Panhandler Posts Her Working-Rate
There are Five Big Things you want to avoid during an interview. They are:
That’s according to an article by Jerry S. Wilson, Senior VP-chief customer and commercial officer at Coca-Cola Co, in addition to his current incarnation as a motivational marketer, etc.
Categories: career choices · client meetings · hard choices · presentations
Tagged: career choices, hard questions, interviews
Super Hero, Straight Guy, and the Femme
Its all about you. Describe who you are and what you do. Its professional speed-dating. That was the exercise before us that evening.
How are you going to be concise, informative, engaging, and confident? Without the hems, haws, errrs, and latent narcissism that is just dying to get out and run with muddy boots on white shag carpeting?
It was a messy start. Words got stuck in my throat. I was stumbling. All the reference points in my head were now floating furniture in a zero-gravity un-fun house. I closed my eyes like I was trying to see a match-flare in the dark.
If I’d been sparring in the boxing ring, I’d be knocked-out. If I was driving, there’d be a fireball. Help!
Start at the beginning.
“I’m a graphic designer with over 31 years of print production experience”.
Good start! Establish a professional bona-fide that you hadn’t been living as a Trustifarian.
“I am also a photographer that works with vintage cameras and film because of their unique visual qualities. The photos are then composited into unique digital illustrations, or left as freestanding documents”
Lumpy, but getting closer. Onward!
“One of my long-term documentary projects is photographing 100-mile runners immediately after they finish, in a mobile studio set-up at the finish line of the race. I shoot with medium format camera, using black-and-white film”
A definable, tangible artifact!
The second hand is sweeping towards the finish.
“I also…”
DING!
And now it’s your turn to listen to somebody else’s pitch.
At the end, I was wrung out. No surprise there—these muscles are flabby from inactivity. But its a start. As I went through the 60-second pitch process, I found that I thought I had it almost-wired. Almost. Until I got home and realized that I’d left out a lot. Like the fact that I’m writing this in a way that’s hopefully concise, informative, and engaging.
Categories: career choices · client meetings · interview · networking
Tagged: definition, networking, pitch, presentation, resumé, selling
Abandoned 1920s Billboard, N of Mojave CA. 1989
I was contacted recently by a student who is going to be graduating this spring from Brooks. She included a survey and asked for answers so she could figure out her next move.
Tell me about yourself and your business.
Self-employed freelance print-production expert, with a sideline in photo
Where did you go to school?
Ohio University
Why did you choose that specific school?
A complicated story. There was no choice in the matter–my dad taught photo there, and with a faculty discount I paid (you’re not going to like this part) $79 a quarter (1973-77). However I had to cover all my own school expenses, while working nearly fulltime at his wife’s boarding stable. Much, much later I discovered that my grandparents had salted away money for my education…
What was your major?
Graphic design
How did you get started after school?
Looking for entry-level jobs. Got a job as a paste-up guy at a tiny magazine for $4.50/hr
Did your schooling prepare you for the industry?
What are your most effective methods in growing and sustaining your business?
Being adaptable, learning new skills, learning old-school techniques and processes. Showing up on time. Meeting deadlines. Not being a dick.
What was the greatest challenge in starting your business?
Overcoming the terror. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Is there any particular methods you would target and approach clients?
Be honest. Get a mentor
What are your favorite strategies of promoting yourself and your business?
Word of mouth. Social networking via LinkedIn/facebook. Its not surefire, but it helps.
What is your branding method or strategy?
Selling my experience.
What is the job market like in your market for new college graduates?
Really bad
What is the competition like in the industry?
Fierce
What is the competition like in your geographic area you promote and operate your business in?
Same as above
How do you determine your pricing?
1/ not being a CraigsList low-ball dick.
2/ realistically cover your costs, because this is a business
What would be your advice to a recent grad from a photography school about art direction for a career?
An effective art director is somebody who understands that looks alone are not going to make truly effective or interesting advertising.
I had a teacher who observed that fashion advertising is a world where the rules of gravity are suspended. I read W because the photography is alternately wonderful and horrifying, and gravity-free. Like the recent Marc Jacobs stuff where models are in a swirl of what appears to be mustard gas. Those are somewhat interesting images, but missed opportunities for art direction and design. By contrast there were some Chanel ads that were brilliant in their understated strength.
Are you growing as a business or entity?
I′m trying to grow my business as a specialty photographer using vintage cameras and film. Since my work is not insta-deadline driven, its a set of techniques like an illustrator
Would you recommend going to marketing classes or seminars?
depends on who’s teaching them. Get on a photo/designer list, ask questions, poke and pry. You’re trading money for talk.
Do you attend seminars?
Yes, very selectively
How is changing technology affecting your business?
Too numerous to mention. Suffice to say I watermark every image I post. Yes, its a dick move, but until I get paid for that image, its there, at 5% opacity, and meta-data’d as well.
What advice do you have for a student photographer desiring to enter the business?
Get ready to work very, very hard. Some joy, a fair amount of heartbreak. The stuff you thought was soul-deadening in school will probably pay your bills.
CODA
I mentioned my dad taught photography. Every quarter hed review the numbers for his Basic class:
450: annual number of students in Basic Photo [150 x 3 quarters]
100: number of students accepted into Intermediate, annually
25: number of students in Sr Class
10: number of students as graduate students
1: number of students making their living in photo, 5 years after graduation
This did not take into account the photo-journalism shooters, which was a different program. The numbers may have shifted over the years, I don know.
I sincerely wish you the greatest success in your efforts. I really do. Hopefully the soundings I offer will help in some way, and not be discouraging. If I can be of any other assistance, let me know.
Categories: academia · ancient history · career choices · client expectations · job search · post-graduation despair
Tagged: education, first job, graduation, pricing, working
A physical book/portfolio is essential, and a co-equal to a web presence.
A physical book lets an interviewer scan your work in less than a minute, and know exactly what you can and cannot do. They don’t have to wait for a Flash/media presentation to load. No cut on all the Flash wizards out there, but they want to get in, and out, fast.
They don’t care about anything else.
Sometimes an original item is a showstopper, and provides physical evidence that you are capable of handling large print projects.
I produced a 355pp high-end furniture catalog several years ago. This monster was printed at Geo Rice & Sons, lush and sweet. Ditto for annual reports, where 4/4 plus spots are more often used.
Exceptions would be telephone books, newspaper, OfficeDepot catalogs, etc.
Presentation styles come and go. I’ve seen slide portfolios, 8×10 trannies, matted flat pieces, laminated ‘place mats’, 8×10 vinyl books [in varying degrees of finish], godzilla attache cases, etc. Currently I’m in the higher-end vinyl sleeved book place.
A multtude of sins and defects can be hidden in a 50% reduction of a double-truck spread to an 8-1/2 x 11 page. Colors become more saturated and rich, etc.
But back to Flash and other media: this brings up questions of process versus content, which I’ll revisit at a later time.
A splendid time will be had by all.
Categories: career choices · interview · presentations
Tagged: Flash, portfolios, presentations, print
A wise man once said “I’m going to teach you everything you know, but not everything I know”. Unfortunately, he was eight feet high in a movie theatre.
The following are observations about the print production, agency life, and work in general. Its organized into easily-ignored categories.
That’ll do for now.
Categories: ad agencies · career choices · esoteric knowledge · workplace dynamics
This diagram is a way of explaining what can happen in the design/print production experience. Its also to show that things aren’t entirely grim here at “Mr Pre-Press Speaks!”
This schematic was drawn in 1990 using analog technology. However, all the working parts are unchanged. Avoid sticking your fingers in the moving parts.
Categories: career choices
I remember the day the light went on. I’d figured out the ad industry wanted young creatives and seasoned, experienced production people.
The ad biz wasn’t looking for another 49 year old art director. Especially one with less than 2 years in a B2B shop. The business looks for, and gets, 25 year olds; who are typically beaten with a stick for 60-80 hrs a week, and are paid a lot less than a senior guy or gal makes. Everyone hopes they make their bones before they fall over from complete burn-out.
However—a senior production guy/gal who knows their game is a different proposition. I went home that afternoon and rewrote my resume to say boldly “25 Years of Print Production Experience”. I started working regularly after that.
I didn’t set out to have a career in print production. Honest. But here I am.
Long before I was a junior art director I was a disgruntled print-production guy. I tolerated it as it enabled me to pursue other things like running 100-mile mountain races and other outdoor pursuits.
Late one August night in 1997, I got fed up with being fed up and started back to school. Foreplay was Art Center At Night for a couple of semesters. There was a pause. I was still looking.
In late 1998 I lucked out and found out about Mike Whitlow’s Bookshop. I sat in on a class and realized that the Bookshop was the real deal. This became my after-hours MFA. It took 2-1/2 years, and when I had my book, I was wrung out. But it got me a job as an art director in a small B2B shop,
Our primary client was Aon Insurance. I got laid off after 9/11. Aon’s New York office had been on the 105th floor of the South Tower. Aon and my agency went into vapor-lock along with the rest of the economy.
I spent the next 18 months looking for art direction gigs. The job market was not good. The sky was raining art directors. I reluctantly went back to freelance print-production.
One day in 2003 I was down at a huge direct mail shop in Marina del Rey. Looking around me, I saw men, mostly; guys who’d been group creative heads, creative directors, guys with TV reels. They were doing direct mail. And the tanks were rolling across the Iraqi sand, hotf00ting it to Baghdad.
And that’s when I got it. Something else also happened. Being an art director didn’t define my entire creative existence. And not being one was a relief. Didn’t have to stay up nights and weekends agonizing over things I didn’t care about. Being a Lee Clow whose sole life was advertising struck me as being a monocultural retard, like genetically modified corn.
I’d begun to allocate energy in a different way. And that freed up considerable calories to deal with both print production and my photography in two different capacities. I became a happier guy in the process.
The starting line is continually redrawn. Nobody can afford not to stay engaged. Or in a more cruel vein, the rest of you can go back to sleep while I pursue my studies. Don’t mind me if I eat your lunch.
While working at Grey Advertising in the mid-90’s I met Ben Worthing. Underestimate Ben, but only at your own peril. Yes, he wore powder-blue polyester suits, and looked like the kindly grand-dad you wished you’d had. But he never missed an opportunity to look ahead and learn.
Ben was officially kept on the payroll well after the mandatory 65 retirement age because he was too valuable to let go. He’d schooled the young whelps who later on ran the agency in his print estimating office when they were fresh out of school and useless.
One evening I asked Ben a FileMakerPro question which had been bothering me. His answer was straight to the point. I then asked him how come he “got” computers when many in middle and upper management simply didn’t.
He quietly told me that it went back to his flying days in the Army Air Force in 1942. He was trained as a navigator on a B-17. He didn’t get sent to England because one of his original crew got sick, and the crew was pulled from the flight line. This probably saved him from being shot down over Germany somewhere. He was reassigned to Fort Bliss as an instructor.
By the end of the war in 1945 he was training crews in B-29s. The transition was from an unpressurized, manually controlled, 3-ton payload bomber; to a fully-pressurized, high-altitude heavy bomber that had electro-servo motors for flaps, landing gear, bomb-bay doors that unleashed 10 tons of destruction.
So when the first Macs appeared in the late 80’s he saw a tool that would change his work life for the better. He could now turn estimates for outdoor boards in three locations and four sizes in less than an hour, instead of four hours using an assistant riding a crank-calculator and a pencil on an estimating sheet.
He smiled gently, and walked slowly back to his office on bad knees. I saw him in a completely different light. Ben had remained engaged and curious when his peers resisted. An open engaged mind is a powerful thing. That’s the kind of grand-dad we could all use.
You’ll excuse me—one of my cameras needs to be exercised.
Categories: career choices · graphic design · hard choices
Tagged: Art Center, Bookshop, war stories
One day last February, I was contacted by one of my cheerful placement agents. He asked if I was busy. Sad truth, at that moment, I wasn’t. He asked if I was interested in going to a remote part of the LA Metroplex to work on-site for a large B2B client. I was searching for satori, and opening my checkbook provided some trenchant insights.
I heard myself saying “I can’t be Sandra Bullock forever…”.
“And you’re gonna have to go on a date sometime!” was the snappy rejoinder.
Arrangements were made, and the next morning I was onsite.
The first order of business was a 495 page book that needed text revisions. By end of the week 10 days hence. Flipping through the mark-up it looked pretty straightforward.
The fun started when I tried opening the Quark document. I was barraged by repeated error messages telling me why it wasn’t going to open. Swell! A corrupted doc. Of course this was the only copy, the previous final doc on the server. Shutdown and reboot.
The second attempt at reopening was met by the same error messages. Consulting with other employees in the adjoining veal cubicles was met with semi-blank faces and admonishments to “keep hitting Return”.
OK. I did, and it finally opened. There it was, all 455 pages in one document. Cue up forbidding rumblings of distant thunder.
Consulting again with my littermates yielded advice to “save over the doc, and throw the old one away…”
No way. After taking a further look into this Amateur Hour bit of home-made sin, I made a decision.
I got up, walked over to the Graphics Supervisor, and explained what I’d seen, what happened and what I thought was the most effective way to deal with it.
Bottom line was I couldn’t and wouldn’t work on it in its current state. Otherwise they would be wasting their money, and my professional reputation was not negotiable.
A startled silence greeted this news. This wasn’t what they had in mind. Frankly I wasn’t about to humor them in this. The odds were good that Mr Murphy would make a dramatic appearance at the time of his own choosing. In the Continent of Failure, no man is an island, he is a peninsula.
They said “Uhhhhh……OK,…I guess”.
I imagine similar noises had been made at Initech when Lumberg was out of the office.
The next thing I did was to call my assigning agent and tell him exactly what happened. This was to establish my professional assessment of the situation, because I knew that within minutes he’d be called, and might be told something along the lines of “he won’t play nice” and so forth.
I was reassigned to other tasks. And I got to see the quality of Quarksmanship that oozed from that locale. It was not pretty.
Towards the end of the assignment, I got a call from my assigning agent, asking how things were going. I told him things were going fairly well, given the boundaries of competence and attitude displayed. This location was where bottom-feeding Quark operators went to die, because they couldn’t get hired anywere else.
Or anyplace that I would willingly work at.
Categories: career choices · hard choices · quark
Howdy!
I’m going to share out observations, opinions, facts, and fabulisms about advertising, design, pre-press, Mac publishing and other incidental aspects of the work experience.
After 30 years in the business, I might have something to say that might be of some use or amusement to you, Gentle Reader. To paraphrase the late alpinist Willi Unsoeld; “sometimes I will tell you the truth, and maybe a few lies, and you will like it in spite of yourself”. Unlike Willi, I do not intend to die on Mt Ranier.
Twenty years ago I was putting together a catalog over in East LA at a print shop. It was a strictly industrial setting. My wee cubbyhole was under a flight of stairs. I would appear at 0730, and work until 1530 in the afternoon. The bike ride home was pleasant enough. When the presses would start up in the back of the building, it was if a steam locomotive was on rollers getting a workout.
In the midst of this funkiness I had an epiphany about work. Here was where Saul turned to Paul. It hit me that for the previous ten years I had been the most useless worker imaginable. And like all revelations, they appeared in numerical order. I cringed as they were revealed, but wrote them all down.
Now I had stumbled off the mountain, and with new zeal, had Share The Word. Specifically with undergraduates where I had gone to design school ten years earlier. I got the nod from my ex-teachers, and verily I Shared It Out.
I introduced my self by noting that I was a working professional, in the early middle phase of my design/advertising career. I wasn’t going to trot out My Greatest Hits, but instead discuss basics.
I started off with the No-Brainers, like Showing Up On Time and so on. A mere shiver of ennui coursed through the gathered. Not content with that, I quickly moved along in the outline. I told the dewy ducklings that sooner or later in their career they would face Three Things:
1] Getting laid off or fired
2] Getting stiffed by a client
3] Going to court and/or resorting to other methods to recover the money.
The train had now jumped the tracks and gone straight through the cornfield. A sudden still filled the classroom. As if on cue, feet began to tap nervously.
Finally, a girl in the back asked plaintively “Don’t you have anything nice to say about design?”
I said “Yes I do. Design is a chance to make some beauty and order in the world, but you have to understand that this is a business”.
Glassy smiles on all present told me that nobody wanted any part of it. My show was politely over, and that was that. Or so I thought. The following year I tried to give the same talk. By polite deflections the answer was “no” but I was invited to hear Michael Manwaring who was giving a talk.
His presentation was His Greatest Hits, and it was fun to watch his show, and see it through the eyes of the students. After it was over, I stood in line to shake his hand. And then I asked him The Three Questions.
“Have you ever been laid off or fired?”
“Have you ever been stiffed by a client?”
“Have you ever been to court to recover the money?”
He smiled and said yes to all three. I thanked him for his time and patience.
So. In the course of this blog I will use actual cases, and most of the time I will conceal the names of the attendees to whatever trainwreck or comedic disaster that occurred.
We’ll all have a swell time.
Categories: career choices · introduction · money
Tagged: , introduction
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