April 2008 Archives

This week we welcome special guest Bennett Peji to the Reflex Blue Show, and what an enjoyable show it was! We're always thrilled when we get a chance to sit down with the best in the business (just listen to the first 3 minutes for Bennett's resumé. You will suddenly feel somehow inadequate), but even then it's a rare treat to find designers as passionate and excitable about their work as Peji. He specializes in urban and district branding managing multi-million dollar projects with potentially hundreds of clients, but got his start by opening his own graphic design company while he was still a senior in college to do a single logo. The man's got what we like to call range. 

Nate and I have always made it a policy to answer as much of our mail as possible (our emails are easy enough to find), but doing so on the podcast causes a delay based on recording schedules, and CJ may be on a timeline with these, so I'll answer in a written format this time.

CJ: I've been listening to The Reflex Blue Show since it was the Be A Design Cast and have always enjoyed it. I am starting a research paper for class where we interview a designer, and I know Nate and yourself always have cool anecdotes. Would you mind answering four or five short questions for my paper?

DB: Of course. Although cool anecdotes at eight in the morning will be limited.

After a week's hiatus we are back in full effect! Tom Nemitz makes his first Reflex Blue Show appearance as we list the Top 5 Designer Office Items (by category). and those categories are: Poster, 3-Dimensional Object, Wild Card, Reference, and Inspirational Tome. We want to see your answers below! Thanks for listening,

Doing what I refer to as contract design work at first seems to be the same as the freelance design work I spoke of last week: you do design for a client and they pay you. But you're not actually on salary. In those respects, I understand grouping contracting and freelancing together, but other than that, contracting seems to be a whole different job, although in my case and many others, it has been done at the same time as the freelance work we all speak so highly of.

The main difference to me is that you're either doing overflow work for a creative shop and/or ad agency, or working directly with a client on random jobs that the majority of are too small to outsource to an agency, and would be considered ideal for an in-house designer if they had one (or if it was a high enough priority). As before, these things I learned are listed in no particular order:

Our complete guide to getting a graphic design summer internship. We welcome Design Princess Ashley McFeely back to the show, well, to the Reflex Blue Show, for the first time ever to trade old war stories of internships gone by. Tales of portfolio samples; tales of getting boned by other interns who hate you, and tales of that one guy who got hit by a car. We also give out a Top 5 tips on how to land an internship, so don't think we forgot about you. A must for design students. Peace out --

During my first job it was encouraged that I started freelancing. After all, working on just one website all day, every day, could start to burn you out a bit - and make you start losing that creative spark that keeps you loving this sort of work. My freelancing technically ended at the same time as my fourth job. It's at that time, just over six years ago, that I went full-time working for my own company. The work started out the same, it just wasn't referred to as 'freelance' anymore.

As before, these are listed in no particular order, but since I get asked more about freelance advice than than any other in the field of design, there are ten this time:

A few weeks back Donovan and I gave a show stopping presentation at a student portfolio event called Meet the Pros (site and poster design by me). And even though we weren't their first choice, we were the first ones to say "yes" and low, PORTFOLIOWN'D was born. A rip-roaring take through the entire student portfolio process -- from purpose to process, order to interview, we cover how to make a great portfolio from top to bottom. Much of what you are about to hear we learned from our own experiences as former students, as professors, as interviewers and portfolio reviewers, and from people much smarter than ourselves. So sit back, grab a cold one, and relax on your inflatable couch. Enjoy.

True story: This one time? I totally got fired on April Fool's Day. Hilarity ensued.