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Log/Transition has moved. I have since moved into a Creative Director / Co-Founder position at Wander, and will continue to write about the process of shifting my career from agency design work to product design.
You can follow the process at Field Study. Thanks for the support and looking forward to more good conversation!
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Our awesome team is looking for an awesome front-end dev!
This may come as a bit of news, but for the past six weeks I have been happily plugging away on an amazing project with a small but voracious team (more details to come on this). After an intense summer spent looking for the right fit, I finally joined a startup to help build a small piece of the future of the internet (no small task mind you).
Now we need a killer Front-End Developer to help us build and really refine our product. We are a small team, we work fast, and our standards of elegant functionality and beautiful experience are high. If your up to the task hit me up at hi@keenancummings.com. Look forward to talking!
~ Steve Jobs on being fired from Apple.
It has been a few weeks since I left agency job. I will have details of the process and progress that I’ve made in the past few months: getting aquatinted with the field; applying and interviewing with about a dozen startups; figuring out how to budget for risk; and taking what I feel to be the optimal position for making this transition.
I feel light. I have nothing to do but work on this one incredibly interesting problem. No time sheets, no orientations, no meetings — just a lot of intense and interesting work. There is no clear career path before me, no next rung of the ladder than I am scraping to climb. And that means endless opportunity to just make something, hopefully something great. I am truly a beginner. This will be my first of many things. I trust my instincts, I lean on incredibly generous support, and I enjoy the rawness of it all.
~Dsyke Suematsu from his white paper discussed at Why Ad People Burn Out.
Our generation is looking for greater meaning in their work, and we’ve proven that we are willing to compromise deep savings accounts, home ownership, and clear work/life separation in favor of finding and doing something we love.
My decision to pursue a career in entrepreneurship was a difficult decision to make and is proving difficult to follow through on. I did however know that if I had continued on the path I was currently on (chasing a Creative Director position in the agency world) I would burn out long before I was able to create anything meaningful.
I’ve left the agency, and joined a small (team of 3!) start up. Designing for interaction and building platform for users to use and express themselves, it is exhausting. But burn-out is not a risk. Financing our vision, finding traction in a crowded market, designing a great experience — those are very real and heavy risks. But burn-out is not a risk.
I am building just a bit of what I believe will be a world changing project. I am laying track into a foggy future unknown. I am enjoying working with and associating with others building the internet and trying to understand how this thing is going to work. The internet is a massive project that is open for anyone to work on and I get to own it as much as anyone else does. I still get to make things, but now I get to make them for myself and for people. That opportunity is an exhausting, humanizing challenge.
“You want to achieve fairness and a place of equality on earth, how would you do that? … A big part of it was impact entrepreneurs. And design thinking and designers. Designers being a different kind of person that have some special capabilities. And we thought if we can enable designers to realize: hey, you’re more than you might think in terms of someone who can make great posters, you’re actually a person you can design great companies. … I hope [in the future] that the idea of making a company that doesn’t have a social impact aspect of it is just lame. It just doesn’t even make sense. Why would you do that?” —Alex Bogusky and John Bielenberg on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters Interview, Sep. 30th.
~Josh Miller on why he dropped out of Princeton in his 4th year to join a startup.
It’s easy to get the sense that there is a wave a both right and left brained talents that are leaving behind promising career paths, taking on significant risk (although the real risk of joining a startup is overblown), and challenging themselves in ways that a corporate or agency position could not.
It’s not that agency work is entirely uninteresting. It’s that it isn’t what it once was. A friend asked if our design demi-gods of modernist graphic design — the Eames, Rand, Bass — were alive and working today, where would they be looking to apply their talents. His guess was that as creative minds who were always pushing outside the boundaries of the industry and looking for maximum influence, they would likely be fascinated in building out the internet.
What I’ve learned in the past several months: be honest about the risks, asses your passions be on “design”, and give some real thought to the opportunities that align with those passions.
Open Job: Coursekit / Design Director
This person will be my partner in building a delightful product and a leading design team. Design is a central part of Coursekit: everyone here considers themselves a designer. All decisions are made with thought and purpose.
Apply: jobs+design@coursekit.com
Additional Info: Lead Design at Coursekit
Location: NYC
““Do I need to know how to code?” is a question that comes up with sure-fire consistency in design circles. I’ve seen it asked by so many, from uncertain design students in classrooms worried about their chances of landing a job, to seasoned professionals at conferences seeing their pool of print projects slowly evaporate. The question is being asked with even greater frequency as of late, because Adobe has launched their product Muse, which promises designers the ability to “create unique websites without writing code.” So, if a designer wants to work on the web, should they take the time to learn this dastardly “code” or instead rely on software like Muse?
My short answer is “Learn code.” My long answer, I suppose, would be that one should learn to code, because it’s the language of the web… and the knowledge does nothing but benefit the designer. Design decisions are not only affected by the characteristics of the content being designed, but also the qualities of the format…”
Discuss> · (more at frank chimero)
Open Job: Everlane / Freelance UX/Product Designer
“We’re always looking for great graphic designers to help create the Everlane experience. We look for creative designers with a strong aesthetic and sense of typography.”
Apply: jobs@everlane.com
Additional Info: everlane.com/jobs
Location: San Francisco
Over the past few years, Web Design and Motion Design have emerged as full fledged sub-industries to the traditional Branding and Print Design industry. Product/Service Design is a nascent discipline, but the curricula are being created, programs are being built, and communities (this very blog) are starting to form. It’s a huge opportunity for designers to set a career path early.
quote: Chris Dixon
The previous post in this series was prompted by a series of interview questions I’ve answered over the past few months. Those questions have been enough to strip me of my portfolio-clad confidence and prompt some serious soul-searching. But the hunger to make something real, that real people will use and potentially love has kept me determined. I’ve been through a handful of interviews and confidently claimed that this is something I could pull off. I know that my design background has given me an innate sense for what resonates with an audience. But without the product portfolio to prove it, it’s been difficult convincing anyone that I could be a valuable part of that process.
But before you give up and send your resume in to InterBrand, remember that your design skills are an extremely important *40% of your qualifications.
For a while I thought this was an issue of taste: so many companies seem to lack a taste level that would steer them away from building messy, mediocre, ad-laden services that die before they get out of Beta.
But it’s not about taste, it’s about empathy. You’ve spent your whole career trying to communicate as clearly as possible with as wide an audience as possible (the greatest good for the greatest number of people). Every client you have ever worked for wants to be understood and loved by their target market. They are coming to you for your ability to make things that people understand (to inform) and love (and delight).
“Market Opportunity” is biz-speak for “there are a ton of people who really want this thing to exist, because it doesn’t exist, or everything out there is junk, and a painful experience to use.” You have notebooks full of this stuff. If you’re like me, your ideas have typically been design-centric: a funny t-shirt idea (Freelance Ain’t Free), a great web catalogue of some design niche (NoLayout), a crowd-sourced directory of printers (InkerLinker). These are **great, and I am working on one of these kinds of projects myself.
These ideas come from your ability to perceive a need (probably something personal), and evaluate how many other people might need the same thing. When you start expanding your knowledge base, start looking at other industries, other problems, other pain points, you will start to have ideas that could potentially serve a much larger audience. And when you team up with people that have deep domain knowledge in other fields, technical experts that know how to make amazing things but have a ***harder time spotting the greater needs, that is a powerful combination.
*The rest of that make up: 40% your ability to make things (and you have to start making things on your own before someone will want to make something with you); 10% your relentless hustle (getting to know the people that will want to hire you when you’ve proven you have the skills); 10% being a nice person to everyone and showing genuine gratitude (by the way, just want to say thank you for reading this blog).
**Someone once explained that although design is Niche, it is a culturally influential niche that has the power to spread ideas and carry them beyond the design community. Pinterest is a great example of a niche product that has spread to anunexpected and wider audience.
***The Segway was technically a semi-miraculous innovation, but hardly empathetic. The wheelchair that Segway inventor Dean Kamen created using the same technology to enable disabled users to interact with others at eye level — that was a design insight born of pure empathy.
Open Job: Firespotter Labs / UI+UXDesigner
“We are growing fast and one visually-minded pixel crusher is no longer enough. We are looking for another full-time interface designer. Our first app launched one month ago, but we have a couple other products in development that will need a lot of love.”
Apply: jobs@firespotter.com
Additional Info: blog.iso50.com
Location: San Francisco
I’m starting this series with some of the intimidating questions that have been thrown at me over the course of this process:
Why do you, as a well-schooled graphic designer with primarily agency or in-house experience, think you can pull off starting a business out of nothing but an idea and a few executional skills?
Does your abstract design sense translate to building a product — a product that has just as many technical and business needs as design considerations?
Do you have the experience and the know how to take a product not from brief to deliverable, but from inception, to research, to development; through refining, iterating, and depressing setbacks; to launch, marketing, failure; and on to rebounding, rebuilding, and relaunching, with no guarantee of success?
Open Job: Eatmetrics / Lead Product & UX Designer
“Eat Metrics is seeking an experienced UX designer to join our team as the Lead Product and User Experience Designer. An ideal candidate will have experience with product and graphic design, and wants to join a company where they can steer the functional and visual direction of the product…”
Apply: jobs@eatmetrics.com
Additional Info: eatmetrics.com/jobs
Location: San Francisco
Reblogged from pieratt|6,888 notes |#
You have an inherent need to solve problems, visually and conceptually. There is enormous value in this, but you may be misplacing your talents… The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time.
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