Creative Seeds

Portland Confab panel discussion video, part one

2009-07-03T00:00:56Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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 tomorrow.

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

2009-07-01T23:55:26Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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!

To say nothing of finding clients, collaborating across time zones, and getting to the actual task of doing design work. Which takes an enormous amount of time, and is fraught with uncertainty and apprehension. Being massively proactive with publicity and the sales pitch is key, of course, but moreover, doing it consistently and creatively. "Hi! Do you want a Kicker sticker?" were the first words I heard from Jenn when we very briefly spoke, at that same SxSW scrum where Alissa describes meeting her for the first time. She handed me the logo sticker with such gusto that I felt compelled to slap it on my notebook right then and there. It helped that it was accompanied by a rhyming couplet, of course.

Even the simple task of constructing a whiteboard became part of the publicity onslaught, as they diagrammed their process and turned it into one of the sweetest, most bloggable press releases we've gotten this year (and blog it we did). Bove sums up their strategy nicely: "in order to do things that other people will be interested in, you need to do things that you find interesting."

There's much more useful information to be found, on topics like forming studio alliances, the volatility of job leads, and staying busy when work is slack, but it's succinctly enough stated that I'll just recommend anyone interested go read the posts themselves. I certainly will.

>>Read the ongoing series here.<<

Learning from welders about the creative job market

2009-06-30T18:14:00Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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

What Do You Look For in a Designer? : Chelsea Vandiver, Ziba

2009-06-25T23:54:35Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

1. What do you look for when hiring a designer?

Craft: Does their work demonstrate an eye for design and the ability to produce great work within the realities of manufacturing and budget constraints?

Design Thinking: Can they think broadly? Do they have an awareness of design's role within the context of business and culture?

Cultural Fit: Can they work in a rigorous multidisciplinary collaborative environment?

2. Is there a particular "tell" that signals a good or bad fit?

Craft and design thinking are competencies that can be easily assessed by viewing a designer's portfolio and listening to them present their work.

Cultural Fit is more difficult to gauge. The most telling signal of a potential good fit is an engaging dialogue. If a candidate does not demonstrate a genuine curiosity in the work that we do here, it's typically a red flag.

3. What is your best interview "horror story"?

I've had candidates break out in hives, drip sweat on to their portfolios, completely lose the ability to speak, blush deep eggplant, knock their water glass over, but I wouldn't call these horror stories. We tend to look beyond nerves, and in most cases I find a nervous candidate endearing and genuine.

I think the worst "horror stories" are candidates that aren't taking the time to be personal or do their research. We often get cover letters to the affect of "IDEO is my top choice…"

4. Do you have any specific advice for recent graduates, or people just starting straight out from school?

Recent graduates are essential to firms in the innovation business. They bring new ideas, questions and insights to our teams. However, unfortunately in this economy there are few full time positions available for recent graduates. Be open to alternative relationships with design consultancies such as apprenticeships, part time and temporary contracts. The first few years out of school should be viewed as a form of graduate school. Exposure and experience is crucial to your career, take any opportunity you can get.

5. What is the single, most valuable piece of advice you could give to those on the hunt?

Be authentic to yourself. An interview is not all that different from a date. If my husband had shown up in heels blaring Indigo Girls on his stereo for our first date, I would have found it down right creepy. Don't try to imitate the company you are pursuing, demonstrate how you can have a meaningful relationship with them.

6. Regarding creative employment, what do you know now that you wished you knew then?

Focus on understanding what you want to do, not who you want to work for.

- - - - -

Chelsea is the head of the Communications Design Group at Ziba in Portland, Oregon. Over the past decade, she's grown her multi-disciplinary design team from 4 to 14 members, spanning the graphic, web, and interaction design disciplines, and produced award-winning work for clients like Procter & Gamble, FedEx, Nike, Pixelworks and Umpqua Bank. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the University of Washington, sat on the discussion panel at the Portland installment of the Coroflot Creative Confab, and is an incredibly pleasant person to chat with.

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

2009-06-20T01:46:10Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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.

This may be a good thing for designers. Since creative hiring decisions are often made by folks in less freelance-prone fields, convincing an interviewer that a resume full of short-term employment doesn't indicate flightiness can be problematic. An environment where other professions are seeing more temporary and contract employment, though, could make those ears more sympathetic. It should, in any case, help dispel the image of the loose cannon designer, freelance by choice rather than necessity.

There are multiple downsides to this trend for the job market as whole, however, one of which was elucidated by Chelsea Vandiver, head of Ziba's Communications Design Group in Portland last week. While on the panel at Thursday's Creative Employment Confab, she pointed out that applicants often define their own temp-ability through their skill set. "When I see craft," she explained, "I think freelance," while staff positions generally require excellent communication, management and cross-disciplinary skills as well. The CAD Monkey and Hot Pencil stereotypes bear this out: much as we might admire a tongue-tied prodigy who does nothing but crank out gorgeous renderings all day, we rarely envision him rising through the ranks, or even staying put for more than a year or two.

Could it be that the further Temping of America will exacerbate this split and drive it into other professional fields, leaving us with a bifurcated work force of full-time overlords and lifelong temps? The creative professions are generally understanding of a freelance youth, and with some demonstrated savvy and leadership experience, shifting from temp to staff is tricky but not impossible. Other fields, newer to these employment structures, may not be so forgiving.

Hiring a Designer is a Deeply Frightening Thing

2009-06-17T22:37:13Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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.

Consider what you are telling an employer when you inquire about a job. "I want you to pay me a considerable sum of money," you are, in essence, demanding, "for a long, long time. In return, I will come up with fantastic ideas that you can use to improve your business. These ideas will be appropriate to your projects, fit in with your established process, and be realistic enough to reach the market. They'll also be astonishingly creative -- stuff you've never seen before, nor even imagined. And I'll work seamlessly with the rest of your team, challenging and pushing them, but also listening to and working with them. I won't be a diva, and I won't be an asshole. I'll make you money." That's a lot to propose, but when you get down to it, that's the reality, and the consequences for for not fulfilling all of those needs are severe.

A poor creative hire is a fucking nightmare. Anyone who employs designers expects to pile a big stack of money and effort on top of their designs, and if they're ill-conceived or poorly realized, that money and effort goes down a hole: the campaign falls flat, the product doesn't sell, the building stays vacant, the publication ends up in the trash. It's bad for the designer, of course, who probably takes a lot of pride in delivering a great solution, but it's even worse for the company at large: an ineffective design team eventually means a failing company. And while the hiring process can be laborious and expensive, the firing process can cost even more. One reason more and more firms are hiring on contract rather than salary is that it reduces the costs of a bad fit.

Good firms and studios are cautious in their hiring. Beth Sasseen, a senior recruiter at Nike who sat on the Confab panel in Portland last week, recounted multiple instances of hires that took six months or more to finally complete. This sounds interminable from the applicant's point of view, but it's just as excruciating for the employer. Time is money, after all, and if they could find a guaranteed perfect designer in one day, they'd have them on salary the following morning (check out this interview with Josh Morenstein of FuseProject for one example). The reality is more complicated. "Taking a chance" on an unknown applicant means taking a chance with the company's livelihood, and successful firms don't do that. They make sure.

So when you're updating your portfolio, building your networking, setting up informational interviews, and sending out contact letters...have pity. Make it easy on the poor recruiters and team leaders. Find out what they need -- not what you want them to need -- and explain to them in clear detail how you'll deliver that. Make it easy for them. You can do that. You're a designer.

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

2009-06-16T00:21:49Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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

2009-05-29T01:30:00Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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"

2009-05-22T23:19:44Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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.

2009-05-18T20:03:50Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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.

2009-05-13T22:44:20Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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

2009-05-11T23:27:03Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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?

2009-05-11T20:02:43Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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.

The Big Money, Slate.com's recently begun business magazine, ran an opinionated article in February called "Ad Business: Do Something Useful." The author, Rob Walker, has gained a certain notoriety as the pragmatic conscience of the design and marketing industries, especially since his star turn in Objectified, and we quote him here and at Core77 frequently. The article makes a good case for continuing to do so.

It suggests to ad agencies that seeking out ethical, green and socially conscious clients is not really sufficient; neither is doing the occasional bit of public service work to assuage their consciences, after shilling for Big Oil, Big Pharma, or whoever else pays the bills. The challenge he levels is to simply pursue projects that are actually good, by the agency's own reckoning, and use them to define its area of expertise; I propose that the same case can be made for any creative business. The ailing economy is no good excuse to avoid doing so, and in fact could be seen as a best possible opportunity for getting started.

Tanzamook makes a timely example of how such a move makes sense, for ethical as well as business reasons. To begin with, the costs involved are astonishingly low. According to Ry Koteen, one of Design Department's partners, that extra room in Tanzania adds around 1% to the overall price of each unit -- less than the difference, I would guess, between installing granite countertops and ones surfaced in plain tile. Another DD partner, Ben Hufford describes it as, "a real education in the power that the US dollar has in the rest of the world." Second, of course, is the branding angle, which makes "finding the soul of the product" dead simple, and blazes with that most elusive of brand traits: authenticity. It's easier to write marketing copy about why a project is good when it actually is good.

The less obvious advantages may turn out to be the more effective in the long run, though. Like any architectural development, there were dozens of opportunities for Tanzamook to go wrong, and dozens more remain. Irvington is an old neighborhood by local standards, and convincing residents to accept the development's higher density and architectural unfamiliarity was a struggle. So were permitting, demolition, and construction management. Obtaining favorable press is always tricky in Portland's architecturally cautious environment, an endeavor made even more necessary in a slow buying market. Each of these challenges is eased by good will, and while not everyone exposed to the project has been charmed by its intentions, many have. Even the least impressed have offered nothing worse than a bit of confusion ("Do I get to stay in the other bedroom too?" some potential clients have asked). Ben made a point of not bringing up the Tanzania angle during community feedback meetings, but attests that it certainly changed the tenor of the discussions, and pre-disposed many potential critics to view the project with favor. While Tanzamook is not offering pre-sale, Ben explained that 15 buyers with "solid interest" in the 10 units have made themselves known, with completion still several months off.

The last advantage worth mentioning, especially on a blog about creative employment, is the effect this sort of initiative has on hiring. It's been widely observed that the recent economic crash and disillusionment with corporate behavior has spawned renewed interest in work with an element of social good. The best and the brightest in the creative professions have always been attracted by intangible benefits in addition to pay, and there may never be a better time than now to attract them with a promise not just of interesting projects, but of other forms of fulfillment as well. Hufford points out that he's got a stronger roster of contract designers on his list than ever before, and while part of this is attributable to the lean job market, he notes a clear commitment from some of his best collaborators to sticking with a studio that commits itself to social improvement.

The same benefit applies to the studio itself, of course: if you're measuring success in a professional career by metrics other than monetary gain, then incorporating development work into every project is a direct investment in job satisfaction. Which, in the end, is probably worth the occasional clunky project name.

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

2009-05-07T19:59:06Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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.

2009-05-05T02:27:46Z

Carl Alviani http://www.core77.com/search/blog_authors_search.asp?author_id=67

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.

Once upon a time, filling a job vacancy, like selling a product, was more than anything a matter of generating as much awareness as possible. In the days when multiple impressions meant multiple printings in periodicals, the bottleneck was simply getting your message to the right people. When 1000 digital copies of that message cost the same as one, though, the message is no longer the valuable part; the filter is. This is, of course, the genesis of the professional network: when you source applicants from trusted colleagues, your fraction of dud responses falls off dramatically.

None of which is to say the online job posting is useless. Like any tool, though, it needs to fit the task at hand. It's fair to say that the more specific the job requirements, the less appropriate a large but poorly targeted site like Craigslist -- or, to a lesser extent, Monster, HotJobs or CareerBuilder -- will be, and the more time and effort the user will have to devote to filtering the results.

As more employers come to realize this, and as the economy continues tank, myriad smaller, niche-oriented job boards are popping up to offer an online alternative. The Cheezhead article relates the example of LawJobs.com, which lists paralegals and other law professionals, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a professional field that doesn't have its own unique job board (the creative professions, for example, have been pretty well covered for a while now...).

The other response to this, outlined in a recent New York Times article, is the formation of grassroots job-seeking communities by recently unemployed professionals with similar levels of experience -- "Pink Slips Unite" in Seattle is one of the more charmingly named, but dozens or hundreds of such groups appear to have sprung up across the country recently. Their utility is similar to the targeted job board: since they're new, and relatively obscure, their members are more likely to be knowledgeable about their professional community, and that usually translates into high-quality talent. Which translates into less filtering for the employer. Try getting that from Craigslist.