Passion, character, and initiative are a requirement. A long resumé is not — as long as you care about the right things, we can help build your skillset. This is true for those we hire, and it is equally true for our apprentices.

“There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?” — Warren Buffett

The Golden Age Of UX Won’t Last. Here’s How To Prepare For What’s Next

25 Jobs with the Best Career Opportunities in the U.S.  

Important skillset that can be used for direct work in a wide range of causesWeb design is a skill that’s in-demand in many types of organisations, from charities to startups, giving you great flexibility and the opportunity to work on high impact projects.Organisations that are especially high-impact to work at or volunteer for include:Government departments, such as Obama’s US Digital Service and 18F or the UK’s Government Digital Service.Effective non-profits, such as those recommended by GiveWell, Giving What We Can and The Life you Can Save.Innovative for-profits, such as Google, which now has seven products with over one billion monthly active users (Search, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Google Play, Maps and Youtube)1, or AirBnB.For-profits focused on the global poor, such as Sendwave.Effective Altruist organisations.

Part-time advocacy journalismDue to the rise of online publications it is becoming easier to get published, which opens up the opportunity to pursue advocacy journalism part-time, as a freelancer alongside another job that pays the bills. We know of several people who are successfully pursuing this option.

Documentary film-making seems like a form of art with a good chance of direct and advocacy impact, in that it resembles investigative journalism. It also appears stronger in terms of network and transferability of skills. As a result, we would expect a career profile on documentary film-making to be more positive than this one.

The Binding of Edmund McMillen

The rise, and completely predictable fall of game developer Phil Fish

Why we never hear from the maker of Fez anymore

The Making Of Fez, The Breaking Of Phil Fish

Finally, after 11 years of lukewarm comfort and mediocre job security, I decided to take a chance in trying out in art, which I had always loved. From one point of view, I’ve succeeded, because I am making a living doing this. But even if I didn’t, the bottom line is that at least I have tried. If we try really hard and things don’t work out the way we want them to, we can move on.  I moved with two suitcases to New York from Tokyo and started over with my life. I enrolled myself as a freshman in my 30s, among my 17 and 18-year-old classmates, at School of Visual Arts, started studying art for the first time. Four years later, I received an MFA in Illustration, then started slowly working as a freelance illustrator

SIGGRAPH: Share your top three technology tools. CC: I hate technology! But if you’re trying to make something pretty in this medium, there’s no avoiding it

SIGGRAPH: What is the best advice you would give someone starting out in animation? CC: Draw. Carry a sketchbook (or a tablet) and draw (or paint!) every chance you get. Make observations from the world around you, from photo or video reference, from artists you admire. Most importantly, don’t just observe, but put those observations down on paper in visual form. Make a habit of it. The things you learn that way will stay with you forever. And that knowledge will be useful no matter what medium you end up working in.

A: Anything else you’d like to say or tell the new comers and/or the community? L: Mmh, I know how it feels to be limited by your own lack of skills and today’s tools are taking away a little bit of that barrier. And the more the software helps you to get rid of the technical problems of representation, the more creative you can be. While the tool is the same, it’s very fun to see that everybody has its own take to how to use Quill. It wasn’t at first, but now I see more and more people having their own style. It’s so refreshing. I follow the group and what is going on with a lot of attention.

A: Hello Lip, please tell us a bit more about you. What is your background? Did you study visual arts?   L: Not really [laughs]. My parents forced me to have a very classical education. I studied Latin and ancient Greek in high school. But when I was 18, I realized that I enjoy to visualize my ideas and thoughts. So I went to the University and studied advertising. I was heading toward more of a copywriting agency type of occupation until I felt the need to carry my ideas until completion. I was tired of giving them away too soon because I found my stories never really turned out the way they should be. Since the softwares got easier and more accessible, I managed to find the right moment to jump in and learn the technical skills to do it on my own.

Where did you study and what were some of your first jobs? I actually have a degree in Economics from Colorado College. This was pursued at the behest of my father and after bartending for a year in London after I graduated, I went to the Vancouver Film School and took their course in Multimedia. My first jobs were all menial labor: I worked sorting packages at a Greyhound station, cleaning recycled bottles at a brewery and erected party tents. After VFS, I moved to New York and freelanced as a web designer/flash animator for a bit before I helped found heavy.com with two of the guys I had been freelancing for. That lasted for about five years before I started Buck with my partners in 2003.

What’s interesting looking back is that the path of his career could have been very different. He graduated in 2008, right as the global financial crisis unravelled. As he approached graduation, he had three open job offers, but by the time he’d received his certificate all three had disappeared. So he decided to strike out on his own with his solo studio. “These jobs were as ‘design manager’ or as ‘creative technologist’ at big companies,” he explains. “Extremely narrow jobs – they can be really rewarding but I can’t imagine I’d have been able to do as many things as I’ve been able to do on my own. Maybe I was lucky that those three job offers disappeared!”

as societies become wealthier and more gender equal

This was a time when I was starting to think about what my career was going to be. I’d failed to make it as a musician. I’d had lots of appointments with A&R people. After two seconds, they’d say, It’s not going to happen, man. So I thought I’d have a go at a radio play.  Then, almost by accident, I came across a little advertisement for a creative-writing M.A. taught by Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia. Today it’s a famous course, but in those days it was a laughable idea, alarmingly American. I discovered subsequently that it hadn’t run the previous year because not enough people had applied. Somebody told me Ian McEwan had done it a decade before. I thought he was the most exciting young writer around at that point. But the primary attraction was that I could go back to university for a year, fully funded by the government, and at the end I would only have to submit a thirty-page work of fiction. I sent the radio play to Malcolm Bradbury along with my application.  I was slightly taken aback when I was accepted, because it suddenly became real. I thought, these writers are going to scrutinize my work and it’s going to be humiliating. Somebody told me about a cottage for rent in the middle of nowhere in Cornwall that had previously been used as a rehabilitation place for drug addicts. I called up and said, I need a place for one month because I’ve got to teach myself to write. And that’s what I did that summer of 1979. It was the first time I really thought about the structure of a short story. I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on. At the end I had two stories to show, so I felt more secure.

LINCS is a national leadership initiative of the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) to expand evidence-based practice in the field of adult education. LINCS demonstrates OCTAE’s commitment to delivering high-quality, on-demand educational opportunities to practitioners of adult education, so those practitioners can help adult learners successfully transition to postsecondary education and 21st century jobs.

17. SAY NO TO SPEC WORK Speculative work, or spec work, is a request by a potential client for uncompensated creative and design work at the inception of a project. Avoid this like the plague—it’s a devaluation of the entire design process and marginalizes our efforts as a whole. AIGA.org has great resources for dealing with spec work, including a sample letter that you can personalize and send to clients explaining why their request is unappreciated (see No. 19).

9. BUILD YOUR BOOK One piece of advice I give young designers looking to fill out their portfolios is to find the best local arts organization with the worst visual brand identity or website and make a trade. They get some great design work, and you get creative control and real-world projects in your book that other potential clients will recognize.

6. LEARN TO SAY ‘NO’ Some of your best design business decisions will ultimately be saying “no” to clients or projects. Unfortunately, it usually takes a few disasters to gain the experience to know when to walk away from an impending train wreck. Carefully measure the upsides of any project—creative control of your design work, long-term relationship-building and gross billing—versus the potential downsides—the devaluation of the creative process, being treated like a “vendor” and ongoing scope creep (where the volume of what you’re expected to deliver keeps expanding, while the schedule and budget don’t).

“The most important inspirations and influences in your life and career will come from places other than the design world. Get away from the design scene and cultivate other interests, skills, and experiences. Those are the things that will give you passion and distinguish you.”

“Almost any situation gets better when you ask yourself this: How can I be most useful right now? — Most useful to your employer, to your client, to the people you care for in your personal life, even to your future self. Asking ‘How can I be most useful right now?’ will get you past too little ambition, past too much ambition, past many interpersonal conflicts, boredom, frustration, and creative block. Sometimes the answer is ‘I can be most useful to everybody — including me — by leaving,’ but usually it’ll lead you to creating better work!”

“What did I know? I knew that relationships were critical in design. I knew that hard work was required. I knew that I needed inspiration beyond graphic design. “What did I not know? I didn’t know that time is forgiving. Saul Bass told me that success is defined by a series of successful projects over an extended period of time. I didn’t listen. I was convinced that every project was my last chance to succeed. Alternatively, each failure signaled the end of my career. Saul was right. Some projects were as ugly as something the cat coughed up, but the next one was better. And some projects were incredibly successful, and then the next one came along and it was left behind. The world isn’t black and white.”

“There’s a lyric from the song, Ooh La La by The Faces that says, ‘I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.’ I think of this any time someone asks me what advice I would give young people just starting out. On the one hand, there are a thousand things that I’ve learned over the years that would have made my early professional life easier; things I know now. On the other hand, the great joy of life is learning and growing and making one’s own mistakes. I’d feel robbed if— when I was younger— someone had taken that away from me. “So my advice is to remember that success is a map of failures; Explore with courage. Draw the contours with grace.”

“Make sure to balance work and life. Without balance you may experience early career burn out or create undue emotional strain on yourself and the ones you love. “Connect with nature. Get out of your head and into your body. Nature reminds us to listen, think, and feel in ways that feed our intuition. “Travel. It enriches your life on every level. But there’s more to it because it takes us out of the context of what we know. It challenges us to exercise muscles that we don’t normally use. “There’s so much to learn from immersion in the unfamiliar. The benefit is a heightened sense of empathy and compassion — along with a sprinkling of humility. Chance invites spontaneity and play, which fuel creativity. Being open to chance — wherever you are — is a fearless act.”

“Work for things, and with people, you believe are good. Good work and good people attract more good. “Work outdoors. If you’re stuck, go outside and watch squirrels or take a walk. Take paper and a pen. “Give your own work devotion.”

“Talent is essential for success as a creative professional, but you also need mastery of current methodology and tools, excellent people skills, and business savvy to make your career sustainable over the long haul.”

“Never stop learning. Embrace what interests you and stay on top of it. Everything you need to know is a never-ending pursuit. It doesn’t stop when you are handed a degree or when you accept your first job. Keep taking classes. Find ways to mingle with other designers who do what you do. Actively research and discover what is out there and who is doing it really well. Ignite discussions with them. Share your passions with your colleagues, friends, spouse. Keep acting as your own teacher and play, practice, experiment and share. Above all else, stay curious and authentic.”

“Early on, if anyone had been able to tell me exactly the right thing, I would have dismissed it as preposterous because the world has just changed too much in unforeseen ways. “However, here’s my advice: get a second degree in something totally different— neuroscience, medicine, linguistics, or whatever feels right. “Design is what all humans do when they have intent and act upon it. Good design skills are most powerful when applied where they intersect with another discipline or two, or three. It is no longer enough to be a specialist only in design. Make your niche at those points of intersection, where future innovation will bloom.”

“Be interested in something besides design. It is invigorating to work with a designer that is passionate about what they do, but I am finding myself in too many conversations with designers that only know their field and nothing else. Read anything that you can. Know the classics for reference purposes, understand mythology, know how a steam engine works, how to change a bobbin, calculate compound interest, and why the North Star doesn’t move. “Yes, great design skills, knowledge, and draftsmanship are fundamental. It’s what you know beyond that world that allows you to conceive of a solution your fellow designers are oblivious to. Load your chamber with everything you can so when it’s your turn to take a shot, you have something to fire at the challenge besides surface.”

In website design, it was important to combine the interests of different stakeholders: marketing, branding, visual design, and usability. Marketing and branding people needed to enter the interactive world where usability was important. Usability people needed to take marketing, branding, and aesthetic needs into account when designing websites. User experience provided a platform to cover the interests of all stakeholders: making web sites easy to use, valuable, and effective for visitors. This is why several early user experience publications focus on website user experience

Resetting expectations. As corporate leaders become aware of the power of design, many view design thinking as a solution to all their woes. Designers, enjoying their new level of strategic influence, often reinforce that impression. When I worked with the entertainment company, I was part of that problem, primarily because my livelihood depended on selling design consulting. But design doesn’t solve all problems. It helps people and organizations cut through complexity. It’s great for innovation. It works extremely well for imagining the future. But it’s not the right set of tools for optimizing, streamlining, or otherwise operating a stable business. Additionally, even if expectations are set appropriately, they must be aligned around a realistic timeline—culture changes slowly in large organizations. An organizational focus on design offers unique opportunities for humanizing technology and for developing emotionally resonant products and services. Adopting this perspective isn’t easy. But doing so helps create a workplace where people want to be, one that responds quickly to changing business dynamics and empowers individual contributors. And because design is empathetic, it implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.

Embracing risk. Transformative innovation is inherently risky. It involves inferences and leaps of faith; if something hasn’t been done before, there’s no way to guarantee its outcome. The philosopher Charles Peirce said that insights come to us “like a flash”—in an epiphany—making them difficult to rationalize or defend. Leaders need to create a culture that allows people to take chances and move forward without a complete, logical understanding of a problem. Our partners at the entertainment company were empowered to hire a design consultancy, and the organization recognized that the undertaking was no sure thing.

Several years ago, I consulted for a large entertainment company that had tucked design away in a select group of “creatives.” The company was excited about introducing technology into its theme parks and recognized that a successful visitor experience would hinge on good design. And so it became apparent that the entire organization needed to embrace design as a core competence. This shift is never an easy one. Like many organizations with entrenched cultures that have been successful for many years, the company faced several hurdles.

IBM and GE are hardly alone. Every established company that has moved from products to services, from hardware to software, or from physical to digital products needs to focus anew on user experience. Every established company that intends to globalize its business must invent processes that can adjust to different cultural contexts. And every established company that chooses to compete on innovation rather than efficiency must be able to define problems artfully and experiment its way to solutions.

Design thinking is an essential tool for simplifying and humanizing.

“There’s no longer any real distinction between business strategy and the design of the user experience,” said Bridget van Kralingen, the senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, in a statement to the press. In November 2013 IBM opened a design studio in Austin, Texas—part of the company’s $100 million investment in building a massive design organization

the iterative process works at GE: “GE is moving away from a model of exhaustive product requirements. Teams learn what to do in the process of doing it, iterating, and pivoting.” Employees in every aspect of the business must realize that they can take social risks—putting forth half-baked ideas, for instance—without losing face or experiencing punitive repercussions.

Tolerate failure. A design culture is nurturing. It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time. Apple is celebrated for its successes, but a little digging uncovers the Newton tablet, the Pippin gaming system, and the Copland operating system—products that didn’t fare so well. (Pippin and Copland were discontinued after only two years.) The company leverages failure as learning, viewing it as part of the cost of innovation.

In design-centric organizations, you’ll typically see prototypes of new ideas, new products, and new services scattered throughout offices and meeting rooms. Whereas diagrams such as customer journey maps explore the problem space, prototypes explore the solution space. They may be digital, physical, or diagrammatic, but in all cases they are a way to communicate ideas. The habit of publicly displaying rough prototypes hints at an open-minded culture, one that values exploration and experimentation over rule following.

Lastly, as a designer, the UX / UI world is not your only avenue to designer career path fulfillment. I've seen career paths for designers go in a thousand creative directions. And in a career that may last 30+ years, be open to changing industries or career focus to ensure long-term relevance. Art Director in an Ad Agency? Make that switch to UX. Copywriter still writing direct mail? Go take a content strategy course. Alan Ball, the screenwriter of the film American Beauty was working as a graphic designer at Adweek when the idea for the film hit him.  A classmate of mine from design school later went on to become an iron chef. The point is to keep an open mind, be open to where life takes you and don't get tunnel vision on what you *think* you should be doing. Designer Career paths are long, and can take you in a lot of surprising, interesting directions, if you're open to it. One of my favorite quotes is "if you want to hear god laugh, tell him your plans."

Production and post-production is, by many accounts, the most profitable element of the entire agency equation, and holding companies aim to boost those totals

as clients' marketing budgets decrease and agency profit margins feel the squeeze.

One boss allegedly followed a round of layoffs by warning employees that all production work needed to remain in-house if they wanted to keep their jobs, in part because production is the agency's only profitable department.

All major agency holding companies have launched their own production and postproduction units in recent years as part of what one agency veteran called "a revenue grab." In some cases, they have publicized this information, but the new divisions largely operate under the radar despite employing hundreds of people. "This isn't a threat to high-end production companies," said one source who has worked in that industry for years, "But it will wipe out the whole middle range of independent companies."

myIDP

IDP Forms and Documentation

Individual Development Plans (IDPs)

Design Talent or Design Skill?

Can Design be Taught or Do you Need Talent?

Listerine, for example, started life on the shelf as an antiseptic, sold as both floor cleaner and a treatment for gonorrhoea. But it wasn't a runaway success until it was marketed as a treatment for bad breath. 

But many ideas are destined for improvement

There are many people with good ideas who don't have the means, the will, or the courage to action them. Similarly, there are very talented business people who have no ideas, but are brilliant at the execution.