surprise the designer

The job I moved to Boston for ended just about a year ago. And then the fall of 2012 was long and drawn out and, well, pretty light on the employment front. I was lucky to have a steady part time teaching job and enough small freelance projects to keep me afloat. Plus serving as a volunteer courier for Be the Match provided a welcome diversion. But there were plenty of long dark days spent applying for positions that I never ever heard back from. Life started to change when I received a call at home (in Ohio) in late December. I had interviewed at a Boston brewery for a tour guide/bartender/server weekend position and they were calling to let me know that I got the job (!) Brewery training started in early January, and coincided with the start of the spring semester (teaching 8 hours/week), a long-term contract design position (16-24 hours/week), and a long-term design project with friends (4 hours/week.) Suddenly my mellow schedule was packed to-the-gills. And it stayed t...

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...

Last Wednesday, April 4 I attended a small roundtable discussion as a guest blogger for AIGA. They'll be posting a shorter version of this same post to their site sometime soon. In the meantime, here's my full synopsis of the evening. *UPDATE: You can see my coverage of the independent designer's roundtable on the AIGA Boston website here . Conversations are inevitable whenever a group of like-minded people are in the same place at the same time. It happens in offices every day around water coolers, by the copy machine, and in the lunch room. Ideas are hatched, plans are made, and partnerships are born. But these important interactions are typically far less common for designers who make their own hours. That doesn't make them any less important. Creating more opportunities for spontaneous conversations—and community—for independent designers was the premise behind last Wednesday's AIGA roundtable.  Ben Spear  generously hosted a dozen designers...