Designers, coders and creative people in all areas seem to share a common trait: We ofter end up doing things that are beyond our ability. Whether it’s taking on a 3d rendering project when we’ve never so much as opened a modeling program, or working on a web application even when we have zero experience with PHP or JavaScript, we seem to love taking on jobs when we have no idea on how to do them.

I’m guilty of this as well. My first design job was at a small print company in Cleveland, TN. It was a magazine publisher, and I had never worked in the industry. At all. It was a 1 week deadline crunch to get 5 different magazines out. I said I could do it.

It was the hardest week of my life, and one of the best.

Now, fast forward a year or so later. I was interviewing for at job in the communications department of a fairly large non-profit. They asked me if I had any experience with After Effects.  My experience at the time with the program included me opening the program, not being able to figure out how to get a video clip into the timeline, and then closing the program in frustration after an hour of trying to use the damn thing.

So, when asked whether I could use the program, I said yes. I smiled, and, with poise and confidence, told them a direct lie. I got the job, and a week into it, I was given an assignment that would need to be done in AE. Now, I had to put up or shut. I learned to get around in After Effects in about an hour, and had the project done later that day. It was simple stuff, so I was ok. If it had been more complex, I would have been screwed.

Every creative person I know does the same thing. I’ve got friends who do application development for Facebook. I know one of them who has taken on a couple of jobs in the past that he couldn’t do. My oldest friend Josh, I know he’s done it a couple of times.

This is the kind of thing that we tend to do a lot of when we’re starting out. We’ll take on projects that we have absolutely NO business doing, let alone charging money for. The next thing you know, you’re spending over half of your time doing those projects. Before long, the thing you once had no business getting into is now your primary business.

My first thought when talking to new designers is to tell them to stay out of those proejcts that are way out of their realm. Those assignments are hard, and they’ll make you want to kill yourself or others at some point. But they’re also good and necessary. Creative people as a whole are curious. We get into things that we see that are shiny and neat, and as much as it can hurt at first, it is essential for us to keep finding new areas to stretch and grow.

We must constantly be reaching for things out of our reach. At it’s core, creative work across any field - engineering, software development, design, accounting - is about one thing: Problem Solving. It’s what we do. We see a challenge or an obstacle, and we try to get through it. It’s our creativity and ingenuity that sparks our imaginations into seeing a solution where other people only see a problem.

I love what I do because I love to solve problems. I like to find ways of working through something difficult, and there’s no easier way to find problems to solve then by jumping into something you don’t understand.

It’s like the game Myst. Some of you will know the game, others can try it out at GameTap. Myst gave you almost no information up front, dropped you in the middle of an uninhabited island, and told you to figure out what was going on. You don’t shoot at anybody, and nobody dies. You just have to fix what ever is wrong. But you don’t even know what it’s supposed to be like when it’s right. The game can be maddening, but it was one of the best selling games for many years, and one of my all time favorites. And, I’ve noticed, many of the creative people that are close to my age also have fond memories of it.

I encourage everyone to take on a project that is out of your realm, even if just a bit. Do work for a client that is beyond what you know, and find a way to make it work. You’ll be glad you did when it’s over. Unless you screw up.

Merry Christmas, all.

My name is Kevin, and I’m a designer living and working in the Atlanta area. I’ve been here for a couple of months, and I’ve decided to start this blog. My goal is to make this site a place where I can write up some tutorials, and offer advice to young designers.

I’ll be covering topics such as dealing with client, contracts for designers, how to work print shops, and some basic design knowledge that you’re not taught in school, and maybe don’t know where to find. I want to help designers avoid some of the pitfalls and problems that I’ve encountered. I’m open to questions, and I welcome any and all feedback.

For my first post, I was hoping to do a write up on CSS and how to use divs in place of table elements. Instead, I’ve found a nice hot button issue to start us off: SPEC work.

Spec work, or speculative work, is something that, unfortunately, is all too common in our industry. Spec work is when a client asks a designer to produce work for free while dangling the possibility of payment in front of the them. A great example of this can be seen at times in places like the Craigs List Art/Media/Design Jobs section. They go something like this: Read the rest of this entry »