Will Gibbons

Date: January 2014
Event: Collaborative Design Career Day
Sponsor: Kendall College of Art and Design
Host: Haworth World HQ Design Department
Subject: Design job acquisition, creating a powerful design protfolio

I work with Entrepreneurs and business owners to build income-generating marketing assets. I specialize in product development, concept generation, and product design. I have 3D Computer-Aided Drafting and Design experience and am capable of producing photo-realistic product renderings. I also have years of professional experience working with graphics and print and catalogue layout. I like to work with those who have an interest in growing their businesses and success through marketing and design. I have experience speaking and presenting to small groups on design strategy, personal branding and job acquisition.

Clients Include:

Ion Me
Uncommon Coffee Roasters
KCAD
Scoonels
SDG
Lakeshore Skate and BMX
Charlie's Round the Corner Ice Cream
Skatetopia

At Felt Bicycles, I bridged the gap between Felt's Engineering Department and its Marketing Group to translate technical design features into powerful marketing materials. I built graphic representations of often-hard-to-explain concepts such as materials engineering and aerodynamics which are used by Felt's Marketing Group.

I have a technical working understanding of mechanics, physics, bicycles, materials engineering, aerodynamics and manufacturing and am able to build visuals to explain this to the target demographic.

To learn more about Felt Bicycles and what I've created for them, visit www.feltbicycles.com > Inside Felt and view Technologies, Technical Documents and Owner's Manuals.

While being a student, I was a Resident Assistant to help improve on campus living and student life at CCS to help pay the bills while earning my BFA in Product Design.

At Haworth I had the valuable opportunity to work with Haworth's senior industrial designers. At Haworth, I was immersed in elegant, intelligent and sophisticated design. Not only does Haworth design award-winning furniture, the company is credited with designing spaces, and experiences which increase comfort and productivity in the workplace. While learning to become an industrial designer at Haworth, my experiences ran the gamut, some of which included:

+ Mocking up 3d designs as models (foam, paper, wood, steel, paint)
+ Building 3d digital design models (Rhinoceros)
+ Creating orthographic drawings of various designs
+ Attending collaborative design and ideation meetings
+ Product development with engineers
+ Conducting user-centric design surveys
+ Generating new collaborative design concepts
+ Designing new space concepts

While at Haworth, I was able to attend NeoCon, North America's largest design exposition and conference for commercial interiors. There I networked with and witnessed architecture and design professionals, attended design seminars, association forums and listened to top-notch keynote design speakers.

While a student at CCS, I had the privilege of working with a small group of classmates on a project for my industrial design studio which was sponsored by Motorola. During the course, we worked with Motorola designers who mentored us and provided student groups with professional feedback. The brief was to design for a developing nation. My group was assigned the region of Brazil. I married my interest of coffee (because it's one of Brazil's major exports) with a desire to design a systemic solution for poverty-stricken coffee farmers.

The solution was a full-system-design which included cradle-to-grave life for a mobile device which would allow the coffee farmers to connect to and 'plug into' the system I designed. The goal was to educate and empower the coffee farmers with the tools they needed to make informed decisions before selling their coffee crop. The designers at motorola provided feedback every few weeks to ensure I was pursuing a worthwhile design solution.

My design allowed coffee farmers to add their crop to a database, allowed consumers to place orders on the farmer's coffee crop, and walked the farmers through the necessary steps to manage the sale and distribution of their personal coffee crop.

At this lovely, historical, Italian eatery, I cleared and re-set tables each night while studying design in high school and later in a college of art and design. Duties included cleaning and maintaining bus stations and stocking clean stations. I also helped servers tend to the tables and ran errands for the bar tenders and host/es/s.

This job exposed me to customer service and I learned how to deal with sometimes agitated and intoxicated customers. The nights were long and the patrons often difficult, yet I learned invaluable communications skills at a young age.

Warehouse manager. Designed and built custom frames and stretchers and became very proficient with power and hand tools. I mixed & matched color, which was a hands-on way to learn color theory (which proved useful in my design career later). I provided sales & retail customer service in the retail gallery of James Brandess Studios. I did touch-up painting to prepare original and giclee prints for stretching and framing. While working for Mr. Brandess, I finished, stained, varnished and painted wood frames to contain reproductions and original paintings. I learned to stretch oversized giclee prints, which can be a challenge. I also had many small jobs that included screen printing, making greetings and holiday cards, general upkeep, lawn maintenance and cleaning. Needless to say, I had many opportunities to apply my creative problem-solving and design interest to make sure James Brandess Studios warehouse was well-stocked and operated smoothly.

I cleaned, charged and maintained golf carts in the small, tourist-town of Douglas Michigan. Odd jobs included stocking the bar and kitchen, and clubhouse and mowing grass. I had to 'rescue' golf carts that got stuck in mud or otherwise malfunctioned while on the golf course.

This was my first 'real' job and learned to work with a stern and intimidating employer. I got early exposure to working hard and for that I'm grateful.