Get ready for a whiny RANT!

GURU is an online resource for artists and work providers to make connections and bid on jobs. In the past I have used them with some success. They were never enough to provide a steady income, but they did provide a stream of new contacts and clients for a minimal fee. I viewed it as an advertising expense. For $300 a year I picked up some extra work and exposure. In the beginning the work that I did more than made up for the expense. However, as more and more (talented) artists from around the world caught the vision of what GURU was doing the more bids I lost to overseas competition. It is hard to compete when a man in Malaysia will do 40 hours of work for $25. I don’t blame him for feeding his family, but I do not look fondly upon the business that propagates the exploitation. As a matter of fact, I often will look at the employer history and see how many jobs they have contracted overseas. If they all read “India” for example, I avoid them like the plague. For this reason I have developed a talent for reading in-between the lines of ads placed on GURU. The following is an actual ad placed on GURU. My reading between the lines are in red.

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Title: Graphic Designers for T-shirt company Project ID: XXXXXX Category: Illustration / Cartooning / Painting / Sculpting

Description: Start up clothing company, is in search of a few graphic designer/illustrator to work through telecommuting. (Can you read English? )

Experience Requirements: Strong experience with Photoshop, and Illustrator. (We don’t want to know where you got them as long as your pirate version works and you know how to use it.) Online portfolio includes examples logos, branding, t-shirt designs, screenprinting preparations (We have no idea what we are talking about, but the artist should be fully trained and exploitable.)

Company Background: We are a T-shirt company with offices located in San Francisco, CA that is focused on identifying and collaborating with emerging/undiscovered artists globally. (We are looking for artists who will work for peanuts, literally, from 3rd world sweat shops.) Our main goal is to (… undercut regional artists by using digital, tariff-free imports of intellectual property and …) provide premium/rare/unique t-shirts that combine our ideas with those of artists that we collaborate (Take your $100 ideas and pay you a quarter.) with. In addition to producing our own t-shirts (from your work) as well as searching for talented artists (slaves), our site offers an on-going t-shirt competition that is open to all artists. (We encourage a large volume of spec work for which you will never see a dime.)

Project Details: Below is a brief description of current design needs. T-shirt Design ( 3 Series of T-shirt Designs): We have several t-shirt ideas that we’d like to bring to life. We have the picture, (Don’t ask about copyrights) color combination that we’d like to use, screen printing materials & techniques, t-shirt design location, etc all in place. (The only thing we are missing is a tangible creative product.) We’re looking for a designer that can help us through the process of having the design ready for production/screen printing. (Again … we have no clue how to do it on our own and need you to do it for us for next to FREE.)

Packaging, Hang Tags, Labels Design: Going forward, we will be looking to have designs for our packaging, hang tags, marketing materials etc. (We are willing to exploit you further for as long as your Government is stable enough to guarantee internet access.) Please let send a resume, art portfolio, relevant material, and initial thoughts and/or questions regarding the projects detailed above. (If you can read English great. If you can speak and write English; even better.)

We are completing a set of marketing materials for Intermax networks. The work will include a series of 15 second commercials, an integrated billboard, and a direct mail campaign. I love seeing my work in print. But seeing it in a large 15 feet by 48 feet display is always exciting.

My blog site is not immensely popular, but it has it’s moments. I average about 15K-20K hits a month. There are spikes of course. Every once in a while, somebody with middle eastern connections will trip across the editorial cartoon I did of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This will cause a flurry of comments, which I ignore. (I shut down the comment thread for this blog post a year ago; out of sheer boredom.) Of course the comments and the hits bring relevance to the post in Google’s eyes, which position it higher in the search engine. This means more eyes see it, which feeds its relevance. Again, those who see it, almost without exception, send links of it to their militant friends, which Google watches. Some of these people will post the article, or the caricature link inside a web forum, which will also cause a flurry of inbound links and then subsequent outbound moves to other relevant sites. All of which reflects positively on the page which they just left. (Mine.)

I sometimes wonder if those who are so militantly apposed to the cartoon (going on three years old) realize that they make it popular by visiting it and commenting on it? If you want to kill something on the web, ignore it. It will get buried under a mountain of apathy and nobody will see it. The more you rubberneck a particular post, the more other people will slow down to look at what you are looking at. It is a simple fact. Congrats to Google for quantifying this quirk of human nature into the most powerful search algorithm in the world.

However, this past month Mahmoud took a back seat to a new key-word rising star on my blog. This magic phrase is “bubble butt.” I mean really? How disappointing this hit must be for the ardent connoisseur of bubble butt when he(?) arrives at my post to see the G-rated rant about my anatomical drawing issues. It makes me chuckle a bit to be honest.

People all over the world are searching for criticlal relevant information, and the nexus is Mahmoud Bubble Butt. There’s a cartoon in there someplace. But the mental image is far to powerful to reproduce. Sometimes it is better not to draw what you see in your minds eye. Sometimes it is better to just let go.

Somebody asked (emailed) me what do I do to keep myself in business? In this market, it is is tough. You are linked with your pool of clients and their failures are you failures to a certain degree. When a client goes under I feel it. I am a small shop, I can’t not feel it. However, there are five things that I try and keep consistent that I believe contribute to the over all health of my business. (This applies to my illustration as well as advertising clients.)

Be service oriented: Treat yourself like a plumber with a pen. People come to you to get a service performed; to fix their visual communication pipes. They come to you because you are the expert. If they could have done the job themselves, they would have. Treat your clients with respect, listen to their ideas, and foster an attitude of service. It will win the client’s loyalty and keeps them coming back.

Be approachable: An air of superior aloofness may foster an image of artistic aptitude, but being a friendly, approachable, down to earth person of character is something that you can take to the bank. Unfortunately, art programs often don’t teach this positive skill set. A lot of artistic types are loners, and not apt at being overly sociable. This may cause an outward appearance of aloofness, when you are in reality standing behind a protective wall. As much as I sympathize with this, it is bad business. Do your best to be open and approachable. Your clients will find it refreshing and frankly it is a lot more fun to be around.

Be deadline focused: An acceptable job done “on time” is worth more than a stellar job handed in late. This is a carry-over from my work in publishing and illustration but it applies to advertising too. More often than not you are not the only person in a workflow. Copywriters, editors, printers, designers, illustrators, photographers, publishers, distributors, are all in the boat with you. A small delay on your part can equal thousands of dollars in overruns for your client and cause problems for the others who are depending on you to do your part professionally. This is no excuse to do mediocre work. Do the absolute best you possibly can, within the established deadline.

Be flexible: Stuff changes. Clients ideas evolve. Better ideas sometime take a while to incubate. For whatever reason, the work that you do and the reputation that you secure will hinge greatly on your ability to adapt to what the client wants today not what the brief outlined two weeks ago.

Be grateful: I worked for a number of years as an in-house artist and art director. I also worked day-labor for a few years before that. Sitting on my backside while I attempt creative greatness is the best job ever. Doing it for myself, on my own time on under my one direction and schedule is about as good as it gets. I have know some great art directors and creative directors at some high powered agencies and companies. Without fail, all of them have said that despite the downsides of begin self employed (there a a few) nothing beats owning a small to mid-sized shop under your control picking and choosing the work you want to do.

I have freelanced bas relief sculpting models for many years to various Mints around the country. Within that time the process of creating sculpted models has remained pretty much the same. You use clay, you make plaster casts, you detail the casts, you pull a positive and send it off to an engraver who reduces the model onto the face of a die. Since going digital with my illustration efforts I have wondered how long it would take for the 3D realm to catch up.

Of course, there is a very vibrant and rich set of 3D tools out there. Maya, Blender, Zbrush, But most of these tools are made for animators and movie-type character production. The tools in general are hard to use and with minor exceptions they are not very intuitive for your average clay-guy to grasp.

I found a new tool yesterday called Mudbox made by Autodesk, that really made me sit up and take notice. I have used Sketchbook Pro (from Autodesk) for years. It also has a very intuitive interface that leans on a graphic tablet for what it does best. Mudbox also works with a graphic tablet and a mouse, and I found it very close to my actual analog working method — with an undo key. This little nose sample took me 30 minutes. It’s not ground breaking, but the proof is not in this end product, the proof is in the tool set that got me to this end product. It was very intuitive for me. I think with an investment of some time I could really break through into some digital bas relief sculpting. The real problem of course is what do you do with it then? Can you export it out to a die engraver? What is the interface for that?

So many questions. But for the first time I can actually see it happening in the near future.

I’ve been wanting to post this for a while. It is one in a series of sponsorship ads that we will be running on Idaho Public Television. This was cool because I was able to tap into my brother’s extensive talents in video production, give him a script, supply the graphical elements and then have us both put it together via an iChat video conference. (He is in New York.) You gotta love the flexibility of using the net to do work.

YOUTUBE LINK!