Wednesday
30 September 2020

What is ‘Experience’?

Ever since first writing this post almost bang on five years ago, I’ve continued learning and displaying more and more web coding in my sites. I’ve redone bloogum and [Snapshot Henchman], pushing myself with the design and the function for each. The more I learn, the clunkier my portfolio feels, so I’ve begun redesigning that, now, too. I’m now working four days a week, what with the COVID and such, so I’m dedicating my Fridays now to job hunting and redesigning my portfolio.

My job hunting tact has not been working out for me. In applying for every job on Seek (all one of them) I get an interview roughly one in every three applications, but I’ve been told so many times I need more digital design industry experience I could recite the speech in full. After dedicating hours and hours, days and days to learning xml and databases, more galleries and php and jQuery, really pushing what I can do with what I already know, continually being told the same thing over and bloody over is disheartening. It hurts. I keep telling myself I just need one prospective employer, just one person, to understand that I can meld together my ten years of professional print design industry experience with my twenty years of hobbyist web design experience and make a kickarse professional web designer.

With this free Friday now on my hands, I’ve faced facts that nobody will. The reasoning I’ve come up with is that I’m missing something, something more than what a print designer who works on websites for a hobby has in her arsenal. I’m using my Fridays now to learn what that is, while also rebuilding my portfolio.

I’m going to learn everything inside-knowledge about design studios. Every Friday, I’ll take my print portfolio (with the plan for my rebuilt online folio printed out just for fun) along with a box of Bribery & Corruption I mean homemade brownies to a design studio. Bosses are great, they do the hiring, but I want to talk to the designers, too. I need to know what I’m missing.

As a sidenote, ‘experience’ isn’t a useful answer. It’s nebulous to one who hasn’t had that experience. It’s a copout, an answer someone will give when they can’t be bothere to be helpful. I learned more in the first month of my first job than I did in my entire final year of uni, but I can quantify it. I learned about RGB vs CYMK in uni; on the job, I saw when RGB black text printed with an unholy combination of CMYK values and the registration was out. I saw transparency laid over an RGB background, presenting fine on-screen, but which printed with a box around it. I saw how the printer would use its automatic conversion from an RGB image to CMYK, and compared that with how Photoshop or InDesign did it. All that was just in one very specific instance of colour. I learned about colour profiles, an impossible ‘don’t worry about it’ mystery in uni which suddenly means something when working for a company that prints in Fogra-39. I could lazily sum that up as ‘experience,’ but I can just as easily pass that knowledge onto my clients, many of them experienced graphic designers, and help them make more technically correct artwork.

This is the sort of stuff I want to learn from design studios. I know what it is to work in a print studio, but I want the ‘experience’ of a dedicated design studio. I’ve got my letter and, in writing it, I’ve realised I barely even know what sorts of questions to ask. Here’s what I’ve got.

• What exact skills does a web designer at a studio have that a print designer doesn’t? Throw as much jargon at me as you like.
• What’s the day-to-day like for an all-rounder graphic designer as compared with exclusively print? My impression has always been that the full-on coding is largely left to aforementioned code monkeys, but at what point do they take over?
• How much of the team would work on any one website?
• Do you primarily design websites from scratch, from templates, a fairly even mixture of both?
• Is LinkedIn worth it?
• What, in the name of all things shiny, am I missing?

From each stuido I visit, I’ll take down my notes on what I learn. If I’m pointed to a resource, or am given a gaping hole in my design knowledge, I’ll research that, too. I’ll put all that together into a post here.

One huge thing I’ve learned through my so far failed job hunting is that this industry is wonderfully helpful. I’ve had multiple bosses give me their time to go through my portfolio to improve it. None of them had to do that, but the level of support I’ve had from people who owe me nothing gives me hope. I’m sure to get something out of this endeavour. Who knows, maybe even a job?

Comment    job hunting, things I learnt, web design
Tags: job hunting, learning, web design