surprise the designer

Have you heard of the Altitude Design Summit ? It's one of the most popular (and from what I can tell, well put-together) annual blogger conferences out there. A bunch of the bloggers I regularly follow go every year, and it's always fun to see their coverage of the event: plenty of tweets, wrap-up posts, and photos of gorgeous business cards. (Check out this awesome pinterest board chock-full of wrap-ups:  http://pinterest.com/melaniebiehle/alt-summit-2012/ Sooo much good information there!) More after the jump...

This post could also be titled: 'Kids are SO cool!' The past year has been a very good one for me. I've gotten to work for a small toy brand that I started out admiring and now downright love. And as a side benefit of that work, I've made friends with a seven-year-old (I don't think there are a ton of 25-year-olds who can say that...) See, the team I work with is a team of freelancers. Each and every one of us works from our kitchen tables and our home offices. Every so often we get to work from each other's kitchen tables and home offices. That means that a couple days a week, I wind up at G's house. If I happen to be there at 3:00, I get to help welcome the kids home from school. Sometimes that leads to grand adventures. More after the jump...

Do you remember who taught you how to put together your very first resume? Who was it who took your paltry experience as a waiter at the diner down the street and combined it with your moderately good grades from that state school you attended to try to show a professional that you were oh-so-employable? For me, it was Peter, the slightly-younger-than-middle-aged professor who taught our co-op prep class and was also responsible for helping us get our first co-op jobs. He had a few simple rules: never put 'resume' at the top of your resume (it's stating the obvious), keep it to one page, list education before experience. For a sophomore in college with a very short resume, these were all exceedingly good tips. And I still occasionally scoff when I see resumes that break these rules (five pages? really!?) But the reality for designers is that your portfolio, your work, matters much more than your resume. So while I've made five or six portfolios since Peter's ...