In what was arguably one of my most entertaining professional moves ever, last Spring, I sent a hiring manager a set of web graphics with zombies photoshopped into his company’s devices. I was amused. He was not. I didn’t get the job.
Since then, I’ve realized it takes a really potent kind of crazy to love doing sample projects. They’re a widely accepted necessary evil that, without fail, either go exceptionally well or horribly wrong. It’s work – like your everyday run-of-the-mill work – but instead of money you’re being offered hope. And the existence of that hope is tied to some really obscure request to satisfy every ‘what if’ imagined by the the person that’s going to look at it, his drinking buddy and his dog. Here, it can feel like the designers are separated from the mind readers, the creatives are separated from the witch doctors and, if you’re really lucky, you’ll discover you’re Harry Effing Potter.
On the heels of speaking on panel at last Monday’s AAF-KC Career Day, I realized that I said something no fresh-faced designer probably wanted to hear. “At some point, things will go terribly, horribly wrong….” Well, friends, you can’t say I’m not honest.
For me, the terribly-horribly-wrongs tend to happen around interviews. I blame this on the unexpected. A solid 5 years post-college, my most recent interview can reduce the most stoic of men to tears of uncontrollable laughter. Climbing into my to-be-Director’s car to go to lunch, my fitted suit skirt split straight up the back. There’s really no easy way out of that situation, so I made the split-second decision to own it – as much as you can own your clothes trying to escape you. “I…I think I just split my skirt. Yea. I did. I just split my skirt.”
I spent the entire lunch and trip back to the office with said Director’s sweater tied around my waist. While that whole situation should register as a deal-breaker to normal people, I remember – somehow – being more concerned with making sure the team got all the information they wanted from me. It wasn’t until I was standing on one side of my bright green car handing the sweater over the top to the other side with one hand and pinching the skirt closed with the other that it hit me – “who in their right mind would hire this mess?”
I typically end up thinking the same thing in the middle of a sample project.
To say that my work on samples shows my best foot forward would be a gross overstatement. I try…I really do…hard. But hope is only so motivating – and at some point I start photoshopping the undead and Googling qualifications for the Make a Wish program.
I’m not saying these projects aren’t worthwhile. I always learn a ton about my potential employer and usually see pretty quickly whether or not we’d make a good team. I am saying that it’s rare, if ever, that I’ve handed off something I feel half way decent about let alone want to have judged as a representation of my entire career and talents. They’re, mentally, a really, really rough challenge. I usually find myself banking on the harebrained idea that this is how most designers feel in this situation – squeezing the life out of that little payment of hope while thinking that maybe, just maybe, my design will suck the least.
Intrigued by that realization, I recently asked some design friends to share their past sample projects with me. Most assumed I was writing about our design failures and handed them over with a laugh. Others refused all together. Some just really rocked it. What we all had in common: our sarcastic love for what we’d created and flawless spin on why every design decision was a good one.
It turns out, you really can hold onto some of that hope, because we’re all in the same boat. Or at least we are – me and my design friends – we’re all fighting to make the most of that creative black hole.
It just so happened that a week prior to the Great Divide of 2013, I submitted one of the most quirky, laid back projects I’d every been asked to do. This gem of a company approached the whole thing with a “show us what you can do” vibe and held to it when they said “we really don’t have any requirements.” When all was said and done, I was inspired to have more fun than releasing an army of spite zombies (which was actually a lot of fun) and submitted a piece I could feel ok claiming as my own. This would be the moment when we say “things just clicked.”
And, when terribly-horribly-wrong finally caught up with me, as it always does, the great project literally covered my ass.
I got that job.