i’m excited to show off that finally, after 10 years of having only outdated business cards with pictures of mulder and scully on them, i have business cards!!! i designed them in illustrator and photoshop, and used www.overnightprints.com to print them. i am quite happy with the results (really cheap too). however, i do notice that the glossy coating on black ink tends to show fingerprints… maybe i won’t get glossy next time.
Filed under: career
6. “hit the ground running” = we sure hope you know what you’re doing because this shit had to get done yesterday.
Filed under: career
i’ve noticed that a lot of job postings use nearly the exact same catch phrases to describe the characteristics of their ideal candidates…
- “must be a team player” = we want you to do bitchwork without complaint
- “have exceptional attention to detail” = we make tons of mistakes, it will be your job to fix them. and don’t miss any or you’re fired
- “must be a self-starter” = we know everything and don’t have time to teach you. come with psychic abilities or don’t bother to interview (thanks, B)
- “ability to work independently and as part of a team” = this strange oxymoronic statement should be read: “no shit.”
- “thrive in a fast-paced environment” = we will never give you enough time to do anything but half-assed work because we don’t have the balls to tell our clients their demands are impossible to fulfill.
now, maybe i’m being judgmental, but what’s with the lack of creativity? especially from “creative” companies. a job posting should reflect the culture of the company, rather than make it sound exactly like all the others…
first, the techy nerd update: I went on a bit of a spending spree and bought a RAM upgrade (up to 2 GBs now) for my macbook. the difference is amazing!!! I’m much happier with the performance of my baby now. hey, look at that, i’m using terms of endearment. it must be love.
I also bought a canon mp460 off of my friend for cheap. so, I decided since i saved money that i would splurge on the bluetooth wireless adapter. WHeeee! Now I can print things from my laptop from anywhere in the room. I haven’t tested yet to see if i can print from the living room, but that would be awesome.
and then, the updated RESUME. I’ve been busier than ever before (well, some finals weeks back in college were pretty bad, but at least now i’m getting paid for what i do) working all day long for Arnold and then going home and working on stuff for the awesome folks at Rainbow Media. I’m tired.
I also realize how much better it is to work from home. Freelancing full time is a weird stress: great to have people to talk to and interact with, but sucky to be sitting at a desk knowing you’re getting paid to sit there and get things done but not always having things to do or not always wanting to be working at full speed. I’ve become a fan of project rate pricing, because I can goof off all i want, guilt free, as long as i get stuff done.
Filed under: career
wow, I let the whole month of February go by without posting! This isn’t entirely due to laziness, though certainly that is a factor. I visited new york at the beginning of the month to meet with a client (which was so awesome!) and came back and got deathly sick. I was pretty much bed-ridden for 3 weeks, even visited the ER, but I managed to get the project done completely on time, thank goodness.
Since being sick I’ve slowly started going out again (dancing, of course) and I’ve been getting a lot of leads on freelance gigs. I took a contract job with Arnold, working on their theTruth.com campaign. It looks like I’ll be taking some flat files and translating them into the first round of Flash movieclips with some basic movement and interaction, then passing that on to a hardcore back-end programmer dude. This kind of work sounds like the perfect happy place for a designer with an engineering degree 
. To do this I had to turn down a couple projects with people I’d love to work with. I wish I could do it all!
I’ve also had the glorious experience of being contacted for full-time positions. VisibleMeasures, a Brightcove partner, would have been an exciting and great fit but I was just too busy. And amazingly, through this very blog, mediumbold found me and suggested I come in for an interview for a web developer position. HOORAY INTERNETS!
It’s all moving so fast, I’ve only been free from Brightcove for a month (healthy for only a week) and already I’m busier than I’ve ever been (possibly ever wanted to be). It feels like when you break up after a long relationship and think to yourself “I think I’ll just enjoy being single for a while” and then all these amazing hot guys come out of nowhere to make you offers you cant refuse. It’s exactly like that. You know, if you replace “hot guys” with “nerdy techy guys.”
“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
from www.lifeclever.com. i’d say that’s pretty true about a lot of things in life. I need to just make more stuff, all the time, be making stuff, and then i will get better. the problem is that i havent designed a portfolio page in a while… a year! i gotta stop putting so much pressure on myself, and just make it and then improve it.
i am having a serious problem finishing this damn thing. i am filled with questions, am i good enough, am i creative enough, am i in the right field… i love learning how to do things but i can’t seem to develop ideas from scratch, and when the pressure is on, like this portfolio is weighing heavy on my shoulders right now, i seem to have even less confidence.
i see so many awesome sites out there and think, i could do that! or, i could totally make that! but, when the time comes i don’t come up with the ideas. and the more skilled i get, the more i realize how uncreative i am. i feel like ive had this problem for a while, definitely in college but even earlier. i enjoyed creating and designing websites and working in a creative setting (x-files original art archive) but i really didnt create that much art on my own. and in art classes, it was so stressful to try and come up with ideas for projects.
maybe i need to keep a journal more, i guess this blog might be helpful. or carry a sketchbook. or take more photos. or something. or maybe im just not an “out-of-the-box” kind of thinker. that would suck, id like to hope that someday i will be really good at what i do. whatever it is.
and the patriots lost. that sucks.
and its really cold. and lonely. and those suck a lot too.
Filed under: career
i went to central kitchen with some of the guys from one of the product teams i’m working on at brightcove, got a great chicken dinner and creme brulee for dessert. oh and a lovely glass of syrah.
i note this because a good part of the 3 hour dinner was taken up with talking about 3 of the guys’ former companies, adobe, macromedia, & allaire. pretty interesting to pick the brains of such brilliant developers.
one comment from the night that stands out is what sean said: that the real successful developers are the ones where someone knows what they want to build and work to find a way to accomplish it. he also said that you have to make noise to climb the ladder. i dont feel like either of those are particularly in my nature, and that’s left me feeling kinda bummed.
he did also mention that the san francisco adobe office is a great place to work and he could hook me up. i dont want to move again but the offer is tempting.
Filed under: career
NATIONAL CHAMPS!!! WOOOOOOO!
my awesome ladies judi and catherine came over for moral support, which of course i didnt need because we clobbered ohio state. HA.
anywho, this is career-related because catherine is a web developer and pointed me in the direction of some additional career possibilities (bigbad, pixelbridge) and renewed my excitement about some others (mediumbold, modernista).
Filed under: career
today i discovered linkedin. this site is awesome! social networking for grown-ups!
hmmm, am i a grown-up now?
felix made this awesome site, a design rss feed aggregator. i'm addicted.
he also suggested checking out squarewave. can't tell where they are located, he says they are in boston though.
Filed under: career
currently, i am a designer at brightcove. but, this is a contract position, and that contract ends at the end of january. everything is pretty up in the air here until the new budgets come out, but regardless of that, i’d like to see what i can find and who i can meet in places that will give me more opportunities to grow, both creatively and techinically.
anywho, this means i gotta get cracking on that portfolio.
