Pro Practices

A special initiative of the career services office at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Pro Practices features posts from advisors, faculty, students and alum that promote events and opportunities; share stories and resources; and reflect and consider news, trends and their own experiences in the context of professional practice in art and design.

Two great St. Louis Companies Toky, and PGAV Destinations, are accepting applications now for Print Designers, Designer/Illustrators, and other positions. 

Humantific is looking for highly motivated Information Designers to join the team in New York City. For more information go to http://www.humantific.com/jobs/ 

Junior Fine Art and Art History major, Danielle Leventhal, poses for a picture with internationally renowned artist Jeff Koons while interning for the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.  While at the Whitney, Danielle did research for the annual Annenberg Lecture with Koons, and helped prepare for the Koons Symposium including organizing artists' and professors' bios and invitations.  She also researched other programs, worked on their website, and wrote posts for the Education Blog. 

About her experience Danielle says, "This internship fulfilled and surpassed my expectations. The Thursday sessions with directors and leaders from all areas of the museum gave me in-depth exposure to the work that I may not have seen in the Education department. I was lucky enough to get a hard-hat tour of the new building downtown with my department, and that allowed me to appreciate how special it is to have been a part of the museum while it’s in this huge transition—not to mention the Jeff Koons buzz that made each visit to the museum exciting. I went on a private tour of the Kara Walker exhibit for Creative Time with the Education department, and took full advantage of my free admission to museums all over the city for the time that I had this access.

Each of these documents contains a list of the top ten things you should consider when planning and executing your career search.

Resume

Cover Letters

Portfolio

Networking

From the Atlantic: How to Write a Cover Letter, According to Great Artists

(Library of Congress)

No surprise that the well-intentioned (and slightly nervous) parents of students in art and design schools regularly forward links to articles that tout career advice for creatives -- much to the delight of the recipients, I’m sure.  (I at least had the good fortune of waiting until school breaks to confront the massive pile of newspaper and Time Magazine clippings waiting for me, on my bed as not to miss -- articles bemoaning the irrelevance of the humanities, predicting the end of liberal arts education, the arrival of an art history major apocalypse. Sounding eerily contemporary, writing this now.)

My guess, however, is that forward-happy parents are thinking twice before passing along this piece recently posted by The Atlantic. Presented with a wink, a connection is made between the strategy and construction of a successful cover letter with an artist’s spirit, temperament, right to irreverence. Funny stuff, from Eudora Welty’s use of a well-placed pun in a letter to the New Yorker, Hunter S. Thompson’s declaration of work he does not want to do, Renaissance masters making bulleted lists of skills. It’s well and fine and good fun to highlight and remark on these instances, since the irony of course, is that these lowly career-seeking conventions were subverted by some of history’s most famous artists, writers, filmmakers.

No one is more of an advocate of emerging artists and designers than yours truly, but I believe strongly that the development of work and craft for a student or young artist or designer should live in one place, and the means by which to secure employment live in another. I am reminded by Michael Bierut’s response to a student question at last year’s AIGA conference, essentially soliciting advice for young designers that would guarantee success. He said, in his authoritative-but-everyman Michael Bierut way, “work on the work.”

A favorite moment in this piece comes from Tim Schaefer, a video game designer “Your quest for the ideal career begins, logically enough, at the Ideal Career Center. Upon entering, you see a helpful looking woman sitting behind a desk. She smiles and says, “May I help you?”

Ideal Career Center. Nice one. I wonder if they are accepting applications?

Jen Meyer

Click these links for useful information from other institutions like RISD, MICA, KCIA, and SCAD.

Networking

Introducing Yourself

Be Professional

Online Presence

Building a Linkedin Profile

Where To Post Work Online

More on Resumes, Portfolios, and Profiles

Job and Internship Search

Where to begin

Possible Careers

Job Listings

International Students 

Out of Country Job Search

Internship Prep

Interviewing

Informational Interviews

Interviewing Skills

How to Prepare 

Mastering the Interview

Essentials

RISD

Maggie Edelman is a Junior in the Sam Fox School studying Communication Design. She will be working with the career center this year and assisting with the maintenance of this blog. Please contact her at [email protected] with any questions or suggestions for the blog.  

Senior Communication Design major, Michael Tarazi is interning in St. Louis this summer.  

"I’m the graphic design intern for Vital VOICE this summer. Vital VOICE is Missouri’s premiere LGBT magazine and serves primarily the St. Louis and Kansas City area. It’s been so much fun and I’ve learned a lot. I mostly work on infographics or just graphics in general for the website and for social media. I have also done some layout design and advertisement design working with third party companies. It’s been a great experience so far and it’s definitely helped me understand what I want to do out of college! I love that the focus of this internship is about the work that I’m doing and not about getting coffee and things like that. I’ve learned a lot of unexpected things like event photography or retouching, and I definitely recommend this internship for anyone interested in working for a magazine!"

Tarazi works at his desk at the Vital VOICE headquarters. 

Junior Communication Design major, Aiden Zucker, is spending his summer working at IBM Design in Austin, Texas.  

"I worked with an interdisciplinary team of four other interns to apply human-centered design to an IBM software product.  We interviewed sponsor users to identify pain points in their current workflows, created personas and journey maps to build empathy, and then ideated features that would alleviate the pain points. Through low and high fidelity prototypes, we iterated and validated different features with our sponsor users, presenting our work to the studio every Friday for feedback and alignment."

Aiden worked with many other interns an professionals while in Austin.