Another fellow Creative emailed me a short while ago asking me my opinion on where and how a Graphic Designer should look for work. Since Creative temp agencies are clearly well-known to be a complete waste of our time, and the ads on CL aren’t any better, then what to do in this horrible job climate?

I have concluded that our industry (Creative) is flat-lined…..DEAD! Unfortunately, it’s been that way for a long time and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon. Not only are reputable businesses not hiring, the ones (not so reputable) that are hiring are offering ridiculously below market insulting wages, asking the world of skill and experience and willing to pay next to nothing in an effort to devalue our industry…..BIG TIME! This is completely unacceptable and why I as a professional Graphic Designer/Art Director (over 20 years experience) and professional photographer am seeking to change careers entirely.

I lost my full time gig 3-years ago (spent 10 years at my last full time gig) and have had only a handful of small projects since. I have worked steadily through recessions before as a freelancer and have even obtained full time positions, but not this time. Our industry is DEAD, plain and simple.

Now having said all this, I am still marketing myself, answering ads and cold-calling, cold emailing prospective employers. I send out thank you letters for the very few interviews I may get and I make follow up phone calls and, most importantly, I refuse to give into discouragement. Also, just as important, although I am willing to negotiate my fee and salary requirements WITHIN REASON, I refuse to allow myself to be taken advantage of and be low-balled by these sleaze-ball, sinking ship scumbag “businesses”.

What’s the answer for Creatives?? You can either retrain for another career, or continue to weather the storm and fight the battle to get that job and salary that you deserve for your hard-earned skills. If you choose to hang in there and fight, then don’t settle for less. Don’t work for free with the hope of false promises of “exposure”, “credit” “future pay” and other bullshit as such. Don’t allow yourself to be used as slave labor for $12 an hour (which isn’t even an entry-level wage for a student in this industry). Flag ads from this forum (which is just about all of them) from businesses that seek to exploit this recession and teach these scumbag “business” owners that they WILL get what they pay for, which is junk-looking amateur work for low pay.

Hang in there, stand your ground and don’t give up or settle for less. Keep trying.

this is for Linux hosting

- if the FLV video plays locally but won’t play once it is uploaded to the server, you’ll have to add an .htaccess file with the correct FLV MIME type (look it up)

- to view invisible files on a mac, you’ll have to go into terminal (look it up)

- thank you internetz for helping me solve my problem yet again.

on a side note: if anyone is actually reading this and needs a place to host their website, i highly recommend tigertech.net

some fine examples:

“Could you make my website fit a A4 paper? And please, no scrolling, visitors get confused when they have to scroll.”

“Can you give us another option for the front page? It’s not quite what we are looking for but aren’t sure of what we want either.”

“I want my website to look exactly like yours. That would be perfect. Except I want my own logo—exactly like this company’s.”

“These stock photos of Native Americans don’t look very Native American. Can we try Philippinos?”

“Well, I was hoping you wouldn’t just be interested in making money. I wanted you to understand how much you could learn from me, and how valuable that would be. That’s why I think $12/hr is a fair rate for you to produce the website. If you can’t work for this rate than you miss out.”

if the client has a Mobile Me account attached to the domain, you will have to go into the control panel (or domain manager), go to Total DNS Control and change the A (Host) by typing in the server IP address. You will also have to change the CNAMES so it points to that domain. make sure you take a screen capture before changing the settings so you can put it back in case you screw it up.

- from copying

- from making mistakes

- from solving problems

- from hard work

- from talking shit

- then getting shitted on

- from dealing with situations head on

- from dealing with lazy, annoying, incompetent people

- from doing things the hard way

- from feeling defeated

- from opening your mind (instead of acting like you know everything)

as you can tell, i’m into making lists right now.

(the above ad was the ad i answered and what i consider to be my entry into the graphic design field. this was from 10 years ago back when looking for job meant buying the newspaper; i was 21 years old. shit, dude…that’s trippy!)

found on dlisted