Creative Advent 2008: Eric Karjaluoto

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.)

Getting the Job Done

I prided myself on bringing my sensibilities as a painter to this job, and tried to infuse each project that I worked on with something of my own. I wanted each ad I created to in some way be sort of great. (They rarely were, but I tried nevertheless.) This involved me using as many typefaces as possible, honing colors at great length, and trying out sort of “neato” type effects.

One day my boss Cliff walked in. He was a pretty direct fellow, and I think he liked how hard I worked, regardless of how weird this long-haired kid in the office may have seemed. As he approached, his face turned a little red, nicely matching the color of his hair, and he explained, “Eric — I know you’re doing your best. But pick a font, pick the color and get the thing done.”

From then on I did exactly that — and he was right. I wasn’t supposed to treat this as art. It was production. I needed to get the job done, and my dallying wasn’t necessary. This of course is something that we all fall into from time-to-time: concentrating like crazy on doing a brilliant job, but sort of missing the forest for the trees.

Over the years, I’ve found myself at a similar place a few times: looking too hard at something that just needed to be done. At those moments I like to think back to what Cliff said. I then concentrate on getting the job done.

Guest Author Bio

Eric Karjaluoto a designer and entrepreneur. Along with his friend Eric Shelkie he runs an interactive agency called smashLAB (www.smashlab.com) and we make neat things like MakeFive (www.makefive.com), Design Can Change (www.designcanchange.org), shiftCMS (www.shiftcms.com).