This week’s installment of Oh Great Yet Another Portfolio That’s Better Than Mine is brought to you by Matt Lehman, a ridiculously talented designer, illustrator, art director friend from Nashville. He’s spent the last three years making CMT/MTV Networks look good fulltime, and he’s open for other business.

Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.
—T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Agree or disagree?

Some time ago, talking to some people, they wanted a bonus if the Lakers made the playoffs. I said, “Bonus? If we don’t make the playoffs, you don’t work here anymore.”
—L.A. Lakers owner Jerry Buss

Define the win, then hold your team accountable for not meeting the expectations. If they go above and beyond, it’s bonus time. But you don’t get bonuses for doing your job.

*This post has nothing to do with basketball.

My team currently has two openings, a Web Developer and Junior Designer, and we just hired a Project Manager. I’ve been spending ~15% of my workdays lately sorting through portfolios, reading and sending emails, and following up with potential applicants. I think most people in Director/Principle/HR-type roles are too busy to explain why an applicant gets rejected, but I want to throw some ideas out there that I think might help you if you’re a design/developer on the job hunt.

1. Show Lots of Work…
Actual, Honest-To-God, well-thought-out, proof-that-you-can-problem-solve WORK. There are 12 year olds with a copy of Photoshop who can set some cool type on an image. Your grandma could learn basic HTML/CSS (hyperbole, maybe—but also probably true). Where’s the proof that you can turn complex thinking into seemingly simple solutions? Proof that you can take a client’s needs and translate them into real work?

If you’re a designer, show a variety of design solutions (include sketches and failed attempts, too—process is important). If you’re a developer, show live code examples (not just “I worked on this website” statements). If you don’t have real clients yet, try your hand at unsolicited redesigns. Just get out there, find problems and solve them. Do it on your own time and show a potential employer/client that A) you can hustle and B) you’re capable of solving problems for them.

2. …in an Easy-To-Browse Portfolio*…
I had a wonderful client/friend (amazing combo if you can make it happen) who once told me he typically browsed through dozens of portfolios looking for the right talent for new projects. “Don’t make me click a lot,” he’d say, “just show me big pictures of great work.” Word to the wise from a guy who hires talent for huge clients.

*Bonus points if I can look at your portfolio on my phone. I’m not a super-busy guy, but I’m also not always at my desk in front of a 30″ monitor. Mobile is the future of how we interact with the internet—if you aren’t thinking about it now, you’ve got catching up to do.

3. …with A Stellar Cover Letter
Make me look twice. Being a vital part of a team is about more than a skillset, so your résumé is only the price of entry. Who you are determines whether you get to stick around for coffee. Is there a person behind the portfolio? How is that person different from rest of the stack of emails I’m getting? Standouts get hired, not résumés—have a voice. Articulate why you’re different.

4. Sweat the Details
Proofread your damn résumé. Make sure your website works. Spell the company’s name right. The care you put into the details of presenting yourself to a potential employer/client is a good measure of the care you will put into the work you do for that employer/client.

I once got a cover letter that led with, “My objective is to obtain a Junior Designer position at [local advertising agency's name].” Since I received this letter and résumé for a job opening on my team, I replied, “I wish you luck in your objective to obtain a Junior Designer position at [local advertising agency's name].” Details matter, always.

5. Follow the Instructions
Be as creative as you want to be, but make sure you follow the instructions in the job posting while you’re doing it. See #4.

6. Be Passionate
Please love what you do. If you’re not energized and excited about the job you’re pursuing, stop, reassess and pursue something else. In a typical week, you’re going to spend 35–45 hours a week with your coworkers—no one wants to work with passionless people. Find something you love to do and run after it.

Homework
Read Kevin Fanning’s Let’s All Find Awesome Jobs. It’s full of great, practical advice.

I believe that the BP oil spill could have even bigger ramifications on our country than we already realize.

If this disaster exits the public consciousess without there being a 1:1 ratio of fault to accountability, then we as a nation will have demonstrated to our government (and the corporations whose interests they protect) that there is nothing we won’t tolerate—that under any circumstances of wrongdoing, even one without moral or religious debate, we can be manipulated and made to forget. And if we allow that precedent to be set, there will be no turning back. They will know something no democratic government ever should: that no matter the circumstances, they can always fall back on the people losing interest if they can be distracted long enough.

—John Mayer

Think what you will about the source, but this is some apt social commentary.

Posting ’round these parts has been sparse of late, as my day job has kept me busy. Our “web team” is a team of two, and in addition to other duties, myself and Mr. Spooner have been todo-list-ing our way through a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of the NewSpring Church website for the better part of the last 10 months. The previous version of the site was launched two years ago, and served us well for that season, but I’m turbo-excited about the new site’s potential.

With Spooner’s skillful bending of ExpressionEngine to our will, we added a Stories section to the site to take advantage of the exceptional content a rather large church makes possible. Taking visual cues from some talented people exploring editorial design on the web (mainly The Bold Italic, Laura Miner‘s Pictory, and Jason Santa Maria) we developed templating system that enables fairly quick turn-around (2–3 hours for design, typically less than an hour for coding/publishing) on new stories without sacrificing unique visuals and layouts. For example: Zac’s story, Kacie’s story, and Neicy’s story are all from the same “visual family,” but unique members nonetheless.

Some of the changes were big. We retooled the sermon series pages to give more flexibility on bringing the series branding to life in a bigger way—page designs like Practical Atheist and Identity Theft weren’t possible on the previous iteration of the site. I look forward to exploring and designing for that canvas in the future. We also made sections like Watch & Listen much more about search and discovery, and improved general site search as well.

Some of the redesign process was more about small improvements to existing pages and userflows. Previous pages on the old site had way too much visual prominence, when they only served as a sort of pass-through or filtering page. For example, Ministries doesn’t need a huge visual of people “doing stuff”—I likely just want information about a certain Ministry and I want to get to it quickly. We don’t make a big deal out of singling out individual campuses, as we tend to stick with church-wide events, so we combined all the location and service time information onto one page. Anywhere we could simplify, we tried to. And the places where we felt like visuals could make a more appropriate, succinct impact, we made flexible.

There is still much to do. A website, at least a good one, is never finished, only launched.

But man it feels good to launch it.

via Stuff No One Told Me

People used to mock my theory that Disney romances are as detrimental to future relationships as pornography. But I believe it now more than ever.

This week’s installment of Oh Great Yet Another Portfolio That’s Better Than Mine is brought to you by Angus Macpherson, a third year graphic design student at Leeds College of Art. Top-notch typographic and print layout work, as well as photos—and not just “for a student.” The sky’s the limit for talent like this.

I’ve only asked for your opinion about the way I do things here once, in regards to blog advertising. I think this is a similar case, because we’re talking about whose voice gets heard, and how many voices are in the mix. So…

There’s been much hoopla discussion about blog comments around the corners of the internet I frequent—most recently, the aforelinked Daring Fireball article, Derek Powazek’s thoughtful response and a further clarification from DF. Both articles make some excellent points about why their respective authors choose to go commentless.

I’ve been working on and off on a redesign of this site/blog for a year now, a time period during which I’ve increasingly been building side project sites in Tumblr (to wit, Blankenship à Go-Go, Blankenotes, Haiku Pickup Lines, Prom Night Fist Fight, and soon Notes to Self). Tumblr’s quick, easy, and has some measure of built-in community for sharing/liking/aggregating that I dig. My initial reluctance to use Tumblr was its lack of native comments, but I’ve come to embrace that constraint. Certain types of content just don’t need comments.

I’m not convinced I want to use Tumblr for this blog. There are aspects of the forthcoming redesign, specifically the ability to post work and play projects with ease, that need a full content management system like ExpressionEngine. But the remaining question is one of comments.

Generally speaking, I’ve always appreciated the comments here. When I started blogging in ’04, it was a place for my circle of friends to interact and goof off. Over time, people I didn’t know began reading, participating, and commenting. 99% of the time, the comments are civil, intelligent, and engaging. Against all internet odds, it seems like we’ve built a bit of a community, however loosely or occasionally it manifests itself in a single comment thread.

But is it necessary? Would you miss it? I don’t write with the thought or expectation (well, except in this case, where I’m soliciting your opinions) of comments, so their absence wouldn’t change my writing habits, voice or content. But it would still be a big shift, and I’m curious to know what you think about the possibility.

If your mission is to quit, there’s no better time than right now.
—Scott, Spartan

There is never a more convenient season. Get it done, or let it die.

“So you have a lots of followers on Twitter and your blog—are you somebody?” Thus went one of the strangest questions I’ve ever received over Chick-fil-A nuggets. “Well, I post a lot of things online. I’ve been doing it for 7 years. That’s all I know to tell you.”

As usual, someone smarter than me articulates it better than me:

Is my soapbox [big]? Yes it is. But that’s fair, because I built this soapbox myself. It’s my firm belief that all websites eventually attract the attention and respect that they deserve. The hard work is in the “eventually” part.
—John Gruber, I’ll Tell You What’s Fair

Granted, Gruber’s soapbox is to my soapbox as the population of China is to the nice folks of Cleveland, but the question remains, am I somebody? I’d argue that we’re all somebody, it’s just a matter of scale. And if you want a bigger soapbox, you best get to building.

Being uncomfortable…means you’re aware of problems with your product and are motivated to fix them. Products that never see the light of day don’t make anyone uncomfortable.
—Rob Goodlatte, Be Uncomfortable

Rob works on a slightly bigger site than I do during the 9–5, so his advice carries weight and scales down to where the majority of us are making things work online. Spooner and I have been diligently working on a completely rebuilt NewSpring site for the past few months, leaving behind a wake of diligently finished todo lists, details, and plans—but it’s fast approaching time to launch, whether we’re fully* ready or not**.

*Fully ready is a myth in web world.

**But we’ll try to be mostly ready.

If you have talent, there will always be someone telling you how to use it. Talent is in short supply, and smart people always have a vision for how you should use yours. It’s not enough to be good at what you do—you need to know where you want to take it (and more importantly where you don’t want to go).

Don’t mindlessly offer up your talent on the altar of the wrong vision. Be intentional with your talent, or someone else will do it for you.

Allow me to tell you a little story…

Once upon a time, in a Chattanooga far, far away, a boy bought a domain because he saw a phrase in a dream that brought some measure of delight to his literary soul. Eventually the boy’s computer died in a fiery crash and with it went his swashbuckled copy of Corel Draw, his first app love/hate, the only vector graphics program he had ever known. Thus he began to wage war with that Adobian beast Illustrator, with the aforementioned domain serving as a battlefield. All manner of color, typography and wit was spilled in 200+ illustrative fist fights. And then he migrated the war over to Tumblr, to make it easier for you to follow along or RSS or favorite stuff. And everyone lived happily ever after. The end*.

So yeah, Prom Night Fist Fight is back. Here are a few personal favorites to hopefully whet your appetite: Hear!, Purple Explosion, Minimum Minded Meme, Dour Words for Cowards, Glory & Grace, The Art o’ Fist Fighting, Sum of Parts, this one, this one, Antoinette, Prog Rock, La Dolce Vita, Psalm 8, Thor!, Word, Booty, Speak Up, Mmm. Vector., this one, and Music to My Ears.

*OR IS IT?

[The '10 Boston Celtics are] a very unselfish team. They don’t care where their scoring comes from. Nobody seems the least bit bothered by that.
—Stan Van Gundy, Orlando Magic head coach

Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.
—Romans 12:10

Same thought from two very different sources, both of which give me lots to ponder about how I interact with my team and who gets the credit. Winning is better than self-promotion.

Tumblr makes it so easy to set-up new sites. The idea-to-implementation timeline on Haiku Pickup Lines was less than an hour. I’m also making use of the Google Font Directory, which is a handy addition to the internet. You should follow along on Tumblr or RSS.

I’m settled in to a hotel in Virginia Beach (yay for free wifi, Hilton Garden Inn! You get it!) for a week of vacation. I hope it’s well-earned, but I hope my team sees it that way, too.

I’ve been trying to shift my thinking over the last year—less about me, more about us—to find out how we can leverage the team best. I still think rest is massively important for both individual and team health, but I’m framing more and more through the lens of team lately.

As I put down roots (physically and mentally) and commit to moving forward with a group of like-minded folks to build something great, I’m acutely aware of how my personal lack has a blast radius beyond my task list(s) and projects. How do my shortfalls pull us down? Destroy our reputation internally? Affect the health of the organization? Am I making excuses or blame shifting? Where am I pulling my weight? Where am I just dead weight?

Here’s to resting… And to working damn hard not to be the weak link when you’re done resting.

You can learn more about Eric on his site or by watching other videos.

No one would have bought subprime loans if they were called non-credit worthy loans.
—David Rubenstein

Rubenstein’s quote sounds pithy in retrospect, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. When you call something what it is, it better enables on-the-spot decision making. If you dress it up with different clothes, clever names, and branding bell and whistles it’s still the thing—you’re just making it more difficult for people to know it on first pass. You can’t build long term trust by misleading people.

Quote, “They can’t print what we paint. They print in pixels.” Up There is a gorgeously shot (and told) short documentary on the dying industry of big city, big scale, hand painted “out of home” advertising. I especially love the bits about apprenticeship and the passing on knowledge.

The old print vs. web debate [is] as tedious and pointless as it’s always been. Different mediums have different strengths. The web is just better than paper at delivering time-sensitive news. It’s idiotic to pretend otherwise. And paper is still good at things the web is not, especially in getting people to actually pay for it. The solution is to use each medium for what it’s good at.
—Derek Powazek, How To Save A Newsweekly in 5 Easy* Steps

Powazek is spot-on here. If companies are savvy enough, they can make changes in content delivery and survive. But most of what I see from the magazine industry is a desperate attempt to continue trudging through strategies that just don’t work anymore.

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
—General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, Retired

Fortunately, it seems like some big corporations, or at least individuals in those corporations, are starting to get the drift. Derek updates his article with this gem from Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek:

We have had it backwards. We produce a magazine all week, we close it Friday and Saturday, and it begins to go out online…. It’s probably time to flip that. You are solely focused on the digital, and by the end of the week you take the best of … then you print that magazine.
—From a Daily Show interview, Part 1 and Part 2

I love the internet. And I love magazines, maybe even more than the web. It doesn’t have to be either/or, but unless more magazines realize their future is in deciding what content fits best in which medium, and curating it well, I fear my love of editorial design in print will have fewer and fewer places to show off.