May 4th, 2007

Cue Pomp and Circumstance

Hello all. I am honored to be giving the speech today at your commencement from [this Art School’s Design Program/University’s Design Program/College of Art & Design].

I have worked as a graphic designer in “the real world” for four and a half years, mostly in Raleigh (“the thinking man’s Portland”). I’ve now been doing this for the exact same amount of time it took me to get a BFA — and I am here to tell you: you are all going down. Seriously, you’re going to get destroyed. There are soooo many things they don’t tell you in here.

Allow me to offer you some incite into how your professional life will start:

I’m sure that you, class overachiever, already have a job lined up with that agency in Manhattan where you’ve been interning during the summers. That’s great. I think I speak for all of us when I say I hope you get run over by a taxi. For the rest of you, it’s time to pound the pavement. Go forth and gather the cream of your theoretically good yet completely impractically crop — type-less posters of randomly placed lines visually representing the fall of communism; packaging mock-ups that use elaborately-divised combinations of bailing twine, corrugated cardboard, and metallic calligraphy ink that has to be mail-ordered from England, etc. — and mount everything on 18×24″ pieces of foamcore and…bwah-ha-ha! I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You just look so ridiculous at the interview, wrestling those giant black portfolios through the door! Rest assured, I’m laughing with, not at. I was doing the same thing four years ago.

Don’t get discouraged, my friends, if you can’t land a job right away. It will most likely take months of cold-calling, lead-following, and humiliating groveling before someone will agree to take you in. To them, as you are now, you’re mainly a liability. There’s so much you need to learn. You have no clue.

On your very first day in your newly acquired position, your boss will (in his mind) toss you something easy by asking you to come up with some ideas for a new client’s logo. You will go back to your desk and generate pages and pages of concepts, rendered in Sharpie on typing paper. He will check in on you about 4:30 and find you haven’t even turned your computer on yet. This is where things will start to go south. When you heard “ideas,” you were, of course, envisioning something you’d pin up on a bulletin board for a room full of 30 like-minded people to stare at for a few hours. Your new boss was envisioning something he could take, present to the client, and they would buy…tomorrow morning.

Shortly after the logo fiasco, you will be relegated to “production” (from the Latin, “prod-” meaning “re-,” and “uction” meaning “sizing stuff until you want to gouge your eyes out”) or possibly even web maintenance, where you will cut and paste paragraphs from Word documents onto web pages for a site that your company stole from the interactive firm that created it, by telling the client they’d keep it updated for less money. Either way, this begins a long period known as “paying your dues.”

You will make many glorious mistakes during this time. Attempting to email a nightmare client a 15 MB pdf without embedding the fonts, when they demand an on-screen proof of their brochure; delivering a four-color project to press with three active spot-colors and it’s linked images still in RGB mode; screwing up code in ways you can’t even comprehend while using a WYSIWG editor, like Dreamweaver, because you went to school to be a designer, for Christ’s sake. In the aftermath of each of these events, you will come out on the other end of a shitstorm, knowing not to do whatever it was you did, ever again. You will know it like you know your mother’s voice. And that’s real knowing.

Hold on long enough, and you will be called upon to “work up some comps” for a pitch. This will be both an exciting and a deeply sobering experience. There’s an old adage that people who have been in the industry for forever are fond of saying to clients. It goes: “Good, fast, and cheap. You can pick two.” The client always opts for “fast and cheap.”

Because of this, there is no time for pedantic process, much less original thought. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you have the time to 1) open up the most recent Communication Arts Design Annual, 2) find something with a “look and feel” that fits the project you are working on and 3) do a variation of it that is a) not ugly and b) far enough away from the starting point to not be recognized as the blatant plagiarism it is.

What I’m getting at is, yes, design is an art form, but — you’ll soon discover — it is also very much a trade, and, above all, a business.

In conclusion, fledgling designers of the world, I leave you with these words of advice:

• Keep you head down.
• Don’t sweat the small stuff.
• When you’re cranking out 20 versions of the same ad for different publications, take the time to double check your dimensions. Was that quarter-pager supposed to be 4.125×5.375 or 4.375×5.125?
• Also, mind the bleed, trim, and safety.
• Keep your chin up.
• Run spellcheck. Seems like it shouldn’t be your responsibility, I know, but the person who wrote the copy didn’t bother to do it before they sent it to you. Even if a typo is not actually your fault, you’ll be the one who gets blamed for it.
• Almost daily, someone will ask you, without giving you an adequate amount of information to formulate an answer, how long it will take you to design something. Each designer has his own ubiquitous answer to this question. (Personally, I always say “half a day.”) Find yours.
• Learn from the people who have been doing this longer than you.
• Reach for the stars.
• Could you make our logo bigger?
• Print is dead.
• For God’s sakes, use your key commands.

Thank you.

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