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(Cross-posting this from Ask/Tell) I've been applying to jobs for years and I've only been invited in for two interviews in that time. And the one that didn't reject me was an unpaid internship that they closed until next spring. I graduated with my New Media degree in June '06. I finished the tail end of another major in Creative Writing in March '07. I don't think my resume needs work. Here is my New Media design portfolio: http://www.tnowicki.com/ Here is some of my work as a cartoonist, with which some of you may already be familiar: http://www.mctcampus.com/cartoons/nowicki.htm I am looking for work either in design, new media, or illustration (HAH!). The furthest I feel I can travel is to the Seattle area, not because I'm not willing to travel further, but because I have practically no money left and most employers aren't likely to pay move costs for an entry-level employee. I honestly have no idea what the problem is. Anybody else think they can crack this riddle?
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Nov 17, 2007 02:13
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magnificent7 posted:Education vs. Experience Perhaps this isn't standard any more, or perhaps it depends on where you went to school, but the design program I went to stressed style guides and identity constraints quite a bit, or at least enough for it to get through to me and a few other students. magnificent7 posted:Monster.com has a 24-page book on how to design online ads for their company. 4 pages alone on logo placement. Same with AT&T, Lincoln-Mercury - ANY national company with a poo poo-ton of money invested in branding will insist that you never run their logo over certain colors, it has to be X picas/pixels from any other element, etc. Yeah, honestly this isn't that surprising in an industry where the big players like Adobe will go so far as to trademark a specific swatch of red. They poured money into developing the details of a design scheme, obviously they're going to want to get their money's worth by using it! magnificent7 posted:And in the design world, that has very little to do with education. If you have degree, it just doesn't matter like it would in accounting or architecture. I want somebody who is creative and has experience in my field already. Okay, well, I'm already graduated and I need a job. How am I supposed to get professional experience if nobody will hire me because I don't have professional experience? How do I do this in a way that won't have me living with my parents or in a cardboard box for the rest of my life? If I just depend on freelancing right now, I'll be lucky if I can get an entry-level position before I'm 30, at the rate things are going. I figured being a national award-winning illustrator and having swell typographic skills along with New Media capabilities would be worth something, but in almost two years of job searching I've only even been INTERVIEWED twice. And one of those was for an unpaid internship that has been closed indefinitely. Why are employers completely ignoring me?? I know people are busy but this is kind of B.S.
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Jan 2, 2008 21:07
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magnificent7 posted:You fake it. Like I said - do some corporate mockups. Lots of them. When I get a portfolio from an applicant, if it's filled with purely concept pieces and no real-world designs -- real, boring, unadventurous designs -- I am faced with worrying if they'll design pie-in-the-sky pieces that won't fly in the real world (see [chavez] response). I'm not a print designer trying to break into New Media, or vice-versa, really. Aside from illustration (which I prefer to do with traditional materials), the bulk of my background, my portfolio, and my degree are in New Media. So I do understand the limits chavez was talking about–in fact, the thought process described in chavez's post is pretty much the same one I use. Does my portfolio not show this? The kind of work I'm trying to get in design would be Flash and other New Media. While I'm capable in print it's neither my strength nor my interest. Akaikami posted:They won't care if you don't have professional experience if you have an amazing portfolio. I guess I'm a little unconfident about whether or not my portfolio is amazing, or at least amazing enough. What do you think? And don't worry, I don't expect jobs to come to me without me looking for them. When I said "years of job searching" I meant to use the word "searching" as an active verb rather than a passive one. But I do think it's kind of strange that after finishing my formal design training in '06, I've only been invited in for interviews twice. That's almost two years of applying to places and rarely even meriting the attention that'd be required to send me a rejection. Deep Hurting fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Jan 5, 2008 |
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Jan 5, 2008 08:57
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magnificent7 posted:The first thing I see when I go to your portfolio is a huge red flag. "Click here to activate". If your main focus is in new media, then take the time to fix that. When I see that, it tells me that you haven't designed a site for a paying customer; they would ask about that before going any further. Why? How is clicking anyplace to bring up a menu any different than clicking a specific link that says "menu," other than giving the end user more freedom of movement (which would seem like a plus, from a usability standpoint)? If you're arguing against splash pages, you don't need to because I agree with that, splash pages are dumb. But this isn't a splash page, it's a fluid, less-restrictive widget-style interface. Maybe the difference isn't as clear as I think it is? magnificent7 posted:Your "BRIEF" and "VIEW PROJECT" buttons are only the text. Put a transparent button over the text to increase the clickable area. Um, I did. That's a rookie mistake which I learned not to make a long time ago. Maybe I should make the hot area for each one a little bigger, but the hot area is certainly not just the text. magnificent7 posted:You don't have to increase the text of the buttons, just make it easier to click them. I know it may seem like little things to you, but those are the big giveaways that it'll take more time getting you up to speed. No, they don't seem like little things to me, I know they're mistakes that are a big deal with usability. Which is why I consciously avoid them, and haven't made a text-link in flash while using nothing more than the text as the hot area in many years. Unless you and I are talking about two different things, which is possible. magnificent7 posted:On your indie expo piece - change the button's actions so the information area doesn't disappear as soon as I mouse away. Leave it up until the next link is moused over... it's frustrating because the mouse area is so tiny, if my mouse moves away a little bit, the info area disappears. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Which area are you talking about? magnificent7 posted:Visually, your work is awesome. Technically, you're missing some things that tells me you didn't do any of these with a paying client. Just the items you mentioned above, or is there anything else? They don't seem like little things, as I said, but some of them are mistakes I already made a point of not making, so I'm not entirely sure how what's there already is different from what you're saying should be there... magnificent7 posted:On your silent movie, give a note that they're going to be downloading a movie file. Same with the tools movie as well. Up until then, "view project" means "open a website"... the quickest fix is to build a flash movie player, so it'll pop up a site that plays the movie instead of making me download the movie. IMO, those should just be integrated directly into the portal instead of opening a new window, via that thing loads an external flv or something. Which I think is what you're saying I should do, but I'm not sure. magnificent7 posted:These may seem like nitpicky things No. magnificent7 posted:quickie edit: most of my suggestions are programming/technical issues and a lot of flash artists will declare "but I'm a designer, let somebody else do the code!" but these days, I think there are very few places that hire a flash designer without expecting them to know a little bit of code -- just for fixing things like these. I know enough actionscript and of mistakes one should never, ever make to get by, and usually if I want to code something that's potentially really complex I can figure it out on my own, in time. I think MORE people designing stuff for the web ought to be MORE adept at code, but I've been told many times that the industry trends the other direction, wanting designers to just design and coders to just code, and not having there be a lot of overlap between camps, which seems silly to me. magnificent7 posted:If you want help with those fixes just ask. Just the above-requested clarifications, for now.
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Jan 6, 2008 01:00
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Thanks for all the useful responses, [chavez] and magnificent7! Really, this is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Let me see if I can address each of your comments:chavez posted:Deep Hunting, I think there are some things you could do to improve your portfolio site. First of all, I agree with mag7; making users click on your site to see navigation is bad from a usability standpoint. I can tell you that if anyone came into our shop with a portfolio that had no nav until you clicked on the site, we wouldn't discount them but it's a pretty solid clue that the designer is inexperienced. Why? I'm not asking to be impudent or defensive, by the way, but because I'm actually curious. I mentioned the term "freedom of movement" (or that may have beenand while it's been a long time, I'm pretty sure my thought process when I came up with it was to give the end user the ability to access anything in the portal from anywhere, without the need of going through multiple pages or something. I was trying to come up with something that would be different from traditional navigation, but easy enough to figure out that the end user would get it almost immediately. It sounds like you're saying that it doesn't fulfill the latter quality. chavez posted:Secondly, your "back" buttons on the flip-side of each site element have a black rollover state, so if I don't move my mouse cursor after clicking "brief" I can't see the "back" button at all. Never even thought this would be an issue. Thanks for pointing out that it is. chavez posted:Thirdly, allowing site elements to spawn below the fold on a screen with no scrollbars is also not that great for usability. If I position the main menu right below the logo, even on my 1440x900 laptop screen, clicking one of the bottom menu items generates a new box halfway off the screen. Also you should disable the ability to generate multiple identical site elements - there's really no need for the user to have 7 identical project elements floating around. I don't know how to do that. :embarrassed: chavez posted:The other thing that seems kind of strange to me is that the entire box for each site element is a hotspot, so whenever they are rolled over, the hand cursor appears but there's no clear indication that you should click and drag, and simply clicking doesn't do anything. You can click and drag. I wanted to make a mouseover event that would produce a dialogue reading "drag" which would follow the cursor whenever you mouse over each draggable object, but in spite of what appears to be a fairly straightforward actionscript procedure I couldn't get it to work. Making the entire thing a hotspot initially was the simplest way I came up with at the time for giving the user the ability to spawn the menu by clicking anywhere, but now I realize I probably could have done it better by dropping some actionscript right on the frame. I haven't redone it differently already mainly 'cause I've been intending to put in an entirely different portal. chavez posted:One other thing I might suggest changing is the fact that I have to click to get any info on each project. The idea of the site elements flipping over is cool but I prefer sites that leave no mystery as to where I'm going by clicking on a link - it just seems odd to me that it's an extra step to find out about a project before viewing it; personally I think it'd be better to pair the site thumbnail and the information on the same screen instead of requiring the user to only see one or the other. I'll make a note of that. magnificent7 posted:
I didn't know that. Thank you for telling me. Why does this only affect Microsoft, though? magnificent7 posted:No - you're right - but the clickable area is limited to just the height of the letters. I would definitely expand that area. Ah, you're talking about the no-click interface one. Yeah, I think I can fix that. Could be easy or difficult, depending on how I put it together in the first place way back when. magnificent7 posted:I know this will sound retarded and eye-rollingly stupid, but I don't have quicktime as the default movie player in my browser. Therefore, when I click on that link, I am presented with the option to download or open the file. This is something you need to consider; your employers will not always have the state-of-the-art setup. In my case, I don't know WHAT I did to this shitass browser but mp3s and movs wont play inline. One day I will fix it. But until then, whenever I click on a link to an mp3 or a mov file, my browser reminds me that I am retarded. Hopefully I am one of only 5 people on the planet who are this stupid, but on the offhand chance that there are a lot of people who don't have quicktime as their default player, it's a safer bet to put your mov files into flash movie players (flvs or whatever) since you know for sure that the user has flash. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's another thing I've been intending to get on, but was holding off for a new and hopefully better portal design. Gosh, I hope I have the FLV encoding software on my personal computer, though, 'cause I don't have access to the material I had access to when I was a student any more.
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Jan 8, 2008 00:33
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magnificent7 posted:I think the wide-open interface is a great idea but a horrible execution. But to set this up - I spent 4 years as a user-interface designer, so I tend to focus on "how easy is it to find what I need?" more than "how cool is this!!" So if I'm reading you right, it sounds like what you're saying is I need to come up with a different (maybe even only a slightly different) approach to express the same basic idea. Is that right? magnificent7 posted:But really - I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. But you asked why hasn't anybody called you for interviews - I'm just trying to point out what I see compared to some other sites I saw. Nonono, don't worry about it! I asked the question to get an answer, not to defend myself. Everything you've said is perfectly fair, I just needed deeper clarification, 'sall. magnificent7 posted:But to be fair - the people I ended up hiring, the website design wasn't really anything outstanding. If I were you, I would try to get some more real-world completed pieces in there, fewer comps. Even if it's just trading out logos for real businesses and filler text with real text. Okay. In school they warned us about using copyrighted material in our portfolios, even in comps. I don't want to get sued (though I must admit there were a couple of times where I fudged the rules even so). Do I not need to be so worried about that at this point after all, long as it's not something I'm doing for some client or other (a no-duh situation, in other words)? I don't think it would be a good idea for me to dump designs where I used custom identities, though, because that's my own work rather than something that was handed to us by a teacher, and I only put stuff that I'm proud of there, to that effect. That doesn't mean I can't add more, of course.
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Jan 8, 2008 11:46
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Can anyone tell me how to get work as an illustrator? Locationwise, I live in Washington State about halfway between Seattle and Portland, either of which are places I'd like to live. This is what my drawing usually looks like. I've been looking for design jobs for 3+ years now, since that's what my degree is in, but in that time I've only gotten three or four interviews. I don't even know where or how to begin looking for illustration work, though.
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Nov 24, 2009 12:02
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Authentic You posted:Are you talking about an actual job as an illustrator with a company, or freelance? Either would be good, though I prefer the former, depending on the specifics of the job, of course. Authentic You posted:I have no idea bout getting a real job, as I know nothing about the industry in your area. Washington state, although I'm willing to move if necessary. I'm somewhat interested in Portland, and while Los Angeles is an obvious place to live for this sort of thing, it's much farther away, so I can't visit it as often as long as I don't live there, and I definitely couldn't afford to live there before locking a job down. Authentic You posted:I do some freelance illustration, and all the jobs I've ever gotten have been through connections and just knowing the right people. Also, the internet is a wonderful thing. I'm in Pittsburgh, and my current illustration client is in Australia. Tell me more about that, please, keeping in mind that obviously I must not know the right people, because if I did, there wouldn't be a problem (or maybe I do know the right people, but just haven't identified them?). Authentic You posted:Freelance is great for adding stuff to your portfolio and getting more contacts and work. I have a former client who tips me off about upcoming jobs with big players like EA, though none of them would have worked out logistically. Good for you. Is there some way you can frame this that will make it useful to me? Deep Hurting fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Dec 25, 2009 |
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Dec 23, 2009 22:53
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