Creative Seeds

Design Sight creative entrepreneurs' event in SF

2009-09-09T21:03:52Z

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

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

2009-09-08T20:41:34Z

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

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

2009-08-28T19:07:59Z

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

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).

2. Delve into the projects shown in more depth. Two questions I like to ask while discussing a specific piece or project with a talent are:

a) Who was on your team for this project?

b) What piece of this were you responsible for? Did you hand it off to someone else for production (print) or coding (web)? Did you write all of the content? Certain pages? Certain topics?

In the instance of interviewing a copywriter, sometimes they have come up with the concept for a website, but not necessarily been responsible for the heavy long content. Many times the title Art Director or Creative Director can vary: some are solely conceptual or just work on photo shoots, not necessarily responsible for the ultimate layout of a piece within Adobe Creative Suite. Others have worked with smaller clients where they utilized all these skills. Designers' duties can range from production (laying out a piece under a campaign someone has already thought up and getting it ready for print) to taking an entire seasonal campaign from initial concept to final product. It's up to you to find out what that title means.

Asking in-depth interview questions:

Unless I have a question about dates or a specific company, I barely glance at the resume during an interview other than to jot down notes. One area I do cover every time is to ask what was the most challenging project an interviewee worked on. Many times there's more than one, but I ask them to pick out one in their mind and talk me through it, from the beginning all the way through to the deliverable or deadline.

On another obvious note, you can ask about their favorite or least favorite project (and yes, least favorite is different from most challenging). Not only do both these questions get them talking about the work they've done and what they love (and hate), it gets them talking about their interactions with peers, managers, and vendors, as well as outside and internal clients. You can gauge a lot about someone's personality based on whether they take responsibility for a missed deadline or haughtily put it off on an incompetent co-worker or boss. Once people start talking about situations they don't like, it becomes obvious how they'll act when asked to do something out of their position's usual scope, or when they receive negative feedback. On the same token, if someone can't get totally jazzed over their favorite project there is definitely something wrong.

You can also use the same approach when talking about companies. Which was their favorite and why? Did they like working independently or within a team? Culture and personality are huge when it comes to creative positions, as people tend to take the work much more personally than other types of positions -- it's their art, and their passion.

Asking the right reference questions -- with the right people.

There's no doubt that any person interviewing for a job is going to give names of references that will speak highly of them. But there are questions you can ask to at least get a little more background information, and what to expect if you bring them onto your team. Picking the right person to question is crucial. I ask all of my talent for two direct supervisors and one peer. Supervisors can speak more objectively about where a candidate may be lacking or need some assistance without feeling guilty about it. Peers, on the other hand, see the important day-to-day interactions and work that supervisors are often not aware of.

Here are four great questions to ask references:

1. What makes this candidate unique in comparison to other [insert position here] you've worked with?

2. What do you feel are the candidate's biggest strength is in terms of their [design, copywriting, web development, etc.] abilities? (Yes, we always start with the positive)

3. If we were to offer the candidate training (which Aquent often does for free) what area of training do you think would help him or her most in career growth? (Stop. Pause for commentary.) This is my ultimate favorite reference question -- like I mentioned before, no one ever wants to say anything negative in a reference call. But this isn't negative! It's so great that we're talking already about giving this person training that the reference always tends to open up. This will at least give you an idea of the areas in which this candidate is still on the learning curve, or may need/want to grow down the road.

4. Was there ever a time you witnessed this person receive negative feedback on work from anyone? Peer? Manager? Internal or external client? What was his or her reaction?

Developing a strong creative team is one of the most important things you can do for your company and your brand. Almost all of the articles I have read on companies that have lasted through past economic downturns speak about having a strong brand and cutting-edge advertising, thanks to their creative teams. These are the companies that weren't afraid of rebranding or launching a new campaign during an economic downturn. When you have a strong, efficient creative team that's inspired to come up with new ideas, they will build a strong brand and great campaigns.

Even when hiring freelancers, it is extremely important to make sure they are the right fit for you, your audience and the growth of your brand. Although assessments are great, in-depth interviews are just as effective at building a creative foundation for your company. Down the road, think about developing specific assessments with your creative team to make sure you see work developed to the highest standard possible.

Image credit: xmatt

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

2009-08-21T17:48:07Z

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

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.

3. Use your portfolio to tell a story. And every great story has an arc. In my view, portfolios ought to use each project as an opportunity to highlight a specific skill; for example, your design thinking, your knowledge of the design process, your ability to tackle a range of problems, your ability to sketch, develop forms, create meaningful interactions, etc. If organized in this way your portfolio becomes more than a collection of projects, it tells a story about you, your design sensibilities, technical skills, how you convey your ideas and what makes you a great candidate for the job.

4.Keep it simple. Don't detract from the quality of your work with gratuitous graphics. A simple, elegant, and consistent layout will showcase your work the best. Let your work speak for itself.

5. Show me you can think. Recent grads have trouble talking about their work, their process and how they think. I'm interested in how you solve design problems and how you demonstrate your thinking. I want to see how you connect the dots and how this leads you to a solution. When discussing your design projects, be sure to illustrate your ability to:

a. Define the problem: for every project clearly state the objective and how you set up the design problem

b. Learn and be insightful: Show me how you gather, analyze and synthesize information; how you identify opportunities and insights that inspire your work. Did you research users, their behaviors, perceptions, motivations, interactions, the social cultural context, competitive context, emerging technologies, inspiring and relevant objects? How did you develop your point of view?

c. Create a great design solution: We want to see your ability to create forms, iterate, test, learn and refine until you've found an answer that is compelling and resolved.

d. Utilize the right design tools: Sketching, model making, CAD

e. Communicate your results: Don't just tell me its good, show me why. Show me how you solved the problem, and how your design connects back to your insights. Your ability to demonstrate this is the cost of entry, don't mess this up.

6. Show me the basics. Entry and mid level designers need to demonstrate their mastery of the fundamentals of form. Telling me you have an intuitive sense of how to resolve form is not good enough -- it tells me your technique is hit or miss at best. It is important to be able to articulate how you know when something looks good, well resolved and/or how you made a form decision. Throughout the design process designs are always in flux, and in need of new directions, development, refinement, etc. Designers need to be able to articulate why and how something needs to be changed. To understand what I mean here, start by picking up a book like Elements of Design, a discussion of Rowena Reed Kostellow's methods for breaking down visual relationships.

7. Get inspired and get feedback. Look to your colleagues and peers, thumb through portfolios online, talk about your work and listen to others talk about theirs. These interactions and feedback will improve your portfolio and your presentation.

8. Meet the criteria. Understand the requirements for the position advertised, research the company that you are applying to, know yourself, and your abilities. Too often I see resumes that don't meet bottom line criteria. Depending on the position involved, here is what I expect from applicants:

a. Entry level: Well-rounded skills, show strong grasp of fundamentals, can sketch, make models, know Adobe Suite and has knowledge of 3D CAD

b. Mid Level: Know the above and can help develop vision for a project

c. Senior Level: All the above, lead vision and can manage teams and clients

9. Get to the point. In my experience a long cover letter can hinder you; make it a non-issue and keep it short. Introduce yourself, why you're writing, and a sentence or two about what makes you an interesting candidate. Anything over a short paragraph or a few sentences is a waste, and it may even stop me from continuing on to your portfolio and resume.

10. Send a summary of your work. Just about every inquiry for job comes through email these days. Always attach a summary of your portfolio or send a link to your work with your cover letter and resume. Do not say that your work can be viewed by request only, or the email will likely be dragged into the trash. Hint: we ALWAYS look at your work first, then, if it's good, we'll look at your CV or resume.

11. Understand the medium. Are you presenting the work, or is it traveling by itself? Is it on screen, animated web page, or printed on gloss paper? You will need to consider your layout depending on how the work is being shown. For example, we won't read lengthy paragraphs on printed portfolios -- those stories are often better told in an interview. An animated graphic on a web page doesn't present well on a static page. Think about the reader, the format, and the best way to make an impression.

12. Be confident and positive. I sometimes get candidates who are too cocky. If you show me a poor attitude, no matter how good your work is, you're not worth the trouble. Others bash the last place they worked. This is a bad idea. Even if you didn't like your last employer, emphasize the positive things you did while you were working there. I'm looking for curious self-starters who love to learn, and can work both on their own and within a dynamic team. I want candidates who know how to have a spirited debate, foster insightful thinking and charge an office culture with creativity.

It is exciting to interview a candidate that I know will be a great hire. Because I was able to get a clear sense of what they can do during the interview, I can immediately begin to imagine the best place to plug them in and get them started. I'm eager to see the solutions they will contribute and how their talent will inspire the creative dynamic across our team. It would be great to meet more of these candidates. I know they're out there.

Good luck!

What small business owners know about creative hiring

2009-08-20T18:51:42Z

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

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)

2009-08-17T22:39:26Z

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

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?

2009-08-12T00:13:39Z

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

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.

And in the weeks since that previous post, Martin Ansin's THX 1138 poster has been bumped out of fifth place by one vote, replaced by -- wait for it -- a 3D rendering on a black background. A painfully sexy concept car, in this case, by Ernesto Rodriguez.

So what is it about these visual cues that make us respond so strongly? The first explanation that springs to mind is their perfection. I don't mean this as a judgement on the designs themselves (though they're all excellent), but in their depiction. Renderings on barren backgrounds are flawless: there are no bumps or scratches, no enormous logos, no errant highlights, and no focus issues. MisoSoup's workstation is free of dust, with the chair aligned precisely to the desk, and Oliver Rosito's mouse is like a Platonic Ideal of a pointing device, too perfect to exist in real life. Since so many Coroflot users are designers or design students themselves, perhaps this perfection is comforting; a brief vacation from the real world, where beautiful designs are subverted by the messy demands of consumers, budget and branding. Of the five, only Arlen's sports any logo at all: a Nike swoosh so tiny it probably wouldn't survive its first marketing review.

The other reason that presents itself is the sense of importance these Hero Shots impart. The best way to show off the function of a mouse, desk, shoe or car, after all, is to depict it in use (see Billy May's Art of the Money Shot guest post for some great examples). But an image of a running athlete or a busy office worker places primary attention on the user, not the design. So while such context shots are crucial to any portfolio, lone renderings like these five get designers truly elated, by reassuring them that the designs are important all by themselves. Adding a foot to Erik's shoe or a driver to Ernesto's car would add to their meaning, but detract from their primacy: "I am a product, and I'm important!" A site full of professionals who design objects and graphics are eager to hear this message, and this, perhaps more than anything, is what arouses their affection.

These are just a pair of guesses though, and quickly hashed-out ones at that. What's the rest of the community think. Why do these five deserve so much love?

Likey comes into its own

2009-07-10T23:38:38Z

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

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:

Martin Ansin's THX 1138 poster (121 Likeys)

Erik Arlen's Nike footwear concept sketch (122 Likeys)

The "At Your Command" lighting concept from DANIEL LOVES OBJECTS! (125 Likeys)

Miso Soup Design's K Workstation rendering (142 Likeys)

and in the lead since December of 2008, Oliver Rosito's Zero Mouse concept (146 Likeys)

There's enough diversity in this collection to keep me from making any pronouncements about what attracts that sort of love, but I will invite readers to start looking through the Gallery with a similarly critical eye, and perhaps we can start a conversation about it when I get back from vacation.

Portland Confab panel discussion video, part two

2009-07-06T18:39:14Z

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

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

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 shortly.

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.