Hasta La Ideas

This is a true story. Descriptions of companies, clients, schools, projects, and designers may be altered and anonymized to protect the innocent.

Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of “Good Ol’ Boy’s” story of chasing his dream I.D. job. If you missed the first part, read it here!

Chasing the Dream

After quitting my crappy job designing supermarket interiors, I hatched a plan to get my dream job at [Hot Design Consultancy]. They were located in [Cool City], where I really wanted to live, and they had awesome clients.

I spent a few days holed up at Mama’s house flipping through I.D. Magazine and clicking through the then-very-primitive Core77—swear to God—thinking about my situation, and eventually realized I needed three things to get this job: Skills, a Book, and Opportunity.

Skills: I could already draw a damn sight better than most of the folks I’d graduated with, but this was the mid-’90s, and all the top design firms at the time used Alias. I knew Hot Design Consultancy used Alias, because during my failed interview, they’d asked me some Alias questions. I’d taken basic Alias classes during undergrad, but not enough to get a good handle on it. So during the interview when the Alias questions got tough, I’d flopped on the answers. I knew I needed to learn Alias, but how? Back then there were no 3D programs you could run on a home PC. A Silicon Graphics workstation, which you needed to run Alias, ran about 70 grand.

Illustrations by Alex Basio

A Book: Coming out of undergrad, my portfolio sucked. It was filled with weird conceptual stuff and didn’t show any real-world critical thinking and any intelligent, realizable solutions to current-day problems. And Hot Design Consultancy had made their name developing realizable solutions to current-day problems. I had to show them I could be a valuable member of their team.

Opportunity: I’d blown my first interview with Hot Design, and my chances of getting a second interview two years later, after all I’d done was design vacuum formed fish and bacon displays, weren’t good. So how would I get the opportunity to interview with them again?

That’s when I realized: The key to getting a job with Hot Design was not to have to go through an interview at all.

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Industrial design is like surgery, auto racing or a military operation in that things can go horribly wrong. And they often do, although no one really talks about it. In this new section for Core77, we’ll take stories from working industrial designers—namely, our readers—willing to recount some of the humorous, maddening or just plain stupid things that have happened to them on the job. While the stories you’ll read here are true, companies, clients, and of course designers are all anonymized to protect the innocent.

Got a “True I.D. Story” yourself? Find out down at the bottom of this entry how you can talk to one of our editors and win yourself a $25 gift certificate to Hand-Eye Supply.

This next True I.D. Story comes to us from “Design Minion.”

The Job

I was the only industrial designer on staff at a small watercraft company down South. Working on boats was cool; as the sole designer I got to do everything from the earliest concept sketches to modeling the parts, designing the boats’ graphics, doing the tool drawings, and I’d even be out on the line for the first builds. Real A-to-Z of product development.

I was also the only creative person on staff. My boss was the head of Marketing, and anything even slightly having to do with art—or really, just anything he didn’t want to do—he pushed off his desk and onto mine. So on top of the rest of my workload, I was also doing POP displays, our tradeshow signage, our brochures, sketches for big-box stores on how to display our product, et cetera.

Illustration by Alex Basio

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