Addicted to Coke

So I was doing some work when I noticed a link on the top of the  Graphic Design Blog. I’m about 63.247% certain it’s paid for that locatio. It would be ridiculous if they weren’t.

Anyway, it’s a mini article that recommends Logosnap.com.

Upon first glance, I, like many other designers, went, omg, I can’t believe they did that!  Members of AIGA are surely all over that page! I actually liked the Red Tree Communications one, but upon further investigation into the site (first page), you’ll notice it’s one of the “Custom” designs.

I played with it, it’s kinda cute, I guess, but the clip art, is, well, clip art and looks like…clip art. But if you’re a guy starting his own plumbing  business with a negative budget, this isn’t bad. You don’t want that guy anyway. I don’t think you do. Maybe you’re into that kind of thing.

That guy is going to be like the Home Depot customer. “Well, Lowe’s will do it for two hundred less and give me a military discount.”

No, they won’t… And is this is how you start off all your business relationships? I can see why you have quite the budget to spend here.

These people won’t make it past the city limits. You really want your design to be Pontiac-renowned?

I’m not a big logo designer anyway, so a site like this might actually help me, just to fill my head with enough crappy images that my brain says, “ENOUGH. I can do better! Here, do this and leave me alone!”

So yeah. I don’t care now. It doesn’t bother me. Besides, with designers making hundreds of thousands off gems like these, you might just need some logosnap.

After talking with a fellow designer yesterday, I realized my real true career goal…To head a design studio. I don’t want to freelance. I need coworkers. But I also need to call a lot of the shots. Most of them. The vast majority of them. I am bossy when I need to be. Luckily, I can run a business provided I have actual control over things, and can use marketing war strategies, good cool stuff like that. Let’s face it. This blog is propaganda and provides a little extra income from ads.

So there. I’m going to start a design firm. Of course, it’ll have pretty much the same kind of set up as freelancing at first. It won’t get complicated until me and…whoever I end up getting to actually work for me start rolling in dough. First, we need a name.

I need a brand new business identity, something just far separated enough for me to be myself, but not myself. You know?

Whatever, just roll with it. …I need to learn Flash. Fast.

I rather swiftly got and accepted an in-house design job with a wholesale distributor. Yes, this means a lot of sweatshop design, but this is part of paying my dues, kind of like an initiation beating/hazing for design. I’ll lump that in with the fact I could not find one I was qualified for to save my life while I was still at the Orange Box.

The actual work I’m doing so far isn’t hard, but it is tedious, and hardly requires actual design skills. It’s copy paste, highlight and make bold design, all flowed into two columns in Quark. Time limits the amount of creativity, and I’m trying to get my speed up on research and placing the necessary items into the flyer before I go back and do something nuts like add a gradient behind new items. I actually have no idea how on schedule I am, but I don’t want them to get behind because of me. Contrary to popular belief, I am deadline oriented.

The other problem is that my commute is on the heinous side. It’s a 40 mile haul across town, literally over the river and through the woods.  My problem is the section of I-20 before I-77 that gets clogged at that exact time in the morning. I could leave at 7:30 or 7:50, but I never, EVER reach I-26 until 8:12. I love driving, but that’s enough to make me miss my freelance commute.

I, somehow, I don’t know how, am also people oriented. I can’t work by myself. I mean, I can, and do. But I need a team.  And I think I need actual clients, peoplr with problems that I can solve. This massive monthly flyer they make…Exactly how successful is it? What featured items sell? Would these items sell anyway? Are these things even  on sale? Only one gun had a “save 25$” sticker on it on the front page. Only a handful of the hundreds of items on these 36 15×11″ pages are new. So how effective is this thing?

But if this was totally effective marketing , nested styling that InDesign features would save a ton of time. Hours. Once the style were established, it should be copy paste. I don’t know for sure though, because I’ve never undertaken such a massive…undertaking. So many items for so many pages…and they do this every month? Rather, I’ll be doing this every month! We have InDesign CS4. Why are still using Quark 7? At least 8 would be excusable.  I’d forgotten how counterintuitive Quark was…indeed, the whole Mac thing…Why can’t I just highlight an item and hit delete?! Why does the firefox back button only work SOMETIMES!?  If I close the last firefox window, why not close the program?! And if you can run more programs on a mac than a pc, why do things just up any unexpectedly quit when I’m running more than Quark and iTunes at the same time? Everything but calculator has done this.

That is a very expensive machine I’m using at work. I always thought Mac was kind of like the BMW of computers, you know? Yes, my little ‘96 Nissan Maxima will get me from A to B, but the BMW is made with better stuff, right? Quark crashed and lost an entire page on my fourth day there, because OS X somehow lost the font folder when they added my account.

You guys! I’m a designer! I wanted to make the cult switch! I wanted to be like everybody else in the design world! I joined AIGA and everything!

I was a Department Supervisor for a year over a variety of departments. Here’s some things I’ve learned:

It’s Not For Me. That setting anyway. You were given a lot of responsibility and not much flexibility in how to achieve your goals. If you want to make a change, be prepared to have an e-mail sent to everyone in the world except the person who can tell you yes, who will say no anyway.

I Don’t Like Wingstacks in my aisles. I hate them. Corporate mandates them, and if your store is not laid out like the newer ones, you could easily end up with a cart of Outdoor Bleach in the hardwood flooring aisle. (It is written somewhere somehow that if the Box did not have primer at the paint desk that they would fail as a business.) I don’t mind strategic clipstrips, or even those large ones with a lot of caulk on them. I don’t mind sidecaps. But wingstacks are always in the way and they look terrible 73% of the time. They are ugly, a safety hazard, break easily, and you can never find an empty one if you need one. It’s the little things like that that bothered me…Being held responsible for big things like sales plan when I didn’t even have control over what I could put on a cart blocking half my aisle.

Running a Store Is Hard. But not unreasonably so. I learned a lot about the business part of it. The Box has a lot of tools (reports, metrics) so you could really micromanage your business, (if you had the time to look at them, giblets, even print them out!) I learned to cope with the fact that numbers existed and could help me out…except for all those totally useless skus and model numbers I STILL have in my head.

But most importantly,

I Learned to Thank People. Let me rephrase that. I Learned to Ask For Help. Then I needed to thank people. I was a really headstrong, stubborn person, with the “If I need assistance, then I must be incapable” mentality. I still am sometimes. But I’ve gotten a lot better about it. I was overwhelmed, especially when I was having my weird heart problems, and I finally learned to delegate and depend on other people. With that, I learned to thank people. I never did it as liberally before. People would thank me, and I was just like, it’s nothing. I’m just doing my job. But I learned it’s important to a lot of people, even if only on a subconscious level, just to be acknowledged for the work they have done. Not just for you, but for everyone. Especially in retail. They didn’t have to do that. It’s retail. They were probably about to walk out of the door right now, just because they were fed up with…whatever. If you take care of your people, they will take care of you, and everything will take care of itself.

Specifically, the Orange Box.

It’s Not For Me. It’s not what I want. I’m pretty sure no one says, “I’m going to be the Department Supervisor of…whatever they want me to be!!” when they graduate from college. I’m about 300% sure no one has said that in kindergarten. When I lost my job, as a knee-jerk reaction, I applied to a bunch of other stores. Then I got a call from one and realized, What am I doing? I finally got the kick in the pants to graduate from this stage. I have a Bachelors degree, website, and need for crying out loud.

Customers Are Fascinating. Some of them are great, some of them aren’t. All of them have a story, and you can almost always turn the experience to your advantage, if only for your own amusement. Politeness stuns you. Rudeness tests you. Impatience makes push the limits of just how fast (or slow) you can fulfill the request. Your confidence can mean everything to your customer. Your expertise can mean just nothing. Everyone is different.

Customers Are Not Always Right. There are some cases, like cosmetic issues, where you’re just not going to win. There are other cases, like the guy who wants to run extension cords behind his wall, where it is your responsibility to stop him. This applies in design, too. Your customers are paying you for a reason. If you know it’s wrong, don’t back down. In retail, you don’t get a chance to see if your client is someone you want to work with. Just because a customer has money doesn’t give you an excuse to be an enabler. It’s bad for you, your customer, and probably innocent bystanders.

Graphic Design is Important. Very important. The sign packages sent to me by corporate were glossy, sexy, neatly packaged, easy to assemble, even with little instructions telling you how and where to put them, and how long putting them up should take. They matched the store’s designs almost seamlessly. But that was the problem. All the signs looked the same. No one knew we were having 10% off our appliances until we told them about it, because the showroom was already covered in other small orange and white signs. The whole store was like that. After thousands and thousands of dollars in marketing and design, a single store is completely orange and white, and very few customers notice/read of the signs. So what happens when you make a simple, neat and clean sign in Word on green or blue paper? People notice you have a sale going on and they buy things! At one point, we made a large chalkboard to advertise it, so I could easily update the sales. Soon, the whole store had one for every department. It was absurd. …And guess who had to make a ton of them.

See Associate for Details. And you’d better know all of them. Most people won’t bother you, but the people that do want to know, and want to know the weirdest stuff. Stuff that you’ve never been asked because you know what you’re doing and you’ve been doing it for years, but this person has No Clue. Your job is to help them. Know your stuff and be confident about it, because the moment your customer senses you’re uncertain is the moment they lose trust in everything. You, the store, the product, the human race, everything can go down the drain for this person if you’re not sure you can still get the powder blue grout, and/or have the project done in six weeks. (This is a double-edged sword for me, because I won’t claim to be an expert in anything I don’t know as easily and readily as the alphabet, but I know enough that a lot of people will simply introduce me as the expert. So, it got awkward when my coworker says, “This is the plumbing expert right here!” And I, covered in paint, I go: “Uh…hi.”)

I Actually Liked Being in Charge.I never really thought I would. I just kinda was in that, I do as I’m told, and I won’t get fired. I thought I was, anyway. I enjoyed throwing mulch and driving the forklift and doing manual labor as very pure, very zen. Getting work done was great. But I hated doing it by myself. There was no real drive unless I had a team right there with me to succeed. While I worked the night shift in garden, I liked it, I thought I did…It was a lot less stressful, but man, it was boring. We were short staffed, the recession was in full swing, and the hours just dragged. I had no goals, very few challenges, and it just sucked until that last hour when I could get my heavy work done while there were no customers. I missed having a say in things, being responsible and even getting into trouble. Of course, in retail, especially at the Orange Box (where they got rid of HR managers in the stores (they decided to bring that little idea back that same day a lot of people got fired)), there’s a lot of bogusness and petty, moderately inconvenient backstabbing and total job insecurity…not to mention the truly insane scheduling (that’s what broke me), but it was a lot of fun. As a result, I will definitely be considering Creative Director or a similar title as one of my goals.

You Can Do It. Home Depot actually did, oh! Oh. The Orange Box (sorry!) actually did teach me that I can do a lot of things on my own that I never would have done myself before I started there. Note to Corporate: Those long PK e-learning classes are WORTHLESS. The Rapid Web-based ones with the vendors aren’t bad, but the ones with Bob and Maria…Man. Weak. If you want to learn, talk to an associate that knows what they are doing. I learned everything I know from my coworkers. You can do it. We can help. We won’t do it for you, but we’ll try to help. Usually. Just don’t piss us off first.

Your Coworkers are your Family. Retail workers, especially the sales floor associate at the Orange Box aren’t there because they’re too stupid to be working somewhere else. If you asked a lot of people why they were still at my old store, many would say because they love their coworkers. I still visit the store, even though it’s further than this one within walking distance. My coworkers ranged from role models to purely annoying, awkwardly polite to painfully embarrassing even in private. They’re weird, but they’re like family. You didn’t pick them. (And if you did, what were the alternatives? o_O;) You spend more time with them than your own family most of the time, anyway. They can be your references, or they can get you fired, or make or break at least 40 hours of your week every week.

I Can Sell Things. I learned that you don’t have to use surreptitious, underhanded tactics and have traded your soul for an overly-animated pushy creep to be a good salesman. All you have to do is know your product and know your customer. Figure out what their problem is first, then tell them the solution and explain why you think it would be best. If they have any objections, take those extra details and factor them in and again, offer a solution. Can’t help them? Then you can’t help them. The only thing that I could not sell was credit cards. You really can’t have a soul to push those.

Nothing Goes Right. Not a single damn thing goes smoothly. You ordered a blue tub, the warehouse shipped you a rather large blue sink. You find your missing boxes of Mother’s Day flowers in the back of the truck carrying the 4th of July hot buys. Someone always changes their mind. Not about simple cabinet arrangements in a kitchen design, not about the color of the blinds or the tile, not about how the budget suddenly got smaller, but bigger, impossibly disastrous, borderline incurable things. Things like someone got canned and now every system in the company is down for a few hours. (Nice one, whoever you are! (We got fired on the same day.)) Things like that number in that column is down 10% from the number in that column, and we won’t even get started on the ones three rows down. Things like the regional vice president is coming tomorrow and we don’t have a giant grinning carpet roll near the front door. Things like the terrifyingly ever-growing and horrifically mortifying secret crush on one of your bosses. But it’s stressful, but it’s actually a lot of fun, or at least super funny when you step back and look at it all. As long as the little wrong things aren’t hurting the big picture, you’ll live.

Alright, real quickly, I’m going to talk about my website, the hosting I use and such. I was recommended Hasweb years ago it by a friend, and I’ve been with them since. I’ve got unlimited bandwidth and way more space than I’ll need in the next three years. They do everything I need them to do: Keep my stuff and be online. They’re cheaper because they don’t have a call-center support, but people like me really don’t need that anyway. The few times I have needed to contact them is done painlessly through e-mail, they respond promptly, and I don’t have to be on hold listening to Jack Johnson for a half hour. As an added bonus, you always have a copy of your issues and their response. I also have my domain name set up through them (Hostdime, really) for ~15.99$ a year.

Included in that I have cpanel, which I heart, and with that comes Fantastico De Luxe, which I avoided until about last year because of the name and ominous grinning icon. I had no idea what it was and I didn’t think I needed it. Fantastico is great for experimenting with applications like Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, and Zen cart. It installs these and a whole slew of other things for free. I say experiment because it can get weird if you don’t update your installations properly. I’ve had it happen once to a blog, but not really bad enough to turn me off the whole thing. I just have this empty folder on my server now that I can’t move or delete for some reason. I may never know why. I can rename it, but I can’t get rid of it!

HOW magazine’s marketing outline for February (don’t forget that weekly networking!):

Week 1 – Create concepts for your first self-promo piece.
Week 2 – Take copy from Website and Revise for promo-piece.
Week 3 – Create Comps and show it to a few clients, friends, other designers.
Week 4 – Finish Promo Piece and get it printed.

What about January? You ask. Well, that consisted pretty much of: Build your website. Which I kinda did. I pretty much took my old template (which most people seemed to like (even though I really liked Kikoeru better)) and moved around a lot of elements, which basically resulted in me…well, recreating the entire site.

My plan: Chinese New Year is coming up, and I love sure love Chinese New Year! This year is my year, too, the year of the Tiger. Sounds like I’ll be making Chinese New Year cards.

Oh! And there’s Valentine’s Day, too, which happens to be on Lunar New Year. And no, I’m not going to try to combine the two holidays like Target did..(Although it was absolutely adorable.)

If you want to get a jump start, week 1 of March requires you to choose your target market to start with and research prospects.

My chi is blocked. Literally. I was making great progress on my website, but I was finding it increasingly more difficult to concentrate because a certain “I hope my knees would just shut up and fall off.” thought kept creeping into my head. Not really creeping, more like a sort of annoying prodding, kind of like how my dog begs me to play with her. She doesn’t do it in the cute, sit there and give you puppy eyes, or even that sweet-at-first-and-then-gross licking thing. She paws. And if I ignore her, she’ll start crawling slowly onto my lap. This is a forty pound dog here.

Back to the knees. The chair I was using is a massive round swivelly chair, roughly 45″ in diameter. That’s right. 45″. It’s insane. Comfy, but lacking reason. In a dinig nook that’s only 7′ wide, toss in the desk, and there’s really no other place to put your legs but on the chair with you. So, my knees have been bent for the past 16 hours. It’s like the exact opposite of the Home Depot syndrome. (Standing and walking on a cement floor for 8 hours makes everything hurt.) I have a decent high back office chair I got from Target. Having a chair with a high back is most auspicious. Symbolically have the power of a mountain behind you. Eliminate backstabbers! But I have this brown 45″ cushion Colosseum laden with pillows instead.

Just move it, you say! …Well, I did. I had to rearrange half the apartment, and now my gerbils are homeless. Not really, they’re just kinda hanging out next to me. They lost their table/stand, though.

I’ve gotten all the major furniture pieces moved into place, and already feel better and more organized. But then I moved the final piece of the puzzle back to its place under my desk and came to a startling realization: I’ve been drinking a lot of coke. My 24-pack case of coke is missing a significant number of cans…I got this three days ago, right? …I’ve only got fifteen cans left…and the half of one siting in front of me.

How much have I been drinking!?

A lot, stupid. You say. You’re a coke addict. Duh.

Yes, I agree, but I didn’t think I was that gluttonous.

…I’ll just blame it on stress.

I’ve done similar things before. I’ve taken off a few days or so of vacation, with every intention of redoing my website…

I always end up using the time doing something else…the last time, I spent it moving out of my apartment.

I had a lot of work to do. My resume needs touching up, and my entire website I want redone. That was the other problem. I could do whatever I want with my website, but I know that as soon as I hit “Upload” in Dreamweaver, I’ll be sick of the thing and want to do it again. I have a ton of ideas, but nothing really jumps out at me.

Usually, I’ll decide I want that clean, modern look, but then I start to do it and find it too easy. It feels like cheating. Tada! Here’s a light blue page with my name in all lowercase with an accent color! Impressive, yes?

No. It’s not my style. I can do it, and make it look great, but it’s just not me, is it.

Crap.

So. My plan of attack:

1st – Resume.

I’m going to have one for vague retail, one more IT related, and of course, one for graphic design. While you should always tailor your resume to your intended job (match up your qualifications with theirs, the difficulty of this could also be a sign of how likely you’ll fit into the job, and what you have left to learn), it helps to have some premade in case of emergency.

2nd – Website.

The portfolio. For a designer, it is probably the most important tool you have. Nobody has to even see your resume, your work should say who you are. You really don’t have to have much. I usually make the mistake of cramming in as much as possible to make up for the fact I don’t have much (that I think is good enough). Quality is more than quantity. Well, maybe not more, but better than. 12 to 15 pieces, just like your paper portfolio is fine. 8 is a bit on the low end, but if they’re amazing, they speak well of you.

3rd -Social Networking. The Free Stuff.

I went to interview at a temp agency, where the recruiter recommended that I look on Facebook, LinkedIn, and, to my surprise, Twitter. I don’t get Twitter. I still don’t. I mean, I have the account and everything, but it’s like if you took the book from Facebook and just left your picture and your status there. You think I’d be all about it because I was the kid that had that eerie obscure status messages on Trillian.

4th – Google yourself.
Imagine your prospective employer decided to google you on the internet. Make sure all your cool information shows up and nothing weird or incriminating comes up instead. Unfortunately for me, my last name makes the results rather interesting… This is currently the second result when you google “Jessa Dance”. That’s obviously not me. Oh, the Internet!

5th – Marketing.
I have an old copy of How magazine, which has a step by step guide I will be posting later. I probably need to go ahead and subscribe. It’s that whole money thing.

And oh yes. I have pretty much no budget. And probably neither do you.

This site is for the Design Classes of ‘08, ‘09, and soon ‘010. Or just ‘10.  Wait. This is for my fellow graduates that can’t find a job in the field that they took four or five years of college…Okay. This is for the underemployed and unemployed because some people ruined the economy for everybody. Good job, those people.We appreciate you crushing the whole “follow your dreams” and “do what you love and the rest will take care of itself”.

But this is that time period that really makes us. How do we respond? How do we survive?

Not like I did. I graduated and stayed in the comfort of the Orange Apron. I was miserable. Everyday, cursing myself, and my degree, and feeling generally bitter as the student loans needed repaying.

Don’t do that.

Actually, I had applied to every graphic design related job in South Carolina I even vaguely qualified for. I got two interviews: One for an entry-level business analyst job, and another as a retail manager in training. I thought they went well, and they probably did. But there were dozens of other candidates, and I have a degree from a small women’s college in Studio Art and Design. Luckily, most people automatically say, “Oh, that’s a good school.”

I went to my old art professors for help, and they told me to contact a few people, and consider grad school.

I thought about it. I really really really would love to go to grad school for Film Directing. I would make movies and do commercials…oh, it would be great. I even got info from SCAD. Of course, with this info came the very real and crushing reality of cost. And while one should consider education as an investment, well, I just can’t afford it. I really can’t. Even with tuition paid, where will I live? How will I eat and pay for all the other costs, like books, equipment, my car insurance, phone, etc.?

I’ll admit, too, after four years of putting out art like that, I felt kinda burned out. I almost cried three days before graduation because I felt like I had majored in the wrong thing. I had almost no desire to lift a pencil anymore.

My problem is that I’m good at a lot of things but not really great at everything. And I want to be great at everything. I’m not talking drawing or design. I mean everything. I want to write the next bestseller, sing perfectly, cook an amazing meal with random stuff just laying around in the pantry. I’m not perfect. Nobody is. But I really really want to be!

I didn’t feel like I was the best. At anything. So I got discouraged.

No more. There’s no time for that. We have work to do.