Good Times Good Times
Posted by Brett | March 5, 2009 | No Comments
It was a remarkable evening. A gala event. With Great Lakes Christmas Ale flowing forth from what seemed to be an endless keg, and catering done by the wonderful ladies of Idea Engine - a great time was had by all.
In what has become a tradition of sorts, The annual Idea Engine party was held this past december. Instead of blab on and on about how much fun it was - I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Here’s a quick collage - if you’d like to see the entire set (I only took about 40 pictures the whole night) - click on the collage.
Tags: Christmas Ale > Holiday Party > Idea Engine > Pictures
Marketing Yourself as a Recent Graduate.
Posted by Chris | February 18, 2009 | No Comments
As a business owner, I often times get solicitations from recent graduates (some not so recent) regarding job opportunities with Idea Engine. Yesterday, an old acquaintance contacted me for some advice on how to go about looking for a job in this economy. I recieved a resume and link to thier personal website. As I was responding to this person, it occured to me that what I was seeing.. how this person was presenting themselves.. was very typical to other solicitations. In an effort to truly help, I replied with the following. I am publishing my response in hopes that I can help others in the same dilema.
1. Present Your Assets. As a recent graduate with limited experience in presenting yourself as a viable candidate for employment your presentation is critical. Many people that fall into this category try to do it ALL themselves, often times to the detriment of what they are trying to accomplish: Getting a Job! For those of you that build your own websites to communicate your portfolio and resume, take a really close look at what you are presenting. I see many “entry-level designers” develop their own site, but do not have the design skills to pull it off. If you build your own site, business owners (employers) want to see that you not only have a strong understanding of programming, but they will also be looking for search engine optimization, user Interface design, navigation, graphic design, and your very valuable CONTENT. Very few people have the ability to do all of these things well. If your site is not great, then get one that is. Let your work product be the focus and not your poorly designed site.
2. What do you want to do in a career? Many people try to show all of their skill sets, Flash, Illustration, Programming, 3D Renderings, Graphic Design, Photography, Videos, etc…. as a guideline, your weakest talents water down your strongest. Reduce your portfolio to only the strongest portfolio pieces and skills. 10-15 portfolio items is plenty to demonstrate your capabilities. Then, focus on selling yourself in those specific areas. If it comes up in an interview you can always mention your other skills. Your first goal should be to get the interview, not the job.
3. Get rid of any college social organization project-work (Fraternity/Sorority) from your portfolio. Noone cares that you did 5 brochures for your fraternity membership drive. Unless they won awards for design, get rid of them. When I graduated, I completely re-designed my entire portfolio which leveraged my best work and applied those practices to made-up projects. I recommend you do the same. The idea is to show your design talents. The company you did it for really does not matter, unless of course you did some kick-ass design for a global corporation. Also, be honest. If you redesign your portfolio and use large companies as examples, never misrepresent yourself. It’s ok to say this was a school project or an experiment in design.
4. Get experience anywhere you can. Offer your services for free to non-profit organizations or small businesses to build your portfolio. This will give you a larger network and more work experience. It also shows that you want to continue learning and have passion.
5. Does your resume look “creative”. If your resume looks like a financial analyst’s resume, its time to get creative. We get a ton of resumes and the ones that are different get read. The others don’t. After “designing” your resume think of how you can market yourself creatively. This is especially important in this market with so many talented people looking for jobs. I had one freelance editor send me her resume and a cover letter that told me she edited my entire website and found a flurry of errors and that upon the interview she would provide me, free of charge, all of the corrections. We interviewed her and hired her for a couple of jobs.
Like I said above… get the interview, then get the job. What can you do to stand out? By the way, when I say “design” your resume, it should still be clean, fresh and have a creative-corporate feel to it. There is a delicate balance.
6. Build you network!!!! Join your local chamber of commerce, join LinkedIn and other social media sites for businesspeople, other business groups like NEOSA, COSE, whereever business people get together. Work it.
7. Do your research! Identify which companies you want to work for and then learn all you can about them. If you want to be a production person great… focus on yourself and your work product. If you want to be a strategic employee, understand what makes a business tick and how you can help. Even small companies want strategic thinkers. In fact more than ever small companies like Idea Engine, need every staff member to be versatile. In this market employers can afford to be very picky so do all you can to be an asset.
Good luck.
The Buzz word is Netbook! Do they have a place in our world?
Posted by Dan | January 8, 2009 | 3 Comments
The new buzz word is Netbooks, in case you haven’t noticed. The trend was shunned by many large manufacturer’s including Apple at the time of this writing (01/08/2009). Seems like the trend is catching on and has a good marketplace. Most of these devices are around $300.00-$500.00.
If you are in a conversation with someone and the word ‘Netbook’ comes up, you should know a few things. It’s defined as any laptop with a 10 inch screen or smaller that runs a full operating system like Windows XP or Linux, hopefully Mac soon. The hyperlink below shows you a very high end Netbook that Sony just released a day ago. It’s about the size of a business envelope and the thickness of a cellphone from what I have read. Here are some amazing features…
- LED screen for brighter screen - not to be confued with LCD - totally different. LED is more like plasma in it’s theoretical functionality, surface light rather than backlit.
- Quick ‘on’ feature that allows you instant access to all of your media without firing up the operating system. It utilizes the PS3’s ‘XMB’ cross media bar as it’s navigation. Cool 
- A beefy 128gig solid state drive
- Bluetooth
- WiFi
- And an amazing resolution of 1600 X 768. That’s more pixels across than an Apple laptop at 1440, of course Apple has better height.
- Runs full blown Windows Vista and can be completly solid state if you opt for the solid state drive.
Bottom line - Sexy little booger.
Here is a link…
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=8198552921644608896
Let me know what you think. Do you think Netbooks will take off, do they have a place in our world? I think they do and will probably be adopted by the younger crowds first becuase of it’s entry price point and may just pioneer the future of computing. So don’t turn your back for too long because you may soon find yourself surrounded by Netbooks. We may look back at our current appealing laptops and say, look how big and clunky these things were.
Where is Steve Jobs?
Posted by Dan | December 23, 2008 | No Comments
I’m not going to make a huge ordeal out of this, but I do have a question that I think the rest of you can share your thoughts about. Where is Steve Jobs? This is my personal point of view so read this with a grain of salt, but ponder my question.
I have been interested in knowing what is happening to Steve Jobs. First I noticed at his last keynote that he looked really thin. Now he is not speaking at Mac World. Tonight I went to Google Steve Jobs in the technology section to check up on the old chap and only two results came up. Now mind you, a few nights ago there was plenty of news on the chap. So my question becomes two part, first where is he, second why is Google filtering the Internet? Makes me question Google’s accuracy. I thought the founders of Google said “to not be evil”. What gives them the right to filter out news about a public figure?
I’m not mad at Google or Jobs, just want to hear what you think about it.
Posted from my iPhone.
See my Google search results below. You are looking at the fact that as I page inwards on the results it’s only the same two results all the way through.
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The Engine Room is Idea Engine Inc's interactive outlet of creativity, inspired ranting and personal expression. Found on these pages you'll discover the thoughts and people that make Idea Engine a well-oiled machine of branding and technological innovation.
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