Viewing Category: Making Stuff
I know I said I was going on hiatus, but I just I got a nice email from a reader today complimenting me on the layout of the blog...thanks Janet! She also asked a question about my old online resume PDF:
In particular your resume's design caught my attention. How did you create a one-page PDF resume that's so organized and detailed? Would you be able to suggest resources or pages on how to design a PDF resume from scratch?
The short answer is that I use Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat, which are pricey professional page layout and document management software packages.
The longer answer is that I spent some time thinking about how I wanted people to perceive my resume and how people actually read them:
After scanning a few hundred resumes, you start to get snow blindness from all that white. This is where graphic designers have a seeming advantage: A HAH! We can use this opportunity to uniquely express our graphical talents and creative expression! While that does work when you know you're competing against a sea of white paper, it doesn't work so well when everyone else is doing the same thing. The takeaway is a resume should be easy to read, with style in a supporting role.
When resumes are being screened by someone who is unable to evaluate the strengths of a candidate themselves, the resume is being scanned for relevant experience and skills that match the job criteria they've been handed. It's important that these requirements are easy for them to find so your resume makes the cut.
When resumes are being handled directly by the people that you'll be working with, they'll be scanning for signs of rare competence or interesting combinations of skills. They aren't hiring for just skills, though: they're hiring for a team fit. While you still need to address the basic requirements of the job, interjecting that curveball skill might just catch the attention of the person assembling the list of "awesome people we'd like to work with".
Most of the time, my resume isn't being processed by an HR or employee review process, but is provided as a formality, so I don't really follow the standard format. What is important, though, is that people get a sense of what skills and experience I have. The issue I have with the standard resume look is that they often have long page-width sentences (hard to read) and are filled with sentences that sound like Single-handedly managed team productivity of 50 associates through just-in-time distributed beverage ordering coordination and delivery processes. I am yawning "BS" before I even get to the word "handedly", so I cater to my own whims by using shorter descriptions in my lists of credentials. My reasoning goes something like this:
- I put all the experience "color commentary" in the "framing statement" at the top of the page, where it is placed so it is the first thing read on the page, after my name and categorical title. It should be short and to the point, serving as a kind of establishing shot, to use film lingo, for the rest of the resume.
- All the following lists of education, experience, skills, and so on then (ideally) support the framing statement. If they don't, then you are sending a mixed message about what it is you do. You may do a LOT MORE in real life, but a company is generally looking you to FIT into a particular kind of box. You might change the actual categories from what I have here to suit the type of business and industry, and if necessary add the necessary years of experience quantifiers.
- While I like to say that people should find out how to stand out rather than just fit in, the resume is one of those cases where you might want to make it easy for potential employers to IMAGINE you as a plug-and-play part in their company. That is what you are trying to sell here: possibility of a good fit, which makes it a no-brainer of a deal to get a phone call.
- When you get to the interview, your personality can then sell the other connections you can foresee. The AREAS OF INTEREST part of my resume provides potential jumping-off points for conversation.
Anyway, this is just what I do for my simple resume. I'm generally targeting the case where my resume is being considered by the creative professional for informational purposes, not competing with others as I've described above. So your mileage may vary considerably!
So, You Don't Have InDesign
In answering Janet's email, I thought about the common problem I face when telling people that I use expensive production graphics software to do my work. The implication is that THEY SHOULD TOO, though it's impractical most of the time due to the need for training and people like to use what they have available. Most of the time this is Microsoft Word or Excel. While I like Word for straight writing and basic formatting of source text, I hate its page layout tools. They are very finicky, and often times one little layout issue will cascade into an unrecoverable mess. Excel just lacks the fundamental typographic control tools, though it is surprisingly flexible.
I avoid using Microsoft FrontPage on general principle, which is that it is the source of ugly web pages that I have had to clean up. Call me small minded, but I don't even want to know what it does because of past ills visited upon me by its twisted autogenerated HTML progeny.
That leaves Microsoft PowerPoint. I occasionally have received photo assets that had been copied and pasted into a Word document or PowerPoint presentation, and this creates a production headache because the original file is down-sampled or destroyed in the process. However, I've also seen several reader-provided PowerPoint and Excel versions of my templates, and these look fine. I then idly wondered if I could use PowerPoint to recreate the layout without looking too ugly, so I gave it a try. I think it actually works. The advantage of PowerPoint over Word is that you can freely place text blocks and format them as you would in Word. You can place graphic imagery. You can also specify in PowerPoint's options to produce output aligned to the resolution of your printer, not the screen. And since PowerPoint is part of the most basic Microsoft Office suite, you probably already have it...so let's rock!
Shown below is PowerPoint 2007 duplicating my resume layout, with the "view grid" and "view rulers" options turned on to make the screenshot look more impressive:
PowerPoint allows you to set the page size of your presentation, so I set it to US Letter. Then I just drew a bunch of text boxes and aligned them in such a way that the white spaces worked together. The grid isn't particularly tight or well-constructed (in other words, it looks a little sloppy) but the overall look is fairly clean. The unit whitespace I used is the height of a line in the body text, because I didn't feel like fiddling with line heights for every paragraph. I adjusted the spaces between the headers to be greater than the blank line that separates paragraphs, and just adjusted other parts of the composition so they tended to line up cleanly where it seemed that should happen.
If I was being more anal, I would have shrunk the space between paragraphs by about 25-30% and tightened everything up proportionally...this would have improved the "scattered" look of the "education" and "experience" areas. However, this effort would have required a lot of paragraph twiddling and hey, I would have used InDesign or Illustrator for this if I were doing it for real. If you are so inclined to this kind of adjustment, though, you would select the paragraph and then right-click to choose "Format Paragraph" to play with the "space after" parameters and linespacing.
There are a couple of tricks that I had to apply to the topmost header that says DAVID SEAH.
First, I tweaked the left margin from 0 inches to a small value to make the left edge of the D in "DAVID SEAH" line up with the type before it. If you align by the text box margins, the D does not optically line up with the left margin of the text below it ("new media designer"). In a real page layout program I would have just nudged it over, but I could not place the text box accurately enough with the mouse due to the way the program "auto-snaps" objects into alignment. Adjusting the internal margin was easier than figuring out how to turn that feature off, which I suspect is not possible.
I opened the text box formatting options to adjust the character spacing (the default value was way too wide) by -2pt. This didn't fix the regrettable amount of space between the D and A letters (a common problem with electronic type on PCs) but it does seem more put together.
I use Acrobat Professional to create my PDF files, but I imagine there are other providers of inexpensive PDF encoders. I'm not familiar with any of them. Readers, any suggestions? [UPDATE: Several suggestions have been posted in the comments, so check them out!]
Download Example Resume Files
If you'd like to play with your own version of this resume, just download the zip file which contains the PowerPoint 2007 source. I've also enclosed a version that should work with PowerPoint 2005 versions and earlier, though I'm not sure if it works. A sample PDF is also included for your reference. Please note that this is not my actual resume, though it is using elements from it.
» Download PPTResumeSample.zip (170K)
» Requires Microsoft PowerPoint
Note: If you are looking for Calibri, the font that I'm using here, it's part of Office 2007. You can download and install the Microsoft Office 2007 Compatibility Pack to get them; check this article for some tips on other options.
NOTE: There have been some really great reader comments for this article; you should definitely check them out! :-)
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.
A launch isn't a launch without some kind of hiccup, and ours was that only HALF of the mailing list was actually notified. As is the case with many Microsoft applications, a "helpful" dialog box popped up to warn about a multiple-email field, which stopped the mailing operation dead in its tracks. This dialog box was also bashful, hiding itself behind another window in embarrassment, so we didn't even see it until we started looking into why some people were not notified just now.
So if you haven't been notified by now, it's for one of the following reasons:
- We're not shipping outside the USA yet
- We don't have your confirmation email
- I was planning on emailing you directly, or will hand-deliver next time I see you
- You canceled your order
In a way this problem makes the launch process more interesting, because it adds some color to the story :-)
Finally, We Are Shipping!
A few hours ago an email notification sent from fulfillment * thedavidseahgroup.com went out with instruction on how to pay and arrange for shipping of the pads. We are fulfilling pre-orders first. After that we'll open up the general ordering for the remaining unsold pads. There will be about 100 of them not spoken for. If you are interested in ordering a pad or three, leave a comment! I'm currently only handling the domestic US, but will be adding other countries as I figure out how it works.
If you had placed a pre-order by the original cutoff date and did NOT receive the instructions on where to go to make payment, contact me through the contact form. If you are having trouble with the form (the anti-spam measures are fairly harsh), you find my contact email address at the very bottom left of the page.
I was expecting the fulfillment process to be incredibly difficult and tedious. Or more accurately, I wasn't looking forward to all the manual labor and accounting. It turned out to not be such a big deal after all.
Handling Packaging and Shipping
One of the most daunting tasks to me was handling the receipt of monies and arranging for shipment. Personally I hate shipping stuff, primarily because it seems to take an hour and a half for me to ship a single package. I've got to do the following:
- Find a box, possibly purchase one somewhere
- Pack the box
- Pad the box with something
- Find some packing tape
- Tape up the box securely
- Fill out any customs forms
- Declare values
- Weigh the box
- Find the shipping address
- Find a destination phone number
- Acquire the right label
- Transcribe the address information correctly
- Double check the address for accuracy, redoing it if it's unclear
- Drive to the nearest FedEx, or wait for a pickup
- Wait in line to drop off the package
- Pay the shipping fees
- Drive home
- Email the tracking numbers to the addressee
- Cross my fingers
Incredibly tedious. I wasn't looking forward to doing this for a hundred boxes.
Thankfully, my buddy Scott figured out the postage options, so we're using flat rate USPS Priority Mail. So long as you're using their official flat-rate envelope or flat-rate box (provided for free), you can put as much stuff as you can fit in the package. So that simplified postage calculation. This still left the problem of automating the addressing of the boxes, so we planned on using a mail merge to create the shipping labels.
It also turns out that order management and shipping is a lot easier with today's online tools. Read onward.
Handling Mail Merges
I wasn't looking forward to managing the email list. I was maintaining an Excel document with all the addresses in it, to use as the data source for the following:
Generating shipping labels with name, address, and number of pads per order. These shipping labels, I imagined, would be used by packers to tell how many pads to put in each box without having to look it up on another sheet, hopefully reducing errors.
Generating the email blast to tell individual pre-orders where to pay, and reconfirm their address and # of pads.
Since I wasn't too keen on doing this, I handed the Excel spreadsheet updating to volleyball buddy Brandy, and then asked The Ultra-Competent Erin to make Outlook talk to Word to talk to Excel to make all that other stuff happen. Whew. Outsourcing rocks :-)
Handling Payment
The new website content management system I'm using, Expression Engine 1.6, has a "Simple E-Commerce" module in it that can handle items and so forth. It also integrates with PayPal, so I figured I would use this to build a simple store to handle the transaction. I already have PayPal, so I upgraded to a Business account and proceeded to build a simple store. It didn't, however, handle quantities and shipping costs by itself, so I gave up and went directly to PayPal to generate purchase buttons.
It was then I discovered that PayPal actually prints shipping labels and postage. Their simple payment button allows each person placing an order to specify a quantity. The shipper can fill out a template to specify shipping methods AND costs, for both domestic and international shipping. Not only that, but PayPal's merchant tools track the entire transaction in a simple dashboard. Once a payment is received, you can click a button to buy the postage online through Pitney Bowes, which comes in form of a printable web page that you just tape to the box. The funds are automatically deducted from your PayPal account. You can then print a packing list that can be customized with your own message and logo, and include that in the box. All you have to do then is drop the package off at the Post Office or arrange for a pickup. This did away with the need to print labels too, so there was some work saved there.
The one drawback of PayPal is that they de-emphasize the credit card payment link to make people think they have to sign up for PayPal to use it. I put instructions regarding how this was NOT necessary in the email, and on the secret order page. Plus there is a transaction fee of about 2% or so, but this isn't too bad.
Boiling down the steps, this is how it goes assuming you are using the US Postal Service's flat rate priority mail packages ($4.60 for envelope, $8.95 for box, no weight limits).
- Order boxes and envelopes from the US Postal Service website (free, but 5-10 business days to receive)
- Get a PayPal account, upgrade to Business Account (free)
- Activate Web Payment Standard (free)
- Set up your PayPal shipping quantities/costs and preferred shipping vendor as USPS (assuming you'll be using their flat rate shipping)
- Create a "Pay Now" button for your individual item, put it on your website.
- Let PayPal manage the payment, address, shipping labels
- As orders come in, print postage and pack boxes
- Drop finished packages off at the post office or arrange for a pickup
It is all rather remarkable how easy it is. The first package I shipped out with this felt...momentous. The next step after this is to use something like Amazon Fulfillment to handle everything, which includes listing on the Amazon website. There is a $60 monthly cost however, because you have to buy a storefront account I believe...but now I am getting ahead of myself. Gotta sell-through these pads first.
The Adventure Continues
So that's it for now. On December 31st I will open general orders to the public. In the meantime, if you're interested in how the project got going here's all the pertinent blog posts.
I must publicly thank Scott Wright: graphic designer by training, MBA by education, experienced print broker, trusted friend and co-schemer. I wouldn't have dared try printing anything for real without his encouragement and support. Dude, you rock! Start your blog already!
Yes, the project has been moving slowly. I've had a few email inquiries regarding the status of the pre-printed Emergent Task Planner Pads. Here's where we are right now:
- We have the pads printed and newly shrinkwrapped for durability.
- We have our shipping options figured out: US Postal Service flat rate.
- We now have an instruction sheet that we have to print (full bleed, 8.5" x 11") on a print-on-demand printer.
- We have to do the mail merge of the mailing list. The mailing list has been processed into Excel, so now I just have to do a mail merge. I believe the last time I did this was in 1984 using a word processor called WordStar, a program I still miss but probably can never return to, much in the way that I can't watch Star Blazers anymore without cringing.
So that's where we are. Here's a sneak peak at the new instruction sheet; eventually I will be making these for all the forms.
Yes, it's a little salesy in the wording (this is something I've been trying to be better at, self promotion and so forth), and I'm not so keen on the typography, but it's DONE FOR NOW and I can move on to other things.
I've been pretty very busy with projects, and haven't even had much time to blog. It makes me think that I would actually like to be writing full-time on a variety of topics, but this is probably a case of "the grass is greener on the side of the fence without projects pressing down on my shoulders". Dad is also visiting, and we've had some wonderful conversations, though I still need to buy a reasonably capable but cheap DV camcorder...aigh, more research. And then there is the looming round of 2008 updates to the various calendars and forms. So my plate is feeling quite full. The always-insightful Matt Cornell, aka Idea Matt, magically sensed my pain and shipped me a copy of Following Through: A Revolutionary New Model for Finishing Whatever You Start out of the blue, which was awfully considerate. I'm looking forward to reading a bit of it tonight; Dad already pounced on it and flipped through, pronouncing it "practical" and "useful" with some energy a few hours ago. Time to read!
