As designers we’re a really cynical breed… too often highlighting for the negative instead of celebrating the positive. Celebrating life. Celebrating accomplishments, and most importantly, celebrating the accomplishments of others (try it, it makes them feel good).

I’m as bad as any of us, so several months ago I put this note on the wall next to my desk. Just a reminder that there’s a lot to be happy about.

Accepting applications for the Project M Lab in AL.

We are currently accepting applications for the position(s) of Design Director(s) at the Project M Lab in Greensboro, Alabama for the 2010-2011 year. Are you a recent graduate who’s interested in challenging the conventions of design? Are you a current student who’d like to put your skills to use in a real, live community? Are you an educator who may be able to identify the perfect candidate for this position? In any case, please visit our website and follow the instructions to submit an application. Click anywhere on this entire paragraph to be re-directed to said application website.

Care to view a sampling of the sort of shenanigans you might be involved with, should you assume the position? Look here. And here. And here. Oh andhere.

If you’re still confused, perhaps this position isn’t for you…but do contact us first before withdrawing your consideration entirely.

Best of luck,
Megan and Ryan
on view here.
and sorta represented here.

Please send all email inquiries to legit@themegryan.com

Of course, when you search using the words, “branding” and “checklist,” you get a million results - some good and some bad, but all more to do with what makes a brand a brand… which doesn’t help me much in my task, but in reading a bunch of these, I think the ways we can talk about branding a company are also appropriate guidelines for defining yourself as a designer — especially a student designer who wants to enter the field.

So I’ve taken a few points from some branding guidelines and questionnaires and put together an inventory of considerations you might gather to help you when (a) you’re figuring out what kind of designer you want to be and who you want to work for and (b) you start to sell / promote yourself to potential employers.

So before you put that portfolio together and before you make those phone calls and send those emails, take time to think, process and resolve the following checklist. I left the “branding” talk in there because you should take a step back and look at yourself as a brand.

1. What is your brand vision?
What is the vision behind what you do? How do you describe your design, your aims, your goals? Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?

2. What are your company values?
This is pretty self-explanatory. What are the things you value? How can you incorporate those values into the way you design?

3. What are the good and bad features/attributes of your brand?
Where do you excel? Where do you need improvement? Really think about this, be honest and be humble. Your idea of “expert” in Illustrator is probably closer to “novice” to a Creative Director.

4. What are the bad aspects of your brand, and how can you dispose of them?
What are some negative impressions you might have left behind, be it at a past internship or with one of your old professors / adjunct or otherwise. Think about the impressions you may have left or mistakes you might have made, and make sure you know how to address those issues if they come up in an interview. What can you learn from these experiences, and how can you improve?

5. What are the practical benefits associated with each of the good features/attributes?
What can you offer with your skills, design or otherwise?

6. What are the emotional reasons why customers might buy your products/services?
How are you in interviewing? Another part of getting a job is how well you present yourself. Whether the CD or hiring person likes you. Looks (the book) are great, but personality does go a long way.

7. What are the rational and emotional personality characteristics of your brand? What can you do to bring these personality characteristics to life?
Again, your personality, along with your work will help you stand out and be remembered. Think of ways you can incorporate parts of your personality into your presentation (but don’t go overboard).

8. How can you use the brand personality to attract and retain more customers?
Think about ways you can follow up with CD’s/AD’s or others you might meet at industry meetings, portfolio reviews, etc. Learn to network. Make sure people want to recommend you. How can you do this?

9. How can you deliver on the promise of your brand?
Once you get the job, make sure you can back what you say. Delivering on your promises is very important.

And lastly,
10. How are you going to generate more trust in your brand-customer relationship?
Once you have the job, keep improving upon your brand. Go back from question 1-10 periodically throughout your career, like companies do when they reassess their presence in their customers lives. Like brands, creative directors and shop owners and clients want a designer they can trust and believe in to get the work done and done well.

So, reevaluate your goals. Look at your negatives and positives and continue to make your brand (your presence) bigger, better and more trustworthy, and one day you might be like the Apple of the designer world. Everyone will want you, and all the other designers will want to be like you.

Name(s) + Company:
Jeff Barfoot, BarfootWorldwide

Education Background (school / self taught, etc):
I have a degree in Marine Biology (that comes in way handy), and then degrees in illustration and graphic design from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Where you first worked (in design / illustration, etc):
When I first graduated, I sort of had two jobs. During college, I had a newspaper cartoon, and I was fortune enough to get it syndicated and into a few national newspapers. At the same time, I got my first design job in Dallas, at Eisenberg And Associates. That was a hard first year - I would work long days on mostly annual reports, then come home at night and try to be funny and get my strip done. I was working 80-90 hour weeks there for about the first 10 months, and I had just moved to Texas so I had no friends. I eventually had to decide between one of the other, and I chose to discontinue the strip, and I don’t regret it. I have had a very fortuitous design career.

Favorite book ever (design or non-design related):
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I love this book - Mr. Bryson takes big science (like evolution, the big bang, etc.) and boils it down into very graspable chunks. It’s like information design in words.

Recommended design / thinking / illustration book(s):
Oh, I have a bunch I love. Here’s a list of five:
1. Paul Rand by Stephen Heller
I love Paul Rand, and this is a very difinitive sampling of his work, and Heller, a great writer, really gives an insight into the man.

2. Marks of Excellence by Per Mollerup
Not just a logo book. This one really explains the history of what a logo is, gets into semiotics and symbology.

3. Otl Aicher by Markus Rathgeb
Aicher is one of my all-time favorite designers. And for my money, he did the greatest Olympics program of all time, the 1972 Munich Olympics.

4. Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin by R. Roger Remington and Robert Fripp
Another favorite designer, but Burtin appeals to my geeky science side. Burtin did a lot of exhibit and textbook design, and had a knack for taking a complex scientific subject and visually interpreting it in a simple way that anyone could understand.

5. The Pixar Touch by David A. Price
I love, love, love Pixar. Everything they touch turns to gold. This is a good book on their history and insight into their thinking.

1. What made you decide to become a designer?
Actually, it was a Fruitopia® bottlecap (and don’t go Googling “Fruitopia” and judge - the design is terrible now, but when I was in school it was well-designed). I was getting into more and more complicated ecology/biology classes, and I kept thinking that it just didn’t feel like the right thing. That semester I was taking this horribly complicated population statistics class at the same time as my very first into to design class. I was sitting in the middle of the statistics class, in the back row, and I was drinking the Fruitopia. I looked down at the cap, and I realized that someone, somewhere came up with that, drew the letters, drew the logo, designed the label, and it felt right. This is not a lie - I got up in and walked out of class, straight to the admin building and changed my major to design.

2. What’s your process for conceiving new designs?
I’ll answer this on with some advice: draw, draw, draw, draw, draw. I try to solve as much as possible on paper first. It might sound like an antiquated way of dong things to students sometimes, but solving on paper is the fastest way to work things out. I do very loose ideas and sketched on paper, and then do refined pencils before I decide what to work up on the computer. I can’t tell you how much time this saves. I’ve had a few times where I’ll have a loose idea in my head and sat down and pushed things around in the computer. I feel that the times I’ve done that, the work isn’t any worse, but it takes me twice as long to arrive at the solution I’m happy with.

3. What do you regret not learning while you were in school?
I loved to draw, and I wanted to become an illustrator very badly, so I took a lot of drawing and illustration classes. I wish that I had taken a few photography classes; I still know almost nothing about how to take real, professional photographs, although I’ve learned a lot about lighting and styling over the years.

4. What’s your most valuable ability? i.e. conceptualization, hand/computer skills, etc.
Definitely my conceptual skills. I love to learn and read, and I love to solve problems in a clever way. I like taking a message and solving it visually or through marketing. I’ve grown a lot aesthetically, I think. I did a lot of annual reports and b2b work at my first job, and that’s a good way to hone your conceptual skills. Afterwards, I worked for a shop that did a lot of fashion and retail work. I hated it at first, felt a little out of my element, but I think that I really grew a lot during that time, and my visual abilities kind of caught up to my conceptual ones. Also, my wife is a fantastic art director and stylist, and I have learned a lot from being around her as well.

5. What is the most exciting aspect of the art/design world right now?
There is a huge illustration revival right now, which is a refreshing change from the ultra-slick photoshop phase we’re coming out of. I see more illustration everywhere, in ads and broadcast, movie posters, packaging. I love integrating illustration into my design, and I’m excited about this. Especially because of selling illustration to a client: most corporate clients are more comfortable with something if they see someone else doing something similar, even though they strive to be different from their competitors.

6. If you could move anywhere right now, in consideration of the art/design scene, where would you go?
I used to want to move to Portland or Seattle, I loved the music work being done up there. I know it will sound cliché, but this is a great time to be a designer or illustrator because you can run a studio literally anywhere, and have client exchanges over email and the phone no problem. My newest client is in New York, which I love, but I’ve never met him in person. I really like Dallas (I’m from Colorado originally). The design community is very strong here, and the cost of living is low.

7. What’s your daily routine?
I am most productive in the morning and late at night, at least, that’s when my mind is sharpest. The afternoon is my low time. So when I get up, I try to do any concepting and sketching then, and use the afternoon for doing computer work, layouts and rendering logos, that kind of thing. I try not to answer email in the morning, and keep that time free. The afternoon is when I talk to suppliers, clients, email, and take care of business things, billing etc. I get a second wind after dinner, and usually have another productive chunk of time from about 8 to midnight or 1. I’ve never needed a lot of sleep, so it’s a good thing for me.

8. What’s the best advice anyone has ever given you, regarding design or otherwise?
This isn’t something that anyone told me, per se, but something I have noticed and tried to live. I think that in order to be a truly great designer, you need to stop thinking of design as a job, and think of it as a lifestyle. I really have embraced being creative, and let that into every part of my life. Our home is like a live-in studio in a lot of ways. My wife (my partner) and I use the dining room as a work area, and we really enjoy creating and bouncing ideas back and fourth all of the time. I really try to always be “on”, receptive to ideas that can come at any time, can spark while Im cooking dinner or in the shower or reading my kids a bedtime story.

9. In illustration/design, do you think is it more important to have a very distinct and solid style or have more of a range of styles?
I think that as a designer, striving to maintain a style is a horrible thing. This is a huge disservice to your clients. Clients come to a designer to help them find a unique voice and identity against their competitors and the visual landscape in general. A style makes everything look similar, so this is at odds with what you should be doing for your clients. Now that’s not to say that can’t have a philosophy that ties all of your work together - which is something a studio should have. We strive to do smart, bright work that’s clever, colorful, positive, and a little funny when possible.

10. Who would you call a mentor / attribute as the inspiration in how you work / do things?
I have learned the most from two people, and they have influenced me in opposite ways. Jack Summerford is a designer here in Dallas, and has a philosophy of simplify, simplify, simplify. He can strip a complex idea down to it’s smallest derivative, the simplest solution. My wife is a very gifted art director and stylist, and is very good with patterns, trends, and adding richness to projects. I’ve learned to really find a balance between the two - to communicate a concept in the clearest way possible, but make it visually rewarding to the viewer/user.

See more of Jeff’s work at barfootworldwide.com