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The Top Five Design Interview Mistakes

1. Assuming that everyone at Acme Design Firm reviewed your resume and your portfolio before your interview.

I have watched this happen over and over again. Invariably, what happens is as follows:

Employer: We didn't have our creative director scheduled for this interview. But we decided to invite her along. Do you have a copy of your resume for her?

You: No... Could you print one off for her from the PDF I sent along?

Employer: [frustrated, but not showing it] Sure, that wouldn't be a problem. Also, our Wi-Fi network is down and the conference room that we're in doesn't have a computer. Could you bring out your laptop and show your portfolio from there?

You: Errr... My portfolio only works from my Web site.

In these kinds of situations, you can hear the punctured balloon of your professionalism starting to leak air. From here, you need to claw your way out.

Easy as ABC? Pt. 2 of 2

Being a designer is about continual reinvention. About knowing the range of your talent, and playing to both your strengths and your weaknesses. About promising to create what hasn't been created before, and being comfortable with going through the process over and over again, drawing on the confidence that you will succeed no matter what the obstacles at hand may be.

In every designer's career, there's a point where you can't just rely on your education and your computer skills. A paradigm shift occurs in how you view the design profession. During this transition, you move from developing your hard skills -- software savvy, technical expertise in various artistic mediums such as illustration and photography, methods of hand-printing or coding your work in the appropriate delivery technology -- into a more nebulous space. A place where you're asked to achieve goals instead of tasks. Instead of retouching a photo or improving a logo, you may be standing in front of twenty clients, your knees quaking nervously while you attempt to sell them on why Logo 1A is better than Logo 3C. The client may be asking you for your opinion on subjects that range far from your realm of expertise: proper colors of blouse for the photo shoot, whether mahogany or cedar makes more sense for the bar-top, and whether it's a better idea to spend $100k on a Web site overhaul or just go put some more ads in the local newspaper.

Clearly, you can't learn all of this in design school.

You had to sop it up by listening your teachers share war stories, or seek out bold assignments that gave you a tiny taste of what a real client critique may do to your self-image.

You had to learn it in the real world by watching your bosses do the tap-dance in front of their clients -- and seeing how the clients reacted when work tripped and fell over.

You had to bluff your way through business challenges and unfamiliar design tasks until you'd absorbed enough learnings from your clients to gain the appropriate lingo and the street smarts to keep up, let alone get ahead.

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What if you could rewind the clock and go back to school, but when you walked into the classroom, your class resembled something more like the real working world, warts and all? And by the time you were done with that class, you'd know what kind of designer you were going to become?

This is the kind of class I've been developing in my free time. "80 Works for Designers" is a brief, intense seminar crafted to help students and aspiring designers gain broad exposure to a wide range of design disciplines and develop the depth of skills necessary to excel as a working professional. Over several all-too-brief weeks, seminar participants will take part in a dozen projects a week under time constraints that match the pace of most professional creative agencies.

Laced into those assignments are some of the "greatest hits" I've either experienced in school or solicited from teachers and fellow designers. Perhaps you have some you'd like to share?

Here's the one I described at the start of this post:

"Easy as ABC"

Assemble a 26-character alphabet using only found objects. Letters may be documented for presentation to the class through collage, photography, photocopying, digital illustration, and other appropriate mediums. Bonus points will be doled out for punctuation such as ampersands, exclamation points, and the like. You may not merge examples of computer typefaces out in the wild, document elements of existing signage, or pull in anything that may be considered a complete letterform. Your alphabet must be crafted by hand.

Here's another:

"Scruples"

A hat is passed around the class. Teams of three students pick out a slip of paper with the name of a major nonprofit organization. For the next class, each team member will be required to bring a redesign of that nonprofit’s Web site home page, including recommendations for use of interactive elements such as video or Flash.

In the next class, those teams will regroup and critique the work... with a twist. One person will be the designer, while the other two are the client. The designer presents the first “round of creative”, which consists of all the Web site designs. Each client picks out of a hat a constraint that governs the changes they want made to the work: “I don’t like any of these,” “My budget just got cut,” “Pick the most dominant color and say you don’t like it,” “The designer cut you off in traffic this morning,” “When you get done with this meeting, you are laying off 25 employees,” and other drivers for their behavior. The clients and the designer then negotiate which design they like the best and draw up a list of revisions they would make to the work. At the end of their creative presentation, the students share their experiences, motivations, and lessons learned.

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If you're interested in trying out 80 Works at your school, drop me a line at dksherwin at msn.com.

Easy as ABC? Pt. 1 of 2

S is for string bean. E is for eggplant. Z is for... what vegetable name starts with Z?

My Intro to Design teacher, a forty-years-young art historian and graphic design aficionado, distributes to the class the following assignment: create a typeface out of found materials, document it in whatever medium you so desire, and present it to the class on a single sheet of paper.

One a.m. before the assignment was due, wire basket full of rare and unusual produce at the 24-hour supermarket, I was beginning to realize just how much I'd underestimated the difficulty of the task at hand. The very idea of creating a typeface, which seemed like such a simple activity when I'd read the handout, had become a gut-wrenching effort. And I only had nine more hours until I had to turn it in.

Fast-forward through one of the longer nights of my life:

4 AM: Photo-reducing bananas on the Kinkos color copier.

9 AM: Frantically cutting and pasting the copies onto a 20" x 24" sheet.

10 AM: Running to the art building, barely making it into the lecture hall before the class began, I dropped my fruit and vegetable typeface into the stack for grading and wearily went to my seat, both surprised that I'd survived the assignment intact, and excited to see what new work I'd be forced to create in the coming week.

*

A foil-wrapped tube with a die-cut in the middle that shows the wine label. A 4-color printed bag with handles made from grosgrain. Or perhaps a simple cardboard container that has been letter-pressed with the restaurant logo?

2006. Another busy day at the design studio. A kind of controlled chaos.

Our client, director of operations at a firm that develops restaurant concepts, needed to see two packaging ideas for their new wine bar by tomorrow. Meanwhile, we're trying to polish off the home page and secondary page comps for a technology consulting Web site. And we've got two big mailers for a cruise line that are still in process and need a ton of photo research.

I need to get a vendor on the phone, since I can't show these ideas to the client without knowing if they're even feasible in their budget. The photo researchers at the stock agency are calling me back soon to let me know what kind of glacier shots they were able to scare up. Meanwhile, I've still got to design the navigation for the Web site and other designers want to have a quick group critique to make sure we're going in the right direction on those trade show booths that are due on Friday. How could I have forgotten the booth designs? Our account manager extracts a deadline out of me, knowing that another project will have to give as a result.

I sit back in my chair for a moment, just letting it all sink in. Somehow this gigantic pile of work will all get done -- and to an exacting artistic standard. Our clients will love the work, and we will get paid for it.

80 Works for Designers in Seven Weeks?

If you were to take a class called 80 Works for Designers in Seven Weeks, what kinds of projects would you expect to tackle in that intentionally ludicrous timeframe?

One of my first roommates post-college was a graduate student in poetry. In the summer of 1999, I recall him being excited that he had signed up for the class "Instant Thesis, or 80 Works in 7 Weeks," which was being taught by the eminent poet Peter Klappert.

Dozens of late nights and weekends later, neck sore from hunching over his computer and notepad, nerves shot by a bold overdose on black coffee, he was a complete wreck... but a more powerful writer as a result, by an order of magnitude.

Many students found it to be one of the most revelatory creative experiences of their lives, expanding their writing ability in ways they hadn't imagined possible through traditional workshop methods. After working through several stages of nervousness, failure, physical and emotional stress, intellectual stretch, loss of self, and high anxiety -- often in rapid succession -- they broke through many artistic barriers into something profound. The entire class explored collage methods, blot-outs, concrete poetry, metric/fixed forms, linked verse, anaphora, dialogue, satire, visual shape, collaborative writing, fixed and loose rhyme schemes, musicality, tone, and dozens of other approaches in the pressure cooker. They had also accumulated hundreds of exercises, generated by the class, that could feed future work.

After spending a number of years being in the fast-paced environments of both small design firms and imposingly large agencies after a somewhat middling design education, I began to think back to my roommate's experience and wonder:

Would it possible to cram 80 wildly divergent design exercises into the course of seven weeks, forcing a student to expand the full breadth of their abilities in a finite period of time? Would design students in such an environment become better designers at an exponentially faster rate, with substantially better portfolios?

What I hope that design students would get out of (barely) surviving this designer-focused course would be twofold: 1) an idea of how to reach a breadth of innovative design solutions, in various media, within any set time period; and 2) a fuller understanding of the complementary skill of learning how to properly frame a design problem before it can be solved.

I'm not sure if Peter Klappert has repeated his course since, but a record of his working process still exists, which was adapted from a Corcoran School of Art class. From his methods, I've been attempting to extrapolate a similar bare-bones approach that could be attempted by design teachers and students.

I'd like your help in determining what those 80 Works for Designers could be for an initial seminar. Everyone whose exercise gets used will be credited, and I will put together a Web site that disseminates the class methods and lesson plan for anyone who wants to inflict this idea upon an unsuspecting design institution.

Since the 80 Works class will generate hundreds of exercises, this initial seeding of starter exercises will grow into a very large body of work very swiftly that many people can use for their own creative growth (I hope).

Feel free to post your ideas here as comments or email them to me at david at davidsherwin.com. And thank you, in advance, for the help.