Quit Stifling My Creative Genius!

How to be a Graphic Designer, without Losing Your Soul, Chapters 7 & 8
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Clients, I suppose they're pretty important to have in this field and the designer-client relationship is an important one. It should be based upon give and take. Sure there's the occasional client that will practically let you do whatever you want, but the rest of the time you'll have to work with the client. If you're dealing with the latter situation cooperation and compromise are of the utmost importance. It's generally unproductive if you spend all your time with a client accusing them of stifling your creative genius and calling them names. Shaughnessy does say though that if the client is wrong you should challenge them, and in not doing so you'd be doing them a disservice. This brings up another good point, it helps when each party is able to accept that they may be wrong.

Another big part of this relationship is the presentation. There are a few important things to do here:

1. Be yourself. Should be easy enough, I've been being me for a long time now, I should be good at it.
   
2. No PowerPoint.
   
3. Be organized, have everything prepared and walk the audience through everything step by step.
   
4. Tell your audience what you're going to show them and then show it to them. Having an idea of what they're about to see helps them prepare before they actually see it. You don't want to completely blow their minds after all, you only want to do that a tiny bit.
   
5. You're presentation should work when you're not there. If it get's shown around, you want people to be able to understand it even if you're not there to explain anything.
   

The second chapter this week deals with self-promotion. There are too many other people doing this kind of work and you need to convince people to hire you. An important piece to this puzzle is a good reputation. For that we have the following formula: reputation = personality + work + x. 'X' can be any number of other things you can do such as write or talk about design, teach new designers, or behaving ethically. Find clients that maybe for a reduced fee will let you do boundary-pushing work, something that others will hopefully take notice of once it's in your portfolio. There are also design competitions you can enter, professional organizations to join, and conferences to attend. Another good thing to do is maintain a relationship with your schools. They're a good source of contacts, you can teach something, or show off some work. I know I've always enjoyed it when I got a chance to see the work of graduates of the IDD program.

 

Designing a Digital Portfolio, Chapter 4
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The format of a portfolio, there is no one right format to chose, but there are some that work better than others.

1. Zip Disks: I wasn't aware that these were still available. These are a bad idea unless of course you get sucked a decade or so back in time.
   
2. CD: CDs are good because they're cheap, they hold a sizeable amount, and are pretty universal at this point. The trick is making them not a pain to navigate and to use common file formats.
   
3. Mini CD: They're sleek, cheap, and since they're not as large as regular CDs they force you chose only your best work to put on them. There is of course a downside. A lot of people in the design field have nice, shiny MacBooks or iBooks which have slot-loading optical drives. These kinds of drives don't get along with mini CDs. In fact, they go beyond not getting along. Upon meeting they'll engage in a battle to the death. The drive will die and if the CD doesn't die with it, it won't matter, whoever was trying to use it won't like you anymore.
   
4. DVD: DVDs are good for showing off demo reels, and other than that, the space they offer isn't really all that necessary.
   
5. Laptop: Laptops are nice because they give you a lot of control. Everything you have should be compatible with your own machine and you'll know exactly how everything will look when displayed. There are a few things to take into consideration though. If you don't have access to a projector, everyone will have to look at the laptop screen. This usually means that you can't be looking at it so you need to know your presentation very well. Another thing to take into consideration is the viewing angle of the screen. If someone is sitting off to the side, will they still have a good view of what's being shown? You also don't need some fancy schmancy laptop for these presentations, which means my 3 and a half year old, super awesome Dell Latitude will do the job.
   
6. Email: An email with a small attachment can be an effective tool. One major plus is that they allow you to target a specific individual. There are some downsides though. First, an attachment is no match for a good website. Second, the size of attachments can be limited by email servers. And third, they can be seen as spam if they show up unexpectedly.
   
7. Personal Website: A website allows you do present a good amount of work to a large number of people. It can be easily linked to and shared and those viewing it can do so at their leisure. For web designers, it's also another way to show of what you can do. Flamaster2 is the portfolio site of someone who does a lot of work with Flash and it has a unique Flash based interface.
   
8. Group Presentations: This could be a gallery site or a sourcebook site consisting of several different portfolios. These seem to be for people who want an alternative to developing their own site.