Status on Hiatus

I'm still on blogging hiatus because I've been busy with a challenging year-long interactive project. This is an enforced hiatus, not a vacation, and it's been driving me a little nuts. The plus side of my time away from writing: I'm learning a lot about relatively-modern video game development technology and authoring. The down side? I really miss writing and working on my own projects. However, this period of enforced time away from blogging has helped me see what I want to do more clearly.

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Freelance Referral Network Building

Today I got an email from someone looking for a referral if I was still booked through November (I am, on that museum interactive project). It highly irritates me that I don't have a good referral network of deserving people who share my values. Almost two years ago, I wrote about a different kind of freelance network that would be powered by circles of personal recommendation of the work, from which the nature of the person can be inferred. My theory is that as freelancers, we really have no idea what clients respond to, so we put together a portfolio of our "best work" and hope for the best. Frankly, it all starts to look the same after a while, and it's impossible to see the person behind the work because we assume that he/she is the same. I say show your most "you" stuff, and let people form their own impressions. If they like what you see (and this is hard to predict), they will act if it's convenient relative to their need.

Referring

When I refer someone, I insist on qualifying what I know about that person's work and character. I don't refer someone who I don't trust, and if there are areas that I think are important to the business prospect that I can not speak to from personal experience, I say that. Here are some of the things that I like to see in the people I refer, adapted from my original post:

• Defines tangible, concrete results.
• Is candid, real, and honest in establishing expectations right from the get-go.
• Tells you how much something will cost before the work is done, to the best of their ability. Sets the expectation that this may change under specific conditions without being a jerk about it.
• Acknowledges the sending and receipt of critical work and related dependencies (e.g. receipt of asset photographs, etc)
• Strives to understands the nature of your work and the context in which you operate.
• Is willing to learn how to speak your own language (business, art, etc).
• Teaches how his/her profession works as necessary or as asked...no secrets! Good clients hire for the person doing the service, not the service itself.
• Actively collaborates to deliver tangible results at every stage of the project
• Keeps your best interest as the priority, not maximizing revenue at your expense, at fair compensation.
• Takes appropriate protective measures in terms of contractual scope that are mutually beneficial, and/or requires mutual commitment through tangible action.
• Looks out for other's relevant interests in day-to-day operation.
• Delivers great product on time.
• Is a source of good ideas and brainstorming.
• Enjoys the process of communication through regular dialog.
• Accepts criticism and disagreement, and works with that to help bring the project back into alignment (any feedback is good :-)

I don't expect to see every one of these line items in the same individual, and goodness knows that I am not perfect in this regard either. However, these values are what I aspire to professionally.

Building

The original initiative petered out as I got involved in other projects, and I figured that the energy it would take to build the network exceeded my available energy. This is still the case, but I'm now thinking of a relatively lower level of commitment. Ask people for resumes. I just posted this on Twitter:

I need to expand my referral network: If you kick ass at whatever you do and have 3 examples of ass kickery to back you up, contact me!

I'm going to keep everyone's information on file and start the positive critical review process myself on the information provided. This is useful for me because I'll start to rebuild my rolodex of people to go-to for work. Secondly, I will make the review process public by posting my positive impressions of the work I get to see. This means I focus on possibility, not expectation. It's up to the hiring client to make a determination whether a given freelance is reliable enough to do the work; I merely want to see what people are doing so I can connect the right gigs with the right people. This is something I like to do anyway, so it will be fun. This is a sort of variation on word-of-mouth, designed to create short lists of qualified candidates as opposed to filtering through hundreds of people.

So if you're an ass kicker of any stripe, send me your information or post it in the comment area. I am not sure how this will all play out, but I think it will be informative in some way. Here's what you should do in the email:

• Provide your name and public contact information
• Provide links to your three best examples of your work, as you see it. And that means you pick three links instead of throwing the whole portfolio at my head. It'll be hard, perhaps, but this is about what YOU think is important, not some abstract demographic. Three means three.
• Tell me what you think you do. If you don't know, that's OK, so long as you picked what you think your three strongest bits of work are.
• Tell me the story of how you got into what you're doing. This is very important context for me.

What I will do is spend about 30 minutes on each set of links, and then I'll spend another 30 minutes doing my informal analysis of how I can imagine your work being used in a given situation. I'll then post it on the public wiki for my reference, based on when I can get to it and what people are asking me for. It will be visible to the public, but as I said I will be only posting the positive reactions I have. This is not a recommendation I'm making; I'm merely documenting possibilities. As I said, it's up to the hiring party to do their own due diligence.

The benefit to you is that you'll get my perspective on your strengths and how I imagine it might fit with other people. People who have gone through this process with me have told me I should charge a lot of money for this service, but in this case you'll be doing me a favor by helping me expand my Rolodex. I can't promise that I'll get to everyone in a timely manner, but I will try my best to help people make connections.

Contemplating Career Directions

I had a long coffee meeting with Fred Schechter yesterday, an industrial designer based in northern California that I've been talking to on-and-off for the past couple of years. Industrial Design is one of those majors I wish I'd known about when I was applying to college; not knowing any better, I had gone into Electrical Engineering. Fred himself had originally started in Mechanical Engineering, but thanks to a chance conversation with a friend ("they have a MAJOR for making cool stuff???") he made an early exit and jumped to the world of product design. Anyway, we've been chatting about our mutual interest in making and selling our own products, and Fred's perspective on it from the industrial design / manufacturing side has been invaluable in fleshing out my next steps. He's an enthusiastic guy too, so if you're looking for someone to talk to about early-stage concept and prototyping for manufacturing, it's worth dropping him an email. Anyway, the conversation has helped solidify some thoughts on my personal career direction, so I thought I'd share them.

What Do I Do?

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that I do, because it doesn't neatly fit into a simple category. Or rather, I don't want it to, which makes telling people what I do difficult. And if I can't tell people what I do, it's hard for them to imagine a way to work together. This is essentially a kind of marketing / branding problem, but from my personal perspective it is an aspect of my ongoing search for identity and how I relate to others; this is the million dollar question. It is what really drives my design process too. I suppose if I billed myself as a marketing or branding person, I would have to say that I'm NOT an operational or strategic manager (which is what a lot of people seem to do). What I like to do occurs before strategy so it can inform strategic planning, but it is not strategy in itself. What the heck is that called? I don't know, therefore I can't explain it.

For most of us getting started in the job market, we've learned to define ourselves through skills and years of experience (this includes education, which becomes less relevant as years of experience accrue). For "creatives", we add a portfolio that showcase the physical work we've materially contributed to. If your job does not produce artifacts like this, then you use position and job title as the lowest common denominator for placing yourself in context to the field with which you've identified; this implies you have relevant knowledge and experience. All of these "markers" of "job identity" work if you fit in the pre-existing system. I could fit into this system (I've tried several roles to date), but they have not fully satisfied me. For the past few years, I've been trying to figure out my niche, so I could adequately define something NEW that fit me well. I haven't thought much beyond that, but that's OK: I've learned to appreciate that chance encounters are pretty much the mechanism through which the Universe makes my life interesting.

In the conversation about making books, Fred helped me figure out a few attributes about my writing methodology from a more detailed perspective. Here's what I think I do from a blogging perspective:

• I am obsessive about documenting process meticulously and accurately. I hate bad docs, having been exposed to plenty of them.
• I scaffold my documentation with personal experience and context. I can safely use myself as an example without stepping on other people's toes.
• I am inclusive of my readers as friends as I document and relate these experiences. I don't like feeling like an outsider, so I try to be as inclusive as I can so long as it feels good.
• I always try to create original expression and new content, rather than just report on what others are doing. It's a personal value.
• I summarize and distill working principles as succinctly as I can, because that's what I find easiest to remember
• I maintain personal continuity in my writing, because I happen to find that kind of thing interesting.

From this, I could see how I could induce general principles of interest from my specific interests. For the past few years, I've been aware that I tend to write about these specific areas:

• Design
• Development
• Productivity
• Personal Empowerment
• Inspiration
• Sharing Personal Experiences

Repackaging these into general principles, I come up with this:

• Design Thinking and Concepts
• How People Work (from a process psychology perspective)
• Building Stuff
• Chasing Dreams and Making Them Real
• Creating Practical Process Guides with Useful Insights

It is interesting to note that my specific interests were inward facing: they are my activities and interests. The general principles, however, are outward facing: they include other people's interests and activities. For example, I'm very interested in what other people are doing with their dreams, and I'm happiest when I'm a part of that process of making them real. With the general principles, I now have the critical balance of perspective that I was missing.

And, finally I can see how I could spin this into a general consultancy specializing in making sense out of things. The skills I have---that is, the specific experience I have with design and development tools, new media development, interactive design, etc---are just tools used to express the general principles.

Friendship-Focused Marketing, Take 1

I had a pretty good time at SXSW Interactive this year, largely free of the self-consciousness and second-guessing I had put myself through the first two times around. I don't know about you, but when I'm around thousands of talented, motivated, and smart people, I wonder just how I stack up. I'm old, maybe washed up, but I still have The Dream. Some tiny part in the back of my mind whispers that it is too late for me to have such dreams; I should settle down and find a good, steady career with great health benefits. Fortunately for me, that part of my brain is speaking Chinese, which I don't understand very well, so it's relatively easy to ignore as I blithely continue down my path toward wherever it's going. SXSW has become my yearly pilgrimmage to stock-up on inspiration and find new stars to guide me.

This year's SXSW was also different because I've had to introduce myself to more strangers. The previous two years, I hung out with groups of people who already knew me from online groups. This year, I hung out with mostly new acquaintances and got to know them the old fashioned way: by talking to them in person. I met a lot of new people just by sitting in the hall flashing my OLPC XO, through the core conversations, and through acquaintances I've only talked to at previous SXSWs. The impromptu situations that arise through the sharing a power outlet lead to the exchanging of cards. As I handed out my cards, I silently kicked myself because I knew my website was a mess. It doesn't really convey who I am succinctly or rapidly. Because my categories are all broken, it's whatever happens to be on the home page that will feed that first impression.

I found it notable that I was so concerned about how my website reflected on me, so I gave the matter more thought. Conveying who I am has always been really important to me, I knew, and it has colored the way I've presented myself to prospective clients. In fact, I started the blog as a deliberate attempt to avoid putting up a regular design portfolio / services website, having developed a severe allergy to crap marketing writing; I wanted to speak my thoughts plainly, not hide behind empty superlatives and ambiguous references to excellence. I told myself that maybe I would lose out on clients seeking "professional" designers, but at that time in my life reclaiming my sense of identity was much more important.

But why?

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Quickie Business Card Design 8: Return of Dot Story

Yes, South by Southwest Interactive 2008 is about to spring again in Austin, Texas, and I am again way behind on my preparation. However, I did finally decide to get business cards printed up beforehand, using Hotcards.com on the suggestion of the Twitterverse. I really liked the Hotcards website experience and the copywriting, so I am taking a chance on them, though it is pricier than some of the other business card services I've seen at $60/1000 plus shipping. Still, I have a penchant of putting my dollars where the user experience catches my eye.

Since this is the first time I've ever had the opportunity to print double-sided cards, I tried to put something together quickly. After a couple of hours of trying to put some Printable CEO-style graphics on the back, I remembered the old dot story concept on my really early cards. I never liked the way that design had worked, as it felt "all over the place" to me. With the extra room to play with, though, the dot story became viable.

Unfortunately, I thought of the "Structure / Story" tag pair after I had submitted the job to press; the cards I get will say "Structure / Design". This sort of works still, but it isn't as relevant to the story-based approach I take to design work. And, the alliteration sounds way better to my ear.

The front of the card is still the same general design I had from the previous round, though I have changed the text to reflect my incremental movement out of interactive and toward general design:

david seah - providing insight + ideation via information graphics and investigative design services

The text is broken with short lines, coor, and selected bold on keywords. It reads clunkily off the tongue, but it convey something. Not the greatest piece of marketing copy in terms of fluidity, but they may work better as conversational keyword starters. I'm not entirely happy with it:

Making these kinds of decisions can drive me nuts, as I'm prone to have long "should have / could have" internal conversations with myself. At some point, you just got to see how people react. Perhaps for my first double-sided card I should have used a cheaper service. Oh well!