Chapter 7 - HGD

Ugh, I read this chapter and one client in particular came to mind when they were talking about bad clients. Fitch Ratings. Fitch has given us at design trust no end of troubles. Every single design was reviewed by three people who all had differing opinions on what the finished work should look like, to the point where they could never agree on anything, esspecially not if they should go ahead and use the work we had done for them. This has gone on now for several years if the horror stories are to be believed. Unfortunately for us, so much of our business currently relies on this one company, that we can't afford to drop them. I doubt David, my boss, would ever drop a client unless they did something truely dispicable to him, like run over all his pets. The point is, we can't get rid of them, so we're stuck doing constant revisions for all eternity, like some designers tartarus.

Designing a Digital Portfolio – Chapter 3

This chapter left me confused early on. Was it talking about me building a portfolio around a demographic, or around a possible client, and if the later, why would an individual designer realistically be doing that kind of search?
The more I looked into this though, the more I realized this was another chapter about finding yourself and building your portfolio to maximize your chances of getting a job in a particular field.
This book, like the “How to be” book, stresses the importance of the elusive mistress that is “word of mouth” and your own personal contracts, although in this case in more of a recon sense than the previous book mentioned.
I am beginning to like the way this book thinks. Being a more impersonal person, I prefer to do a lot of my communicating online. I’ve met several good friends this way, so it can’t be all bad. The book seems to think that the web offers too much information, but I believe that a person skilled at using search engines can skim through much of the chutzpah and get to the good stuff quickly, but then again what do I know? Have I written a book? Nope… and this person managed to get us all to read it too.

How to be a Graphic Designer without losing your Soul – Chapter 6

How to get work, the one thing they never taught us in design school. Good thing we were liberal arts majors. What’s that? They don’t teach you how to find clients either? Well then we’ll have to rely on your contacts for that won’t we? Eh? You’re a computer nerd whose entire social life went down the drain during college? Do you barely have any real friends? Never attended a drinking party or other social gathering while in school? You halted a promising college career in biology because you thought you could make a better living as a graphic designer?

Oops.

I find myself at the end of my college career mooching off the charisma of the people I know around me. The only reason I got the nice internship I have today is because my brother happened to go to the same private school as the President’s son, where I was an alumnus and never even met this guy’s progeny. Connections are the biggest single source of work in the graphic design field. We employ several people whose sole jobs it is to bring in new business to us through their own connections.

The book says that we all need to be new business people. This scares the ever-loving **** out of me. I am somewhat (read very) afraid to talk with, much less deal with, new people who I perceive to be in a position of power over me. The same with making phone calls of almost any kind. I am the kind of person who desperately needs a personal assistant to take my calls for me. This business with the pitch making, count me out. No way do I want to be in a meeting selling myself. I always think my work is worse than it really is, and my ideas often stretch beyond my own means. Why weren’t we warned about all this earlier in the curriculum? This is potentially life-making or life-breaking stuff that’s being discussed here.

I’m just not cut out to be a graphic designer this book is screaming in my face. My work stinks, therefore no one will hire me, my marketing skills stink, therefore I won’t be able to get work, and my interpersonal skills are lacking, so I won’t even meet the people who are willing to look at my work. It even insulted me about my poor handwriting. Let’s face it. I’m not cut out for this line of work.

Where has all of James’ “I’m amazing” attitude and egotism gone to I wonder now. Back when I first started to get interested in digital design, I was working on horribly amateurish projects all the time. I edited video, drew in illustrator, and photoshoped false parking tickets. I even made my own newsletter at one point which was ordered destroyed by the college I was going to for being defamatory. I used to have a drive for this sort of thing, but now it’s just a job to me, something I’m going to do to earn money and nothing else. I pine for the days when I would go out into the woods to look for deer tracks or draw (even if I wasn’t good at it) for fun. I’m busy doing nothing, playing games, watching TV, and eating my way out of the terrible depression I experience almost constantly, interjected only by the occasional grandiose statement brought on by an amusing bit of work from the comics and TV which I admire and hoped to emulate, but which drew me in and never let go.

But I suppose this lack of feeling adequate is what happens to most designers, as the book states. I don’t believe in my own works, so I’m apologizing for them all the time, saying “well this could have been better” or that or the other thing, and they’re wondering “well if it could have been better why didn’t you fix it before bringing it to me?” Laziness, lack of motivation, perhaps it is that I really don’t care all that much. Maybe I’m just desperate for a job (like I was when I met with Connecticut Magazine) and didn’t think it through closely enough. My mother ended up making the call to get me my current job. How embarrassing. I feel lucky though that I had had the foresight to put together a portfolio in 315 as my final project, because it was that piece which wowed them the most. To this day the boss still thinks I’m an expert in flash.

Some of the best work I’ve ever done has been to do with digital portfolios. I’ve built more of them at my current internship than anything else, and built the entire identity section of our online portfolio, from dredging up all the old logos, resizing them, creating thumbnails, and over three hundred links that all had to work and be hand coded, as well as working within the stifling framework of the overall site design, yet making it all work as a separate section. I had them put it up here at the Design Trust Identity Site. Keeping the site looking like its parent site was a difficult challenge to overcome, but in the end it lends an air of continuity to the site as a whole, however lacking the original design may be. Both I and the previous senior designer were chomping at the bit to be allowed to redesign the site from scratch, but the boss is married to it for financial reasons that have to do with external printed materials, and the continuity of our own self branding.

Maybe in the long run we need to let good design get out there and be our best advocate. I still don’t really know how to create good design, but I know it when I see it. Maybe I should become a critic…

How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing your Soul - Chapter 5

This chapter put my entire experience as an intern into a new perspective for me, namely that of my boss. Since I have been at the firm, we have hired and let go a number of people, including all of the design staff aside from myself and the company’s president.

We currently have three account managers, one of whom were fired and mysteriously came back once all the work dried up. We haven’t had any real work in ages, and have been sending me in to fix problems left in designs by old staff during older projects, such as Dannon’s Celebrate Healthy Eating site where it was my job to fix errors in old files such as words on the wrong line or in the wrong language (two identical sites in English and Spanish are hard to pull off), missing images or pages (in flash sometimes), and to replace all the pictures of the old food pyramid with the new one the USDA put just out (don’t get me started on the design flaws of that little piece of work), but I digress.

Point being, according to what myself, the old designers, and the accounting staff knows, the company is in trouble, and the boss isn’t helping with his particular style of running a design firm. My dilemma being, I have a job, I get paid to do what I like, but I’m terribly afraid of losing this job before I can finish this course and then enter the real world. I just know however, that once I’m done with school I’m just going to goof off and not find a job until it becomes really dire that I do, but enough worrying about that for now. Everything in my gut and this book tells me that he’s running the company into the ground, but how do you break that kind of news to the guy who owns the company?

Other issues raised by this book made me think, if I’m not that good of a designer, who the heck is going to want to hire me, and should I even bother going into the design field? I know it’s a little late to start questioning that kind of thing now, but let’s face it; all I really have to show is what I’ve done for classes. Everything I’ve done for anything else was either ill conceived, poorly executed, or I never followed through after the idea phase. My portfolio is a dump, and contains just as much work by other people as myself.
Is there any place in the design world for a man who has amazing ideas, but no talent or ability to realize them?

Perhaps
If I can hire people better than myself at various key skills, then maybe I can pull off running a design company instead of actually going through the physical labor of creating it myself. But where would that leave me in terms of artistic fulfillment? Probably a little ahead of where else I would be, overworked and underpaid. Even the great artists of the renaissance had help on their greatest masterpieces. Perhaps I just need some experience and time.

I regret that I am hopelessly lost as to the nature of the blogging assignment for the previous two weeks and all future weeks. I hope to have this issue resolved as quickly as possible through discussion with my professor in the classroom.

The Logo assignment however has proved quite fruitful, and I have come up with 24 various sketches, and 20 comps and variants, some with final results.

Here are some examples of my work.






I will add to this blog later today after discovering the nature of the assignment.