Fixed portfolio linking; Featured Images explained

l-r: Moa Orrbacke, Smith Newnam, Wei Hsu, Waleed Soufi

First, a Public Service Announcement from your friends at Coroflot:

We fixed the direct portfolio linking problem. Several users recently pointed out that the direct address to a portfolio main page (www.coroflot.com/yourname) did not work if the "www" was left out (coroflot.com/yourname). Realizing that the entire rest of the universe dispensed with "www" a couple years back, we've now fixed this particular oversight, so you no longer have to look embarrassed when potential employers "can't find" your corefolio. You're welcome.

On to other new stuff: Featured Content. When you click on Member Gallery, the resulting default view is sorted by Featured, which careful viewers will notice is different from Most Likeys or Most Recent.

The Most Likeys view is the one that summarizes the opinions of Coroflot users who like mashing on that Me Likey button -- lately this has been giving a lot of love to Belarussian-French designer Dzmitry Samal and Utah-based illustrator Aaron Hughes, among others, and we have to concur: they do some spectacular work.

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Happy New Year. We totally changed Coroflot.

If you haven't noticed already, a number of things are changing here on Coroflot, and while I'll be going into the specifics in a lot more detail over the next few weeks, I thought today might be a good day to officially introduce what we've taken to calling Coroflot Version 5. It is, after all, the first full work day of 2009 for a lot of Coroflot users (though I'm certain that many of the freelancers among us have been cranking along full speed since last Thursday or Friday), and new years mesh with new offerings in an elegant sort of way.

The super-short description of the changes is: Coroflot is getting networked.

Now, the Coroflot/Core77 community has been active and growing since the mid-90s -- that's like, the stone age in internet years -- and I can attest personally to the usefulness of knowing and meeting people through their portfolios, and their posts on the discussion boards. This already constitutes a useful network, but one with plenty of unrealized potential for links and communications between designers, students and employers.

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FLOTspotting: Malaria Must Go, by Andrew Stordy

From the Coroflot portfolio of : Andrew Stordy (London, UK)

Featured Project : Malaria Must Go

Recently coming out of the RCA's Industrial Design Engineering program, engineer/designer Andrew Stordy has put an enormous amount of thought and effort into developing a system to reduce infections from malaria--the world's single largest killer of children. Starting with an extensive research trip to Tanzania, the Malaria Must Go project seeks to work in conjunction with existing anti-malarial technologies like pesticide-impregnated mosquito nets, offering a pair of products that repel and/or kill mosquitoes with locally-sourced materials.

The two prototypes--a charcoal-powered mosquito killer (shown above) and a modified mosquito-repelling oil lamp--are explained and demonstrated in a long but fascinating video on Stordy's website, and the work has earned Stordy both an IDEA Gold award and a 2008 Dyson fellowship, among others.

It's rare to see this sort of research-driven, holistic problem solving at the student level, and even rarer to see it applied to such an urgent, global problem. Deeply encouraging.

Questions for Aaron Hayes of Courage Bicycle Mfg.

Close readers of the captions on Core77 photo galleries may already be familiar with Courage Bicycle Manufacturing from the North American Handmade Bicycle Show spread from earlier this year. Although only mentioned in one frame, Courage made a good-sized splash at NAHBS, taking the coveted Best New Builder award for their clean, subtly retro, fastidiously detailed works of rolling art. Like a lot of custom frame shops, though, Courage is really just one guy: Aaron Hayes, a 33-year-old Portlander, who is of exceptional interest to Creative Seeds because he's also an Industrial Designer.

There's plenty of precedent for this sort of shift. Designers who do studio work--especially in consultancies--rarely stay there for an entire career, often moving on to start their own companies after a few years. The hectic pace of the studio environment is a frequent explanation, as is a desire to see a more solid relationship between the design process and the finished product. For those reasons, moving into a field like custom fabrication can make perfect sense for an experienced designer, though the furniture builder with an ID degree is perhaps a more familiar example.

Aaron's particular choice--frame-building, a highly specialized discipline--combined with his rapid success in the endeavor makes for an interesting spin on the "what else can you do with a design degree?" story, and he was kind enough to answer a few questions via email earlier this week.

There seems to be an unusual fondness for bikes among designer-types, and Industrial Designers in particular. Why do you think that might be?
I think that stems from many designer types wrenching on their bikes as kids. I fondly remember completely disassembling my first real road bike, and struggling to get it back together. It taught me a lot about how stuff works.

Before founding Courage, you worked as an Industrial Designer here in Portland. Can you give us a quick timeline: school, work, and freelance?
I graduated from ASU with a BS in Design in 2000, then moved to Portland to work at Ziba. I'd interned there for a year in school, so I had the luxury of a job waiting for me. Ziba was like a kind of graduate school--we worked hard and lived the "designer" life-- but I got burned out after 3 years of late nights and uber-cool t-shirts.

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How much should I charge? Six things to consider when setting your freelance rate.

Creative Seeds isn't primarily a blog about freelancing, but it does tend to come up frequently. Freelancing, it would seem, comes with the territory: the creative professions are drawn to contract employment far more frequently than the professional world as a whole. Whether as a sideline to a staff job, an interim between more traditional positions, or a default for recent graduates, freelancing is especially well-suited to the project-oriented, sprint-and-rest nature of the creative process.

This last category of freelancer--the recent graduate--is of special note, because newly minted designers are in the doubly daunting position having to both find work and figure out the financial aspects of that work once it's obtained. If you've just entered the creative contracting world, you're in for an exciting and often unnerving ride, and are probably drowning in questions, not the least of which is how much you should be making.

Unfortunately, unless you attended an exceptionally pragmatic school, you probably didn't get any solid advice on determining how much you're worth. Which is a shame, because it's simultaneously one of the most important and most difficult questions to answer when it comes to your early professional success. While there won't be a magic number at the end of this article, it does attempt to sweep together a few major considerations that should help you generate your own, based on much casual discussion with creative freelancers over the past four years:

1. Young freelancers and recent grads almost always ask for too little.
It's true. In dozens of conversations with friends who have taken on contract work, the majority observe that they undervalued themselves when starting out. Offering a good bargain is part of getting your foot in the door when you're inexperienced, of course, but the majority of newbies will err on the low side.

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Questions for Jordan Nollman of Sprout Studios

Even by the strictest reckoning, Jordan Nollman has had a spectacular career as an industrial designer, evidenced by a quick look through his website, which features successful products for Virgin Atlantic, Bose, Dell, Burton Snowboards, Polaroid, Nokia, Nike, and dozens of others. After six years on the staff of San Francisco-based Astro Studios, Jordan recently decided to leave, focusing on his personal design firm Sprout Studio, and expanding a long-term role designing personal grooming and related products for Clio Designs.

Over the past decade, you've designed product, environment and packaging for IDEO, Ziba, Razorfish, Astro, Altitude, Eleven...an astonishing array of high-profile consultancies, but you decided to pack it up and work independently. What makes working for yourself more appealing than for some of the world's top firms?
For me it's a personality thing, and it's about having more freedom. Working independently, I can really drive projects, whereas when you consult for large client firms there are all sorts of other factors. You can work for a year or more on a one or two million dollar project, and it'll get killed before release. Or the division that was supporting it gets cut. All sorts of things.

At the end of the day, you want to get some stuff made, and working at a consultancy for larger clients that's often not the case. Working independently for Clio, on the other hand, I had seven different products go to market in six years, and that was just through freelancing on the side. It's exciting, getting to see your design get made, and the cycle tends to be faster with smaller companies. I designed an iPhone case for Press8 Collective, for example, and it got made in two weeks.

How do you find clients as an independent?
I've got a really good network. Back in school I really latched onto anyone I could, to the point that a lot of my clients now are actually referrals from other designers. Working for Astro in San Francisco was a real network-expanding experience as well; it's like venture capital central there, and I'd get a call every other day from someone who was cashing out from the tech industry and wanted to develop a product of some sort.

You were in the Bay Area for 6 years. Why the move back to Boston?
Three main reasons. First, Clio made me a fantastic offer, essentially making me their chief creative designer if I'd come out here. Second, I have a daughter now, and my whole family's in Boston, and it's important to have that around. But on top of that, the design culture in Boston has really come up recently. Maybe it's the fascination of the Big Dig, or all the schools, but there are a huge number of design firms here, and the IDSA Boston chapter is maybe the only really strong chapter I've seen. I love San Francisco, and may go back eventually, but it's super-saturated with designers...I had a lot of peers there, but here in Boston, I've got a lot of mentors.

Continue reading "Questions for Jordan Nollman of Sprout Studios" »

Where the (Creative) Jobs Are: Coroflot Does Some Math

The economy's stumbling, an enormous bailout is looming, and you're just a lowly creative professional, looking for work. Well, it could be worse; you could be a mortgage broker in Phoenix.

Job hunting in the creative professions, whether for a junior just out of school or as part of a career move, has always been a long, thankless slog, whose success often hinges on circumstances entirely beyond the hunter's control. A volatile economy is one, yes, but designers get hired and fired because of changes in management, business fads, new technologies (just ask those lucky few with interaction design training), even a rise or fall in certain kinds of media coverage. The good news, as far as it goes, is that the Creative Economy seems to follow a trajectory largely detached from the rest of the job market. Bad times for auto workers and shop keepers, for example, don't necessarily translate into lots of graphic designers out of work; on the other hand, good economic times don't always mean more creative jobs either.

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FLOTspotting :
Thomas O'Connor

From the Coroflot portfolio of : Thomas O'Connor
(Detroit, MI)

Featured Project : USB Floppy Drive

What Do You Look For in a Designer? : Alexander Romer / Collectif EXYZT

1. What do you look for when hiring a designer?
I've mostly worked in and with collectives, so any designer hired would need to be comfortable in this kind of work group--which sometimes means making a lot of fuss about nothing, and sometimes a big mess. Nonetheless, I think the only way to keep a collective working and healthy in the long term is for each designer to be quite individual and autonomous, and have her own opinion. The result is more a kind of synergy of individuals who share their ideas, rather than just some honey made by a bunch of mindless worker bees.

Whoever I hire would need to make space for others; interpret and advance an initial idea, and also, of course, take pleasure in developing projects with others. But probably the most important trait would have to be patience: a collective decision is often followed by the disappearance of some of the members...

Continue reading "What Do You Look For in a Designer? : Alexander Romer / Collectif EXYZT" »

FLOTspotting :
Caspar Schmitz

From the Coroflot portfolio of : Caspar Schmitz
(Cologne, Germany)

Featured Project : umbrella table