jim agreed to summarize his thoughts on the matter, giving us a succinct and very actionable set of guidelines. Although focused mostly on Industrial Design portfolios, nearly all of the suggestions apply across a wider range of disciplines.

A portfolio doesn't speak for itself: Tips for presenting you, the designer

Competition for getting a new job is getting tougher every day. As a prospective employer, I've found that it's easy to weed out design candidates who don't show a grasp of basic skills, but frustrating and difficult to tell the difference between an incapable candidate, and one who just isn't communicating well. This is where good talent gets passed over. There's not much time in an interview situation for everyone to really get to know each other and imagine the possibilities of working together; because time is tight, you need to be organized and communicate clearly.

Our projects at Pensa span everything from designing the next cool cell phone to strategizing an innovation pipeline for a global brand. Assembling small powerhouse teams is key for a consultancy's success, so we look for candidates who are at the top of their game, ready to hit the ground running. I know that great talent is out there. For me, it's a matter of finding it; for you, a matter of communicating it.

Over the years, I've identified a few specific factors that separate a successful candidate from one who gets passed over. So below are some tips for presenting your work, yourself, and making a portfolio that will show off your skills and talent. Hopefully this will help tip the scales in your favor, and get you one step closer to the job you want and deserve.

1. Choose wisely. Your portfolio is only as good as the work you put in it. Choose your best projects, and start with something that's going to grab the viewer's attention. Potential employers flip through numerous portfolios every week and spend just seconds glancing at pages to evaluate work. So put your best foot forward.

Avoid repetition and redundancy. For example, don't present 100 sketches when 3 good ones will do. Also, not every project has to be a full blown case study; choose the best one or two, and then select the best aspects of the remaining projects to show off specific design skills.

2. Keep it relevant. Your portfolio is not only about showing your best work, but what's relevant to the position you are applying for. I still get portfolios with drawings of horses and landscapes. Why? No matter how good the drawings are, they don't tell me anything about how you think and your ability to design. Relevance resonates, and therefore makes a lasting impression.

Continue reading "Guest Post: A portfolio doesn't speak for itself, by Jim Best of Pensa" »

What small business owners know about creative hiring

August 20, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

There are far too many good blogs on the NY Times website these days -- between Bits, ArtsBeat, The Moment, and Pogue's Posts, I can barely keep up with the stuff that's potentially pertinent to the creative professions, much less the ones I read out of sheer geekery. On top of all that, a new one's just entered the scene (for me at least), with an outstanding article on the hiring process.

"You're the Boss" is co-written by a number of small business owners, and yesterday's entry, Updating the Peter Principle: How to Hire After the Recession, sums up two facts of the hiring process with incredible clarity.

The first, often missed in breathless discussions of Business 2.0 and the creative economy, is that there is no element of a business more crucial to its success than its employees. The author, Jay Goltz, lays this out right there in the first paragraph: "I can tell you that most of the business problems I've had over the years have been because of bad hiring."

And I'd suggest this is considerably more true in the creative professions. For all our obsession with tools, technology, management strategies and work environments, a business, creative or otherwise, is people.

Innovation? That's people. Creativity? People. "Design thinking?" People. Find the right ones, and learn how to keep them engaged, and you'll innovate.

The second is that hiring is a skill. HR professionals know this, of course, but not many other people do, especially entrepreneurs and small business owners. In the creative fields, where small studios make up a huge portion of the landscape, this can be especially damaging. I also have a hunch that Goltz's observation that "entrepreneurs frequently aren't great at hiring" is probably exacerbated by a creative background. Designers and allied professionals have a tendency to want to take control of everything ("it's all a part of the design process!", and when this is coupled with the level of optimism common in creative professions, you have a perfect recipe for horrible hiring.

So what to do? Be skeptical, first of all. Goltz suggests a "guilty until proven innocent" approach, which translates in the creative fields to not getting sucked in by gorgeous renderings alone. Asking probing questions does not always come naturally to designers, nor does evaluating an interview critically, but both are crucial to finding the right talent.

A more useful piece of advice is this: recognize that you might not be good at this. If you have done some hiring in the past, and they've all worked out beautifully, then great. Congratulations. If not (or if you're new to creative hiring) consider engaging a recruiter or talent agency, or doing some homework first. Interviewing, checking references, and assessing skills are all complicated, effort-intensive processes that benefit from practice and research. I can humbly suggest reading through some of the "Two Questions" posts from previous Creative Confabs, over on Core77, in which directors and recruiters from top creative firms explain some of their process, but there are thousands of other resources available. The NY Times article is a good start -- read the whole post here.

SF Confab announced (finally)

August 17, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

We're keenly aware of how big a fraction of the Coroflot community resides in and around the Bay Area, so a San Francisco date for the Creative Confab series has been an obvious thing ever since we first conceived of the thing back in March. The number of portfolios from SF and surrounds is obviously high, and moreover, the quality of work that we see from that crowd is exceptional, as evidenced by frequent appearances of Bay Area-based portfolios on the Featured Portfolios page.

So it took us, paradoxically, an extra long time to get the San Francisco Confab organized, because we wanted to make sure we got it exactly right. And...I'm pretty sure we did.

To start with, the venue is phenomenal: Autodesk has graciously offered the use of their Design Gallery for the whole day, a massive space on the second floor of One Market Street, so we should have no trouble getting a record crowd in there (we're thinking 200 or so). Transit's a snap, and apparently there's a dinosaur made of Legos, too.

Second, the panel is exceptional. So far we've confirmed three of the four participants: John Foster, who builds and supports creative teams for IDEO; Kate Gilman, a recruiter for 24 Seven who interviews approximately two designers a day as part of her job; and Steve Johnson, Director of User Experience Design & Web Development at LinkedIn.

Third -- and this is a new one -- we're doing both a morning and an afternoon session this time. After feedback from participants of the previous Confabs, we're getting the idea that people have a lot of questions about the creative hiring process...more than can be answered in the course of an hour long panel discussion. So we're extending the panel to an hour and a half, to allow time for more questions, and we're adding a pair of morning workshops.

The first will be led by two account managers at creative talent search agency Aquent: Terra Dehnert and Corey O'Brien. They too have done a huge amount of recruiting and interviewing over the years, and are planning a 90 minute session covering the basics of the creative talent search, targeted at small- and medium-sized firms with limited experience seeking their own design staff and freelancers. Expect a lot of case studies and real world examples.

I'm leading the other one. As you might have gathered from some of the previous articles here on CS, I'm a great believer in the power of the online presence to help or hinder a job search -- I've just spoken to too many people over the past year who've made a great hire or found a great job due to an online connection. This will be a fairly straightforward workshop, based on loads of examples culled from designers' profiles, discussion boards, comment threads, online portfolios and (yes) Coroflot portfolios, examining what exactly makes the difference between a good and bad impression when researching an applicant. It'll include a few research and writing exercises near the end as well -- bring your laptop.

Details and registration are posted on the Confab page as of this afternoon. And as always, we'll be getting some pre- and post-event words of wisdom from the panelists, so keep an eye on CS and Core77 over the next few weeks.

image credit: Shutterstock.com

Likey comes into its own, part two: Why do we love the Hero Shot so much?

August 11, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

A few weeks back (and a couple hundred miles ago), I made a quick list of the five most beloved images on Coroflot so far, as determined by you, the Coroflot user community. With the expanding popularity of the Likey system, and the ever-growing population of portfolios (150,000 is right around the corner), now seems like a good time to look a little more closely at how they got so beloved in the first place. Fortunately, this isn't as difficult as I'd feared: a quick scan of these five, and many of the images right below them, reveal a very strong common theme.

The descriptor that comes instantly to mind is iconic. Highly Likey'd images tend to stand on their own, proud and diva-like, dominating the frame. Juan Cagampang's knives from the previous post are a good example, posed with great intention and clarity in front of clean white background. Of the top five images, in fact, the three most popular are 3D renderings on white or light grey backgrounds.

The fourth, Erik Arlen's 2D shoe rendering, perches under a spotlight against a stage of pure black.

Continue reading "Likey comes into its own, part two: Why do we love the Hero Shot so much?" »

Likey comes into its own

July 10, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

We recently featured an image on the Coroflot Member Gallery, of a folding knife Juan Cagampang did for Gerber. It's a pretty sweet little chunk of hardware, with an elegant curve to its spine, some gently technical-looking structure in the handle, and a striking, perfectly circular hole that forms the pivot.

It's also a statistical phenomenon: in the three days since it went up on the Featured page, it has garnered 51 total Likeys, 37 of which it received in the first 24 hours. This puts it in some rarified company, already in the top 100 most-loved images of all time on the site, and well on its way to the front page: this morning, in its third day post-featuring, it was still the fourth most beloved image of the previous 24 hours.

If this kind of statistical attention seems a little obsessive, that's because my job includes staring at these numbers for an hour or more every day. Anomalies like Juan's stand out as sharply as a lone tree in a field of brush and shrubs. They also point to a certain maturity in the Likey system. When it was established back in October of 2008, the intention of the Likey was twofold: to encourage greater engagement in the Coroflot community by its members, and to create a tool for identifying exceptional work. The first was achieved as soon as the first users hit the little rectangular button on their screens.

The second requires a certain volume of responses to really come into its own -- only in the past month or so has the density of Likeys gotten high enough to become a useful tool of discovery. Juan's knife is a good example. Full disclosure compels me to mention that he and I worked together for a few days doing concept development for an electronics project back in 2006, and so I was slightly reluctant to pick this particular image for featuring. But out of the 300-400 images that get featured every month, only a handful get followed by such a wave of Likeys, so this does a lot to justify the selection on its own merits, and indicates something much more powerful than the approval of a small number of website editors; something nearer to universal appeal.

With this in mind, it's useful to go back through some of Likey's Greatest Hits, and start looking for patterns. For all its early popularity, Juan's knife is still just barely in that top 100; it's tied at 94th, in fact, with Flavio Carvalho's electrifying police car illustration:

Here are the all time top five, so far:

Continue reading "Likey comes into its own" »

Portland Confab panel discussion video, part two

July 06, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1) [Permalink]

The thrilling conclusion of the Portland Confab panel. Some highlights to watch for in the second half include:

- Stories of finding great designers in unexpected places: Beth Sasseen discovers a shoe designer through an online discussion board; Kirk James finds a tremendous sketch artist because of his mandolin-building hobby
- The specific abilities needed to be a notebook computer designer
- The advantages of maintaining a long-term database of potential hires
- The necessity of presenting a true picture of your skills and personality, even if it's not what the employer's looking for -- an interview that doesn't result in a job with one firm can turn into a valuable referral somewhere else
- The difference between skill sets for staff positions and freelance ones

That's it for Portland. Leave comments if you can, by the way: San Francisco's Confab is in the planning stages right now and we're looking to make it even better.

Portland Confab panel discussion video, part one

July 02, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

As promised, the panel discussion from Portland's Creative Employment Confab is online -- the first half of it, anyway. Panelists, from left to right, are as follows: me, moderating; Chelsea Vandiver, head of Ziba's Communications Design Group; Nick Oakley, lead industrial designer for Intel's Mobile Platforms; Beth Sasseen, senior creative recruiter for Nike; and Kirk James, creative director at Cinco Design.

This first half of the discussion, around 28 minutes long, holds some particularly useful insights on the creative hiring process, notably:

- Where creative talent-seekers look for leads on new hires
- What a portfolio can't show
- The dangers of relying too much on a single source of referrals
- How creative teams in large corporations deal with official hiring channels
- Finding the narrative in an applicant's work history and online presence

Hope you find it useful. Part two goes up shortly.

Founding a design firm at the worst possible time: Kicker Studio on FastCompany.com

July 01, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

In the face of a difficult job market, what's the last thing a designer ought to do? Leaving a steady position and lighting off across the country to start a new studio is near the top of the Insane list, and yet this is exactly what Interaction Designer Jennifer Bove opted to do in September of last year, just as the economic future slipped into freefall.

As part of FastCompany's frequently excellent Expert Design Blogger series, Jennifer has been invited to tell the story of her experience building this new venture: Kicker Studio, which she helped start along with Designing Gestural Interfaces author Dan Saffer. Admittedly this isn't quite your typical seat-of-the-pants startup: the team is something of an All Star lineup in the IxD world, with plenty of experience and contacts among the five principals. But selling design is never an easy proposition, especially in a newly frugal environment. And that makes this a must-read series for any experienced creative professional coming to grips with a precarious employment situation, and contemplating something similarly crazy.

Bove is the first to acknowledge that it's a daunting task, explaining that "people have been looking at me like I'm a crazy person" to Alissa Walker during a conversation at SxSW in March, while describing the studio's founding. Alissa's charming intro here includes a few samples of Jenn's work, and makes a great starting point for anyone interested in Kicker's history.

We're three posts into the tale at this point, and already there are a few nuggets of wisdom for those inclined to take a similar path. For starters, being connected really helps -- even more so than in finding a job, building a client base for a new studio means tapping on a lot of shoulders, and Walker's observation that "She knew everyone" probably has something to do with Kicker's continued existence.

The second impression was that, as complicated and difficult as freelancing or job-searching might be, starting a studio is even more so. Here's the first paragraph from Bove's account of Kicker's first few weeks:

The first three months of any startup endeavor is full of new things. How soon can we get the Web site up? Which logo do we like? Do we have an NDA? How about a fax template? We could really use some coffee mugs, a whiteboard and our own trashcans. If only we had some income, we might be able to buy these things. Oh what an exciting day that will be!

Continue reading "Founding a design firm at the worst possible time: Kicker Studio on FastCompany.com" »

Learning from welders about the creative job market

June 30, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

It's a good time to be a welder. A skilled one, anyway. A New York Times article from last week pointed out that certain trades appear to be largely insulated from the job-shedding of the recent economy, including nurses, electrical linemen, and the aforementioned guys with the torches.

One obvious response to this revelation is to lament the diminished status of skilled trades in the West, especially the US: it's been decades since jobs involving skilled manual manipulation were considered prestigious work, and the scarcity of such skills is certainly a contributing factor to the conundrum portrayed in the article.

But at least as important, and far more instructive for creative professionals, is a common trait of those welders, nurses and linemen enjoying such good pickings: demonstrated proficiency in a hard-to-learn field. The welders in such high demand, for example, are the ones with 10 years of experience who can create flawless welds on oil refinery projects. The nurses are critical care nurses: a designation that takes exceptional levels of schooling, dedication and -- again -- experience to achieve. And so on: "...employers are begging for qualified applicants for certain occupations, even in hard times," explains the article. "Most of the jobs involve skills that take years to attain." The Free Exchange blog on Economist.com extends the argument by noting that "experience matters. Employers are uninterested in those without five to ten years on the job -- enough time to master the skills in question. That's obviously not something currently unemployed workers can obtain right away. In the short term, the supply of these workers is essentially fixed."

Moreover, these aren't skills that can be implied or hinted at by a resume or a solid Personal Brand. I've never hired a welder, but I suspect that if I did I'd want to see them weld before offering them the job, and that I'd want to look at those welds very very closely. Same for a special education teacher, another of the professions mentioned: teachers are typically observed in a classroom setting before being handed a contract, especially if they're to work in an especially difficult or high-stakes environment.

Creative professionals tend to walk a border between white collar and skilled labor, and as such don't have extremely clear routes for demonstrating competence. There's the portfolio, of course, which serves a similar function to a welding test in that it showcases ability in a straightforward way: if you can't draw, it'll show. No way around that. Contrast this with management skills, which are nearly impossible to test for directly ("you have 35 minutes to make this team of engineers and marketers into a smoothly functioning team..."). This is one reason why a white collar worker can build a career on affability and good connections despite a lack of skills: they're just that hard to measure.

Designers are generally judged on both. Recruiters and creative directors comment repeatedly on the double-whammy nature of the creative hiring process, where a good portfolio is the cost of entry, but the interview and the referrals seal the deal. It's a bit like being hired twice. The mistake many young creative professionals make is in assuming that their success hinges more on one side than the other. In the current economy, it could be argued that the intangibles, like management, decision-making, and "design thinking" are diminished in importance, since tighter budgets mean more risk-aversion, and an "intangibly great" applicant with a mediocre portfolio is a risky (though potentially fantastic) hire.

A likely short-term solution is to focus more than ever on demonstrable skills. Yes, personal brands are important, networking is important, and communication skills are important. What's more important, especially in a tight economy, is the ability to demonstrate skills in a direct, understandable way. What's the Graphic Design equivalent of a welding test? How does an Interaction Designer showcase her chops the way a critical care nurse showcases his? More and more employers are starting to ask these questions and act upon them.

For the designer, this makes right now a fantastic time to brush up on basics. Successful consultancies tend to spend their slow periods working fanatically on capacity-building projects, practicing the skills that make them competitive by developing their own spec projects. Jobless creative professionals would do well to follow suit, by taking classes, volunteering, or pursuing spec projects of their own: you know, practicing.

photo: Nikola Bilic, courtesy of Shutterstock

As more professions go temp, what happens to the designers?

June 19, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

CNN Money writes in an article from earlier this week that the percentage of American workers employed in freelance, temporary or self-employed circumstances is expected to climb to 40% in ten years time. For creative professionals, the future is already here.

The Salary Survey we've conducted here at Coroflot for the past several years has long supported a suspicion shared by many designers: that they engage in freelance or other flexible working situations at a higher rate than the workforce as a whole. The 2008 survey shows most fields reporting around 60% of respondents in corporate positions, with the remainder divided between freelancers and consultancies, plus a few odd "other" replies, and while consultancies certainly employ full-time staffers, the core-plus-freelancers model is probably the most common. Add the growing popularity of project-oriented hiring in corporate studios as well, and you've got a total flexible workforce that's probably pushing 40% already, if not surpassing it.

The reasons for this tendency have been discussed for quite a while -- the perceived optional nature of design work in many fields, the intense competition for work, and the never-ending search for more interesting projects, among others -- but its appearance in other fields is a relatively new thing. A typical graphic designer can pretty much expect to have a spell of freelance work at some point in her career, but for most bankers (for example) this is still a fairly novel notion.

Continue reading "As more professions go temp, what happens to the designers?" »

Hiring a Designer is a Deeply Frightening Thing

June 17, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

Job-seeking is a stressful task, but especially so for designers: not only must we make the right connections and have the right combination of training and experience, we're also judged -- sometimes quite coldly -- on the merits of work that we've poured our sweat and soul into. It could be argued that the most useful thing design school teaches is how to take rejection and criticism gracefully.

But did you ever consider the job search from the perspective of the ones doing the hiring?

Creative hiring is unique from the employer's perspective as well. The past two months have had me interviewing and conversing with a broad range of recruiters, directors and senior designers (for the Confab series, mostly), and one subtle theme of those talks that caught me off guard is how hard the hiring process is for them as well, and how daunting. It's easy to lose sight of this fact when you're a recent grad or newly unemployed, scraping for something, anything, in what feels like a completely skewed and unfair system; but as with many design problems, sympathy for the client can be a powerful tool.

Continue reading "Hiring a Designer is a Deeply Frightening Thing" »

Creative Confab PDX: Observations. Photos. Next Steps. Comments?

June 15, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

If you're looking for a reason for Creative Seeds' recent two week hiatus, look no further. The Portland installment of the Creative Employment Confab is done, and judging by initial response, succeeded admirably; both as a source of information and a network-building opportunity. Much of the credit must go to the four panelists for providing a nucleus around which the event could form, and a list of points for further discussion. More of it, though, goes to the attendees: a surprisingly high turnout of around 125 highly engaged designers, directors and recruiters, most with years or decades of experience in their books. To put this in perspective, the New York Confab drew around 140 total, from a city approximately eight times as large -- a testament to the size and vibrancy of the Portland design community perhaps, or just the result of better publicity.

Video of the panel discussion is being processed at this very moment, and should be live later in the week, but for immediate gratification, there's a summary of the conversation on Core77, and a brief gallery of panel and crowd shots on the Confab page.

Next steps: Plans for the San Francisco installment of the Confab are already underway, tentatively scheduled for the second week of September, and if initial interest is any reliable gauge, expect it to eclipse all previous Confabs in both size and variety. As always, this blog and the Confab page are the primary sources of news on schedule, venue, speakers and registration.

We're also eager to get impressions from those who were at the White Stag Block last Thursday. Observations, suggestions, praise and pontifications should all be submitted to the comment section of this post, and will be thoroughly mined for information in shaping the remaining two dates.

Pacific NW Readers take note: Coroflot Creative Confab comes to Portland, June 11

May 28, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1) [Permalink]

If you haven't seen it already on Core77, here's the official announcement of Portland's upcoming Creative Confab date -- I'll be moderating the panel discussion again, and sticking around afterward, so any Coroflot fans in the Pac NW, please come by and say hi:

Hot on the heels of the highly-energetic, highly-crowded (140+ person) New York City installment of the Creative Employment Confab, Coroflot is bringing the panel + networking event to the City of Roses in its only Pac NW appearance, Thursday, June 11 at the University of Oregon's White Stag Block in Old Town.

As before, the event will run for three hours, feature ample opportunity for networking with local creative professionals and recruiters, and center on an engaging panel discussion with some of Portland's top designers and design recruiters. We'll be spotlighting each of the panelists over the next week, but you can get start getting yourself acquainted right here:

Chelsea Vandiver - Head of the Communications Design Group at Ziba

Beth Sasseen - Senior Design Recruiter at Nike

Nick Oakley - Industrial Design Lead for Mobile Platforms at Intel

Kirk James - Creative Director at Cinco Design

In addition, there will be a limited number of dedicated Recruiter packages available for design-driven companies looking to establish a presence at the event -- check the registration page for details.

Coroflot's Creative Employment Confab
June 11th, 2:30-6 pm
The White Stag Block
70 NW Couch St. in Portland, OR

Lessons from the Convention Center floor: The problem with "show mode"

May 22, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

New York was a thrilling, exhausting whirlwind of activity, as work trips often are. If you've been following both Creative Seeds and the Core77 blog, you may have noticed that the Confab that just wrapped up coincided neatly with New York Design Week, and that some of the same people were involved in organizing and covering both, myself included.

This makes an interesting opportunity for comparison, between the employment-oriented crowd at the Confab, and the low-key salesmanship on the floor at the ICFF. Both groups are striding a narrow path between forming connections and making a sale: on the convention center floor, it's furniture and objects being sold; at a networking event, it's your own creative expertise. It became quickly apparent that the most successful "sellers" in each circumstance shared at least one notable trait: an ability to avoid dropping into "show mode." This is easier to describe in the context of the furniture fair.

Those charming two-minute video interviews we post during Design Week are usually the second time the designer in question has explained his or her project to us; this is a strategy we've developed over the past couple of years to help screen for compelling content and fluent presentation. We stroll through the fair, or the off-site site show, seeking unusual objects and chatting with their owners about them. About half of those interactions are immediately off-putting: if what we're hearing is clearly a script, we move on. Of the remainder, perhaps 20% have a good story about the project. We linger for these stories, and if it's an especially engaging or visually rich one, we ask them to tell it again for the camera.

This last step would seem to be the simplest--"tell the camera exactly what you just told me"--but for some reason, the urge to slip into "show mode" is simply irresistible. The casual, earnest story becomes a manifesto, or an ad campaign, and stretches from two minutes to six or seven, leaving us struggling to edit it back down to something resembling that first conversation.

The networking equivalent of this phenomenon substitutes a portfolio (whether present or not) for a line of chairs or lighting fixtures, but the behavior is remarkably similar. So is the solution: the most successful conversations are real ones, not pitches, and the most successful presenters those with an interesting story to tell.

Strolling through the Art Directors Club on Friday during the post-panel hour and a half was deeply instructive. Because most of the attendees were more experienced mid- and senior-level designers or recruiters, the overall tone was relatively comfortable: two or three people getting mutually excited about a point of common reference, hands gesticulating, intense attention paid, and the occasional broad smile and chuckle. Little wonder, then, that so many of the recruiters in attendance opted to not be identified as such, as it's hard to imagine that kind of easy communication occurring so frequently in a job fair format.

And yet, over and over we hear from recruiters, directors and senior designers that a clear, honest, passionate voice is the second most important quality they look for in a new hire, right after a strong portfolio. Is this unfair? Is such a voice exclusively the result of years of experience and the confidence born of multiple successes? Based on the number of seasoned designers who still "pitch" rather than talk, and the number of recent grads I've seen knock 'em dead with authenticity, I'd have to say no. Or rather, that there is a correlation, but it's not as strong as you'd think.

Perhaps it's mostly a matter of intent. My own design schooling, for example, never really explained that it was necessary to be direct and at ease when talking about my work; they focused on preparation. And while I cannot fault this focus, knowing that a poorly prepared presenter is straight-up agonizing to watch, it bears stating here: if you want to speak of your work, whether a project, a concept, or yourself as a designer, do these things:

1. Have a story (or three) to tell.
2. Be genuine.
3. Be at ease.
4. Don't pitch. It's not a show, after all, it's your passion.

NYC Confab is a wrap, video on the way. Next stop: Portland.

May 18, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

For those of you who made it to the Art Directors Club in New York on Friday for the most recent Creative Confab, thanks for being so active, engaging, and numerous. Initial responses have been great, noting some great insights from the panel discussion, and some exceptionally useful contacts made in the pre- and post-panel conversation. There are some first impressions and key quotes up on the Core77 front page, a string of live quotes from the event on the @Coroflot Twitter feed, and a video in the works--should be up here on Creative Seeds later this week or early next.

Next month, the Confab heads across country to Portland, Oregon, with a locally appropriate shift in focus from digital media to the design fields that have made Portland modestly famous: sporting goods, consumer electronics, and a growing interaction design community. Official details and registration information are coming shortly, but for the moment, interested parties in the Pac NW should save this date:

Thursday, June 11, from 2:30pm to 6:00pm, at the White Stag Block (UO Portland) - 70 NW Couch St in Old Town. We've got a similar format and a great panel lined up. Hope to see you there.

The professional advantages of writing back.

May 13, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

One of the great pleasures of preparing for the upcoming Creative Confab here in New York (I'm on-site in NYC for the moment) has been the pre-interview process with the panelists. One of the tricks to getting a panel to go smoothly is to get acquainted with everyone on it ahead of time, in ways both general and specific to the topic to be discussed. It is, fortunately, a delightful process: every panelist is a thoroughly accomplished design professional willing to discuss their background and experiences at length.

The most surprising aspect of these pre-interviews was how easy they were to set up. Liz, Michael, Johnny, Khoi, Judy and Tom are spectacularly busy people with full schedules, and each was able to spare at least 20 minutes, and sometimes over an hour, to answer questions with a complete stranger on just one or two days' notice. While this is probably due in part to media-related credibility, there's a lot more to it: I've had much more difficulty getting hold of much less reknowned creative professionals in the past, design magazine cachet notwithstanding.

Moreover, this access is often granted to a wider audience. Khoi Vinh has a contact email on his Subtraction.com blog, with the assurance that he loves hearing from his readers, and makes a point of returning emails as quickly as possible. Liz Danzico is similarly accessible through her personal blog. Both are, to some degree, rockstars within their professional circles (and both exhibit a deep love for their respective dogs).

The more I've pondered it, the more I've realized this accessibility is the rule rather than the exception among accomplished designers. Mike DiTullo's willingness to coach design students is something I've mentioned before, and I've gotten into numerous fascinating email discussions over the years with big-deal speakers at conferences and talks by simply following up after a chat and an exchange of cards, even as a student or recent grad. Conversely, the number of really successful creative pros I've met who were off-putting I could count on one hand.

It's unlikely this is a fluke. Staying responsive despite a heavy workload and great notoriety is really hard to do. You think staying on top of your inbox is hard? Try being in the public eye for a decade and see how much harder it gets. And so I'm forced to conclude that most of these folks are aren't responsive despite their success, but partly because of it.

In all the discussion of networking as a career-building tool, it's easy to forget that strong networks are also necessary for accomplished professionals too. A common theme of all these pre-interviews has been the degree to which the panelists rely on those they personally trust to find good hires and freelancers, and presumably to get work done in lots of other ways too. Being accessible is the cost of keeping a healthy network, and the payoff is rarely immediate.

I'm not your mom or anything, but it would seem, in this case at least, that being considerate and responsive isn't just good behavior, but good business.

Two new panelists for the NYC Creative Confab

May 11, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

If you haven't already heard the news via Core77, the upcoming Creative Confab at the Art Directors' Club in New York City has a new roster of panelists for your design hiring edification. In place of Liz Danzico and Johnny Vulkan, who had to bow out from schedule conflicts, we'll be seeing Tom Nicholson and Khoi Vinh on the stage for the hour-long conversation.

These are a pair of really exciting additions, since both Tom and Khoi are legends in their respective fields, intensely smart, and extremely experienced in the acquisition of top-notch creative talent.

Tom is the CEO of IconNicholson, which bills itself as "the leading full-service digital agency to Global 1000 companies," and has been doing award-winning, industry-defining work in the digital media fields since the late 80s. Khoi's qualifications are too numerous to list in blog format, but a few of the more pertinent include: Design Director for the entire New York Times website; major innovative voice in applying the grid system in a meaningful way to website design; and author of the widely read and respected Subtraction blog.

Moderating a panel with these two, in addition to previously introduced creative industry superstars Judy Wert and Michael Lebowitz, ranks as one of the most exciting things to happen at Coroflot in the past year. If you can make it, it's going to be an exceptional discussion -- details and registration are at the Creative Confab page, and video of the panel will be posted here on Creative Seeds shortly thereafter.

Social conscience: The best brand differentiator?

May 11, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

By nearly any marketing evaluation, "The Tanzamook" is not a great title. The townhome development bearing that unfortunate name, in Portland's affluent, tree-filled Irvington neighborhood, is unusual for a number of other reasons too; reasons which offer some cautious hope for the viability of socially-aware creative enterprise, even in this challenging economic climate.

"Tanzamook" a portmanteau of two place names, as readers familiar with the geography of both Sub-Saharan Africa and the American Pacific Northwest (yes, all 14 of you) may have guessed. Tillamook is a city on the Oregon coast with a famous dairy -- it's also the name of the street on which the ten-unit condo development is currently being constructed. Tanzania is the East African nation that contains both the Serengeti Plain and Mt. Kilimanjaro, and ranks among the five poorest countries on Earth -- it's also the site of Ruaha Girls School, which has added some spiffy and much-needed new dormitories to its campus over the last couple of years.

The point of connection between these two places is Design Department, a Portland-based architecture group that's taken an unusual approach to "doing well by doing good," and enshrined it in that awkward name. The Tanzamook offers one and two bedroom condos to potential buyers. Each comes with a "spare room" in Tanzania, in the form of a dormitory at Ruaha. It's not optional, and it adds US$2000-$5000 to the cost of each. Design Department has an ongoing relationship with the girls' school, and has linked construction costs of the dormitory rooms (to whose design DD contributed) to previous projects as well, resulting in two dormitories currently in use by around 120 students.

Companies engaged in charity is certainly nothing new, from Andrew Carnegie's libraries to the Aga Khan's hospitals, but some recent proposals, especially within the creative professions, suggest tackling social issues in a more direct way. The problem with charity, after all, is that it largely hinges on prior affluence. But by linking business practice with social engagement on a basic, systemic level, "doing the right thing" ceases to be a nice extra when times are good, and becomes a necessary step in the process, alongside client meetings and invoicing.

Continue reading "Social conscience: The best brand differentiator?" »

From the Core77 boards: Sage words of advice on contact emails

May 07, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

At this point, I think we're all pretty clear on the fact that you need to write a cover letter when making a first contact, and that when we say "decent," we mean more than two sentences long. Here to hammer the point home is a great thread on the Core boards with the evocative name of AAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggh!!!!

The first one's a real contact email, received by board moderator ip_wirelessly:

"I am writing to you regarding a possible position within your company as a product designer. Please would you review my CV/portfolio attached. I look forward to hearing from you in due course."

And rapidly followed by the requisite parodies:

"What's up dood, can I get a job? I like yer werks!!! OK, thanks in due course!!!! Peace!!!!"

"Yo hit me up, I Robert, I want job, I design things, give Robert job"

The message here is pretty simple: if you are writing me, and I don't know who you are, it is your job to explain to me why I should look at your work. TaylorWelden's response sums this up nicely:

Cover letter attached or not, an introduction is necessary. Even a brief one. Who you are, what your expectations are, and why you think they're deserved. A cover letter can be for the details.

Do I just want to start downloading 2MB files from someone whom I never have met, and who didn't even take five whole minutes to type me?

And yes, this has mass email written all over it. Garbage.

Responses are cheap. Filters are expensive.

May 04, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

So here's a post on the Cheezhead HR blog of special interest to us in the creative recruiting field. The summary: Craigslist generally sucks as a recruiting tool, and in a down economy, its shortcomings are accentuated to the point of absurdity.

It's not Craig's fault of course, and I'm one of millions of satisfied customers who've found their apartment, wetsuit, vintage cruiser bike, favorite haiku or last Saturday night's date through this mother-of-all-classified-sites. The problem, as Cheezhead explains, and as anyone who's ever posted a job there can attest, is that talent-searching is a fundamentally different effort than, say, used-computer-shopping.

The distinction between shopping for stuff and "shopping" for people is more than just sentimental one, since the qualities of that used computer are largely a matter of immutable fact. If you place a posting seeking a particular type of system, you can be quite specific with regard to processor speed, hard drive size, amount of RAM, etc. Filtering responses, or the posts of sellers, is a straightforward do-it-yourself affair with fairly reliable outcomes.

Potential employees, by contrast, are much more difficult to filter. Even assuming you've got a clear set of quantifiable requirements (years of experience, degree held, software skills) and that respondents are forthright about refraining from applying if they don't meet them, determining whether this is someone you can work with hinges on mostly non-searchable qualities. And in Craig's world, unqualified employees don't refrain from applying to your job, as the article explains:

The result, say recruiters, is that every Craigslist job posting is inundated with applies, and given the demographics of the typical Craigslist visitor, that influx of applies has created a backlog of work. Instead of receiving 30 applications for a position, among which one or two may be worthy of an interview, companies of all sizes report receiving hundreds of replies within 24 hours of each posting.

Yet the number of qualified candidates who apply remains the same or has fallen for many positions, recruiters say, which translates into multiple hours spent reviewing an overload of resumes searching for the needle in the haystack.

Continue reading "Responses are cheap. Filters are expensive." »

Why now is the perfect time to invest in marketing (and creative hiring)

April 28, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1) [Permalink]

I've always been fond of dating analogies, especially as they relate to client- and job-searching. They're just so apt, sharing common themes of communication, self-confidence, and the value of knowing a lot of people.

Turns out Eric Karjaluoto likes dating analogies too, evidenced in the most recent post on his often excellent Ideas on Ideas blog, entitled "Stop acting like a sissy and market your company." The message is fairly straightforward: getting clients, like getting dates, requires making impressions on a lot of people, and presenting yourself as valuable. So when the economy tightens, the last thing you should be doing is getting quieter:

What baffles me about all of this is how people are choosing to cut their spending. I can appreciate reducing office space or negotiating a lower lease rate. I similarly understand reducing staff members or entertaining job sharing options. What I can't quite grasp, however, is this tendency to narrow the pipe for incoming sales. When you aren't getting dates, you don't go home and watch re-runs of Matlock; you get out of the house and meet people.

It seems that most companies are in fact doing the opposite of this though. I talk to numerous people in key roles who look a little like they're a moment from crapping themselves. When I ask what they are doing in terms of marketing they typically respond in the same fashion,
telling me something to the effect of, "We know it's something we should be doing, but we have to cut right now."

A nice office space doesn't directly drive sales. Office perks may heighten morale but they don't necessarily bring in new clients. In
times like these, all of us have to look at what keeps the machine running. As such, there's one simple truth that I want you to embrace: your company has to accelerate its marketing and sales efforts.

This may help explain why the creative professions seem to be doing slightly better than the job market as a whole. Getting noticed, whether for purposes of selling stuff or attracting clients, requires creative effort, and smart businesses recognize that. This is why good designers, especially those with a marketing bent, are still relatively in demand, though they're probably expected to multitask more than in pudgier times. Karjaluoto takes the additional step of presenting the company that embraces marketing as being in an unusually good position to gain share from more timid competitors:

When times are good, everyone's clamoring to have their voice heard. Today, however, your marketing dollar has more bang, largely because fewer people are advertising, selling, and getting the word out. It's ripe for you to get out there, bang your drum, and perhaps even grab a couple of your competitors' clients in the meanwhile.

Guest post: Billy May on 'The Art of the Money Shot'

April 27, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Recently featured in the Coroflot Member Gallery, Billy May has quite a flair for dramatic, explanatory images -- see this clear yet thrilling shot of his Nike Hindsight concept, which in one brief second conveys more information than some designers' whole portfolios:



After leaving a glowing comment under this particular shot a few weeks back, I was contacted by Mr. May, a New York based Industrial Designer with an unusually broad array of 3D modeling and rendering competencies. He's graciously offered to share some of his secrets:


The Art of the Money Shot by Billy May

The "Money Shot" is essential to communicate the benefits of a design to your clients, customers, bosses and fellow designers. Effectively reaching all those audiences requires a high level of completeness, and a sense of immediacy. A napkin sketch, for example, has little immediacy, but a fully modeled and touched up rendering of the same idea, with all of its nuances and consequent forms comes a lot closer. Logical next steps might include a 3d animation demonstrating use, and a production quality prototype to hold in your hands and play with. However, since fancy renderings remain the efficient frontier of design communication, it behooves us to make them look good.


Achieving Immediacy

In trying to break down the subject of immediacy it's useful to look at it from the perspectives of accuracy, environment and simplicity. The easiest of these three would be accuracy. By conforming every otherwise unimportant detail to the standard of expected reality, the object becomes more real in our minds. This is not to say distorting proportions for artistic purposes is always wrong (see windows on car sketches), but when possible, fill in the details realistically. Even if it's just a concept for internal evaluation, parting lines, texture, and miniscule gaps and fillets can impart substance to an otherwise abstract idea. Extend the audience to non-designers and the principle becomes even more important: a good Money Shot is one that's believable as a product about to show up at your local Best Buy. And the more available it looks, the more we want it.

Continue reading "Guest post: Billy May on 'The Art of the Money Shot'" »

Michael DiTullo's advice to design students

April 21, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

For those readers who haven't seen it yet, Michael DiTullo (aka Yo) wrote a lengthy and well-considered post on the Core77 discussion boards on Sunday, offering some succinct answers to questions posed to him by a job-seeking student. Given that Michael is probably better qualified than I to talk about what it takes to get hired -- he hires a lot of designers himself -- I'm going to cherry pick the best out of the list and elaborate on them.

Knowing Michael's background adds weight to the responses, so if you're not familiar with the name, here are a few pertinent pieces of background. Michael is Design Director at Converse, having moved over there a couple of years back after designing shoes for the Jordan brand on Nike's campus here in Portland. He's also a frequent Core77 contributor and board moderator, a fantastic sketch artist (his 4-minute sketch videos are simply thrilling to watch), an itinerant educator and mentor, and a genuinely nice guy. If you're in Boston and have the chance to meet him, have some smart questions about the design process ready, and chances are good he'll put several minutes into responding with a smart answer.

This combination of experience and generous nature is what makes Sunday's post worthy of remark, beginning with the first question, the obligatory "What's a typical day at your work like?"

Michael replies: "...When I first started, 11 years ago, they were solid 10 hours of sketching. Now I meet with my marketing, engineering, and business counterparts a lot, present ideas and concepts, a bit of sketching, mostly as overlays for my designers... most of my day is spent convincing the people above me, below, and around me to do good design."

Which raises a point many students seem to miss: with few exceptions, designers don't spend their whole careers designing, at least not in the way they learned in school. While there are the rare positions that keep one person doing nothing but concept-development and form-giving for their entire tenure, the far more common trajectory has the junior designer stepping up after a few years to a place where there's less hand work, and more design-oriented writing and talking. This is the main reason "communications skills" are such sought-after traits when employers look for senior designers and directors; let them languish, and you'll stay a junior forever.

Continue reading "Michael DiTullo's advice to design students" »

Five successful practices for new grads, and the glory of screwing up

April 17, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

There's a nice, quick advice article over on Product Design Hub (the parent site of Product Design Forums) listing a few standard bits of advice for recent design school grads. It's written by Philly-based ID consultant Bradford Waugh, and the advice he gives is...pretty obvious. This isn't a bad thing, really -- don't they say the average consumer needs fourteen exposures before remembering a message?

So if you need to be reminded again, here's what you should be doing if you just graduated, or are about to: Learn how to speak well, develop a personal brand, build your online identity, and immerse yourself in the professional culture. Those are the first four.

The fifth is one we sometimes forget about, so I'm grateful to Brad for reminding me: screw up. That's worth a paragraph or two. Here's his:

At this point you have just started to learn what you need to know to really be successful in design so you will undoubtedly make mistakes. Don't be dumb, but don't be afraid. You're not expected to know everything and when you do mess up, own up to it and learn from it. As much as companies need wise old engineers they also need young zealous designers. Even though your concept relies on the discovery of magic doesn't mean it's a waste. Sometimes a foolish thought inspires a brilliant break-through.

To which I would say "damn straight," and remind students and recent grads that your most useful skills five years hence are going to be learned on the job, through trial-and-error. I've been privileged to speak with a lot of senior designers and hiring directors over the past few months, and the topic of flexibility comes up frequently. It's an increasingly crucial characteristic in creative positions, and it's hard to find. Strangely, design school is frequently not the place that students learn to be flexible. This isn't really the fault of the design schools. Flexibility is nearly impossible to teach directly, and the sheer number of basic competencies that most design students need to learn in a compressed period require high-speed repetition of foundation skills to grind them in. And while failure and recovery are part of the educational process, many recent grads will lock up upon graduation, becoming suddenly tentative and risk-averse. In the fear-filled environment of a tight job market this tendency is even more prevalent.

I'm going to assume that the young job-seeker already has a clear idea of how much hard work is ahead of them (it resembles what's behind them, after all), and that everyone understands that a clear portfolio showcasing solid skills is the cost of entry, just as it's always been. As a means of differentiating yourself from the competent masses and showcasing a willingness to explore and learn, though, nothing shines like a beautiful, well-executed failure.

Getting your creative work featured

April 15, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

People must be paying attention to the Member Gallery a lot these days, because the number of emails and comments we've gotten asking how the featuring process works has amped up considerably. On the one hand this is both flattering and encouraging: given the relatively recent introduction of the Member Gallery as a browsing option, it's great to see it rapidly become central to so many employers' and designers' routines.

On the other hand, it certainly puts a small informational burden on us, as the ones doing the featuring. There's not a huge amount of mystery to it though, and in the pursuit of transparency, I thought I'd describe a few of the key guidelines we use when selecting what goes on the front pages of the Portfolios and Member Gallery sections.

A small group of us select between 8 and 15 Featured Images each weekday. Since I'm on the West Coast and much of the Coroflot staff is in New York, this spreads out the selections across much of the North American day, so if you're in Europe, there may still be new images going up by the time you head to bed.

First and foremost, we're looking for high-quality work and originality -- ideally both. This can include outstanding sketching, illustration or rendering skills, but if we come across a graphical or interior design concept, for example, that is truly unique among the literally thousands of images that hit our screens each month, it'll probably get featured, even if the presentations just pretty good. In our experience such combinations are rare though, and creativity and diligence tend to arrive in concert.

Continue reading "Getting your creative work featured" »

Form studies: Last-minute tax tips for creative freelancers

April 13, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

I spent much of this weekend finishing up my taxes -- probably not an unusual Easter activity among creative professionals in the US, especially those getting a large chunk of their income from freelance and contract work.

It's a bit last minute, of course, but represents a real step forward since my first year as a bona fide freelancer just out of school, when I simply totaled up my invoices for the year and lumped them onto line 21 of my form 1040 ("other income") . It took two years for the IRS write me a sternly worded letter about this not quite cutting it, but when it finally arrived, the accountant I hired to help me sort things out took a look at the documents and uttered the sort of sigh usually reserved for 6-year-olds who try and bake a cake from scratch. I'm sure it was all he could do to refrain from going "Tsk, tsk" as well.

The problem isn't that there's a lack of information about filing taxes in the U.S. -- on the contrary, a quick online search will turn up more tips, pointers and official instructional documents than either of us could consume in a lifetime -- but since pretty much everyone in the country has to file, sorting the useful information from the completely unrelated is daunting to say the least. Freelancers new to their Self-Employed status have a lot of concerns and responsibilities that typical salaried workers don't.

So as a favor to you, and to all the accountants fighting the urge to groan at your mistakes, I've compiled a few basic pointers for the (unincorporated) self-employed, that I wish I'd had back then. It goes without saying that I'm not a certified accountant, nor do I work for the IRS, so if this is your only reference when doing your taxes, you're...hmm...foolish. If you've been procrastinating out of worry or confusion, though, it may serve as a good starting point:

W-2 vs. 1099 - This is the most fundamental difference between the typical freelancer and the typical staffer -- at the end of the year, you get a stack of 1099 forms from your clients, rather than a W-2 from your boss. Since no taxes were removed at the time of payment, you have to pay up everything you owe when you file, and it can be quite a lot. Above a certain amount, you can also be penalized for waiting until tax time to pay (the government likes their money sooner rather than later), which is why Quarterly Estimated Tax was invented. If you make a significant fraction of your income from freelancing, and estimate you'll owe more than US$1,000 at the end of the year, you need to set up quarterly payments; the forms are here.

Schedule C and Schedule SE - Assuming you're working as a sole proprietor (not a partnership or corporation), and you make most of your money as a freelance designer or other creative professional, these are the two main documents you'll need to complete in addition to your 1040. Schedule C is where you report the income from those 1099s, as well as your business expenses, resulting in a net income (or loss...but this is unusual for designers, who typically have a fairly low overhead). You then take the results of this form and use them to calculate your Self-Employment Tax on Schedule SE. When you're done with that, your net business income and Self-Employment Tax go on lines 12 and 57 of your form 1040, respectively. Got all that?

If you decide that freelancing is something you're going to stick with for the long haul, it's worth examining options other than basic self-employment. Bryan Engel, a New Jersey-based accountant with a sizeable roster of freelancer clients, suggests that "forming a corporate entity such as an S-Corporation [can] minimize your total tax liability by not having to pay self-employment tax."

Business Expenses - The online freelancer's tax service Outright.com recently created a list of the Top Five Deductions A New Freelancer Should Know, and it's good enough, and short enough, that I'm quoting the whole thing right here:

Continue reading "Form studies: Last-minute tax tips for creative freelancers" »

Six reasons why I didn't look at your portfolio

April 06, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (16) [Permalink]

I hope this doesn't come off as too harsh, because it's really not meant that way.

You've got some fantastic hand skills, a creative streak a mile-wide, and you love doing design work the way most people love eating cheesecake. You might even be perfect for this job, and in a tight market, that's really saying something; the good openings get positively flooded with applications. But I couldn't say if your portfolio is one of the good ones, because I didn't look at it. I'm sure it was phenomenal. A real eye-popper. But you skipped a few simple, non-negotiable steps, and that just wrecked it before it even got a chance. Sorry.

It's not just me, either. I talk to plenty of seniors and HR directors who hire designers and review portfolios on a weekly or even daily basis, and two incredible themes recur in these conversations as faithfully as the sunrise: how universal the basic rules of application are, and how few applicants seem to know them. So I hope you don't mind me enumerating them, but here are the six most glaring reasons why your splendid document or website never saw the light of day.

1. I have no idea who you are. Initially, that might sound a little rough: how could I know you if this is the first time you've sent me your information? Actually, there are plenty of ways. The creative professions are surprisingly tight communities, and you'd be surprised how many of the applications that roll in are attached to vaguely familiar names. Some are people that I chatted with briefly at an event, or who freelanced for an old college friend, or wrote a smart, thoughtful comment on a design article last year, and that's enough to strike a tone of familiarity. I'm going to look at their portfolios first, because I've got a ready-built process for looking up references on them, and finding out what they'd be like to work with. You? You're an unknown entity.

I looked you up online too, of course. And I didn't find much. Don't you ever Google yourself? SEO isn't just for megacorporations, you know.

2. You have no idea who I am. I'm not all that big a deal, but if I'm in a position to be hiring a designer, chances are pretty good there's information out there for you to find. Look up my name or my company, find me on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. Find out what I've been working on, what I've written, what my studio's been up to. Then let me know that you know. Flattery, you say? Not really -- you're showing me that you a) understand what you're getting yourself into, b) have the smarts and resourcefulness to research your target market, and c) aren't lazy. If I don't get all three of those from you I'm not going to sink 20 minutes of my day into reviewing your work, because no matter how good it is, you're probably not going to make a good employee.

3. It doesn't sound like you really want this job. Just because you're a good designer doesn't mean you'll be good here. The creative professions are more idiosyncratic than most, and the trick of making the right hire is as much about how you'll fit into our team as it is about your mad skills. Our team works because everyone on it wants to be there. It's a labor of love. We get excited about our projects, and if you're not excited about them too, you're going to crush the delicate, beautiful structure we've worked so hard to create. So you need to convince me that the kind of work we do is the kind you want to do. If you can't, I'll move on to someone who can.

4. You sent me a form letter. I can spot generic copy-and-paste emails a mile off, and I don't like them (if you're not sure why, re-read numbers 1, 2 and 3 above). I know you're probably making multiple applications, and there's nothing wrong with that; but if you're using exactly the same text for every one of them, I will notice. At least modify it enough to make it clear that you're aware of your recipient. Show me that you give a damn.

5. I can't tell yours apart from the seven others that arrived this morning. Like I said, this position's been generating a lot of interest, and my inbox is just crammed. I make a point of reading every application once through though, because notwithstanding the criteria above, you never really know where the great candidate will come from.

But damn, it's a tedious process. It's astonishing, really, how so many different applicants, with such a diversity of training, cultural background and style of work can all write nearly identical cover letters, attached to portfolios with nearly identical front pages. Put yourself in my position for two minutes: if you received a dozen of these a day, and only had time to really scrutinize three or four, would your portfolio be one of them? Does it stand out, whether because of its artfully worded introduction, its astounding first page, or an embedded portfolio link that impresses me in five seconds flat? Or is it just another lukewarm three paragraphs and a predictable nine page PDF?

6. Did you even look at the application requirements? I've got a pretty clear idea of the designer I need, and have put some effort into describing him or her. I've also put some effort into explaining what sort of application I'm looking for. So please do me the favor of responding in kind. If I asked for a PDF under a certain size, please keep it down. And if I absolutely require that you know Flash and Illustrator, and currently live in Atlanta, don't send me an architecture portfolio from Hawaii. If you've really read the requirements, and think you'd be a good fit despite not matching them, at least offer an explanation of why you need consideration anyway. If it's a convincing argument, I'll pay attention, but shotguns are for grouse hunting, not job seeking. Conducting a broad job search means tailoring a lot of applications, not adding more addresses to your Bcc list.

photo: gregoryjameswalsh

In a tight job market, creatives learn to do more jobs

April 02, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

A post from HR blog Cheezhead today discusses a recent study by CareerBuilder, highlighting an aspect of the tight job market that's often forgotten by job-seekers: many companies are reacting to the economy by neither firing nor hiring. The job board site's CEO Matt Ferguson is quoted as saying that 64% of the employers in the study "expect there will be no change in their number of full-time, permanent employees in the second quarter."

The impression I've gotten from recent discussions with senior designers and hiring directors at creative firms agrees with this pretty closely. While the creative professions seem to be weathering the storm a tiny bit better than the job market as a whole, most of them agree that individual designers are being asked to do more things themselves, and cut costs by shopping fewer things out. This isn't based on any studies, merely a repeated statement I've heard from a range of creative professionals.

It makes a lot of sense though. If you're not on the hiring end of the equation, it's easy to forget that laying off and hiring talent are both expensive propositions; far more expensive than simply retaining the staff on hand, if there's enough work to keep them busy. Many consultancies appear to be reacting by keeping their staff busy on fewer projects, but expecting individual employees to perform more tasks than they did in the past.

The implication for job-seekers is pretty clear: showing a breadth of skills, and an ability to work on multiple aspects of a project in succession, is more important than ever. The similar implication for the currently employed: if you've ever thought of becoming more of a generalist, now is the time. Specialization is for insects.

Coroflot needs an intern!

March 31, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Owing to the ever-expanding set of tasks that come with a growing online community, Coroflot is, for the very first time, seeking an intern to work with me here in our Portland office. It will be a paid part-time position, lasting for a period of three months.

We're looking for someone to help out with many of the small day-to-day tasks of community management, some vaguely glamorous (reviewing new content for featuring, contacting designers, contributing to blog posts and other online content) and some less so (deleting spam comments). I can tell you from first hand experience that it's an outstanding way to get acquainted with the state of the creative professions on Planet Earth, and therefore would make an excellent fit for a student of design management, design writing, or any creative professional with a love for language, and an organizational bent. We're also in the midst of major improvements to the social media aspect of Coroflot, so applicants who habitually spend hours a day on social networking sites anyway will be looked upon favorably (you knew that was going to come in handy some day, didn't you?).

Please note that the position will be on-site in our Portland office, and involve an 8-10 hour commitment per week, so only local applicants will be considered. If you're interested, drop me a note at alviani -at- coroflot -dot- com with a resume and a convincing cover letter, and we'll take it from there.

Group Portfolios on Coroflot

March 30, 2009 | Articles | Member's Work
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

I wanted to take a moment to shine a spotlight on an interesting new development on Coroflot that occurred without any action on our part whatsoever: group and project portfolios.

The vast majority of portfolios here consist of the work of a single designer -- that was the original intent of the site, and it's still something it does well. Recently though, we've started noticing "members" with a more collective bent, two of which I'd like to briefly highlight.The first one, called Augmented Coast, documents a joint studio program between students at Louisiana State University, the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, focusing on Louisiana's hurricane-prone Gulf Coast region. The portfolio is remarkable for its size -- over 1500 images total! -- and the manner in which it is structured. Each of the 47 sets within the portfolio documents the work of one student, as far as we can tell, letting the viewer follow a single perspective on the project before moving on to the next. The diversity within and between the students' sets is magnificent, ranging from plant life samples, photocollages and annotated maps exploring the geography of the region, to more abstract representations like sketches, wire sculptures and chipboard plane studies. It's very much a whole-greater-than-the-sum entity, in which each student's work illuminates a different side of a complex topic.

The second example is the group portfolio from the Bristol Design Festival, which showed up in our Featured Images list on Friday (and which we're eagerly watching for new uploads). It appears to be a work in progress, with photos of several entries from the Festival's GRAFIKEA coffee-table hacking competition up already, followed by some snapshots from the festival floor. Hopefully there's more coming, because what's been posted so far is a lot of fun, and as with the Augmented Coast portfolio, it succeeds in its probable primary task of getting viewers interested enough to find out more -- I clicked on their URLs, anyway, and am glad I did.

As editorial director, this sort of thing excites the hell out of me. One of the things you hope for when building a community site like Coroflot is that the tools you create for members to use start uncovering applications you never would have thought of yourself. These are a couple of great examples, and I'd urge anyone involved in a large student project or group show to consider giving it a try themselves, and letting us know how it goes.

Five things Interaction Design probably isn't

March 24, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (15) [Permalink]

Shoddy economic future be damned; the past couple of years have been a rollicking time for Interaction Design. A brief attempt at summarizing the poorly-understood field on Creative Seeds last year began with the words "Hot, hot, hot," and things don't seem to be slowing down much, even as the job market as a whole collapses all around. The IxDA conference in Vancouver last month, for example, was notable for its remarkable enthusiasm and relative lack of gloom and doom (though this could be a function of its being populated mostly by the still-employed). Rob Walker, who I finally had the pleasure of meeting (briefly) in person at South by Southwest Interactive last week, recounted on his blog at festival's end that:

...the last day it came up in one conversation that nobody seemed to be talking about the economy at all...People were unveiling business ideas, lining up for movie openings, crowding panel talks to here more about what's the next Twitter or how to be me more awesome, or whatever - and figuring where the next party was.

Given that these are arguably the two biggest events of the year for Interaction Designers, and throwing in IxD's stellar performance in the most recent Design Salary Survey, perhaps we've got a...dare I say?...recession-proof discipline on our hands.

I will temper this suggestion with the observation that the average Interaction Designer seems to be working awfully hard, and if there was an over-arching lesson to be pulled from all those panels and party conversations in Austin, it was that succeeding in IxD is largely a matter of hard work, long hours and endless improvements. That said...so is every other creative discipline. What makes this one different?

That turns out to be an incredibly hard question to answer, especially since the actual skill-set that defines IxD is so ill-defined. Last year's CS post ended on an abstract, unsatisfying note:

Ask any ten Interaction Designers what they do all day and you'll get nine or ten different answers. The actual tool used to optimize an interaction can range from Visio charts to Flash animations, storyboards to text-only essays....It is a continually self-evaluating field, but one content to let the process of asking be sufficient. Similarly, it is a field unwilling to cling to any particular tool...

One commenter was even more succinct in expressing his bewilderment:

This post sums up the absurd level of frustration I have felt during my entire learning process. I know I don't have the experience to "be" an Interaction Designer, but no one can point me to a "real" path to follow (unlike say web design where I get a solid understanding of HTML/CSS and build from there into specialty areas)

Like most of my friends and colleagues in the creative professions, I have trouble explaining to my mom what exactly I do for a living, so it's not like confounded laymen are an indicator of intentional obscurity. But IxD seems to be in a different category entirely. Not only does it confuse outsiders, it confuses Interaction Designers too.

Continue reading "Five things Interaction Design probably isn't" »

Whipping your portfolio into shape with Coroflot traffic stats

March 20, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (3) [Permalink]

This isn't just a place to put images of your awesome work, you know. I mean, yes, there's plenty of great eye candy on the site, but all of us here at Coroflot are well aware that there's more to finding creative jobs than just posting some JPGs. This fact hit home while I was chatting with a Portland-based industrial designer a couple of weeks ago by the name of Graeme Wagoner-Lynch.

Graeme, like many Coroflot members, also has a portfolio site of his own, with a unique URL and a greater array of work samples than what you'd find on his Coroflot account; it's in the process of being updated at the moment, for reasons we'll discuss shortly. His Coroflot portfolio has two main functions. First, it's a searchable point of contact for interested clients, driving traffic to his own site. That's a common strategy among experienced designers who a have a large body of completed work from which to choose, especially freelancers who depend on visibility for their livelihood.

He described a slightly unexpected second use though: as a testing ground for portfolio ideas, based on the information in Coroflot's Statistics pages. Plenty of members watch the numbers that rack up on the Traffic Stats page, hoping for that stroke of luck or attention that suddenly sends viewing numbers through the roof, but as with many things in creative employment, there's much to be gained by being pro-active.

To begin with, there's a significant story told by the relative values of Home, Profile and Image Views. An account with lots of Image Views but few Profile Views means your work is being looked at, but you aren't -- anyone truly considering you for a job will examine your experience and education, so a skewed ratio (like what you see in the March column in the example above) suggests you've got a lot of good-looking images, but little that actually makes you look employable.

Continue reading "Whipping your portfolio into shape with Coroflot traffic stats" »

Creative Confab #1: Quick summary, video on the way

March 18, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Does a successful creative professional need a skill set that's broad or deep?

Yes.

As unfair as it sounds, this was the consensus from the hour-long panel discussion at the first Coroflot Creative Confab at South by Southwest Interactive on Monday. The three speakers -- frog design's Jon Kolko, CCA's Nathan Shedroff, and Dell's Michael Smith (l-r above) -- were uniform in their expectation that a successful candidate for most any design position has to demonstrate solid communication and collaboration skills in addition to a dynamite portfolio. Prolific design writer and occasional Core77 contributor Alissa Walker has a thorough summary of the panel's opinions over on Fast Company, and it's very much worth a read for anyone in the creative job market, whether seeking or hiring.

Need the specifics? Later this week we'll be posting a video of the panel here on Coroflot, so you can catch the conversation in its entirety. Other topics discussed include the impact of the growing global design community on the US creative job market, the growing preference companies are showing for contract workers over in-house staff designers, and the rise of the multi-disciplinary creative professional. Useful stuff, from some smart and eloquent design pros.

The Creative Confab group here on Coroflot is still in its infancy, but will be maintained and expanded through the entirety of the five city tour as a forum for attendees past and future to suggest discussion topics, share their own job seeking and hiring experiences, and maintain contact after the events. Residents of NYC, Portland, the Bay Area and Detroit interested in their city's Confab are encouraged to join; suggestions for future venues can be posted in the comments section here, or via email at alviani -at- coroflot -dot- com.

Leveraging competition results: this is what it looks like

March 13, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

If you've been reading Creative Seeds for awhile, you might remember a rather contentious piece from last February about design competitions called "Exploit Me!" I say contentious because there are some strong feelings from portions of the creative community that competitions are a bad idea across the board. They're the worst sort of spec work, goes the argument, because the vast majority of entrants are guaranteed to not get paid at all.

While I didn't argue this point -- and in fact pointed out some examples of poorly designed competitions that rob all entrants of their intellectual property once they enter -- I did suggest that there was some use to entering them, especially if you take care to maximize the results for your own publicity purposes. The designer I singled out as a good example of how to go about this was James Owen, a freelance industrial designer in Portland, Oregon who regularly enters (and often wins) competitions, using the results as a key component in his publicity strategy. I won't go so far as to attribute his considerable freelance success entirely to this practice -- he's also quite talented -- but I would suggest it's a contributor. More importantly, Owen has a great facility for turning his competition entries into excellent press releases.

Here's a great example. The Cut & Paste competition rolled through Portland last weekend, and Owen was among the 3D Design competitors. He also won. Three days later, this showed up in the Core77 Blog Tips inbox:

Continue reading "Leveraging competition results: this is what it looks like" »

The End of the All-Nighter?

March 12, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (6) [Permalink]

How many All-Nighters did you pull in school?

There are a couple of schools of thought on the common design school practice of sleeping in the studio out of dedication to your craft. The traditional view is akin to boot camp: cranking out good work under emotional duress and tight schedules is something you'll have to do as a professional, so the occasional sleepless night, the sleeping bag under your table, and the bleary-eyed coffee-enabled 9am crit are crucial. They build endurance, confidence, and not a little bit of camaraderie, in the "we're all in this together" vein that makes the studio such a communal place.

The other view, which is gaining some currency lately, is that this is a pile of crap, perpetuated by a sort of hazing mentality that has professors insisting that their students suffer the way they once did. This letter, posted recently on an Archinect discussion forum, shows that at least a few schools are taking some genuine action against the all-nighter. Reprinted anonymously from the internal communications of an undisclosed architecture program, it directs the design studios to actively discourage overnight stays, and indicates that students

may not set up sleeping-modules in the building and that security has been advised to identify and report students staying overnight.

The reasons they cite are sensible. Staying up all night is dangerous (especially, I might add, in the presence of razor blades, hot glue guns and power tools). It discourages diversity by excluding students with family responsibilities. It's not appropriate for modern academic settings where few students live within walking distance of the studio. Sleep deprivation is not healthy.

As someone who attended design school in my late 20s, I had a somewhat more "adult" rhythm than the undergrads did, and got accustomed to knocking off by 10pm so I could start working at 8 or 9 the next morning -- often in complete isolation. Such a schedule has much to recommend it, especially if you're the type who thinks most clearly with morning sun streaming onto the work table and the day's first cup of coffee at hand. On the other hand, the lack of colleagues in the early morning meant losing much of what makes the studio such a magical setting: the buzz and banter of a dozen exhausted, enthusiastic creative people all critiquing, encouraging and borrowing from each other.

The letter spawned a long string of comments both praising and dismissing such a move, but I'm curious what Coroflot's design community thinks of this. Were all-nighters crucial to your development as professional designer? Do you wish today's new graduates had more of them under their belt? Or fewer?

Only 20% of Hirings Come From Job Boards? Even That Figure's High

March 09, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

'Tis the season for charts about employment, seems like, and the latest installment shines a bright light on the rapidly diversifying nature of job searches. Via a couple of different HR blogs (most notably Cheezhead), this chromatically confusing pie chart has two overwhelming pieces of advice hiding between its slices:

1. There are more different ways to get hired than ever, and they all work. Sort of the career-building version of the Long Tail Theory. Hiring by referral is still the preferred method -- no surprise there -- but the 27% number arrived at by CareerXRoads, who conducted the survey, is shockingly non-dominating.

2. More than ever, the jobs go to those who hunt for them the hardest and build the best networks. Hiring agencies account for less than 3% of the total, and traditional lower-effort means like print ads and job fairs don't fare much better, with 3.4% and 3.2% each. Even the online job board, which we kept touting as counting for just 20% of all placements, is losing share fast, with a 12% slice. The executive summary of the report PDF goes on to suggest that the use of job boards

has indeed peaked and predict it will diminish in the future. Within the category, Monster has lost ground to CareerBuilder. The two of them account for half the job board hires but both are losing ground to the "long-tail" of niche sites, social networks and other online search engine marketing capabilities that are expanding their reach.

As a job board, this is of interest to us here at Coroflot, although not perhaps as much of a concern as it is at, say, Monster. One of the primary advantages to working within a community as dynamic as the creative professions is the natural tendency toward networking within it -- designers talk to each other and check out each other's work as a matter of habit. Even a posted job will often be filled through some combination of direct response and prior familiarity, which leads us to believe (perhaps a bit optimistically) that a combined portfolio and job site, like Coroflot, should weather this storm a bit better than more traditional sites.

There is, in fact, a great little graphic further down in the CareerXRoads report (download the whole PDF here if you're really curious) depicting the growing cross-linking of factors that contribute to successful hiring.



To which a designer might add a few more ovals: Posted work on portfolio site and personal website; Chatted with senior designer of firm at a professional event; Went to school with former intern at firm; etc. Sometimes it's nice to live in a small world.

Branding the Recovery: Then and Now

March 04, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1) [Permalink]

Via Rob Walker's frequently enlightening Murketing blog, a pair of posts pointing out yet more similarities between our grandparents' heyday and our own: both the Great Depression and our current, as yet to be named economic emergency provoked logo responses from the federal government. Above on the right is the official seal of recovery.gov, the official website of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or as it may soon be simply known, The Recovery. On the left is the symbol of the National Recovery Administration, set up under FDR and, it should be noted, not released until 1934, a full five years after Black Tuesday. So at least our brand-establishing responses to economic doom are quicker than back in the day.

More interesting from a design perspective is a discussion of the relative merits of the two logos, and indeed the usefulness of a Recovery logo at all. There's actually a great argument to be made that the branding of a recovery is a crucial step in realizing it, as consumer confidence is a key component of economic health. The FDR-era logo does a pretty good job of inspiring confidence, with its strong, solid silhouette and lightning bolts and stuff. Does the Obama-era one do the same? Walker observes it looks "a bit wimpy to me, a bit, I don't know, Facebooky or something -- or like it represents an iPhone app" and the first commenter likens it to the EPA logo, but as with many branding efforts context is everything. Notes Walker in the initial posting: "If people really start to see this a lot, connected to actual work being done, it will have the desired effect: 'Wow, that stimulus money is making things happen.'"

In any case, I love his proposition that Shepard Fairey be put in charge of the new Recovery aesthetic. I mean, really, who better?

Design an Avatar for this HR Director, and Achieve Fleeting Fame

March 04, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

In addition to being busy with the Survey, the Confab and the redesign, we've been spending our free time chatting with the Human Resources community, to try and get some insight on the job market from the hiring side. If you've seen references to blogs like Cheezhead, Careerealism and Punk Rock HR on Creative Seeds recently, that's where it comes from.

On top of mining the HR blogosphere for information, we've also made efforts to increase awareness in both directions. The funnest manifestation of these so far has been a small competition on Punk Rock HR last week, in which we invited the blog readers -- human resources professionals, recruiters, hiring directors, and so on -- to give Coroflot portfolio review a shot. The winner -- Jim D'Amico, a Senior Recruiting Advisor at The Schwan Food Company -- was singled out from all the entries for picking a real gem of a portfolio for us: Nate Van Dyke, an illustrator and designer of magazine and editorial graphics, and the occasional urban vinyl figure, based in San Francisco.

What's Jim's prize? Funny you should ask -- that's where you come in, CS readers, and it constitutes a great publicity opportunity. Jim wins a custom-designed avatar, to use on his Facebook page, Twitter feed, comment posts, etc.; and the custom designer will be the winner of a small competition we're hosting here on Creative Seeds. The winning avatar design will be announced on PRHR, with a link to the designer's portfolio on Coroflot: an unusual chance to draw attention from not just the design community, but from a larger professional group whose job description is hiring people.

Interested? Here are the specifics:

1. The avatar should be submitted in two sizes: 100px by 100px and 48px x 48px, as a GIF or JPG, optimized for web viewing. Animated GIFs are OK.
2. Mr. D'Amico is your client, so you might want to know something about him. He's worked at Schwan for several years now, resides in Marshall, Minnesota ("which is literally in the middle of nowhere"), and originally hails from Cleveland, Ohio. He performs stand-up comedy in his spare time, practices kendo, and is a huge Star Wars geek. If that doesn't give you enough fodder for an awesome avatar design, I cannot help you.
3. Entries must be received by 7pm Eastern time on Wednesday, March 11 (4pm Pacific, midnight GMT), and should be submitted by email to alviani@coroflot.com. Winning entry will be published here on Creative Seeds and on Punk Rock HR simultaneously.
4. We're primarily looking for original artwork, but if you want a picture of Jim, his bokken, his favorite piece of Star Wars memorabilia, etc. to use as base or inspiration, drop a request in the comment section below.

That's it; best of luck and happy designing!

The 2008 Design Salary Survey Results are In!

March 03, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

A new collection of graphs today, but these are a bit different -- a little more hopeful, a little more specific to the creative professions, and a lot closer to our hearts here at Coroflot. After four months of collecting and sorting through data from over 3900 respondents, we're pleased to announce that the 8th annual Coroflot Design Salary Survey is live and ready for its close-up. The findings are a mix of the obvious and surprising, with some of the readier conclusions summarized below.

Before we get too far into it, a few comments about the sample group and methodology. Respondents comprised a broad sampling of the global creative community, representing over 60 countries, and ranging from recent graduates to seasoned senior managers. They were asked to identify themselves as one of 18 different Positions (see the second graph, below) and one of the eight Specialties used by Coroflot to tag portfolios: Design Management, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Interaction Design, Interior Design, Architecture, Fashion, and new this year, Web Design (Yes, we're aware that Web Design is not a new specialty, but had previously left it off since so many other online communities cater to it specifically. With the increasing crossover in skill sets and responsibilities, though, between Web and other design disciplines, we theorized there might be a large chunk of Coroflot members who would prefer that moniker. Judging by the response, this theory was correct -- Web Design receive the third highest volume of respondents in this, its first year of existence.)

The Survey was left open from November 5 to December 16 of 2008, thus putting squarely in the middle of the first major round of economy panic, and with this in mind, the responses are relatively positive. Total volume was very nearly the same as the 2007 survey, and while there were some drops in reported salary, they appear less dire than global economic news might lead one to predict. Respondents were also asked to indicate their level of education, years of experience, and whether they worked in a corporate, consulting, academic or freelance setting. Our findings are as follows (click on individual graphs for larger view):



Impact of education and experience on salary: While a first degree will definitely improve your earning potential, a second or third may not. On the other hand, experience is rewarded with greater pay, regardless of expertise.




Salary by Area of Expertise: Overall, wages in the creative professions have kept pace with inflation, but shown little growth beyond that -- with the primary exception of Interaction Design, which has increased dramatically in pay since 2006. This keeps with anecdotal indications that IxD professionals have become extremely sought after, in part due to the lucrative and growing mobile devices market. Design Management has also enjoyed significant increases, perhaps riding on the recent vogue for "design thinking" in the business world.

Continue reading "The 2008 Design Salary Survey Results are In!" »

Design for Healthcare and Education: where the jobs are, '09?

March 02, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1) [Permalink]

Another employment-related graph came to my attention over the past few days, that's both gloomier and more actionable than the Bureau of Labor Statistics chart from last week. This one comes from the January statistics pages of general job listings site Indeed.com, and I say gloomier because it's very specific and very immediate.

Rather than saying something discouraging about the economy as a whole, this chart is a direct manifestation of the economic downturn's effects on your chances of getting a job, assuming you are, in fact, looking for one. Every one of the categories Indeed uses to define the job market is down from this time a year ago.

The actionable part comes from looking at the two relative bright spots in the landscape: Healthcare and Education. Now, let me preface this by saying this is not Statistically Authoritative Data in the strictest sense, but it does come from a pretty large sample covering a wide array of positions. And it supports two pieces of conventional wisdom about the employment landscape. First, that the US has an aging population, and that as the Baby Boomers enter their 60s, the demand for healthcare will continue to increase. Second, that in a bad economy, people go back to school, or stay there longer than they otherwise might have.

This becomes significant for creative professionals when we realize that there is no general category for designers and related disciplines, because they work in all of these fields. Retail, transportation, construction and, yes, healthcare all require the input of creative professionals, especially as these fields begin exploring new avenues of interaction with their consumers. It's likely that design jobs related to healthcare are going to remain relatively recession proof, so students and recent grads looking to add something useful to their portfolios would do well to give the medical field a close look.

The second is that the competition to get into art and design schools is probably going to get tougher, especially in programs favored by working professionals returning to school -- good for the schools, probably, but more work too.

Are resumes a thing of the past?

February 23, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

So here's a slightly confrontational idea in entry-level job search: your resume isn't worth anything.

Career coach and consultant J.T. O'Donnell voiced this proposal recently in the online magazine examiner.com, and it's not as absurd as it might seem on the surface, within certain limitations. O'Donnell is referring specifically to current college students, especially those applying for internships, though the reasoning extends handily to the recent graduate with very little experience. To make the point, she uses the example of her own internship program, in which resume or CV review is supplanted by a series of essay questions and group discussions:

"For the kind of candidate I desire--proactive, smart, resourceful, well-read, passionate, accountable--I want to see their thought process. So, I use behavioral interviewing extensively, in both the written--application sent to me--and verbal--group interview with their peers and myself--forms....The 10 questions weeds out any lazy candidates who just want to send in a resume. If you want the internship with us, you'll write great answers to the questions."

Not discussed in the article are some of the weaknesses of the resume-writing process that make it so eminently replaceable: the general lack of relevant work experience for most current or recent students; the similarity of educational backgrounds; the buzzword-heavy terminology usually employed, eliminating almost any sense of an applicant's true demeanor or communication skills. Given that most undergrad applicants to a design internship (to use a locally appropriate example) will have a similar educational history (high school followed by a handful of foundation classes) and similar work experience (bookstore, retail, restaurant, etc. or nothing at all) the resume is, for the most part, an exercise in following a template.


O'Donnell's essay-based solution has some real wisdom to it, then, and may indicate a trend in hiring, especially in the creative fields. Differentiation is just as much a factor in employment as in marketing, and one of the headaches of the interview process lies in teasing out what exactly makes one applicant different from another. They've been schooled in many of the same techniques for writing a proper resume after all, and to a lesser extent this is true of portfolios as well in the first couple of years--you can only look at so many perspective-drawing exercises or poster projects before they all start blurring together. Going pro-active can be a smart move on the part of the employer, giving a more accurate picture of how smart and communicative an aspiring intern truly is, and potentially reducing the effort in finding the right one: "I get fewer candidates applying for my internship, which is good--less time spent reviewing applicants," explains O'Donnell. Consequently, getting prepared for that sort of inquiry might be a smart tactic on the part of current design students.

For those paying attention to the broader trend, this slots right into the theme of direct communication as a job-filling tool, which pops up pretty frequently these days. Is the shotgun approach to entry-level career building over? Maybe not yet, but the prognosis isn't pretty.

photo: photograham

Guest post: Niti Bhan on making a good first impression with your first contact letter

February 04, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

Today's post comes from frequent Core77 contributor Niti Bhan. Currently based in Singapore, Niti has been developing market strategies and writing about design and marketing for underserved populations for nearly two decades now, with a special emphasis on Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) markets. She writes the Perspective 2.0 blog for the Emerging Futures Lab, as well as numerous feature articles for the design and business press.

Niti also gets contacted a lot by students and recent graduates with requests for information, jobs, advice and internships, and has noticed certain pitfalls the authors of such requests often make. Here's her take on how to write a first contact email that people will actually want to read:

As a designer, you know the value of a good presentation - whether it's your portfolio for a prospective employer, your concept sketches for a client, or even getting your idea to the front of the line in the product design department of a large corporation. You know the importance of first impressions and will spend hours refining a sketch; but have you ever given a thought to the very first email that you send someone?

Particularly when you are making some sort of request -- asking for information, inquiring about a job opportunity or an internship, hoping for feedback on your portfolio or consideration for a project, writing to grad school about scholarships or teaching assistantships -- all these imply that you want some sort of response to your email. Even here, presentation matters, more so when you are making a 'cold call' - that is, nobody has introduced to the recipient already over email nor have they given you a referral as in "use my name and write to so-and-so".

So, how can you improve the effectiveness of your request? Here are 5 major points you need to address, to ensure your email doesn't end up in the spam file:

1. Do your homework - Small signs like spelling the recipient's name wrong, not knowing their gender, showing no knowledge of his or her area of interest and expertise; or larger gaffes like writing to a graphics design studio asking for a product design internship -- these simply tell the recipient that you are careless and haphazard in your work. Why should they write back to you regardless of how beautiful your portfolio may be? You obviously don't have a clue whom you're writing, nor why.

2. Introduce yourself - The people you're writing with your requests are probably busy, or you probably wouldn't consider them worth writing in the first place. So take the time and trouble to give a little background about yourself, it makes you less of a stranger sending a random email and more of a real person reaching out to them. Don't make the mistake of plunging straight in with your request to someone who has never heard of you nor is expecting your email.

Continue reading "Guest post: Niti Bhan on making a good first impression with your first contact letter" »

Too many design students, not enough jobs? Depends on your definition.

February 02, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (12) [Permalink]

A smart and jarring post last week on Unbeige bluntly states: 'Prepare to Find Another Line of Work' Say Working Designers to Design Students. The sentiment is reasonable. In light of the current economic downturn, this sort of tough-love, meted out the previous day by designer Ian Cochrane and "branding guru" Michael Peters, seems entirely appropriate. "There is too big a supply of young designers and far too many people doing mediocre work," Peters concludes, and legions of young design school graduates presumably hang their heads in shame, contrite for ever having nurtured such a frivolous collective dream as doing the things for which they were trained.

While some hard realism in an ailing economy is certainly appropriate, it seems like a slightly overwrought response, what with Cochrane suggesting design school students go work in restaurants rather than try to get jobs designing them. I say overwrought because it comes from a deeply polarized view: either you do precisely the sort of real design job that school convinces you is appropriate to your ideals, or you ditch the whole thing and go bus tables. No discussion of the variances within the design economy as a whole. No suggestions of less obvious fields for which design training is highly applicable. Just "pack it up, you're not good enough."

Continue reading "Too many design students, not enough jobs? Depends on your definition." »

Hey Interaction Designers: Coroflot Job Board at Interaction 09 in Vancouver

January 22, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Last year's massive Interaction '08 conference in Savannah, Georgia was a hit, for several reasons. Hosted in a gorgeous city, attended by IXD professionals from all over the planet, and featuring talks by Bill Buxton, Sigi Moeslinger and dozens of other thought leaders in the still-emerging field, it practically couldn't fail. It also featured a little something we like to call the Coroflot Job Board: a real-life actual board to complement this virtual one you all know and love. By the end of the four day event last February there was hardly a bare square inch of cork left on the thing, for all the postings for IXD, User Experience, Information Architecture and User Research jobs.

They're back at it again this year, and so are we. Interaction '09 is to be held in the equally lovely (though slightly chillier) city of Vancouver, BC this year, from February 5-8, and Coroflot will once again be hosting the official Job Board, as well as thoroughly covering the talks and events over at Core77. If you're an Interaction Designer attending the conference, or an employer looking to find the best IXD talent, come and say hi. If you can't make it, don't fret -- Core's coverage will be thorough and fervent as always.

Featured Portfolios; New zip search capability

January 22, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Two quick updates on Coroflot's ongoing quest for creative portfolio nirvana.

First, better Portfolio search capability. The "Advanced Search" option on the Portfolio page is the most specific, directed way of seeking out individual designers; if you're an employer looking to hire creative talent that meets particular criteria like educational level, years of experience, field of expertise and location, this is the tool for you. Responding to requests for more finely tuned location-searching, we've just cranked up its usefulness a bit by adding Zip Code-based searches for our members in the US. In addition to specifying country, state and city, you can now enter a Zip Code and a search radius, perfect for urgent, short-term freelancer fixes when you need to be in close physical proximity.

Second, Featured Portfolios are now on a weekly update schedule. When you click on Portfolios at the top of any page, the first thing you see is a list of an even dozen Featured Pool Members. These are similar to the Featured Images in the Members Gallery in that they represent a diverse sampling of some of the best work on Coroflot. The difference here, though, is that they're all new -- every Featured Portfolio is culled from members who created their portfolios within the past seven days.

In one sense, this is a way for us at Coroflot to say "Welcome...here's how happy we are to have you with us." On the other hand, it's a service to long-standing members who spend hours a week browsing portfolios (admit it...we know you do) looking for the best of what's fresh. And from this update forward it'll be a weekly occurrence. This week's Featured Portfolios give a pretty good representation of what the site looks like as a whole: they come from seven different countries, six different specialties, and range from students nearing graduation to seasoned professionals with 25+ years of experience. Oh, and they're all really good at what they do. Go check 'em out, and give 'em some love.

Playing Scramble on Facebook probably won't get you a job.

January 20, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Another excellent article on network-based job searches from Mashable (yes, it's my new favorite site) (for now), entitled "She's the BEST Employee I've NEVER Met." Predictably, it revolves around an online connection that resulted in a job recommendation, despite the fact that the candidate and the author doing the referring never met in real life.

Stories like this should be completely unsurprising at this point, given the number and quality of networking tools available to the average searcher, and the amount of press they've received (including here. and here.). And yet the anecdotal evidence suggests that they're still quite rare, and the network we refer to when talking about successful career-building is usually a face-to-face one.

This paradox was on my mind this morning while watching the CNN/Facebook video/update coverage of the Presidential Inauguration, and a possible explanation for this discrepancy began suggesting itself. As excited as we get at the promise of connectivity implied by 3000 update posts a minute scrolling past our eyes while we watch the ceremonies, the fact is that we're learning essentially nothing about the folks doing the posting. "Watching history being made!" and "He's such a Barack star!" are perhaps charming if you're in the right mood, but it doesn't constitute network or community building (I turned them off after two minutes). And to be fair, I doubt that was the point of this particular update stream; expressing public sentiment and letting CNN advertise how with-it they are were probably much higher objectives.

Unfortunately, much of the network-building efforts in which job-seekers engage don't communicate much more than that stream did. While many observers agree that it's important to establish a presence in as many networked spaces as possible, much less attention has been paid to the quality of those presences. What we end up with is a string of short statements and preferences on Facebook, a bare resume on LinkedIn, maybe a Twitter feed occasionally explaining what we had for lunch today. Well and good, but not likely to get anyone recommended.

Consider this comment in response to the article:

I literally found my job through Twitter - via someone I have never met! A few days after being laid off, I tweeted that I was looking for a new job. Someone who was following me (I wasn't following her yet) forwarded me to someone she knows on Twitter. I started working at the new company last week.

Not the first time I've heard this one, and the implication is clear: get on Twitter, and let people know you're looking for a job. What's unspoken is that--at least in the instances I've seen this work--the people who get the jobs are actually worth following: they're clever and observant, even at 140 characters a pop; they communicate expertise in a field through specialized topic selection; they're funny, articulate, and link to things worth reading. I'd be shocked if this wasn't true of our commenter's feed as well.

J.T. O'Donnell, the career strategist who penned the article, makes a similar point when explaining why she felt comfortable referring the applicant:

In my mind, she's not a stranger. While it is true that 93% of effective communication between two people is done face-to-face (i.e. voice tone and pace, eye contact, body language, facial expressions, etc.), the reality is that she only got to use 7% of her communication skills (the words and style of her writing) by e-mail to connect with me. I had multiple dialogs with her online--and all of them were consistently professional and enjoyable.

Professional and enjoyable--more or less the same things you try to be when trying to form a career-enhancing relationship in real life. Moreover, O'Donnell points out that the recommendation came after several months of "interesting conversation, which indirectly led me to learn all about her strengths as an employee."

This gets right to the heart of the problem with how many people mis-use their online network. They fail to be professional and interesting at the outset, and thus fail to communicate why they'd be a good employee before they start asking around for jobs or recommendations. When the need strikes, those who could potentially help them out don't have enough of a relationship to justify doing so. Making a referral, after all, carries a bit of risk; if the candidate sucks, it makes the reference look bad.

Online networking can still be extremely powerful, but like any other sort of networking, it's more than a matter of just showing up.

More proof of our love: Coroflot V5 Redesign page

January 15, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Enthusiastic Coro-surfers still looking for a comprehensive explanation of what all we've done to the site over the past month and a bit, look no further. Or rather, look here -- the newly updated Coroflot V5 Redesign page.

It takes the form of a series of screenshots from the various parts of the site redesign with annotation showing you how to get the most out of your browsing, searching and networking. It's accessible from any page on Coroflot by clicking the "Coroflot is all new!" message in the banner at the top of every page, and will continue growing as we receive feedback.

Take a look, let us know what you think (comments welcome).

Six ninja techniques for finding great creative talent at Coroflot

January 12, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

To all the employers out there, looking in vain for the right designer, illustrator, art director, architect, etc. -- first off, fret not, you've come to the right place. Second, finding good creative talent is a careful business, with some similarities to other sorts of hiring, and plenty of differences as well. Many of the things to look out for when hiring in general are true in creative hiring too -- look for collaborative ability and common sense, ask detailed questions about past work, expect strong communication skills -- so we won't dwell on those. Over the years though, we've noticed a few approaches to finding creative professionals that work better than most, and thought we'd share some of the better ones:

1. Look at some pictures.
One of the difficulties in hiring creative staff if you don't have design training yourself is the unfamiliarity of the skill sets. While most can tell that a Rembrandt is more skillfully rendered than a stick figure, discerning which of 20 different product designers sketches the most innovative, produceable concepts may not be readily apparent. One way to prepare yourself for a talent search is to look at the output of a broad array of professionals in the field you're searching, to get a sense of what the range looks like. The Coroflot Member Gallery is a good place to start -- pick the specialty you're looking for, and browse through Featured images (ones we think are good) and those with lots of Views and Likeys (ones other designers think are good). It's kind of like doing your research before buying a car.

2. Talk to someone you know.
The importance of personal recommendations is as important in the creative disciplines as anywhere else; maybe even more so. You are, after all, looking to hire someone who creates persuasive images and objects for a living, so it's nice to get a second opinion. If you have any smart co-workers, friends, or professional contacts who are closer to the field in which you're hiring than you are, talk to them first, and involve them in the hiring process if possible. Lacking that, set up an account and engage with the creative community on Coroflot, to see if you can make contacts with working designers in your local area. Creative professions are often small little worlds -- they may even know (or know of) some of your prospects.

Continue reading "Six ninja techniques for finding great creative talent at Coroflot" »

Two flavors of image page

January 12, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

One of the biggest additions we made to Coroflot in the V5 upgrade was an alternate way of viewing images. The new page style, which we're calling a Gallery Page, enables fellow designers and employers to browse through images of your work in a few ways that weren't possible before. Even though it looks fairly similar to the standard Portfolio Page you've all come to know and love, it's got some linkage abilities that make it far more flexible.

Explaining the difference is easier with the aid of some screenshots, so I've pulled a couple from one of our recently feature Coronauts -- Italian trans designer Oberdan Bezzi, with his drop-dead gorgeous 70s-style motorcycle renderings. If you've gotta pick an image to use as demo, it may as well be a sweet one.

Anyway, this is the classic Portfolio Page view of Bezzi's MV Agust 750 3 (which you can view in full size by going to the corresponding portfolio page here):

This has been the standard way of viewing a portfolio image for several years now, here on Coroflot, and it's not going anywhere. Every one of the 1.2 million images on the site has a page like this, and you get to them the same way you always have: by finding a designer's portfolio, going into one of the sets of images there, and clicking on the thumbnail. Previous and Next buttons let you cycle through the images in that set, or you can go up a level by clicking Back To Sets in the upper left corner.

What's new is that all of these images can also be viewed through the Member Gallery, and this is where the new Gallery Page comes in. If I were to spot Oberdan's work in the Member Gallery page and click on the thumbnail, I'd see this page (original is here):

Same work, different lay out. Specifically, there's a box of thumbnails to the right of the image allowing you to preview Oberdan's other work in that set, there's an instant link for contacting Oberdan if you want more information, and most importantly, there's a slew of related images by other designers down below. This is the network-y part of the Gallery, showing other Coroflot users who liked this image (you can click on those thumbnails to view their Likeboxes in full), and beneath that, thumbnails of other work that was Likey'd by these folks.

So why the switch? Things were going so well for us in the past!

A couple of reasons.

Continue reading "Two flavors of image page" »

"Industrial Designer" makes Top Ten Jobs list

January 08, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1) [Permalink]

Number 9, in fact, just below Sociologist and just above Accountant. The list, created by CareerCast.com and featured on the Wall Street Journal's website, includes 200 different careers, and grants high rankings to jobs with low stress and physical demands, high earning potential, and high job satisfaction.

While we're not going to argue with Lumberjack sitting at the bottom of the list by virtue of the job's high injury rate (it's more dangerous than either policing or firefighting, statistically), we do think there's something to be said for getting outside and tromping through the woods every day. That said, the smell of a freshly sharpened Prismacolor and the thrill of a late night team sketching session are definite marks in favor of ID, provided we don't inhale too many marker fumes in the process.

Of course, when you rate 200 different jobs, you're bound to miss a few tricks: the site also claims designers work an average 45 hour week. As if.

Design students take note: Stephane Angoulvant's studio blog

January 08, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1) [Permalink]

Since a significant slice of Coroflot's user base consists of art and design students, this seems like an appropriate link to post: the studio blog of Stephane Angoulvant, a second term product design student at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.

For those who haven't already caught wind of this one through the Core77 discussion boards, Stephane announced the blog a week and a half ago, and has invited interested fellow design students to follow along as he goes through various sketching, modeling and design projects. All of which makes it abundantly clear why ACCD's grads are some of the most sought after in the world.

Depending on your perspective, the images therein are humbling, fascinating, familiar, or in my case at least, a combination of all three.

UK Design Council says "Design your way out of the downturn"

January 07, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

As creative professionals we're fond of saying that investing in design during rough economic times makes sense, but it's nice to see a few stats and case studies to back up the claim. Being the Design Council and all, they certainly have a vested interest in the final outcome being positive, but the writing is clear and well-defended, citing examples like Swatch (near broke to world's largest watchmaker in just a few years) and Smokehead (Scotch whisky employing fresh graphic design, pictured above, to appeal to a younger audience) to make their point.

If you've got higher-ups contemplating cuts in the design department, maybe send them the link.

How to really use online social networks to get a job

January 07, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

The online job search just keeps getting weirder and weirder, and not necessarily in a bad way. It's been not quite a year since I wrote this: a clever post, or so I thought, about how social networking sites are changing the employment landscape, including some suggestions from a Frog Design HR specialist on how to best take advantage of them.

Well, it turns out I was just scratching the surface. I'll still stand by the fundamental tenets of the article, namely that savvy employers will seek out all the information they can about potential hires, building your online identity is crucial to the creative job search, and sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are fantastic tools for maintaining far-flung professional networks. Given the rate at which the social networking phenomenon is growing, changing, and being accepted by mainstream business, though, it's no surprise that a lot of new opportunities have emerged in the past year.

For a great summary of these opportunities, I can't recommend highly enough Dan Schwabel's article on Mashable.com from Monday of this week (7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media). The argument that Schwabel starts with is familiar enough: that the majority of jobs don't get advertised, that employers hire those they know and trust, that networking is crucial to professional success. But most advice that starts this way sees these truths as sadly insurmountable, and up until recently, they were right. Dan's article takes a pleasantly can-do approach instead: If employers hire those they know and trust, how do I get to be one of those people? If employment depends on personal contacts, how do I get more personal contacts? etc.

Clever readers won't be surprised to hear that the answers he proposes hinge on going pro-active with social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. (I mean, even I knew that). There are some surprises in there too though: Do you have a video resume up on YouTube? Do you track the employees of firms where you want to work via Twitter and Wink? How about using Google AdWords, to advertise yourself?

I'm not saying that every one of these strategies is going to work for everyone out there, but given that this is a creative employment blog, I have no choice but to deeply respect the creativity here. Or at least the audacity.

Fixed portfolio linking; Featured Images explained

January 06, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

l-r: Moa Orrbacke, Smith Newnam, Wei Hsu, Waleed Soufi

First, a Public Service Announcement from your friends at Coroflot:

We fixed the direct portfolio linking problem. Several users recently pointed out that the direct address to a portfolio main page (www.coroflot.com/yourname) did not work if the "www" was left out (coroflot.com/yourname). Realizing that the entire rest of the universe dispensed with "www" a couple years back, we've now fixed this particular oversight, so you no longer have to look embarrassed when potential employers "can't find" your corefolio. You're welcome.

On to other new stuff: Featured Content. When you click on Member Gallery, the resulting default view is sorted by Featured, which careful viewers will notice is different from Most Likeys or Most Recent.

The Most Likeys view is the one that summarizes the opinions of Coroflot users who like mashing on that Me Likey button -- lately this has been giving a lot of love to Belarussian-French designer Dzmitry Samal and Utah-based illustrator Aaron Hughes, among others, and we have to concur: they do some spectacular work.

Continue reading "Fixed portfolio linking; Featured Images explained" »

Happy New Year. We totally changed Coroflot.

January 05, 2009 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

If you haven't noticed already, a number of things are changing here on Coroflot, and while I'll be going into the specifics in a lot more detail over the next few weeks, I thought today might be a good day to officially introduce what we've taken to calling Coroflot Version 5. It is, after all, the first full work day of 2009 for a lot of Coroflot users (though I'm certain that many of the freelancers among us have been cranking along full speed since last Thursday or Friday), and new years mesh with new offerings in an elegant sort of way.

The super-short description of the changes is: Coroflot is getting networked.

Now, the Coroflot/Core77 community has been active and growing since the mid-90s -- that's like, the stone age in internet years -- and I can attest personally to the usefulness of knowing and meeting people through their portfolios, and their posts on the discussion boards. This already constitutes a useful network, but one with plenty of unrealized potential for links and communications between designers, students and employers.

Continue reading "Happy New Year. We totally changed Coroflot." »

How much should I charge? Six things to consider when setting your freelance rate.

November 10, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (24) [Permalink]

Creative Seeds isn't primarily a blog about freelancing, but it does tend to come up frequently. Freelancing, it would seem, comes with the territory: the creative professions are drawn to contract employment far more frequently than the professional world as a whole. Whether as a sideline to a staff job, an interim between more traditional positions, or a default for recent graduates, freelancing is especially well-suited to the project-oriented, sprint-and-rest nature of the creative process.

This last category of freelancer--the recent graduate--is of special note, because newly minted designers are in the doubly daunting position having to both find work and figure out the financial aspects of that work once it's obtained. If you've just entered the creative contracting world, you're in for an exciting and often unnerving ride, and are probably drowning in questions, not the least of which is how much you should be making.

Unfortunately, unless you attended an exceptionally pragmatic school, you probably didn't get any solid advice on determining how much you're worth. Which is a shame, because it's simultaneously one of the most important and most difficult questions to answer when it comes to your early professional success. While there won't be a magic number at the end of this article, it does attempt to sweep together a few major considerations that should help you generate your own, based on much casual discussion with creative freelancers over the past four years:

1. Young freelancers and recent grads almost always ask for too little.
It's true. In dozens of conversations with friends who have taken on contract work, the majority observe that they undervalued themselves when starting out. Offering a good bargain is part of getting your foot in the door when you're inexperienced, of course, but the majority of newbies will err on the low side.

Continue reading "How much should I charge? Six things to consider when setting your freelance rate." »

Where the (Creative) Jobs Are: Coroflot Does Some Math

October 03, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (3) [Permalink]

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.

Continue reading "Where the (Creative) Jobs Are: Coroflot Does Some Math" »

How to Get an Entry Level Job or Internship, v2.0

September 18, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (4) [Permalink]

We've had a ten-point "how to" for internship-seekers posted over at Core77 for a while now, but have lately realized that with all of the changes in the creative professions and the communications landscape--online in particular--many of the best avenues for finding work today weren't even conceived of five or six years ago. To that end, I've been tasked with re-writing our "How to Get an Entry Level Job or Internship" article, with a special focus on utilizing online resources and digital media. If you, like many readers, are a recent entrant into the land of creative employment, read through this one and tell us what you think. If you've recently completed such a search, read through and tell us how you did it.

Nearly or recently graduated and looking for your first big break? The right internship or junior level job can be the gateway you need into the thrilling world of design! Follow our simple ten step program, and you'll be well on your way.

Research

1. Make some decisions about what you're looking for.

If you've been staying current in your particular branch of design during your studies, then this should be the easiest step. Start by thinking about firms and/or cities where you're interested in working, paying special attention to recent work that's been produced there. Magazines, websites, books, professors and fellow designers are all good resources here, and can help to round out your impressions and keep them realistic. While it's true that some types of creative work tend to cluster in certain cities (New York for periodicals and publishing, LA and Detroit for automotive, the Bay Area for tech, Portland for sporting goods, etc), be careful not to limit yourself unnecessarily--a lot of interesting work goes on in unusual places, so cast your net broadly.

2. Make a list of at least ten different firms and designers that you want to contact.

The truth is, many places you contact probably won't write you back, so it's important to hit several places at once. Rank your top ten, using criteria like reputation, level of interest in their projects, kinds of skills you'd learn working there, location, and degree of specialization. Then plan on contacting them in reverse order, lowest rank first, and on up. By the time you hit your most desirable target, you'll be an old pro at this.

Continue reading "How to Get an Entry Level Job or Internship, v2.0" »

Playing it Safe: Contract Basics for Freelance Designers

September 03, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (5) [Permalink]

Do I need a contract?

It's a reasonable question for freelancing creative professionals, especially those of us just starting out, or doing a little work on the side. The ordeal of tracking down and retaining clients, after all, is complicated and time-consuming enough, and The Law a confusing and foreign construct. While many small consultancies (and most of the larger ones) will have clear sets of legal guidelines for entering into any kind of work agreement, lone freelancers frequently sidestep the whole issue, trusting in their personal client relationship to derail any potential disputes.

To the uninitiated, it may be unclear why a contract is such a big deal in the first place. To help answer that, I sought the advice of Joe Makuch, a patent attorney at Marger, Johnson & McCollom, a Portland law firm that's been handling Intellectual Property (IP) and patent law since the 80s, for companies like Samsung, Pixelworks and recumbent bike builder BigHa Cycles.

The most immediately useful aspect of a contract, it turns out, is the degree to which it dispels uncertainty. A chat and a handshake are comforting, but it's remarkable how many slight differences in understanding can emerge once you start writing them down.

Continue reading "Playing it Safe: Contract Basics for Freelance Designers" »

Staying Creative, As the Only Creative

August 11, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (6) [Permalink]

What's the best environment for getting creative work done? For such an important question, it's maddeningly difficult to answer objectively. A more succinct version, from a pragmatic point of view might instead be this: under what circumstances have creative professionals gotten the most work done?

That one's a little easier to address--though still tricky--and in conversation with working designers the answer is most often: "When I was in studio, back in school."

Funny to think that, for all its cobbled-together insanity, the academic studio still represents the most productive space in many of our working histories. When most of us imagine an idealized creative work environment, what we come up with often resembles the bullpen of our school days: a large-ish room full of feverishly working colleagues, chaos, and creativity. Sketches and models and reference materials spread across every tabletop and wall, up to (and sometimes including) the ceiling.

Few of us did the best work of our careers in these spaces, but we did put in incredibly long, impassioned hours there, and joyfully so: something about that environment seems to bring out an energy that we might spend the rest of our careers trying to re-attain. The thrill of learning and exploring certainly has something to do with it, but the element most responsible is almost certainly each other's mere presence: creatives do their best work around other creatives.

Continue reading "Staying Creative, As the Only Creative" »

Climbing out of the Genius Trap: Eight Real Ways to Build Your Creative Skill Set

July 29, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (3) [Permalink]

How do we go about getting better at what we do, then? The last installment of Creative Seeds was all about being flexible and acknowledging that creative ability can (and should) be endlessly improved. The obvious next step is to make a list; faithful readers are well aware of how much we love making lists here at CS.

For the creative professional eager to make that toolbox brighter and shinier, then, but unsure of how to do it outside of school, here are eight ideas you may or may not have thought of:

1. Start a side project.
Creatives in small studios sometimes remark that their leanest periods are their most productive. When clients dry up, good studios work on their own projects, cranking out spec work, competition entries, skill-building exercises, or simply personal interest projects. There's good logic behind this method, as it not only maintains creative momentum, but can add projects to a portfolio unrestrained by budget or client needs, letting the agency nudge its body of work closer to the sorts of things they'd like to do more of.

The same strategy can work for individual designers, too. Whether you're between jobs, fresh out of school, on break or just underemployed, there's no better time to get started on your dream project. If you've always wanted to design posters, but have been stuck doing brochures for the past year, now's your chance. Ditto for wannabe shoe designers, children's book illustrators, or whatever. Picking something that truly engages and inspires you makes for superior creative output, and real passion tends to shine through quite brightly in a portfolio piece.

The big drawback, of course, is the inherent lack of structure: with no client to dictate needs and schedules, you have to be your own taskmaster. So identify a fictitious client or target market. Write yourself a brief, set a deadline, and get started.

2. Set an effort-based goal.
If you're honest with yourself, you probably already know which tools in your box need sharpening, and setting yourself a specific goal for improvement is the obvious next step. Creative growth can be difficult to measure, so the most effective short-term goals are usually based on effort rather than quality:

-"I will sketch for one hour after work every day until the end of the month."
-"I will design four album covers for a band that I like by the end of the summer."
-"I will learn enough animation to make a one minute movie about my last project by September 1."

Continue reading "Climbing out of the Genius Trap: Eight Real Ways to Build Your Creative Skill Set" »

The Clever Creative, Languishing in the Genius Trap

July 15, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (10) [Permalink]

photo: FatMandy

The single most effective way to improve your prospects as a creative professional is to improve your creative skills.

Despite the millions of words of advice and discussion that have been traded on the web over the years about how to market yourself, that sentence is almost certainly the truest, most useful advice you're going to find.

As creatives whose jobs are tightly intertwined with marketing, branding, and other forms of perceptional influence, it's often tempting to focus more on the sizzle than the steak, even (or especially) where our own skills are involved. To a degree, this is useful, as the problem of the talented professional who never scores the right job due to poor self-promotion is a very real one. It's my suspicion, though, that the opposite is more pervasive: the designer, illustrator, or creative director who believes an improvement in self-marketing will always yield greater rewards than simply getting better at what he does.

There are a couple of explanations for this. The first has to do with this tendency among creatives to hyper-focus on marketing; we are, after all, frequently asked to take a weak concept and make it as appealing as possible, through adjustments in its physical design, surface treatment, advertising, packaging, or some other touch point that generates work for us. A missive in the New York Times Business section last week, though, offers an additional reason that's probably even more fundamental.

Continue reading "The Clever Creative, Languishing in the Genius Trap" »

Writing a Creative Job Posting: Eight Ways to Snag to the Right Applicant

July 02, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (2) [Permalink]

photo: Splodge

Most of the advice in this column to date has focused on the job-seeker. After all, we've all been one at some point or another, so the appeal is pretty broad and the well of personal experience from which to draw is pretty deep. The creative job market, though, is a two-sided affair, and just as there are plenty of do's and don'ts for the applicant, there are some easily avoidable mistakes that many hiring companies make when embarking on a talent search.

The search process, as anyone who's completed one can attest, is a huge pile of work: not only do multiple interviews need to be prepared for and conducted, but countless portfolios need reviewing, travel and scheduling logistics need working out, references need checking...and that's after the initial job description has been formulated and publicized. Like many labor-intensive endeavors in the creative world, though, much of a hiring's ultimate success depends on the earliest steps. A job that's well-defined is easier to fill, and a job posting (if that's how you choose to publicize) that's clear and compelling can raise your quotient of good candidates dramatically.

Look at an ad from a major player, read it aloud, then read yours. The tone should be different of course, but yours shouldn't sound dumb in comparison. Nobody wants to work someplace dumb.

Coroflot being a job-listing website, we're inclined to focus on the posting step...and we've seen enough of them over the past few years to have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't. So if you're getting ready to look for your next hot pencil, procrastinating about starting the process because it's too daunting, or wondering why you keep getting applications from all the wrong people, read on.

1. Look legitimate.
Formatting, spelling, and grammar are noticed, even by creative professionals. On-line career advertising is great because it's relatively inexpensive, and allows any interested party to post; but this also breeds skepticism. There are plenty of small-potatoes, poorly run, hellhole places to work in the world, and some of them post right next to Apple and Pentagram. Job-searchers have gotten good at paying attention to the hallmarks of a serious, professional employer, so it behooves you to spend the extra couple of hours making sure your ad has them. Look at an ad from a major player, read it aloud, then read yours. The tone should be different of course, but yours shouldn't sound dumb in comparison. Nobody wants to work someplace dumb.

2. Avoid marketing speak.
We're familiar with marketing bullshit--we read it every day, and some of us write it--so you're generally better off playing it straight. Admittedly, a posting from academia, government, or a large multinational corporation is going to come off a standardized template, then get edited by committee to within an inch of its life; applicants understand that and accept it, albeit grudgingly. For a smaller company or an agency, though, something more direct and conversational is usually expected, both when describing the company and soliciting the applicant.

Continue reading "Writing a Creative Job Posting: Eight Ways to Snag to the Right Applicant" »

Seven Ways to Make Your Business Card Stand Out

June 20, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (16) [Permalink]

Business cards are a sort of great equalizer in the professional world. Everyone has them, everyone exchanges them, and generally speaking, the less important you are, the more say you have in how yours looks. For creative professionals, especially the legions of us who work for ourselves or in a tiny little studio or consultancy, this makes them exciting -- what our personal or small-business brand lacks in name recognition can be made up in creative expression, at least that's the theory.

While I stand by my earlier statement that a good card isn't worth a damn if you don't back it up with skills, interest and enthusiasm, a well-designed one can turn a brief impression into a lasting one. Unfortunately, with the plethora of cards out there, it can sometimes feel like every good idea's been taken already. Maybe so. On the other hand, some are more taken than others, and every creative professional has a duty to jump into a challenge like this with gusto, whether the results are 100% unique or not.

Based on a much-longer-than-expected search through Google Image and Flickr streams, we've boiled some of the most promising business card strategies down into seven types -- with examples -- for your reference, or at least entertainment. If you've been racking your brain trying to come up with that killer card lately, hope it helps. If you think you've got something better, by all means let us know in the comments section. Everyone else, have fun:

1. Extra Slick

This is probably the default mode for the creative professional who wants to stand out: razor-sharp hyper-modern layout, peculiar but thoughtful color selection, heavy coated stock with multiple textures. If done well, this can be an effective strategy, especially for graphic and industrial designers who are trying to convey a cutting-edge aesthetic and technical know-how. Because the clean, modern card is so popular, though, the bar is set high: if you're not a graphic designer yourself, you'll need to hire one, and all those effects don't come cheap.

Caution: Overdoing it with the colors and textures is a quick and easy way to make an expensive eyesore that conveys loud, bad taste; sort of the business card equivalent of dressing head-to-toe in Diesel.

2. Letterpress

Continue reading "Seven Ways to Make Your Business Card Stand Out" »

Watching the Creative Clock: Five Creatives Talk About Their Work Days

June 13, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

photo: jek in the box

"How do you get all your work done?"

It's a question I've asked, overheard, or been asked by others countless times in one variation or another. Creative professionals seem to have a special relationship with the clock, whether because of the nature of the work (we have to get "inspired", but a lot of us also bill by the hour) or because of the nature of the worker -- design, illustration and other creative disciplines are known for attracting the truculent and quirky in disproportionate numbers.

Given the large fraction of us who work to a ticking clock, whether as a freelancer, in a consultancy, or through a corporate budgetary allotment, figuring out The Trick to being productive all day, every day, is of great concern. The problem, as most of you are probably already aware, is that there is no Trick, just as there's no Secret to Being Creative. In a professional field where singularity is a competitive requirement, any kind of universal directive for being productive, efficient, or content seems doomed to fail.

That said, it never hurts to ask. So I did. In a thoroughly unscientific sampling, I sat down in person or on the phone during the last couple of weeks to talk with five creatives of various stripes about what their typical work day looks like. Mostly friends, and friends of friends, these five cover a pretty broad spectrum: interaction design, writing, web, exhibit, and ID is in there; freelance, corporate, and consultancy; two of the interviewees are senior designers and one is a company co-founder. The results are predictably skewed, but a few themes prevail throughout -- see what you think:

Continue reading "Watching the Creative Clock: Five Creatives Talk About Their Work Days" »

Want to Save the World? Just Ask.

May 12, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (4) [Permalink]

photo: Megan Ann Rucker

A pleasant surprise hit my inbox last week.

In the process of corresponding with a fabricator, with whom I was working on a long-term freelance project, the question of shipping product came up; as had been the case twice before, I was called upon to calculate the dimensions of the shipping crates for various parts of a large, unwieldy sculpture, and dutifully responded with a list of numbers, well-padded (as instructed) to make sure the rather delicate components were surrounded by plenty of packing material. Unlike before, however, the fabricator wrote back with a simple request:

"How could we 'green' this crating strategy?"

I was thrilled, of course, and responding was an easy thing. Numerous suggestions on how to do just that had occurred to me over the months I'd spent on the project, some more feasible than others, so all I had to do was pick the most likely and outline it for the fabricator and client. A pretty simple fix, it involved building the crates in batches, with a few extra small ones at first, so that those actually doing the packing could deviate from the crating list if they felt they could get away with a smaller size. Estimated savings in packing materials, from this and some suggestions that arose from further discussion with the fabricator, exceed 30%.

The solution is in process, it'll work, and it's not complicated, which leads me to this question: why didn't I suggest it in the first place?

Continue reading "Want to Save the World? Just Ask." »

Building Your Portfolio Website: Six Things to Always Do

April 17, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (6) [Permalink]

photo: vanessa kennedy

So by now perhaps you've read through last week's advice column on how to keep from making the most common mistakes when creating your online portfolio (and perhaps you've written in to say how horrified you are that coroflot would suggest using a template, rather than building the whole thing from scratch -- that's fair, there are some good arguments on both sides). Assuming you've decided to make the leap and start publishing your work, whether through a template, a custom-designed site, a hacked blog, or something else of your own (hopefully low-Flash) design, there are a few additional suggestions that have cropped up since then from an array of sources.

Besides last week's expert adviser (Miles Begin of Pollen Design), I was lucky enough to attend a talk at Portland-area stationery store and designer's mecca Office on the subject of...portfolios. Representatives from a number of local creative employers were there, including Nike, Nemo, and UNKL, and although the discussion was more broadly focused on both physical and digital portfolios, some excellent tips came out; some confirming last week's caveats, and others building on them.

1. Make sure you are in there somewhere.

One point that all of last week's presenters agreed upon, and Begin reinforced, is that the world is full of good portfolios, physical and otherwise. The ideal candidate, from the point of view of many creative employers, is someone who combines talent and obvious passion, and communicates both simultaneously. So in addition to showing projects from school, freelance gigs, and assorted other "official" projects, it can be surprisingly effective to post work that you got excited about.

Continue reading "Building Your Portfolio Website: Six Things to Always Do" »

Building Your Portfolio Website: Six Things to Never Do

April 09, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (9) [Permalink]

photo: pandoro

So, you've got a corefolio posted; you've put together a nice PDF sampler; you've printed out a gorgeous little book to take to interviews. You're working your networks, both real and virtual, and so far...not much. Potential employers are looking over your work, and maybe they like what they see, but somehow this isn't translating into more gigs, or that one crucial interview.

One possible answer to these woes is a personal portfolio website. They've been around for a while now, and emails from colleagues in the creative professions are increasingly signed with a short list of URLs in addition to a Yours Truly--with good reason.

Group sites like Coroflot, AIGA and others offer instant visibility and searchability, and for that reason they are indispensable. Many recruiters and working designers will tell you, however, that such postings by themselves aren't quite enough to make a hiring call, and given the option, they'll move on to someone with additional sources of information. A portfolio website can be the perfect next source, and given the relative ease of creating one these days, they're rapidly becoming an expected part of any designer's self-marketing plan.

The problem is, they're so easy to get wrong. After listening to years of complaints about some of the visual garbage recruiters and seniors have had to sort through, I decided to seek some specific answers about what separates a job-winning portfolio site from a confusing mess.

Miles Begin is a staff designer at Pollen Design, a small product consultancy in New York City (full disclosure: I freelanced for Pollen a few years back, before Miles hired on), and as the designated portfolio reviewer, he looks through around 15 PDF portfolios a week from hopeful applicants and aspiring interns.

Speaking over the phone last week, Miles was able to immediately confirm a few suspicions: that the fraction of applicants with web portfolios is large and growing (about 40% of applicants have them now, by his estimation); that he, and many in his situation, prefer websites to PDFs alone, because of the clearer picture they paint of a designer's personality and process; and that many of these sites are horrific, but in easily avoidable ways.

As with so many things in design, and real life, getting a portfolio website right seems to be less a matter of what you do than what you don't. Compiling Miles' observations together with other comments I've heard over the years, a few clear prohibitions seem like a good place to start. Here are six of them.

1. Don't think you're a web designer unless you actually are.

This is the Achilles heel of many creative professionals: the belief that being competent in one creative capacity qualifies you for another. Most of us recognize that a great cinematographer probably won't be such a great architect, but a huge number of industrial, graphic, interior, and other designers seem to forget this rule, and try to build a great website from scratch.

I know I did: my first go around a few years back, I holed up in my room for about a month, teaching myself Dreamweaver, calling up friends to ask them what exactly a Style Sheet was, and learning a lot in the process. It was fun, and engaging, and taught me plenty of useful skills, but the resulting website was utter crap.

"There's a difference between showing you're a good designer and making a bold statement that you don't really have the tools to make," says Begin. The problem with building a site from scratch, unless you're already skilled at web design, is the powerful desire to do too much, and do it poorly. Given the endless potential and flexibility of the web, it's easy to muck up an otherwise compelling body of work with animated graphics, complicated interfaces, soundtracks, easter eggs, pop-ups, Flash intros and all other manner of puffery, when all the visitor wants is to see some images with text. Few situations better merit the guideline "Less is more" than building your first portfolio site.

Continue reading "Building Your Portfolio Website: Six Things to Never Do" »

Eight Things They Never Taught You About Networking

March 17, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (8) [Permalink]

photo: Marie Richie

"Networking," as a verb, occupies a strange location in the creative professional landscape. It's an activity that practically everyone agrees is desperately important, and a clear delineator between the successful and the merely talented but frustrated. On the other hand, it's a maddeningly nebulous term; a kind of Emperor's New Clothes that folks agree on, but are hard pressed to accurately describe. Every now and then, a bold student will ask a teacher or presenter to please define this strange verb, and in my experience, the response is usually akin to "You'll know it when you see it..."

The most likely explanation for this haziness is that networking is a form of relationship building, and like all human relationships, professional networks defy clear definition. There is no definitive handbook on what makes a healthy marriage, for example (though many books have tried), or for that matter a sturdy parent-child bond, and so the best advice tends to focus on specific examples.

With that approach in mind, I've compiled a short list of specifics that aim to shed a little more light on this crucial but undefinable skill, with special attention paid to the ways it resembles the personal relationship-building that traditionally receives more attention. So here you are: a random sampling of eight incomplete answers to the question "What does good networking look like, anyway?"

1. It's not about the first impression, it's about the third.
You know what they say about the Third Date, right? There's a reason the number three has so much meaning attached to it in relationships, and it's true in professional networking as well.

First meetings happen by the thousands. In both professional and personal life, we're understandably wary of first impressions, both because they're so frequent, and so influenced by circumstances. A second meeting implies more common ground; in the professional arena this elevates your relationship from "We met once" to "We're acquainted." Meeting someone a third time is a different story though. It implies that you're inhabiting some of the same circles, and know some of the same people.

Continue reading "Eight Things They Never Taught You About Networking" »

The Pen is Mightier than the Pen: Why Writing Matters for Designers

March 07, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (4) [Permalink]

photo: stack

The CS post from Feb. 15 ("Questioning the Cult of the Sketch") happened to coincide with a lengthy thread on Core77's discussion boards about the necessity of sketching. It's always gratifying when coincidences like that occur, allowing us to entertain the idea that we've tapped into some universal subconscious of the creative professions.

This time, though, I'm simply cribbing what's already out there. A thread started last week asking whether a cover letter was really necessary when applying for a design job. The answer is that of course it is, and responders quickly concurred on this point, offering some excellent advice on why it's important and what to say; readers seeking tips on cover letters would do well to give it a look. What's curious about the exchange is the assumption that prompted it, or rather the lack thereof; it's hard to imagine such a question even being asked in most other professional fields.

Continue reading "The Pen is Mightier than the Pen: Why Writing Matters for Designers" »

Exploit Me! : A Designer's Guide to Surviving Design Competitions

February 25, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (5) [Permalink]

photo: John Haslam

If contests are so bad for the profession, why do we keep entering them?

An article by Jeff Fisher in Fast Company this month discusses, as others have before, how bad a deal design contests can be for those who enter them. They require enormous effort, the chances of winning are slight, and even the grand prize doesn't usually compensate for the time invested. Worse than all of this, participants stand to lose rights to their own work; Fisher's example of a book cover competition for graphic designers includes this snippet of text from the entry rules:

All entries become the property of Sponsors. By entering the Contest, the winner agrees to assign all of his or her rights, title and interest in the entry (including all copyrights, trademarks, design rights, moral rights and all other intellectual property rights) to the Sponsors or their designee(s).

What all these articles are pointing out is that there's great potential for exploitation here, and I'm inclined to agree with them. Yet most of us know about it, and we continue to enter, despite the downsides. Shortly out of school, I designed a piece of flat pack furniture for Designboom.com, and got a Shortlisted Entry out of it. No money, not a lot of notoriety, but I didn't feel cheated, and I'd do it again--in fact I'm working on an entry for Dell's Re-Generation competition at this moment.

Continue reading "Exploit Me! : A Designer's Guide to Surviving Design Competitions" »

Questioning the Cult of the Sketch

February 15, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (19) [Permalink]

Designers must draw. We pretty much all agree on that one. Regardless of whether we're designing buildings, products, clothes or even web pages, a good number of us are judged--and judge each other--on our ability to snag a sheet of paper from the printer and quickly draft something beautiful and compelling.

This makes sense if you examine the history of these professions. Until the advent of desktop CAD, being a designer or architect meant being a draftsman too, for some or all of your career. The daily impression of pen on paper lent itself to the building of visual eloquence, and more importantly a lasting professional culture of valuing that eloquence.

In light of this culture, it's surprising to look back on the work of great designers of the early and mid 20th century and realize that what's usually depicted is the product itself: Russel Wright's teapot, the Eames' chaise lounge, Dieter Rams' phonograph. With few exceptions, when a book or exhibit highlights great product design, for example, the sketches associated with them are brought out only sparingly. This is partly because the design has passed into the realm of general public awareness, and plenty of non-designers are looking at them. It's also because a lot of them aren't that good.

Continue reading "Questioning the Cult of the Sketch" »

To Score The Perfect Job, HR Professionals Suggest Geeking Out Online

February 07, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (5) [Permalink]

The Black Hole. The Fortress. The Bottomless Pit (of despair). When recounting their last job search, friends and colleagues in the creative professions are prone to using terms like this to describe their most desired employers' HR departments. Most of us can probably recall a time when we felt the same way; as if every studio and firm we really wanted to get into had an army of technicians cleverly sealing off every point of access, and perhaps enfolding all the good jobs in a cloaking field of some sort. There are ads out there, of course, encouraging us to spend weeks tuning our portfolios and resumes, and so we hop through the HR hoops, then fling everything into that hole, never to be heard from again.

And a nagging voice inside says "You know nobody really gets a good job this way, right? You need a network."

And the nagging voice is right, especially about the creative professions. Creative careers, more than just about any others except for maybe acting and politics, are all about maintaining a professional network: while you're in school, looking for work, while employed, looking for work again. 80% of career-building jobs are found through means other than listings, so networking isn't just a corollary task, it's central to your professional livelihood.

One crucial way in which the networking process is changing is with the growing importance of internet communities, and social networking sites in particular. No longer just ways to keep in touch with that DJ you met at Burning Man, these sites have matured a great deal in the past couple of years. They are, among other things, serious business tools. BusinessWeek writes about them incessantly, the Wall Street Journal just added a FaceBook widget, and the monetary value of MySpace appears to have no upper limit.

As networking aids, they have a lot to recommend them:

-They're well organized.
-They offer a level of preparation that makes keeping in touch less daunting for the socially awkward.
-They allow you to show your best side to people while maintaining a calm detachment.
-They're searchable.

Continue reading "To Score The Perfect Job, HR Professionals Suggest Geeking Out Online" »

Small Pond, Smart Fish: Why Young Designers Should Avoid 'Design Capitals'

January 25, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (14) [Permalink]

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.

Continue reading "Small Pond, Smart Fish: Why Young Designers Should Avoid 'Design Capitals'" »

Sidestep: Interaction Designers, and How They Got That Way

January 14, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (10) [Permalink]

"Hot, hot, hot" reads the caption under Interaction Design on the Core77 discussion boards, and with good reason. Anyone who's been following the creative job market at any point in the last few years is probably aware of the feeding frenzy currently going on, as companies large and small seek interaction designers to do...well...whatever it is that they do. For those of us not in the field, and without much exposure to the IxD (for that's how it gets abbreviated) process, it can seem a bit of an esoteric, shadowy art, attracting the attention of media and employers, but without knowing quite why. We know they work with information (usually), and computers (sometimes), and pay close attention to the users of technology (pretty much always, right?), but that's a vague enough description that it could be applied to web design, graphic design, industrial design, and a number of other disciplines. Determining how one actually becomes an Interaction Designer is an even tougher challenge.

Asking a few working designers about their jobs, the first question that gets answered is why the rest of the questions are so hard. It's a difficult to define field because it's both extremely broad and relatively young--though not as young as you might think: the term dates to the 1980's, meaning there are in fact seasoned interaction designers out there with 15 and 20 years of experience under their belt, in addition to the young cubs we might imagine negotiating six-figure salaries. This puts IxD in an identity-seeking mode that is, if anything, more profound than the one ID has been going through (blog posts and discussion threads asking "What is 'design' anyway?" are approaching mosquito swarm levels of abundance and annoyance), and certainly more frenetic than the academic queries that surface periodically among graphic designers.

What also makes the questions hard is the feeling that Interaction Design is something that happens anyway, with or without the input of Interaction Designers. As an Industrial Designer, the parallel is obvious: many of us are fond of pointing out that every product in the world gets designed by someone, whether or not they know what they're doing. Similarly, every time a user interacts with a piece of technology (there's that broad-ness problem again), someone designs that interaction, and frequently they screw it up. Hence the discipline. Interaction Designers, more than any other group of creative professionals I know, are keenly aware of their own usefulness and their own dispensability.

Continue reading "Sidestep: Interaction Designers, and How They Got That Way" »

For a Long-Awaited Design Program, a Uniquely Composite Approach

January 07, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Responding to a long-standing need for more qualified designers in the Pacific Northwest, the University of Oregon will be opening the doors of its new Product Design program this coming June. In an energetic phone interview last week, Zara Logue, the Portland representative for the program, described a uniquely hybrid program combining faculty and strategic guidance from U of O's vibrant architecture and art programs with active involvement from major companies in Oregon's burgeoning creative economy.

"It really is kind of like Voltron," she wryly observed, noting that all three elements--art, architecture and business--have been heavily involved since the idea for the program began germinating nearly five years ago. And like any compound battle mecha worth its mega-thrusters, the new major takes several institutions that have already shown success on their own, and builds a new entity that attempts to take advantage of all of them.

The most unusual part of the program's story may indicate a growing trend in design education: a curriculum derived largely from the needs of the industry, rather than a legacy of theoretical guidelines. The imbalance between design education and design employment in the Pacific Northwest, and the Portland area in particular, has been discussed and commented on for years. Oregon's largest employer and its largest locally-headquartered company--Intel and Nike, respectively--both rely heavily on creative professionals of various stripes, but have long looked to distant schools to supply them.

Continue reading "For a Long-Awaited Design Program, a Uniquely Composite Approach" »

Your Dream Office is Just Over There: Co-Working and the Instant Creative Community

January 02, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1) [Permalink]

When we start out in a creative career, most of us have a certain idealized image of what our work day will look like: there will be high ceilings and large windows, hiply dressed 30-somethings having insightful conversations about aesthetic minutiae, and a charming mixture of bleeding-edge technology and old-school architectural details. There will probably be drawings or printouts pinned to the wall by the dozen, and some obscure objects scattered artfully about, to add visual spice.

To be sure, some design offices are like this, and some advertising and architecture firms too, but for most of us, reality is decidedly less fabulous. For the freelancer or contractor--and that's a category that's growing at breakneck speed--the options are even scarcer. A temporary on-site cubicle, a cobbled-together home office, and a jovial but ultimately isolating coffee shop are the three most common options, and all of them lack the most important quality of the ideal creative workspace: other creative workers with whom to interact. It's well understood that good ideas and good creative work flow almost never flourish in a vacuum, and yet increasingly we are asked to make them do so. And we're not alone. New media professionals have been dealing with this issue since day one, sometime back in the 90s, and writers have been dealing for far longer. Some of them have solved the problem in the most obvious way, by starting their own company or publication and filling it with good collaborators, but in this time of high rents and unstable work loads, it's a tricky option at best.

A less orthodox and perhaps more appropriate solution to this dilemma has been proposed in recent years, and goes by the slightly touchy-feely name of Coworking. Like a laborer's equivalent of cohousing, coworking got its conceptual start in the artists' and writers' collectives that started appearing in big cities as early as the beginning of last century, though they didn't achieve a freelancer-appropriate configuration until recently. The structure of a modern co-working group is fairly simple: grab a bunch of freelance or contract workers who find their productivity flagging in the absence of a peer group, and gather them together in a single dedicated space.

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Design Your Work Day: Five Questions for the Home Office Worker

December 12, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Searching the web for suggestions on how to improve productivity in your home office, you find a lot of conflicting advice. Some writers would suggest you maintain a rigid schedule and work nowhere but a dedicated office that emulates a corporate cubicle as closely as possible. Others spend most of their time celebrating the conveniences and flexibility inherent in the situation, urging you to stay in your PJs all morning, only throwing on a pair of sweats when you're ready to hop down to the post office to enjoy the short lines of mid-morning. It's a confusing topic, made all the more so by the large fraction of workers who are new to the whole working-from-home thing, whether through recent induction into the growing ranks of telecommuters, or a shifting professional climate that encourages freelancing.

On further thought, this lack of consensus is reasonable: we're talking about millions of people, after all, working in all kinds of different capacities, with different needs, habits, and levels of self-discipline. Most advice-givers are essentially writing about what works for them, not what works for everyone...because honestly, what could?

Considering a more specific breed of worker--creative professionals--allows for more generalization. In a normal workplace, we typically like a well-designed, varied environment. We like interesting, competent co-workers, and bosses who are good at managing us (whatever that may be). We want a little bit of structure, but not too much. We like good coffee, daylight, getting out of the office for lunch.

It's remarkable how rarely any of these rules get applied to home offices though. I have seen the environments and work schedules of plenty of freelancing and telecommuting friends, and they are dreadful, almost all of them. Smart, creative people, in dark, airless rooms, staring at a screen for 12 hours a day, but only getting 5 billable hours in. This makes sense when you ponder it objectively though: if you worked in an office like that, your productivity would suffer there too.

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The Bemused Optimism of the Dispensable

December 04, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

All of Portland got laid off last week. That's how it seemed, anyway, last Wednesday evening, as a group of designers gathered around a pair of tables in a bar in the southeastern quarter of town. Once a month, for nearly a year now, a clutch of workers from across Portland's creative economy--15 to 30 of them--have been getting together after work to gripe about clients, enthuse about projects, drink IPA and and generally behave the way any other group of like-minded professionals might during happy hour. It's a remarkable group for its diversity within the field: there are interaction, product and graphic designers, students and educators, researchers, even the odd engineer or project manager, working in companies as big as Intel and Nike, and as small as a solo consultancy. On this particular evening, though, it felt more like a support group, with fully one-third of the regulars in attendance finding themselves out of work within the past few weeks. The culprit was a major technology corporation that had employed dozens of designers in the Portland area, and had recently cut creative staff as a cost-saving measure.

I knew about this before getting to the bar that evening, having corresponded with a few colleagues in the previous few days, and arrived expecting slack faces and morose dialog. I was disappointed, though. The overall mood wasn't just acceptance, but something like bemused optimism. "I'm actually fine with it," several of them explained, shrugging and chatting about where they were thinking of going next. And it occurred to me that this is the same reaction I've seen in pretty much every creative professional I've known who's lost a job, myself included. It's remarkable how surprised we act upon realizing our relative lack of anguish, given that it seems to be the rule and not the exception. True, we could all be putting a sunny face on a difficult situation, but comparing it to the reactions of laid-off friends and relatives in other professions, there's a noticeable lack of worry amongst designers and their kin.

This brings attention to one of the most crucial traits a successful creative professional needs to have these days that hardly anyone talks about: resilience. The creative field is a brutal one, in which jobs are lost frequently, often without any correlation to competence. There's a crucial truth to creative employment that makes this happen; a truth that very few of us are comfortable acknowledging: our jobs are dispensable.

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Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How to be a Font Geek

November 30, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

So, I finally saw Helvetica this week. Yes, very lame to have waited so long, but I'm always wary of films with such niche appeal, susceptible as they are to The Dancing Bear Effect: It's not so much that the bear dances well, as that it dances at all. So it is with films about obscure, obsessive topics; just about anyone could do a documentary about typography, and they would be guaranteed a small, but reliable and passionate, audience. Typographers and font geeks are a passionate bunch, and if you didn't know this already, Helvetica would rapidly set you straight.

It's a pretty good movie, especially considering the two very different audiences to which it's playing: the aforementioned font geeks, and the general public looking for an entertaining and perhaps educational 80 minutes. The drama that the filmmakers try to build out of the feud between the Modernists and the Post-Modernists is interesting for about four minutes, and then becomes dull and repetitive to the uninitiated. The majority of the film, though, concerns itself with convincing the non-geek that this is meaningful stuff, and it largely succeeds.

To the average person who claims "I don't really care about typography," the average typographer might remark, "Yes, you do. You just don't realize it." Type, like cinematography, product design, web page layouts and interior design, affects everyone that experiences it, frequently without making itself known. In this way creative professionals of many stripes are in the same boat, spending their days and energies creating things that are hidden in plain sight.

Continue reading "Stop Stealing Sheep and Learn How to be a Font Geek" »

Dude, Your CAD's Showing

November 19, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (6) [Permalink]

AutoCAD turned 25 last week. That's an awful lot of legacy to shoulder, especially for a product so bound to change as a software package. The fact that it's still around (how many other 25-year-old programs still exist with their original name?) is a testament to a few things: being first to the party, being very good at doing something a lot of people needed, and being really hard to learn. Architecture and engineering firms are full of experienced AutoCAD drivers who once suffered through an interface that's excruciatingly pedantic by current standards, and built a career on having done so. The only alternative was the even more laborious and mistake-intolerant science of hand drafting.

They worked on through the 80s and 90s, confident that they were using the state-of-the-art, and glad to have been freed from the unforgiving world of Maylines and powered erasers that their seniors knew. And then 3D CAD showed up, expanding software's role from a drafting-board replacement to a studio necessity. From the mid-90s to present day, we were presented a bewildering assortment of options, similar enough to make choosing the right one a chore, but different enough to inspire deep-seated assumptions in their users.

Although there's a common saying in the Industrial Design community that "CAD is just another tool," and a truly skilled designer uses whatever tool is necessary and appropriate, it's quietly understood by many that your CAD package speaks forcefully about what kind of designer you are. Anyone familiar with the field will already be aware of a sort of crude continuum of "real ID": parametric solid modelers (Pro/E, SolidWorks, CATIA, Unigraphics) are for engineers, and by extension, designers who are really just engineers that don't do math; surface modelers (Alias and Rhino) are for "creatives" who can't be bothered with manufacturability; and if you're a Real Designer, you can do everything that needs doing with a bin of pens and markers. It's an invented hierarchy that leads to endless pissing contests about sketching skills, but considerably fewer about modeling skills: the stereotypical hot Alias jockey is still more self-effacing technician than rock star, and Pro/E and SolidWorks don't even really have "jockeys," just users.

Certain industries have long associations that lead to these perceptions, like Alias for the competitive, art-driven auto and cellphone industries, and CATIA for the wonkier world of aerospace. The visceral nature of hand sketching probably deserves some of the blame too. Watching someone sketch, after all, is fascinating. Pulling CVs in a surface model is somewhat less so, but still has a kind of sci-fi demigod quality to it. Parametric solid modeling, by contrast, with its pop-up dimension boxes and methodical ordering of features has little appeal to the non-user. It's a bit like watching a flower grow: an amazing process that will probably produce something beautiful...but couldn't I just come back and see it when it's done?

Continue reading "Dude, Your CAD's Showing" »

Sidestep: When the Artist Turns Illustrator, Challenges Come From Both Sides

November 13, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Illustration, like many creative professions, is a hybrid discipline. Balancing the fire of creative expression with the boundaries of client-imposed constraints, successful illustrators often encounter a range of challenges--and opportunities--that their counterparts in the realm of fine art never see.

Rachel Salomon is, by all accounts, a success of this sort: her yearning, comfortingly melancholy images have illustrated articles for Spin, The New Yorker, and LA Weekly, among others, and she's created work for campaigns by Target, CD cases for Blue Note, and book covers for Penguin. More to the point, she makes a solid living doing something she loves. While a majority of illustrators go directly into the field, either through art school or through practice, though, Rachel got there on a more roundabout path through art school: prior to entering Illustration she earned a BFA at Brown University, never contemplating that the faster-paced, client-centered job she currently holds would eventually prove more satisfying.

Speaking with Rachel as she waits for a Boston-bound train at New York's Penn Station, several hard realities about this type of creative shift become clear. First off, it's harder than you think.

Continue reading "Sidestep: When the Artist Turns Illustrator, Challenges Come From Both Sides" »

Junior Rockstars to the Rescue: Making an Internship Program that Works

November 08, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1) [Permalink]

Work is piling up, staffers are stressing out, and there's nowhere near enough slack in the budget to hire another full-timer. Bringing in a freelancer is a possibility, but the constant in and out of short term workers is making it tough to build a fluid team dynamic. What this studio needs is an intern: energetic, creative, full of new perspectives and skills, committed to a whole summer's worth of 50 hour weeks. And cheap. Maybe free.

At first glance, an internship program seems like a godsend for a small, overworked studio, and with the right preparation and management, it can be. A good intern can bring all the advantages mentioned above and then some, but a bad one is a drain on time and resources with little to show for it. Getting the right one and keeping him or her productive is a tricky skill that plenty of employers have had to learn by hard experience. Those who've never handled interns before will want to take stock of their own needs and capabilities before diving in; finding and managing one is significantly different from finding a staff designer or other permanent creative employee.

For starters, interviewing for an internship is a skill unto itself. These are kids mostly, with enthusiasm, talent and fresh perspectives, but less professionalism than an experienced creative. Extra perspective is necessary when reviewing their portfolios and resumes: a little less weight should be placed on proper layout, finish and adherence to convention, and a bit more on seeing through to the potential underneath. Unlike a staff employee, a good intern is defined less by a polished skill set than by ample stores of confidence and a boundless capacity for learning.

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Sidestep: For the Engineer Who's Really a Designer, What to do Next

November 06, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (6) [Permalink]

Smart, creative, mechanically-inclined. Likes to take things apart, modify them, put them back together. Had to be forcibly removed from the Lego pile at dinner time as a child. Has to be forcibly removed from the Lego pile as an adult. Watches construction sites the way fans watch football games. These are the hallmarks of a natural-born engineer, right?

Possibly. The combination of interests and abilities described above is not uncommon in kids and teenagers, and though they might indicate a predilection for engineering, they could just as easily describe a latent artist, architect, programmer or industrial designer. Distinguishing between them is a difficult task for parents, counselors or confused students, and this can end up producing a working engineer or recent graduate with the dull, sinking feeling that they've spent the best years of their life struggling up the wrong professional ladder.

Engineering is an exacting, rewarding field with a strong creative element and a deep awareness of the utility and usefulness of physical objects in human society; in these ways it resembles Industrial Design. It is also fundamentally wary of emotional and aesthetic considerations, and often eschews novelty in favor of predictability and repeatability; in these ways it can prove frustrating to those who yearn for a more directly expressive act. Shifting to Industrial Design is one way in which some misplaced engineers have found resolution.

Continue reading "Sidestep: For the Engineer Who's Really a Designer, What to do Next" »

First Year of Work = Last Year of School: 9 ways to get the most out of your first job, by Carl Alviani

October 12, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0) [Permalink]

Your first job! Nice work kid, we always knew you had it in you. Getting a staff position or even a steady freelance gig in the creative world is no easy feat, especially for someone right out of school. If your school is like most, there are probably three or four former fellow students from your class still hustling for work or who've given up and slunk back to whatever they were doing before. So this is testament to your skills and perseverance.

Hang on though, you're not done yet. Have you ever heard the saying "The first year of work is the last year of school"? If not, it's probably worth committing to memory, because plenty of recent grads think the hard part is over, and so they stumble. The next few years will do more to determine the course of your career than anything you did in art or design school, and in some ways demand even more attention than you're used to giving. The working world is like school in some important ways--there are deadlines to meet, egos to appease, and plenty of late nights--but there are some crucial differences, and a successful career largely depends on your ability to adjust to this new structure without losing passion and focus, and without ever letting the learning process end.

All those new skills you're picking up are going to be not-so-hot at first. You'll be tempted to stick with the same tools you've spent years sharpening, and rightly so: you're getting paid to be awesome, not flail around with something you just learned. There's a balance to be struck, though, because if you never practice your new skills, you'll never grow, and growing is what you came here for.

What follows are some broad guidelines on how to make the working world more like the academic one, squeezing as much toolbox-building into that first year as possible. And if you're already into your second year, it's never too late to start.

1. Be humble.

However hard it was to make it this far, remember that everyone else in the office made it too. Most creative disciplines are highly competitive fields, so chances are good that your co-workers were really hot in their school days, and on top of that, they've been doing it in the real world for a while: under deadlines, answering to demanding clients, busting their butts to produce the great work that made you want to work there in the first place.

It's easy to come out of school thinking you're done learning, since you just spent the last two to five years struggling to the top of the heap, but there is plenty they didn't teach you there too. Five years from now, your most useful skills are probably going to be those learned on the job, while the slick, bizarre projects you took such pride in senior year sit wrinkling in the closet. You'll get the most out of your job by adhering to Socratic adage: "The beginning of true knowledge comes from accepting that we know nothing."

2. Make friends with people who know how to do things you don't.

The specific application of Guideline #1 starts with actively seeking new things to learn, and lucky for you, you're surrounded by people who want to help. Creative professionals are generally a vain lot when it comes to their abilities--I know I am--and tend to be pretty indulgent to small requests from admiring compatriots. So find someone who's good at something you're not, and tell them so. If there's a formal training system set up at your workplace, so much the better, but you can learn an awful lot just by opening up a new software package and asking a couple of quick questions every day after lunch. One of the most valuable perks of my first staff job was getting to learn Pro/Engineer from an extremely talented and experienced designer, for free--you know how much that's worth?

Continue reading "First Year of Work = Last Year of School: 9 ways to get the most out of your first job, by Carl Alviani" »

9 Tips for giving "a presentation that kills", by Carl Alviani

October 01, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: core jr | Comments (2) [Permalink]

The jury's still out on whether creative professionals inherently love attention or despise it. Creating art, design or product for a living implies a desire to make something people will notice, and while there are those who never show their creations to anyone, they rarely make a career out of it. On the other hand, an artist, designer or illustrator is not the same as a performer: it's your work that's out there on display, not you, much as it might sometimes feel that way. This level of separation is attractive to many creative professionals, while others would rather be be right out there with their creation, describing it, talking it up, doing whatever it takes to make their willing audience love it with the same ardor they do.

It might be comforting to know that loving presenting doesn't necessarily make you good at it, nor does being ambivalent about it. Being a good designer is no sure indicator either: the brilliant creative who makes an ass of himself when put on the spot is practically a cliché. But whether you love the spotlight with all your heart or cower in the corner at the slightest hint of attention, chances are good you'll have to do some presenting in your creative career. And like most worthwhile skills, presenting is something that can be learned.

As creative professionals, we're often called on to show the results of our work in visual form. The mistake many of us make is assuming that a well executed visual can take the place of a well thought out presentation. It can't. When you're planning your presentation, think about it as a narrative arc: what story are you trying to tell, what's the beginning, middle and end, and why should anyone care?

"Presentation" is a pretty broad term. In the creative world, it often means pitching a concept to a client or another department in your own company, with the intention of winning a job, making a case for a specific creative decision, or informing them of a project's status. It can also mean a more general explanation of your own capabilities as a freelancer, consultancy or team. In both cases, you'll probably be showing some work, and you'll probably be talking to non-designers. With that in mind, we've put together a short list of tips to get you started on the right path. Most of them are pretty common sense, and revolve around a few basic themes: being prepared, telling a story, not being afraid to run the show. So here you are: 9 tips that can make the difference between crashing and burning, and soaring gracefully through one of life's more nervous situations.

1. You give the presentation, not your stuff.
Drawings, models, prototypes, movies, Powerpoint decks, sketches, renderings, and anything else you might bring to the table isn't what your audience really came to see. They came to see you; if they wanted to just look at sketches, they could have stayed at their desks and scrolled through a PDF. One of the fundamental rules of presenting is that people pay more attention to people than to things; that's why the ability to tell a story is so important.

As creative professionals, we're often called on to show the results of our work in visual form. The mistake many of us make is assuming that a well executed visual can take the place of a well thought out presentation. It can't. When you're planning your presentation, think about it as a narrative arc: what story are you trying to tell, what's the beginning, middle and end, and why should anyone care? Once you've got the story laid out, build a presentation to express it. The assets you assemble should support the story, so that when you get to that gorgeous rendering you spent 4 days on, your audience knows exactly why it's so great. You wouldn't create a design without solidifying the concept behind it first...why would you do that with a presentation?

2. Know who you're talking to.
Talking to marketers is different from talking to engineers. Talking to executives is different still. Before you commit time to creating a presentation, figure out what your audience wants to know. An ounce of empathy is worth about a ton of misplaced effort in this case. When the meeting is being set up, take 2 minutes to ask who will be in attendance, what their jobs are and how they're involved in the project. Then think about what you'd want to know if you were them, tailor your talk to address those concerns, and emphasize what you have to offer them.

When I was still freelancing in New York, I once flew out West to meet with the client--a metal detector company--of a studio I was working for. Knowing that all of the project engineers would be in attendance, and that several of them were working feverishly to develop an improved detection scheme, I made sure to mention my background as a physics teacher, and my deep interest in the science behind the project (which was true). Not only did the meeting go well, but I established a positive rapport with the engineers that lasted the entire 2-year duration of the project.

Continue reading "9 Tips for giving "a presentation that kills", by Carl Alviani" »

Living La Vida Freelance - Keep on Keepin' On

September 26, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: co-pilot | Comments (0) [Permalink]

THE $$$ SITUATION (OR LACK THEREOF)

A huge part of freelance life is the financial precariousness that makes nine-to-fivers shudder. So, here's a couple of tips:

- Figure out your expenses. Your bathroom mirror or the moths living in your wallet can probably speak at greater length that I can about what you specifically need to survive and keep the loansharks at bay, which will better inform you as to the type of work you may need to seek out.

- Stay on top of your taxes. For freelancers, taxes surpass death in importance in that taxes occur with annual frequency. Most freelance work entails being paid without having the taxes taken out; the danger in this is that, come April 15, you owe the government a hell of a lot of money (four digits) and feel a bizarre kinship with Leona Helmsley. Something I recommend is to go to a tax service and have someone do them. Don't be intimidated by fees; the accountant I saw charged me $200, but saved me over $1000 in legitimate write-offs. Another good idea is to pay your taxes quarterly, which softens the blow of parting with that many dead presidents. A tax service can explain how this works and set you up.

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Living La Vida Freelance - Let's Get It On!

September 24, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: c77 admin | Comments (0) [Permalink]

This collection is a series of opinions put forth by one person who has found success by working in the manner prescribed below. It is not intended to be universal advice, but rather a look at how one individual is "making it" as an Industrial Design freelancer in New York City. Hope it helps.

The Freelance Life requires a strong stomach, a tight belt, and a high degree of confidence. It requires the multiplicity of a chameleon and the flexibility of Mary Lou Retton. As an anonymous, highly successful one-man design firm once said of the freelance life, "I love it. But I would never recommend trying it to anyone."

However, for those of you with the stomachs and the belts and the gymnastic tights and all that, there are a lot of reasons why the freelance life is worth the trouble. Read on.


THE MERITS OF THE FREELANCE LIFE

Self-Determination
If your cash situation is stable or you've succeeded in eluding the loan sharks/officers for another month, you can pick and choose projects that you'd like to pursue, gaining experience in the specific aspects of design that you're into. To me, doing the kind of work that you like to do is its own reward; getting paid for it is akin to receiving a bonus prize, like the toaster the banks used to give you.

Turning the Daily Grind Into the Occasional Blast
The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan has a series of ads featuring an MTV-like conception of the prototypical office worker; grey-skinned, hunch-shouldered and shackled to his desk. If this is what you feel like in a lifelong routine, if the nine-to-five feels more like ten-to-fifteen with good behavior, then my friend, the freelance life is for you. Changing environments and projects with shifting foci and skill demands is both exciting and a good test of mettle. Different projects week-to-week! New faces, new places! Varied experience! The thrill of living hand-to-mouth, struggling to keep bread on the table, and straight-faced lying to creditors!

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Freelancing 101: The 3 things you need to know, by Jesse Huffman

September 10, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: core jr | Comments (3) [Permalink]

If there were a job posting for freelancing, it would read like a classified ad for a pyramid scam: "Work from the comfort of your own home! Set your own hours, pick your jobs, and build your creative empire as you see fit!" But unlike mailing away $200 to a dodgy offshore address, going to work for yourself has become a legitimate form of modern employment, especially for creatives.

According to a 2006 U.S. Government Accountability study, independent workers (freelancers, consultants, independent contractors, temps, part-timers, contingent employees and the self-employed) count for more than 30 percent of America's workforce today. And for many freelancers, the exclamatory promises of that newspaper solicitation ring true--the graphic designers, animators and illustrators we interviewed for this article ranked a "flexible work schedule" and "avoiding office politics" the top reasons for perusing an independent work path.

If there were a job posting for freelancing, it would read like a classified ad for a pyramid scam: "Work from the comfort of your own home! Set your own hours, pick your jobs, and build your creative empire as you see fit!"

Still, there remains a price to be paid for the word "free" in freelance. Freelancing is a business, and running that business can be costly and complicated. Below, we'll discuss the issues of billing, insurance and taxes, and intellectual property rights, and look at how some freelancers around the U.S. deal with them.

1. Billing: Fees and the art of diplomacy
It starts with the first job you land--what to charge, and how? You want to be equitable, you want to make the client happy, and you want to be able to pay the rent. In her widely-cited essay "Getting Your Clients to Pay Up," creative business consultant Emily Cohen advises using a payment schedule, and lays out 12 "proactive measures and precautions" for freelancers who want to get paid on time and avoid the dreaded problem of a non-payment. It's a daunting list of business considerations, including schedules, invoices, change management strategies and termination policies--all of which make good sense. But do all designers need to go that far?

Aaron Draplin is a graphic designer working in Portland, Oregon, and has more than a decade of experience working in the snowboard industry. He feels that the measures encouraged by Cohen would be foreign to his model of a typical client-designer relationship.

"Some of these businesses are so homegrown that contracts have a tendency to be threatening," said Draplin. "If you're working with a buddy you used to snowboard with, you don't have to worry about that stuff." With close friends as clients, he doesn't bill the typical "50%" up front. His business revolves around several retainer clients whom he works with on an annual basis and bills quarterly--he estimates all the projects involved in the contract, and pads on top of that figure for changes or overages. On short-term projects, Draplin would rather pay the cost of mid-design changes instead of charging for every minute over the clock; adding that this always guarantees him additional work, and more than makes up for the lost time. As far as non-payments, Draplin cites the insular world of the snowboard industry as his recourse--in such a tight-knit community, word of mouth is enough to sink a brand's reputation.

Continue reading "Freelancing 101: The 3 things you need to know, by Jesse Huffman" »

The 3 Things You Need to Do in a Job Interview, by Dan Buchner

August 22, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: core jr | Comments (2) [Permalink]

When it comes to preparing graduates for the portfolio process, design schools are falling down on the job. I have seen hundreds of portfolios--most of them looking (and sounding) pretty much the same. Most people focus on the work--for obvious reasons--but your behavior during the interview is perhaps the best tool you have for making a great impression.

There are three things to focus on here:

1. Differentiating yourself from your peers and other applicants
2. Communicating your value to your potential employer
3. Exhibiting an inclination toward business savvy and client relations

Most design firms receive hundreds of portfolios a month. The best firms get even more. To avoid being clumped (and possibly overlooked) with similar applicants (with similar capabilities), think deeply about what it is that differentiates you as a designer--and as a person--from others in the portfolio pile. But standing out does not mean sending a portfolio that's molded into the shape of an origami swan or delivered by carrier pigeon. It means contextualizing your work as part of a larger process, and describing the process of your work in the form of a narrative.

More on these in a second, but first, you're not going to get into that interview unless you avoid these pitfalls:

There can be no typos in your cover letter or email correspondence; spell people's names correctly, and spell the company name correctly. Double-check these. And, of course, there can absolutely be no typos on your resume--this needs to be a flawless document. Your portfolio and your resume are literally the first impressions you present to a prospective employer, so read and reread for typos and errors, then have someone else read and reread for typos.

Also, you are applying for a job as a designer--an expert in imagery, form and aesthetics. Make certain that your portfolio is clean and legible. This sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised what people walk in the door with.

Continue reading "The 3 Things You Need to Do in a Job Interview, by Dan Buchner" »

Taking Credit: What can creatives, studios and clients claim for the work they do? By Petrula Vrontikis

August 09, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: core jr | Comments (4) [Permalink]

Who gets credit for a design? What can you show in your portfolio, and what should you say about it? Who owns the work that you completed while working for an agency? Is this about ethics, or about law? And what are your obligations as a client, having completed a project with a design studio? Well, when it comes to credit, things can seem like a custody battle. Here are a few words of advice on the topic:

Presenting work this way clearly implied that these were her clients. I felt this was unethical and demanded she make it clear what she did and where. She was confused about my request. She had no idea why this would be a problem: in her view the work was "hers"--she designed it, and it represented her creative capabilities.

The Stakeholders
In the CREATOR'S mind, design work is their recipe, their cooking, and they want to take credit for it at the dinner table. Clear enough.

But CLIENTS see themselves as the owners of the restaurant. Through branding and advertising, they want a direct association from the consumer to their company, without any information distracting them from this path. Clients feel that they are the ones making the dollar investment in the brand, and so they want the ability to control and manage that investment. After all, they paid for it! And that purchase includes the right to say anything they want to, or nothing at all, about the process and people it took to get it done.

The STUDIO/AGENCY's position is holistic; that they provided the client, the contract, the concept, and the means to get it all created, approved, and out into the world. In their mind, that's the real battle. It's an honor for the CREATOR to have an opportunity to participate, and if she wants more work from the studio in the future, she shouldn't make too much of her "supporting" role.

In the 90s, I saw four different people present the famous "Got Milk" television ads at various conferences. The campaign originated at the San Francisco agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. I saw Rich Silverstein present it, two guys who left the agency present it, the director Michael Bay present it, and a writer from I don't know where--present it. Success has many relatives, but none of them said anything about others who worked on the campaign, nor mentioned any specifics of who did what and how. All of the presenters were convincing by the way, and left us with the impression that they were the sole genius behind the campaign's success.

Oh, and let's not forget the CLIENT: The Milk Board's website lists over 70 awards--from Clios to Cannes. No agency, or any of the campaign's specific creators, are mentioned.

What's the problem here? Not giving credit, or taking exclusive credit?

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6 Ways to Make Your Interview Attire as Slick as Your Design Portfolio, by Robert Blinn

August 03, 2007 | Articles
Posted by: core jr | Comments (2) [Permalink]

Pantsuit? Distressed jeans and penny loafers? Chuck Taylors? What is acceptable attire for a design interview?

Sales adages have long held that the best way to judge the spending power of a potential client is to look at their watch and shoes. So showing up at Saks with a t-shirt and khakis might actually attract hordes of obsequious salespeople...if you're wearing a Patek Phillipe. Likewise, attention to detail in accessories or details in attire can have a profound impact on the way an applicant is perceived. The shine of your shoes says a lot more about the character of your personality than your brand of jeans, but designers don't require military polish to pass muster. Designers are usually meant to break the rules, to establish new trends, and to innovate--both professionally and sartorially. The following are a few simple rules for how to make a good impression in a paradoxical business where "any publicity is good publicity."

The only people who can start fashion trends are the ones whose positions in society are assured regardless of convention. Designers are supposed to be experts in cool, and your clothing is the first signal that others see about how culturally aware you are.

1. It is OK to "fit in," especially as a junior employee.
Ultimately corporate culture is predominantly about being a team player. Society has very strong pressures for "fitting in," and business is no different. A good interview benchmark for fashion is to look to the other employees. As a designer, it is your burden to act creatively within someone else's parameters.

2. Your attire (and grooming) is an extension of your portfolio.
Your bosses will at some time (ok, most of the time), ask you to create things that go against your personal taste. To do so, you'll need to become adept at calibrating other people's desires and expectations. Your design interview is no different. So supplying a portfolio that fits your potential employer's design ethos is more important than creating the "perfect" portfolio for you. Your attire is an extension of your portfolio and of your image and should follow the same rules.

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