Archive for December, 2008

Make Friends And Lend A Hand When You Can

I believe the best piece of advice I’ve ever received was to ‘make friends and be there for them’. And I’ve read people give similar advice many times on various blogs. The reason is quite simple: it works!

But not only does it work, it’s also a lot of fun! Just like in ‘real life’, you meet people and some of these people will become friends. I’m sure the friends you have in the offline world have strengths and weaknesses, just like you do!

Don’t be afraid to try something different in your designs, especially if it’s silly or crazy.

I had an eccentric professor for quite a few of my portfolio classes in college. Among other things, he taught a small unit on photography. For our assignment each week, we were given one word and we had to photograph that however we saw fit.

Not All Business is Good Business

I have been in business for 25 plus years. There have been some excellent words of advice over the quarter century that I’d like to share. The first is that not all business is good business. You have to be true to your company brand and essence. Don’t take business that will either drag you and your firm down, or force you to work under conditions you are not comfortable with. If high quality is what you strive for, and you have potential clients that are either unwilling or unable to pay your fee, don’t take the business. You will produce work that you are not proud of and you will not end up with a long term client. That type of business is costly, let it go.

Read “What color is your parachute”

As a graduate student studying Industrial Design, I was not required to take the undergrad professional practice course. Fortunately, I absorbed some of this knowledge through the other students. Most important was the name of the book to read if you want a great job after graduation, “What color is your parachute”. This introduced me to the concepts of networking, writing great targeted letters, and researching companies thoroughly. I practiced these principals and within a few months of graduation I had two compelling offers from which to choose. My guide had an answer to this dilemma as well, choose the firm where you will develop the broadest skill set.

Jason Santa Maria recently posted an interesting article about blog comments that I found intriguing and really had me thinking. In his article Jason explains a very common occurrence in which a blog article has received so many comments that new responses get lost in the clutter. The time necessary to read through such a large number of comments and then respond is so great that most people would rather not, or they might respond without reading. Jason has a devised a hypothetical solution, however I can’t help but draw a different solution.

Best career advice I received was actually several months long process of talking me into quitting my day job to become a freelancer. At that point in my professional life I was so insecure about taking the step into going solo that and I hesitated for a long time, almost 2 years. Then I started to talk about it with a friend of mine, who was already freelancing and was doing great. He was trying to convince me that I should make that decision and quit my 9 to 5. At the end I did

After art school, I spent the summer working at the camera shop. It was an awful job, and as such, I felt quite privileged to move on from that to my first job in design at a newspaper. (In all honesty, it was really a production job, but I learned a lot there.)

For example, I learned about troubleshooting Postscript errors, working with imagesetters, pagination, and even the rockin’ requirements of Adobe Photoshop version 3. Oh yes, I even learned how to close-crop photos and apply drop shadows. (I won’t lie; this made me feel like I was really at the top of my game.)

The best piece of advice I’ve had during my (brief) career hasn’t really come from one particular person and it’s not one specific piece of advice that I can quote. I read a lot of business and freelancing-related content, and I studied business in college. A number of different times I’ve been encouraged by others to pursue my own projects as well as doing freelance work.

The best piece of career advice I received came from my father before I was interested in design as a profession: “The value of an unexecuted idea is zero. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there.”

OK I admit it, I am a little late on posting the November roundup of amazing website designs. The Creative Advent Series took a little more time to manage then I thought, however the results so far have been great. If you haven’t had the time to check out the series yet, you can find all of the articles by clicking here. November was an interesting month full of both well designed and beautifully art directed websites. No matter what the technology, each of these sites has reinforced the fact that intelligent design is more than possible on the web.