The Optimist’s Guide to Getting a Job in Graphic Design
by Nate Voss, (7 comments)
You should know that getting a job in graphic design is not easy. But neither is getting a job in any field where people actually care about what they do. You want to work in a bank? That’s easy. So rule number one is: you have to be prepared to work really hard at becoming a good or great designer.
Rule number two is that there will be a lot of people, like me, writing articles like this for you to read. But there are no more test answers here; there is no right or wrong way to do it; no absolute guide to success; no single method to greatness. You should read them all, and take with you the parts which best fit your own unique outlook on life. This guide, for example, is for the non-jaded, energetic, glass-half-full young designer.
STEP ONE: Care. Care more. Chances are, if you don’t care about design, you would not be reading this now, unless you Googled “getting a job in graphic design” and this is what came up. It is not required that you care about the way design is run (most non-design companies don’t know how to run it), or that you care about work or clients that you don’t want to work for (don’t). Just care about good design, and care about making it. If you don’t care about design, working in it everyday will not make you a fulfilled person. If you do not care about design, you should move on to something else that you do care about. If you do care about design, this will be the last time you should allow anyone to tell you that you shouldn’t be in this field (regardless of how your portfolio is put together). Check? Good, let’s continue.
STEP TWO: Learn. Learn more. Always learn more. To some people this can mean “learning Flash” or “learning InDesign,” and to others it will mean “learning logo-design theory” or “learning how to establish a brand’s visual language.” The point is to never stop growing as a designer. Your mind has a near infinite capacity for acquiring knowledge, so take advantage of that. Read as many books as you can and don’t just look at the pictures; look at the pictures in all of those books you’ve been reading (really, get your nose up on them, really look); go to designer speaking events, and talk to as many people as you can who are smarter than you. That’s right. No matter how good you are, and you may be very good, there are still people who you can learn from. Ask them as many questions as you can. Joe Duffy, founder of Duffy & Partners, AIGA Medalist and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, gave a presentation of his work in Des Moines, Iowa, in January of 2006. By February of 2007, when he spoke in Omaha, Nebraska, he told us that half of his presentation would be different (which it was), because he himself had learned so much about design in the past year. And if he’s still learning, then we can all still learn. Never stop this step.
STEP THREE: Get involved. Really involved. There are over 50 chapters of AIGA nationwide as of this writing, and each chapter should have events every few months. Don’t just go, go to participate. Ask questions. Meet as many people as you can. Introduce yourself. Meet the people throwing the event and volunteer to help them with the next, even if you’re just going to be folding chairs for them. Check your local newspaper to find art shows and design events that aren’t related to AIGA. There will be plenty. Go to those events and repeat the above instructions. Meeting new people can be intimidating, so if you have trouble in social situations, just do your best to be outgoing and nice, but try hard not to overstay your welcome. Do your best to remember the names of the people you meet and/or politely ask for their business cards. Have one of your own ready in case they ask for yours in return, which is pretty common. And say thank you.
STEP FOUR: Don’t be an asshole. This is a great rule for the rest of your life. Nobody likes an asshole, and nobody wants to hire an asshole aside from other assholes. And then there you’ll be, working for an asshole, which is no good for anybody. People don’t hire portfolios, they hire people. They hire people who meet certain criteria specific to the position they are trying to fill, and who they would be able to see themselves working alongside day after day. So be a good person. Be warm, polite, giving, caring, genuine, respectful, and honest.
I’ll bet by now you’re starting to wonder when we’ll get to the portfolio step. Well if you’ve gone far enough with steps one through four you’re probably ready to start worrying about that big intimidating ‘Book.’ Shall we?
STEP FIVE: Have a portfolio. It doesn’t need to be great; it doesn’t need to be perfect; you just need to have one. And you need to know it backwards and forwards, inside and out. You need to know every detail of every piece that is inside of it, every story behind every decision that you’ve ever made in that work. Because how you present your work is going to be more important than what you show. Be able to walk someone through every nuance of your work, every concept, and every connection. Be able to speak about the work in terms of the problems you’ve solved rather than the context of the classroom assignment. A great presentation will always elevate poor work; but great work will always suffer by a poor presentation.
There is no perfect way to build a portfolio. In general, it should be an honest and straightforward representation of where you are at that moment in time as a designer. Don’t worry about having real work in it if you’ve never done real work. Just show the work that shows the best of what you can do and the best of what you have done. Be sure this work allows you to tell the stories you want to tell. Use your portfolio as a jumping-off point for conversations about where you would like to go in design, the kinds of work you love to do, the process of design that you use. Always remember that a portfolio alone will land nobody a job. Again, people hire people, not portfolios.
And that’s it. That’s what you have to do. If you follow the above steps you will be a well-educated (from inside the classroom or out of it), connected, involved, passionate designer, who is not an asshole. That is exactly the kind of designer who has little trouble finding gainful employment in this field.
[There are 5,780,000 ‘design portfolio tips’ and 9,500,000 ‘job interview tips’ on Google. If you want more advice specific to those topics, start there.]
STUDENT TIPS FROM THE BE A DESIGN CAST: We’ve had a plethora of incredible designers on our podcast, here are just a few of the tips they’ve dropped on us for students.
“Showing a wide range of experience, and showing it in an innovative way … is the way to really build a portfolio that’s going to get noticed.” — Joe Duffy, Duffy & Partners
“Draw. Incessantly. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to be for aesthetic reasons. But learn to use that medium. Because it’s what we do. We design for print … we design for web. Any of it. It’s through the eyes. It’s visual. And the very basics of visual design are [in] drawing.” — Steve Gordon, RDQlus Design
“You have to be able to really articulate how you came to a solution and why you chose all the different elements incorporated, instead of just ‘putting it out there.’” — Brian Edlefson, Target
“A good tip, and I wish it was mentioned to me earlier when I was a student, is everyone works so hard, they work all-nighters, you focus so hard on the work, but the work is just going to run out of ideas if you don’t live your life. So work hard, and play especially hard.” — Lorenzo Appicella, Pentagram
“Keep it humble. There’s a lot to be learned out there, and it might not necessarily be about design, what you learn. It might be about how to interact with other departments, with other people. It might be about project management. It might be about Bengal chants.” — Tricia Bateman, HOW Magazine
“Wait until you’re 30 to start compromising … do not ever compromise in your 20s. And if you can hold off until you’re 30, then push yourself until you’re 40.” — Debbie Millman, Sterling Brands
PARTING WORDS: Rember, don’t waste your time with anyone who tells you that you don’t have what it takes to make it. If you care (see STEP ONE), that is enough.
Don’t waste your time doing “fake work.” Do real work for yourself, for your friends, and for people you know. New Year’s party invites, birthday cards, graduation or birth announcements, T-shirts, posters for your favorite bands, even your own little portfolio enhancements like a resume and business card, and a leave-behind piece, are all terrific ways to add to your body of work outside of the classroom.
Do go back to the start of this article and reread STEPS ONE and TWO. Those are the most important.
Do improve old class projects that are not up-to-date with your current design skills. Those are freebies, you can update them as often as you want.
Don’t ask permission to succeed. If you want to be a designer there’s no one who can tell you not to. If there’s no position open at a local design firm or agency, start your own. Learn as much about running a small business as you do about design. Have a job on the side to pay the rent and keep food on the table until your business gets rolling. Start with work for people you know, and ask them to tell their friends about you. Following STEP THREE is also imperative to this course of action. As is that part about ‘learning the business.’ Can’t stress that one enough.
Now go forth, young designer! And take over the world!
Click here for the Pessimist’s Guide to Getting a Job in Graphic Design.
Comments (7)
p.berkbigler said:
It’s amazing the way that life sometimes functions so much in parallells: two writing colleagues on Be A deciding to start talking about ways to gear up for “breaking into” the design life - two former students of mine who just e-mailed me and came to visit asking some of the same questions… It always seems to confirm the notion that there is in fact a zeitgeist / “spirit of the moment” that people communally tap into…
Anyway, diversions aside, there were some thoughts that I passed along to one of my student last night that I wanted to toss out here for public scrutiny, very related to what Nate and Adrian have both been talking through in these discussions.
So, Berkbigler’s additions to the lists would be:
A. Establish relationships, don’t shop for jobs
If I had simply called / e-mailed my eventual boss out of the blue and said, “Got any work for me?,” there’s no doubt that his first response would practically have to be, “I don’t think so.”
There might legitimately not be enough extra income available at a given business to share with another “mouth to feed”, but that theoretical boss should also likely say, “No” primarily because he’d have no clue who I was, whether he could trust me, whether I had much promise as a worker and a designer, or whether he felt comfortable being in the same space with me. Even having seen my portfolio and met me once, he’d reasonable still wonder about a lot of those things…
Multiple meetings in multiple situations and suddenly a fuller picture of what I might be like as a person and an employee would start to emerge. Try to find ways that people can “meet” you more than just a single time.
Think of any “first” meeting you’ve had with anybody and write down even three things you remember about that person, favorable or unfavorable as the meeting may have been…
B. Examine working situations as thoroughly as possible
I’m tending at this point in my career to always suggest people consider any job interview to be more of an opportunity to interview the employer than it may be a chance for them to interview you. Ask questions about what they do, how they do it, how long they’ve been doing it, etc.
Figure out who they are in equal or larger portion than they’re figuring out who you are. It always seems to strike people job-hunting as an odd notion, but why would you want to automatically work anywhere that would hire you? Try to figure out if it’s actually going to be a successful environment to work in first and then start angling to work there.
C. Communicate to an employer what they stand to gain from having you in the mix
People are people - as much as we want to believe in the fiction that common man possesses untapped powers of mind reading and intuition, I haven’t met anyone yet who guessed the number I was thinking more than once in a row!
You’re not a mind-reader, I’m not a mind-reader, and I’m not going to pay to find out which psychics know more than I want them to about me - an employer isn’t going to just “guess right” in terms of what you can or can’t bring as a benefit to the work they’re aiming to accomplish.
There’s nothing criminal about clearly expressing why you’re a valuable worker - I sometimes think people get too hung up on the idea that they need to be “discovered.” - Far better to have been clearly expressed first so you know what people are going to “discover” about you.
Figure out how many different ways (your portfolio, your conversation, a couple face-to-face meetings, whatever send-ahead or leave-behind piece you can devise, your reputation in town, your ability to make killer lemon bars, etc.) fully communicates why you should be a hot commodity for any business to have. If you can’t answer that question for yourself, there’s little to no way a potential employer is going to ferret it out either…
Another does of Berkbigler’s wanderings on a Friday afternoon…
Posted on February 23, 2007
p.berkbigler said:
It’s amazing the way that life sometimes functions so much in parallells: two writing colleagues on Be A deciding to start talking about ways to gear up for “breaking into” the design life - two former students of mine who just e-mailed me and came to visit asking some of the same questions… It always seems to confirm the notion that there is in fact a zeitgeist / “spirit of the moment” that people communally tap into…
Anyway, diversions aside, there were some thoughts that I passed along to one of my student last night that I wanted to toss out here for public scrutiny, very related to what Nate and Adrian have both been talking through in these discussions.
So, Berkbigler’s additions to the lists would be:
A. Establish relationships, don’t shop for jobs
If I had simply called / e-mailed my eventual boss out of the blue and said, “Got any work for me?,” there’s no doubt that his first response would practically have to be, “I don’t think so.”
There might legitimately not be enough extra income available at a given business to share with another “mouth to feed”, but that theoretical boss should also likely say, “No” primarily because he’d have no clue who I was, whether he could trust me, whether I had much promise as a worker and a designer, or whether he felt comfortable being in the same space with me. Even having seen my portfolio and met me once, he’d reasonable still wonder about a lot of those things…
Multiple meetings in multiple situations and suddenly a fuller picture of what I might be like as a person and an employee would start to emerge. Try to find ways that people can “meet” you more than just a single time.
Think of any “first” meeting you’ve had with anybody and write down even three things you remember about that person, favorable or unfavorable as the meeting may have been…
B. Examine working situations as thoroughly as possible
I’m tending at this point in my career to always suggest people consider any job interview to be more of an opportunity to interview the employer than it may be a chance for them to interview you. Ask questions about what they do, how they do it, how long they’ve been doing it, etc.
Figure out who they are in equal or larger portion than they’re figuring out who you are. It always seems to strike people job-hunting as an odd notion, but why would you want to automatically work anywhere that would hire you? Try to figure out if it’s actually going to be a successful environment to work in first and then start angling to work there.
C. Communicate to an employer what they stand to gain from having you in the mix
People are people - as much as we want to believe in the fiction that common man possesses untapped powers of mind reading and intuition, I haven’t met anyone yet who guessed the number I was thinking more than once in a row!
You’re not a mind-reader, I’m not a mind-reader, and I’m not going to pay to find out which psychics know more than I want them to about me - an employer isn’t going to just “guess right” in terms of what you can or can’t bring as a benefit to the work they’re aiming to accomplish.
There’s nothing criminal about clearly expressing why you’re a valuable worker - I sometimes think people get too hung up on the idea that they need to be “discovered.” - Far better to have been clearly expressed first so you know what people are going to “discover” about you.
Figure out how many different ways (your portfolio, your conversation, a couple face-to-face meetings, whatever send-ahead or leave-behind piece you can devise, your reputation in town, your ability to make killer lemon bars, etc.) fully communicates why you should be a hot commodity for any business to have. If you can’t answer that question for yourself, there’s little to no way a potential employer is going to ferret it out either…
Another does of Berkbigler’s wanderings on a Friday afternoon…
Posted on February 23, 2007
Adam said:
Paul, I love your point about establishing relationships. I feel that is just as important as having a good book.
Developing a network will get you a job alot faster than just job hunting. Not to mention when hiring, an employer is not only going to judge you on your book, but how well you will fit in with the company. If you have not developed any type of standing relationship you will have a good chance at being passed on in favor for someone that has.
Posted on February 23, 2007
Adrian Hanft said:
I guess “pessimistic” is better than what you were calling my post yesterday, so thanks for the “optimistic” change of heart. Overall I think your post suffers from the same problem that most of these “how to get a job” posts do. It is full of vague ideas (care, learn, get involved) that don’t get the applicant any closer to a job. It may sound good, but people don’t need (or want) philosophical idealism (what you are calling optimism) when they are deep in the job hunt. What then need is practical tips that they can start using now. Real things that they can do differently to get ahead of the competition. That is what I was trying to write, and most of the reactions my post got were thankful for the blatant truth. Also, I think that at it’s best that is what the student tips in the podcast provide: real advice that designers can use to improve themselves.
Posted on February 23, 2007
Dave said:
Establish relationships, don’t shop for jobs. That is called dating!
Let me start with my view on this glass thing that seems to be dividing people. If I started with a full glass and I consumed half of it; it is half full. When you give me a glass that is half empty I hope it is a large glass containing an expensive wine!
When I read what Adrian wrote it seemed a sincere attempt to put into writing some thoughts after seeing the efforts of people who wanted a job. Except for the not putting in the date of graduation it was logical. Oh, the suit burning, that just reminded me that you need to research the place in preparing to interview for the job. I also hoped for fashion and environmental reason it was not a polyester suit! I was equally impressed with the way The Optimist presented ideas and agreed with what was written. I found the “They hire people who meet certain criteria specific to the position they are trying to fill, and who they would be able to see themselves working alongside day after day.” That seems to be an accurate description of what goes on in the process.
“Again, people hire people, not portfolios.”
It was when I got to “Berkbigler’s additions” and read his let’ s all just be friends and maybe some day we will produce beautiful art together … I got lost!
I understand networking but most folks starting out are not provided with opportunities to check with their friends if they are running behind and need a hand.
Paul shares, “Ask questions about what they do, how they do it, how long they’ve been doing it, etc.” Yes and if it their first time interviewing people and have a needy personality they will be impressed with you!
The whole mind – reader, statement about psychics lacked substance. You are telling a person they need to claim how wonderful they are so the interviewer will like them! I am looking for some content here! “fully communicates why you should be a hot commodity for any business to have.” Does not provide substance… what would make your student a “hot commodity”? That is what we need to know!
Posted on February 24, 2007
PixelHustler said:
Wow, talk about a couple of polarizing posts. I think the most interesting thing to come from all of these comments, and the posts themselves, is that no one is going to agree on “The Best Way To Get a Job”. What works for one(or some), may not work for others. I personally felt that all three articles offered -something- that would have helped me had I been looking for a job right now. They all helped in different ways; Adrian’s post was succinct and logical, the “pessimists view” post was a good slap in the face, clearly placing the responsibility back on the potential employee, and the “optimists view” post offered some positive-outlook advice to keep the designer going. While I can’t say I agree 100% with any of them, the discussion generated has been great.
Posted on February 26, 2007
Yael said:
“…There’s a lot to be learned out there, and it might not necessarily be about design, what you learn. It might be about how to interact with other departments, with other people. It might be about project management. It might be about Bengal chants.” — Tricia Bateman, HOW Magazine
The quote from Tricia is excellent. I would like to think I apply the above idea passionately. Learn everything. Knowledge is power. If you only learn about design, you will just be regurgitating everyone else’s design.
Posted on March 29, 2007