This is a true story. Descriptions of companies, clients, schools, projects, and designers may be altered and anonymized to protect the innocent.
Editor: This one comes to us from “Design Ninja,” who early on in his ID career finds himself grappling with something many of us have: Should I go Corporate or Consultant?
Loosely speaking, as big-city industrial designer looking for full-time work there are two paths you can pursue straight out of school: Going consultancy or going “in-house,” i.e., corporate. After undergrad, I discovered the hard way that my book was good enough to get me corporate work but not good enough for the consultancies. So I landed a job at a certain corporation’s in-house product design department.
Corporate work was fine for me in the beginning. The hours were great (strictly nine-to-five), I never minded wearing a suit, and I got along great with the four guys and one woman in the design department. But the things I were designing were all in the same family of products—let’s say that I was designing restaurant equipment—and after a while you get tired of doing soap dispensers, injection-molded dish racks and coffee stations.
After a few years I decided I had enough ambition and talent to do more than that. That’s not to say the guys who worked where I did lacked those things, it’s just that they were content, and I was not. So I started secretly sending my book out to several consultancies in the area. I scored a few interviews, but during them it became clear that my narrow focus in one area of products was not adequate.
So I did what Good Ol’ Boy did and went back to grad school. The decision didn’t come lightly, but I looked at some of the older guys at my job’s design department and decided I didn’t want to end up there.
My grad school story isn’t as epic as Good Ol’ Boy’s, but I achieved what I wanted, which was an improved book with a good range of stuff in it. Money was an issue for me, so during grad school I only interned at corporate design places because they paid more. But it was consultancy work that I really wanted to try. It sounded so exciting from what I’d read about it, to get to work on an interface for a car dashboard one month, then a cool retail store, then a line of furniture.
Straight out of grad school I was pretty proud of my book, and sent it to the Best Design Consultancy in the city. I knew I wouldn’t get the job, but I wanted to aim high and work my way down.
They called me in for an interview—and I actually got the job. I couldn’t believe it. First place I’d applied to! I’d been prepared to flounder for a couple of months and freelance to pay the bills, but here I was with a job at [Best Design], basically a week after getting my Masters.
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