Basics for the impending graphic design graduate
Originally published in ‘zine form in 2017. The print version is available via Wordshape.
You are living in an extra-interesting time — design is more acknowledged as a profession and something of value than ever before.
You should probably start thinking like an entrepreneur if you have not started doing so already. As you are reading this, you are probably what the writer, artist, and critic Martha Rosler describes as the “new flexible personality”.
“Many observers have commented on the changing characteristics of the international workforce, with special attention to the “new flexible personality,” an ideal worker type for life without job security, one who is able to construct a marketable personality and to persuade employers of one’s adaptability to the changing needs of the job market.”
The new flexible personality is akin to an octopus in that one is expected to have no spine and be able to perform seemingly impossible tasks, such as how a 600-pound octopus can fit its body through a hole the size of a quarter.
But that was just a general description of desirable laborers today. In terms of creative labor, she writes:
“Creatives’ may bring not only training in design and branding, and often a knowledge of historical agitprop and street performance, but also the ability to work with technological tools in researching, strategizing, and implementing actions in virtual as well as physical spaces. Actually or functionally middle-class, they are at ease with the discourses and modes of intellectual endeavor required in higher education, or in college prep.”
This is the present, the future, and the immediate past. I got out of school in 2004 and found it incredibly difficult to become employable in typical Fordist roles in Los Angeles. I was too much of a generalist — I didn’t have enough skills to sit at a desk and do 8 to 14 hours of work every day in motion graphics or web design. Instead, I had to compose a mix of different income streams — much of which was culled from trawling Craigslist for creative projects with okay budgets alongside drawing clipping paths of jewelry at a photo studio on weekends, scraping together freelance work from acquaintances, and hounding design studios and advertising agencies for piecework.
This is the landscape that you are going to graduate into, as creative mass production is now normative.
I knew what was happening to me somewhat — I had taken a political economy class in undergrad and had marginally read enough culture studies books to have a sense of what PostFordist disassemblies of integrated labor and manufacturing/distribution structures were. I started reading about these ideas when I went back to school at age 26 — fed up with blue-collar life, despite the 401k and the stock options offered to me at that time as a Kinko’s employee.
I self-destructed my six-year Kinko’s career a few semesters into my bachelor's degree and went freelance. Then work dried up. Then I went back to Kinko’s again for a few months at a different location with crappier pay and a crappier schedule at a location frequented by junkies… and then I got fired for never showing up on time.
My working life since that time has largely been defined by precarity — which is how many theorists and critics describe labor at the present moment for creatives. Contract-based, telecommuting-based, or project-based. The good old days of the 9-to-5 are history for most folks… or at least, for most of us older folks. Collectively, I think that the older denizens of developed nations are really nostalgic for stable employment, but there is no way back. For you, however, there is a way forward…
…and that, dear friends, is in getting a job.
DO THE RESEARCH
Okay, it is job-hunting time. First off, where are you going to look for work? This is one of the biggest questions that my undergrad students ask. This is a difficult question, as it depends on what your needs are. Being situated in Tokyo, many of my foreign students are constrained by one big, looming question: What company is going to provide me with a work visa so that I might stay in the country? Notions of quality and type of workplace tend to come second for my students. It is a difficult situation and one that I have faced in the past for which there is no easy answer. Just as important a series of questions are these:
What kind of business do you want to work for?
An ad agency?
A boutique studio?
A UI/UX consultancy?
A startup?
Do you want to work in-house at a company?
Do you want to work for yourself?
Adjacent to these questions are manifold others:
Do you want your employer to provide health care?
How much is your rent?
Do you want to do big things?
Do you want to make small things?
Cold, International Style things?
Scripty home-style things?
Screen-based things?
Risographed things?
What kind of things make you feel good when you make them?
I think that these kinds of questions are extraordinarily difficult for recent graduates. There are the things that we like to make, but then there are the things that our teachers tell us we should make, and it is really hard to get away from this bias.
As a teacher, a designer, and as an individual, I personally do not like crafty things. I do like intimacy with the things I design, and I love personality, but I hate stuff that looks like it is part of the scrapbook of some senior citizen in the middle of America. That, for me, is not graphic design, and it is a bias that I impose on my students because I want them to have a sense of craft in their making.
And here, when I write “craft”, I do not mean crafts.
On the other hand, I am not a Swiss revivalist, and I find the fetishization of the aesthetics of the mid-century corporate world and the worship of high modernism to be disturbing at best.
You see, this is probably the kind of bias that you might be struggling with. If so, I suggest making a bunch of stuff and seeing what feels best to you. TO YOU. Living a life where you make the kind of things that you want to make is the best kind of life.
Tokyo sports a gigantic array of types of creative businesses. There are all of the types mentioned earlier, plus heaps more. It is up to you to do the homework to figure out what the landscape of potential employers looks like in your locale. Alternately, if you are thinking to move somewhere else, it is equally as important to see what kinds of businesses there are in the area you want to move to.
In most cases, you will probably not get a job at the place where you really want to work. At least not immediately. Becoming a valuable employee takes time and work. Of course, there are always the lucky ones. Or seemingly lucky. One of my undergraduate students is working as a graphic designer in the Tokyo offices of a global luxury fashion brand. She is having a great time — her boss is amazing and she is doing all kinds of intense projects. However, the flip side is that she has also had to put off graduation for a couple of years and is taking one class a semester, whittling away at her degree while pursuing her dream job.
The point: amazing jobs often come at a price.
Check your target area for a wide variety of potential employers. Check out magazines that may feature local designers, as well as searching the Internet. Despite Tokyo being the largest city in the world, many design studios don’t have websites because they are just too busy working to create a proper website. Ask your teachers. Ask your friends. Ask your colleagues. Snoop around.
DEAR ___________
Once you have identified a number of potential employers, figure out exactly who you should be talking to when you contact them. My design studio (and I should note that “my studio” is mainly me with a few friends helping out here and there) receives at least five emails a week from people who write “Dear Sir or Madam”, who do not address me by name, or emails that simply start with “Hello”, despite me not knowing them.
I don’t write back to these people.
I don’t check their portfolios.
Frankly, I just delete their emails immediately.
There’s nothing worse than a really impersonal email. This is what is going to happen to you if you write emails that are not addressed specifically to an individual by name.
Often, it is unclear who you should write to. Staffing at advertising agencies changes frequently, and you cannot be sure that the people on the website are still working in their offices. The best thing to do is to give businesses that you are interested in potentially working with a telephone call and ask who exactly you should get in touch with, including the correct spelling of that person’s name, and their email address. If you don’t do this, the probability is 99.9% that you are never going to hear back from anyone.
You wouldn’t write an anonymous love letter. It is the same when hunting for work.
WRITE YOUR LETTER IN A WAY THAT IS PROFESSIONAL, BUT FRIENDLY.
Tone is your friend. Write your email in a way that is kind and upbeat and positive. Brevity is key. You want to give the potential employer as much information about you as possible and as short as possible. Avoid big words that are laden with the aroma of academia, notably terms like “postmodernism”, “deconstruction”, and references to design theory (unless the folks you are seeking to work with are actively involved in design theory).
Also, avoid clichés about design like “less is more” and “form follows function” — just be yourself.
COMPLIMENT
Be complimentary (but not ass-kissy). Mention a recent-ish project that a potential employer completed that you relate to and explain why. Having a rationale for the compliment is essential. It is an essential lead-in for how aspects of their work reflect your interests. (Also, if their work is of no interest to you, then you probably should not apply there.)
Let the compliment lead into the complement.
I LOVE _________.
Talk about your interests. This is key. Even if it is something as simple as loving music, this is important for employers to hear.
People like people who are excited about things. Show your enthusiasm, but don’t come off like a maniac.
EMAIL SIGNATURE
Use an email signature. Don’t load it down with emoji and ornament. Don’t add stupid taglines that read like bumper stickers. Don’t include too many URLs.
That being said, you can use humor to your advantage here, for example listing your fax number or pager/beeper number.
(On second thought, maybe that’s a terrible idea. I don’t know. I’m not applying for a job. You are.)
YOUR PORTFOLIO
One of the most sound pieces of advice that I received when I was about to leave undergrad and was working on my portfolio was this: in terms of sequencing, put your best piece of work first, and include your second-best piece of work last. You want to start and end with a BANG.
You want to edit. Every portfolio has a couple of stinkers. It cannot be helped, and honestly, you are probably too emotionally involved with the work to be able to see its shortcomings. Ask a bunch of people whose opinions you respect for their feedback, including both designers and non-designers. Take everything with a grain of salt.
Your portfolio should feel really robust. It should have a wide breadth and depth of the fork, potentially including identity work, apparel design, UI, UX, motion graphics, editorial design, type design, typography, image-making, abstract form-making, and whatever else you can pack in there.
I highly recommend including projects that have wide breadth in terms of stylistic approaches — if your portfolio just looks like the usual Dribbble profile, you are probably in trouble.
Include big depictions of your work that will look nice on screens that are both big and small. Take a look at what other people are doing with their portfolios, as well as what mock-ups are really popular at the moment, and be sure not to use them or do things in that style.
As I am writing this, it is really popular to use this specimen-esque arrangement of desktop items with logos on them — like an iPhone and a pencil and a business card and horn-rimmed glasses and a pair of scissors and a bunch of other knickknack-y bullshit on a really rough distressed wooden tabletop that would give you splinters if you tried to work on it. This is terrible, as it pops up all the time in portfolio after portfolio. Be critical of the contemporary moment in terms of aesthetics — even mock-ups, especially if you are using them to show your work.
Include pointed, thoughtful, well written, correctly spelled, grammatically correct text to accompany your images that is short. Save your thesis for graduate school. When job hunting, it is far better to be precise than to r-a-m-b-l-e. (Also, it is probable that if you start rambling, you are going to be talking above your potential employers' heads.)
FAKE IT ’TIL YOU MAKE IT
This is really, really important. The kind of work that you include in your portfolio should represent the kind of work that you want to be doing. When I was in undergrad, I really wanted to make music packaging. For other people. And get paid for it. The death of the music industry was not even a glimmer on the horizon yet, and making that kind of work was really helpful because I was creating work that had a surface slickness that appealed to the first design studios that I worked at.
When I was building that portfolio, I worked at Kinko’s and I had a small screen printing set up in the basement of the house that I lived in. I made a bunch of rather deluxe fake vinyl record sleeves that were a mix of floods of flat color that I printed on sample sheets of paper that I picked up from a paper distribution company’s warehouse and then overprinted with photocopying and heat transfer silver foil.
I went to the local record store and bought a handful of records that were pressed on colored translucent vinyl for really cheap, based solely on the aesthetics qualities of the records themselves. I printed out labels that I designed for those records and glued them on top of the existing labels, with the exception of a few random test pressings that I found on crazy vinyl that had no labels. As the independent music scene was relatively obscure in the late 1990s, it was impossible to tell if these were ‘real’ records or not. Honestly, if you listened to those records now, you probably still couldn’t tell. I very intentionally made things that looked and felt real. They had grit and seeming integrity and totally helped land me my first job working at a studio.
Strategically, it is really important to present the kind of work that you want to make in the future because it will help guide your career. The design world is full of people making work that they think others want to see but that no one actually gives a shit about. Show people the work that you care about, and hopefully, you are strategic enough in thinking about how your vision and potential employers’ visions might align.
There are definitely a few things that you are going to need before contacting potential employers, namely:
-a website
-a PDF portfolio
-a CV/resumé
WEBSITE
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with your website. Adobe offers a free portfolio site when you subscribe to its Creative Cloud service. That is enough. They load fast, look decent, and are responsive. Alternately, a Tumblr account works well, too. If you are web-footed and are applying to UI/UX-oriented oriented companies, then you should probably hand-code that yourself. If you are using something like a Bootstrap template, strip out all of the unnecessary code and anything that suggests that the codebase is somebody else’s work.
Also, if your website isn’t responsive, there’s pretty much no point.
YOUR PDF PORTFOLIO
Be sure to export for the web. Include a cover page with your contact info within. Repeat your contact info on the final page along with the words “thank you” in big type. Be aware that there is an audience.
YOUR CV
Keep it tight and to the point. Include things that set you apart, e.g.:
-Oh, you are fluent in Korean?
-Oh, you are fluent in Esperanto?
-Oh, your student project typeface was a bestseller on MyFonts?
-Oh, you already have a D&AD Golden Pencil?
Just add that stuff as bullet points. Don’t brag. Nobody likes a braggart.
DON’T GET ATTACHED
One big thing going with all of this stuff: do not send attachments. People hate attachments these days. Send them a link to everything, or multiple links, but run those links through tinyurl.com or whatever link- shortener the kids are using these days.
Just put the URL for your website in your email signature. More than two links in the body of an email makes people tired.
SEED THE CLOUD
Next: take your portfolio materials and maybe aspects of your CV and populate portfolio networks like Behance, Dribbble, Canvas, and the like. Be sure to upload new projects when they come out on all of these different networks. Get in the habit of doing it. There is so much shit out there these days that everybody is fighting for attention, and if you can grab peoples’ eyes for even a few minutes, it can potentially pay off with decent freelance work on the side.
FOLLOWING UP
Most of the time, you will send out all this stuff, and you won’t hear back from people. Potential employers usually have a bunch of potential employees harassing them to look at their work all the time. Hopefully, your work is twenty times better than everybody else’s, but remember that working people are busy: they are working. The best bet is to follow up with them within one week by email. Just drop them a short email in which you copy the content of your previous email and let them know that you are very interested in meeting with them, even for an informational interview.
This term “informational interview”, makes it feel as if you are not desperate, even if you are. Try not to ever let people see that you are desperate. Humans are opportunivores who will take advantage of other humans at every turn if they think that you don’t mind. I am not saying that you should be a dick, but you should not be taken advantage of. You should treat each interview in as balanced a manner as possible, despite how frightening interviews can be. If an interview goes badly, as they often do, then it is just a sign that that is not a place where you should be working. Either you can’t handle them or they can’t handle you. And you shouldn’t really worry about it. You should just be happy that you’re not going to be working there.
Sometimes, however, people are really busy and you don’t hear back from them even after a follow-up. The best bet is to wait one more week and drop them another email — without the original email content in there. Include a short professional note that is just a few sentences long letting them know that if they have any free time, you would love to speak with them.
If you still don’t hear back, wait four months and then try again, but do not write the same email, and do call the business to see you who you should potentially contact aside from that original contact person.
Definitely do not copy and paste the same text.
When I first moved to Tokyo, I was extremely interested in working at a particular advertising agency, and I wrote them and did hear back and went in for an interview, but it was with an account executive. They didn’t seem to understand anything about graphic design, and I never got a follow-up call from them. One year later, I wrote to the Executive Creative Director directly, and we had an interview and he was impressed and he asked me, “Where were you a year ago? We had so much work and we really could’ve used someone with your skillset.”
This is a really big lesson: make sure that you are talking to the right people.
At that point, if you do not hear back, you have given these people every potential opportunity to work with you, and they are not worth your time. Right now, anyway. You’ll be surprised — you will probably wind up working with them in the future.
INTERVIEWS
Interviews can be really weird. I’ve been to interviews where it seemed like everything was a green light and that I was totally lined-up for an amazing time working with great people, and then I never heard back from them again. I hate it when people are fake like this… but it happens.
The worst thing about these situations is when they have your physical portfolio and they don’t let you know that you can pick it up. There is one studio in Los Angeles that I had to keep calling and calling to ask to get my portfolio back and I kept getting the runaround from the secretary. After a few weeks of this, I just showed up at their office, as I had other folks I wanted to show my portfolio to.
My portfolio at that time was two-fold: I was using this really nice stainless steel screw-post binder that was thin and compact, and I had gone to a lot of trouble to steal. This was complemented by a matching steel box with printed samples of work that I had done — packaging, magazines, and other ephemera. As I’d racked both, they were worth a lot more to me than the hundred dollar retail value that each actually had — I couldn’t afford to replace them.
I showed up at the studio and asked for my portfolio back and was given the runaround, and when I stated that my portfolio was housed in a really memorable binder and box that was worth $300 and I would really like it back, I was greeted by an angry creative director who just gave me the portfolio back without any of the original pages in it and the contents of the box were thrashed. He was sweating and weird and had obviously thrown away the actual portfolio material and was going to use them for something else… potentially his own portfolio.
This kind of shit happens all the time. There are innumerable copies of the designer Allen Hori’s portfolio floating around LA just because it was wonderfully packaged. They are really beautiful and completely gorgeous design objects.
(Incidentally, I gave my box and the portfolio binder to a student a few years ago once I realized I didn’t need to tote samples around to people anymore. That is what the internet is for these days.)
Other super-weird interviews happen. It can be really, really uncomfortable. I had one interview where a creative director talked about how really good at sex one of my old bosses is, but I knew that already because I was sleeping with that person (and was totally head-over-heels in love with them). That totally fucking sucked. I left early, commenting that I felt like “this interview isn’t going anywhere” in order to not punch this person in the face, thanked the individual for that individual’s time, and exited stage left.
I had another interview with the owner of the studio who talked about how he loved to take a hangover poop in the morning while his wife was taking a shower just to gross her out. I stupidly took the contract work that he offered, and shortly thereafter realized that this was his approach to all relationships, not just his marriage.
Really good interviews can happen as well.
One of the best interviews I’ve ever had was with a guy named Joshua Berger in Portland, Oregon. Josh runs a studio called Plazm which was doing exactly the kind of work that I wanted to do: corporate and cultural identity projects for independent businesses. I showed Josh my portfolio and we talked about terms. He wanted me to be an intern, but I wanted to be an employee. I was aware of the scope of work they did, and I also had a huge ego at that time and thought that I could do everything that they could do. I was both right and wrong. Sure, I could do the basics of corporate identity — the mainstay of their practice, but I had no idea about any of the other things that involved running a graphic design studio. I suggested to Josh that I might work there for a month for free and that we have a performance review after that time. If I wasn’t doing the workload of one of his full-time designers, I would continue as an intern, but if I outshone everyone else in the office, I would become an actual employee. I think he liked my pluck more than anything, and I really loved that he had the guts to actually agree. Joshua Berger is a man of integrity.
Over the next month, I did absolutely everything to make myself indispensable. I cranked out so much work that it was insane. I stayed later than everybody else. I came in a bit early. I did not shirk. When there was a bit of downtime, I cleaned up the paste-up table, and I made friendships with the people that were sharing the warehouse that the studio is located in. I made myself a part of the community, but without being annoying or ingratiating. I learned the very basics of type design and just tried to help out on a project that I had no business working on.
At the end of the month, we had a performance review and he offered me a job. It was a three-month contract position with the option to renew, but it was a position. I was able to quit my job at Kinko’s and become a designer. I am intensely thankful for Josh for that opportunity. I have told him this repeatedly in person, but it means more in print.
Afterward, I lapsed into being a terrible employee, and I probably still am a terrible employee. (If you are reading this and you consider hiring me in the future, you probably shouldn’t. I am selfish and I will steal your photocopies. I’m just letting you know now.)
Being an employee is hard. You see the ceiling, as you know what your salary is. You never know if you will get a raise, and you never know if you will be rehired if it is a contract position. It is even more difficult if there is a visa involved, as that always involves a certain amount of desperation.
The thing is, you are probably not going be an employee of one institution forever. I have had so many jobs in my lifetime. I have been:
-a lawn care specialist
-a horse stable cleaner
-a target puller at a rifle range
-a supermarket bagger
-a supermarket facer
-a line cook
-a smörgåsbord buffet manager
-a telemarketer
-a telemarketer
-a telemarketer
-a warehouse worker
-a babysitter
-a newspaper writer
-a music critic
-a preschool teacher
-a bagel shop employee
-a copy jockey
-a convenience store clerk
-a contractor in a graphic design studio
-a Kinko’s employee again
-a contractor in a graphic design studio again
-a software QA engineer
-a student
-a teaching assistant
-a photo studio worker
-a contractor in an advertising agency
-a contractor in an advertising agency
-a freelancer
-a contractor in an advertising agency
-a contractor in a web design company
-a teacher
-a contractor in a web design company
-an owner of a supposedly successful design studio
-an owner of a type foundry
-a full-time teacher at a university
-a full-time teacher at another university
-a part-time faculty at another university
-a freelance writer for hundreds of publications
-an editor
This is never going to stop. I am sure I missed at least a half-dozen jobs in this list. Your roles as an employee and an employer and everything in-between will shift significantly throughout the course of your life. There is no conclusion.
In the words of Sister Corita Kent, “There is only make”, which maybe seemed inspirational in the 1960s or 1970s when she said it, but I view it with a much darker tone these days. I would say, “There is only work.” The future is labor, and I don’t mean that in the hopeful British sense. Jobs are like relationships, in a way. They are a series of failures, until you find one that works for a while, and then somebody dies. It’s the same deal with work.
That being said, don’t be afraid to go out there and date. Life is too short and too lonely not to.
BEING NICE
I was hanging out in the smoking area at my university with one of my students, listening to him freak out about job prospects and his mixed feelings about his employability.
I broke it down to him like this:
“You are a nice person, and you are a super-talented designer. You know how to talk to people, and when in conversation, you never act weird. You are kind and smart and funny and deferential and approachable. These are exactly the talents that cannot be taught in school. They are inherent. These are the things that are actually going to help you the most in your professional career.”
I really meant that. He knows it. We are doing some freelance work together now, just like I am doing with a few other students. This is a new thing for me. I have not had the financial bandwidth or the ability to share work with student-folk like this before, because I was just trying to hustle and make a living as an adjunct faculty member.
Things have changed recently, and I’m happy for that. I have been able to bring six of my students into a big project for a tech company and they totally killed it. (We split the money evenly — I did not skim.)
I was also able to bring this one guy, who I mentioned earlier, into a branding project for the same company, and he has been doing great, both with the work and in meetings. He is figuring out that much of design is just a matter of talking to others. This is something that took me a long time to learn, as well.
The first graphic designers I met were during the time of the first web bubble in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 90s. They were shitty and authoritative and I thought that was how designers had to be. Since then, design culture has shaped up a lot, and now people are kind to one another for the most part, or at least that’s how it seems from all of these ‘a little bit country/a little bit rock ’n’ roll’ graphics that I see slathered on the Internet these days.
In terms of my own interactions with people, I have learned that conversation is the best way forward. If you listen before you speak, and I mean listen, not hear, that is the best bet.
One should not propose directions that are unwarranted. Don’t bullshit. Ask people what they want.
It is so easy, but it is so hard to just listen. I wish I had this figured out when I was getting into design. I wasn’t comfortable with myself, and that is the hardest battle of all. I’m not sure I have it all figured out today, but enough of it so that I feel okay, and I make others feel okay when we talk.
Strive to be nice. Do your best to be the kind of person that you would want to hang out with. That can be a tough row to hoe, but that is really the best business advice anyone can give you.
THE REALNESS
OK, this all sounds glib and easy enough after you have lived it for twenty years. It is no less scary today. It never stops being huge and fucked up and discordant and difficult. The thing is, it never gets easier, but you do get smarter, despite what scientists say. You accumulate a wealth of knowledge and experience over a lifetime and it helps inform your interactions with others along the way.
You’re going to meet some of the best people in the world out there in the world. You can’t help it. You’re also going to meet some of the worst people in the world out in the world. Sometimes they will turn out to be the exact same people, which is a total mindfuck, but that’s the nature of being human. We are complex and contradictory and no matter how much we try to rationalize the world, we are all ruled by the desire to make our lives both comfortable and meaningful, which is a really hard set of lines to try to stay in between. sometimes you color inside the lines and sometimes you color outside the lines. Life doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would. It never does. Technology and civilization and culture change too rapidly these days for that kind of thing to happen.
I hope that you enjoy the telepathy, the lightspeed travel, and the tooth seeds that the future will bring.
FIN
Thank you to my students, especially the ones that gave their input.
This ‘zine/online essay is for Sereina Rothenberger and David Schatz (dba Hammer). You are my heart. (This will also be wildly unhelpful for your European students. Enjoy that.)
Copyright © 2017 Ian Lynam ianlynam.com
Published by Wordshape wordshape.com
