designburn

Unexpected. Cool Church...I mean House.

Our local chapter of the AIGA just had our annual board retreat where we figure out what path we are on and what path we want to take going forward. The venue was at a board member's house and it really was a nice surprise and a wonderful location to undertake such an effort. The house was a completely remodeled church and the member did a phenominal job keeping the integrity of the building. It really should be on a show like "This old church." The photo above is of the view as you enter the house. It was a great day talking about design in a very unique setting.

Ohhh Canada.

Things have been hopping with designerID and a new interview with Canadian designer Chris Zawada will be a nice addition to our growing list of designers. He is a senior designer with the Fleming Creative Group out of Vancouver. Look for it to be posted sometime in the April.

I should also mentioned we just finished an interview with David Chanpong of Abercrombie & Fitch. He is a Design Manager working out of their headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. And we just confirmed that we will be doing an interview with Liza Butler, a Design Manager with E & J Gallo Winery.

Designing a Community

Today I had a phone conversation with Aaron Hurst who is the president and founder of the Taproot Foundation. The Taproot Foundation has developed a new model for leveraging the talents of the business community to provide pro bono business services to nonprofit organizations. It has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the most innovative and high potential nonprofit organizations. It is based in San Francisco and has programs in Chicago, Boston, New York and Seattle. They are continually building and growing their organization and partnering with designerID will create added visibility in the design industry and potentially get more designers to contribute in a structured way for helping non-profits in their community. We will begin the partnership by donating ad space and profiling a designer member of the organization. The partnership has the potential to grow and really make a difference in the communities where we work and live.

Helping Designers.

Yesterday I finalized an agreement with Krop to offer jobs on the designerID web site. Krop is a first-class company that has created a creative employment network that features some of the Design and Development heavyweights including: Newstoday, (mt) Media Temple, Lowdown Magazine, COLOURlovers, Lounge 72, Heavy Backpack, DevLounge, Design in Europe, Urbancollective and many others. Our members have been asking us to carry jobs and we are excited to now have a quality solution for both members seeking positions as well as members needing to find quality people. Those members posting positions will have their position not only on designerID but on all sites in the Krop network (seen by millions of talented creative and tech candidates). Look for this feature as part of the redesigned designerID site coming soon.

Faces of Design

Look for a cool new feature coming this month that will let any visitor to designerID see all designers at one time. The feature will be part of a redesign to the site. It will be a separate page that will load every designer that has posted a picture of themselves. Graphics or logos will not appear on this page as we want to promote that it is a community of people. Additional screens and information about the redesign will be coming soon.

Identifying Designers. Sharing Work.

I had an idea for a designer community in 2005 that would be unlike any other online design community. It would allow designers to connect by many different variables such as freelance, project type, city, country, school, market or company. All work would be easily searchable by project type, year, industry, country, keywords or company.

I was able to crystallize the idea with the help of my partner Matt Keith. Note that it only took me three months to find Matt – a very capable developer out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. The site, designerID.com, launched in March 2006 and has been steadily growing ever since. It now has 733 designers registered and over 3,300 works uploaded into the database.

DesignerID has allowed me to focus much of my energy back on design and the industry in which I work. A pleasant surprise has been interviewing various members and posting an in-depth look at them as designers. We’ve already posted written interviews with Andrew Sabatier (UK), Neal Ashby (USA), Debbie Millman (USA), Tanya Gyani (ARE) and Filip Blazek (CZE). I've also had the opportunity to video interview Woody Pirtle (USA), 2003 AIGA Medalist. Look for many more to come in 2007.

Much of the content of this blog will be driven by the creation and ongoing development of designerID.com. Kind of a behind the scenes look at what drives this site. While other content will come from my involvement as an advisor for the AIGA Cincinnati Chapter and from my business experience running Brian Hock Design and infiniteIDs. I hope you enjoy reading this blog and certainly register on designerID.com to see how it evolves in the months and years to come.