Story: Sam Eichblatt

Have you found yourself sitting in class wondering if you’re doing the right thing? What about life after tertiary training (poly, college, uni)? Can you draw the line between your portfolio in its current state, and that plum job at DesignReallyDoesWork Ltd, or the vision of yourself as the next Vince Frost that you’ve been cherishing for the last four years?

Design industry employers and recruitment agencies agree that there is “fantastic talent” coming out of the tertiary institutions, and that, all being fair in the world, there’d be a place for every graduate. However the simple rules of economics and employment dictate that there isn’t.

The path to success in the design world is strewn with discarded CVs, unreturned calls and fruitless interviews. In fact, it’s just like any other sexy 21 st century vocation that promises to reward individual creativity. The good news is, you’ll be judged on what you make of yourself, rather than having an established career trajectory and that’s also the rub. You’ve got both the power and the responsibility to get it right.

These days, in a market saturated with bright graduates eager to wreak their personal design vision on the world, it’s as much about your strategy to find employment as it is about raw talent. Raw talent is the baseline. You might not be the best, but if you’re in the right place at the right time, and you’re in front of the right people, who knows? For most, getting there is achievable through a slightly more banal reality hard work.

THE OLD CATCH-22

Bridging the gap between graduation and employment has always been difficult, a fact confirmed by creative industry recruiters. Portfolio Recruitment’s Louisa Golding, who trained in design herself and specialises in graphic design and advertising recruitment, describes the current NZ market as “client driven”. While more design courses are on offer than ever before, the pool of potential employers simply hasn’t grown at the same pace. As a result, employers can pick and choose, from the graduates at least.

Simon Lusty of international recruiters Aquent agrees: “We always struggle to assist graduates when they’ve got no commercial experience whatsoever, although we’d love to help them. However employers, when they’re looking for freelancers, need seasoned operators who can come in and hit the ground running from the minute they walk in the door.”

Without work experience, a graduate is, at best, a bit of a long-term investment. An employer is banking on the graduate’s potential to evolve in a way that will benefit the company and commercial reality dictates that the company chooses wisely and errs on the side of caution. .

“People come out of a course, and they’re talented artists, and can produce beautiful work. But in the commercial sector, does that really work?” says Lusty. He points out that there’s a critical difference between an artist and a designer having a strategic mind, critical thinking and the ability to understand and challenge design concepts. It’s not just creative ability, but the ability to apply one’s creativity. Design is, after all, an applied skill, rather than an abstract one.

EMPLOYMENT CONTACTS

Vice President of Designers Institute of NZ, Fraser Gardyne of Auckland designers Gardyne Design says that when he looks at a student’s portfolio, he looks for designs that don’t need to be explained. “If I can look at a student’s work and understand what they’re trying to do without them telling me, it works.”

Wellington firm DNA Design’s Grenville Main agrees: “Being creative is one thing, but being able to apply that relevantly is another. If something arrests me, but I don’t understand what they’re saying, it’s not working. It’s about communicating ideas. If something creates a really strong platform, but I don’t build any visual affinity with it, or it’s a bit too weird and wacky, it doesn’t work for me either”.

Nevertheless, talent will out and Alan Deare from designers Inhouse in Auckland admits that the company recently hired a graduate without experience purely on the strength of her portfolio, because of her “outstanding ideas, and the application of those ideas across various media”. Here, t he key word was application.

Also high on the list of things a graduate designer needs to prove is their ability to understand someone else’s (ie a client’s) requirements. Fraser Gardyne says that a lot of design students he sees tend to design for their personal outlook, as opposed to solving problems. To get his investment, they need to have got to a point where they can contribute to a client’s business needs. “I look for someone who listens, and isn’t pushing their own barrow they’ve got to be prepared to push the client’s barrow,” he says.

It’s a hard old world out there. Underlying everything there’s the business aspects to consider. “It’s about having a commercial mind as well and understanding that side of design,” says Simon Lusty. “While you may not have that initially, having the ability to develop in that area is important.”

Says Grenville Main : “That’s still the biggest gap for these guys [ie the average graduate] to bridge the dirty old commercial reality of what we do can be a rude shock for some.”

As an employer, what he looks for is “a kind of pragmatic reality” to go with the requisite “beautiful and seductive work”. He also encourages students to come in and work at the DNA office for a week, just to witness what really goes on. “It gives them the chance to see, not how grim it is, but how pressured it is, and what those pressures really are.”

DIY CAREER: HOW TO ….

So, how exactly do you prove to a senior designer or creative director you’re the right person to invest in?

Firstly, you can start work while you’re still studying. Freelancing is a well traveled route for a good reason, and there are also cases of student entrepreneurs who successfully set up their own business before they left school. There are organisations, like Wellington ’s (and now Auckland ’s) The Church, that mentor students through corporate briefs to give them some “real world” experience.

When you talk to successful young designers, everyone’s got a different story. The Wilderness originally made flyers for drum ‘n bass gigs. Budding company Pinkeye worked freelance throughout their degrees and then found that they had so much freelance work when they left, the only sensible option was to set up their own business.

The editor / designers of Lumiere and Threaded magazines, Kyra Bradcock and Tim Wong, funded themselves, started small, solicited publicity, made deals with sponsors, and continue to grow. Others, such as young web design outfit Tanash, negotiated quid pro quo deals with other emerging artists, designers and cottage industries.

The common denominator is that they all these bright young things got experience somewhere. At the same time they proved that they could apply themselves to an external brief, put a client’s needs first and work within the parameters of time and budget that go along with that. The side-effect was they built up a client base and got noticed. And being noticed differentiating yourself from the rest of the stack of CVs sitting on someone’s desk is key.

In the words of the recruitment agencies, it helps to literally “get in front of someone” if you’re approaching them (rather than responding to a recruitment ad), whether you’re looking to be hired full-time or just to get extra work.

In these broadband days, it’s all too easy to fire off 50 emails to 50 organisations with your portfolio attached to them. So they’re just as easy for an employer to delete, ignore or simply forget when they don’t have an immediate need, or aren’t actively searching for their next design junior, however generous their intentions.

Seeing someone in the flesh makes an impression that can’t be erased as easily.

SO… WHAT DO YOU DO AGAIN?

So, make sure you’re a face, not an email. But before you get face to face, identify what the agency or company does. It sounds like the most basic notion, but it’s also one that is completely lost in the scattergun approach when you’re firing off emails instead of approaching people personally. Design is a growing industry with an increasing range of specialist sub-categories, so tailoring your approach is essential.

Simon Lusty maintains that there are jobs out there at graduate level for those who are targeted in their methods. The advice he gives to students and graduates is to “do research, understand what kind of organisation you’d like to work for and what kind of role you’d like within it, and be very clear and articulate about that.”

Fraser Gardyne’s advice is to go into your final year at school with some kind of understanding of where you want to be in the long term, in order to create a portfolio that reflects the area you want to work in.

So yes, it’s competitive, but what you want is just as important. Does your vision of the future revolve around you as the senior PhotoShop guy everyone goes to for help, or the auteur-like creative director winning awards for brand campaigns that were just crazy enough to work? Or are you going to start your own empire? Thinking about your personal aspirations will go a long way towards determining your pitch for the job, or the type of company your approach.

Another consideration is the kind of projects a company chooses to take on, which these days is becoming more and more a reflection of its corporate philosophy and in a brand focused world, that’s pretty important. You may also need to find the right “fit” with the character of the company particularly if it’s one of the smaller ones.

“It’s almost as important to have the right personality as it is to have raw talent,” says Alan Deare. “Both would be great. At Inhouse we try to create an environment for ourselves that is as comfortable and natural as being at home. Personality is an important component in this dynamic.”

In addition, a lot of people might not be happy working, for example, in an overtly casual and unstructured environment, or on a campaign to promote a company associated with GE, or pharmaceutical products, or the meat industry, or “brand X”. Whatever your values are, you need to think about them and if you’re prepared to compromise, how much.

With the relatively small New Zealand market, you also need to be able to turn your hand to a few things although both Grenville Main and Simon Lusty also say that if you’re a specialist with a passion, to stick with it. However, odds are that at least at first, you’ll be working within a team of designers on a range of projects, so your portfolio needs to be broad rather than narrow. And even high-end designers need good finished art skills and the ability to drive a Mac in certain environments, says Lusty, so production skills will always be a great asset.

Having said all that, it’s impossible to create the “perfect portfolio”, says Gardyne. “What you’re really trying to do with a portfolio is to show how far you can be extended.” In other words, what you’re trying to show is that you have some understanding of their business, and the potential to add value to it.

Remember that “investment” analogy? A lot of design companies won’t take a gamble on people who haven’t had experience producing a similar style or caliber of work. “Being able to display to a company that not only can you produce work in a similar style, but you can also add something different is also really important,” says recruiter Louisa Golding.

HOW TO: MAKE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE….

The last hurdle is something every employment consultant will repeat again and again, most of the time to deaf ears – persistence pays. Each solicited application, whether posted or emailed, needs to be followed up with a phone call, something which few people think to do. The same goes if you’ve dropped off an unsolicited yet nicely edited package of your work along with your CV, or sent them a striking email portfolio.

We all sit behind computers far too much these days, and it’s possible to forget that real people exist sometimes. Or if you want to look at it another way, calling or making an appointment to see someone makes them accountable, even if it’s only for five minutes of company time.

Simon Lusty believes that too many people seeking employment take any negative answer as a knock-back, and as a consequence feel despondent and don’t bother to keep in touch. The truth is, most clients won’t have something immediately, but given the peaks and troughs of the industry, there’ll be a demand next week, in a fortnight, or in three months’ time.

His simple recommendation is to ask permission if you can stay in touch on a regular basis and drop them an email or a call every month or so, maybe with your latest work attached or a brief synopsis of your recent activities. The majority of people will have no problem with that, and in fact, will probably appreciate the fact you recognise they’re busy. Your contact details will be easy to retrieve when they do need someone, rather than just being a vague memory in the hundred of one-off phone calls they received that year. Face it, making yourself available is no bad thing.

KEEP ON RUNNING

If it sometimes seems like you’re running a marathon with nothing at the end of it, take heart from the bigger picture. “Not everyone is going to just walk into the kind of job we all aspire to,” says Grenville Main, “Just like not many people leave law school and make partner by 21. There are always a few people who do, and everyone else gets there in the end, if they stick it out for long enough.”

It’s competitive; times are changing and people are becoming more visually literate. While you’re born blessed with creativity, it is, as Main says, “harder to be great” in the design world. Successful designers know this, hence there’s an almost philanthropic attitude towards good young designers with focus and direction whether offering informal internships, looking out for emerging talent, and offering work experience or advice.

Making the transition from studying to work will always be hard, but the beauty of it is that once you’ve done it, you’ll never have to do it again; and by the nature of creative industry employment, you’ll have learned invaluable skills in marketing yourself and your own talents.

Whether you wind up with a certificate go the whole hog on a degree, or go down a pure design path (or one in a related industry), it’s comforting to know that design is finally growing up in New Zealand . First, there is a generation for whom technology is a way of life. Second, the design studios are producing work of an internationally recognised (and sometimes envied) class. They’re also beginning to attract talent from overseas, cross-pollinating local talent with international designers keen to work in a rapidly growing industry known for its freshness and the gift of innovation.

By trading on ideas and intellectual property, as time goes on New Zealand will inevitably join the young design centres around the Pacific Rim Sydney, Tokyo and Hong Kong that can learn from the older guard in New York, London and Milan. All this at the same time as creating our own unique vision. Whatever your part in it, it’s a future to look forward to.