Hire A Student

It was ten years ago, almost to the day now, that I handed out these little state-of-the-art jobbies to interested and prospective gawkers at the 1998 Advertising Art Open House. Imagine, my entire portfolio of college work on a 1.44MB diskette, complete with self-contained slideshow software. A technological marvel, and about as practical today as a Beta tape.

I was the prototypical student then; I had a dive apartment with a hand-me-down spider plant and stalactites of gunk hanging from a leaky ceiling. That sport jacket in my diskette design here, I nabbed from a box of free clothes at CoreFest, the long-defunct alternative music festival at Garbage Hill. Those shoes were ten-dollar loafers from lord-knows-where. I ate macaroni. I had a firm grip on frugality.

My portfolio today is markedly improved over the one you’d see if you cracked this floppy open. That should be a given. I was quite high on my college portfolio at the time, but now find it embarassingly bad. The one standard I work by is whether, as a whole, my output as a designer each year is better than the last. I’m a harsh critic on myself – and that extends especially to creative output – so I may be thrilled with any one thing I make at any given point in time, and be blasé about it weeks (or even days) later. I must continuously remind myself this attitude is healthy.