Industrial Design Cover Letters?!

What have I been up to for the past three and a half months?! I’ve been getting a lot of these lately.

After I returned from y 6-month Co-op position with the P&G Oral Care Design team, I slept. Seriously, that’s an eight-hour drive.

So this is what I have been up to: design projects (both for myself and as contract work) to utilize my time on a productive way.  I’ve been making things , sketching,  jogging, attending family dinners, and some serious hanging out with my friends that I didn’t get in Cincinnati.

One other thing I’m doing is applying to ID positions for when I graduate in May 2011. It’s pretty early, but bow is the time to do it for some of the more proactive companies. I have applied to a lot of positions, but I have two top companies that I’d love to work for. It’s a little unsettling to fill out the application, send away the information, and then just sit tight. I can only be confident in the quality of my work and experience, and keep on doing productive things.

So. The other reason I wrote this post is to help out any design students out there that might be confused with design-specific cover letters.  Design applications can look very different from ones in other professions (have you seen a designer’s resume?) After a friend of mine asked me what they should put on an ID cover letter, I told him my suggestions, and then pointed him to this discussion on Coroflot. It’s a thread on some really bad examples, and some very good ones. I learned a few tips, too. So all of you design job seekers out there that just Google’d “Design Cover Letter,” I think this should help.

-Adam

moved

I have decided to change the blog address to my name instead of a goofy nickname, in the spirit  of professionalism. thus, all future posts will be under the name Adam Graiser

so please enter my world at adamgraiser.wordpress.com

I’ll see you there!

Look at this!

Straight from Shankwiler!

New Wonderous Info!

check out robrodriguez.com for some sweet PhotoWorks tutorials.

He has on his front page a Solidworks render of the Mach 1 from SpeedRacer

Check it out! If you don’t take the time to better yourself, you obviously don’t have the drive necessary to be the best.

Not good branding

well i was going to put a funny branding picture in here, but wordpress changed their interactions, and the uploader thingy isn’t working. way to go.

which is interesting, because I see a lot of that lately. Changing of a well branded thing.

Most people are resistant to change, especially when the change moves away from something that works well. It is only when the change is for the better( or at least perceived that way) that people start saying, “oooh they are so smart for changing that!”

But they only say this after they’re done complaining about things changing in the first place.

So, how do you know when its tiime to change some thing that is well-established as working well? The old Adage goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But what if the quality is subjective?

Time to look at a few examples. The new Microsoft Office. WTF? I loved the drop down menus. I knew where everything was. Now, they messed with all of the commands and menus for all of my familiar programs: Word, Excel, Powerpoint… I am frustrated by the need to do the simplest of commands!

At first I was agitated. Why change something that works well for everyone? Why mess with a format people have had years, in some cases over a decade to get used to?

Then I considered: maybe thats the point. Maybe Iv’e grown used to a bad thing. Kinda like the Start Menu on Windows. I never used to bat an eye going to the Start Menu.

But that must be confusing as hell for new users. Go to the “start” menue to turn a machine off? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. So.

What’s it going to be? New and Different, of Old and Safe?

that’s a question for life as well as for branding. What would you do?

Notes on the Biologically Inspired Design lecture

this lecture was a while ago.. but i felt like writing about it

This lecture was kind of a bust. The lecturer kept showing past projects of her group (I forget the name). Her group only creates designs inspired by nature. She cited one relatively new advance in science that was inspired by nature: Gecko Tape. The tape mimics the gecko’s feet, in that there are tiny nanotubes that create suction on the sticky side of the tape. One square inch is supposed to hold twenty pounds.

But all of the projects that her group had done seemed a little shallow. There were some cool concepts, but every final design seemed like it had the “nature idea” forced on it. I guess that would be expected of a group that only designs things that are inspired by nature. They have “pigeonholed” themselves.

I guess the one design that sticks out in my mind is a housing project that is inspired by a bee’s nest. Again, I saw a cool concept, with poor execution. The end design was a big blob-shaped mass attached to a 60 ft column (supposed to resemble a tree). Inside the nest-house, rooms were plentiful, but small. And getting anywhere was a maze.

I guess my problem is they had a cool idea and they seemed to have just stopped there. They took their initial concept too literally, instead of coming up with lots of concepts and revising those concepts a few times to find the best one.

These conceptual projects are great for enhancing creativity. But in this proffesion (ID) designs must be usable! If no one would buy/use the dsign, than the designer has FAILED.  That’s the difference between art and design. Art is just for the sake of expression. Design is not.

Well, if industrial design was easy, everyone would do it.

happy thanksgiving/holidays/new year/ birthday

well.

end of the semester. Now that studio is psuedo over, I have to do everything else.

LCC is the most noteworthy. But this is a design blog, and honestly, no one wants to read about LCC. BORING!

but I do have this link for you to consider…
Design Awards

pretty cool, huh?

These are pictures of my project. Pretty sweet. Basically its a clip that sends out your GPS signal so that you can let people track you (It can be turned off, of course).  In an emergency, it will also notify the police.

The clip is more of a backup, because a lot of times, cell phones get stolen along with wallets, meaning that vicitms can’t call for help when they are feeling their most helpless and vulnerable.

so. there it is. Time to go start the Materials project.

this could be fun…

oh, and 1 more thing:

The final Materials project (30% of the final grade) must include:

* Filled-in Excel spreadsheet – make the cells big enough to hold all your text!
* DFA spreadsheet for the two plastic, two metal, and one purchased parts in your project.
* Exploded view of your product showing how the key parts fit together, in 16″x16″x300dpi PDF format.
* Additional views as necessary to show the important design details of your key parts, in the same format.
* Front page of similar patent, with images.
* Data sheet for purchased part.

———

2 plastic, 2 metal, 1 purchased part

cover page of patent (with picture)

be specific what type of metal you use.

process book

Ive never done a real process book till now. Sure I did one in CFY but that doesn’t really count right?

I did one 2 nights ago formy group (I was in charge of that) and I think I did a pretty solid job. Its pretty chronologic in order…

intro (problem statement, intent & goals)

research (what we did, what we found)

Concept Progression (first concepts, concept 1, iterations, final concept)

Final Concept Stuff (renderings, orthos, exploded view, shop drawing)

am I missing anything people?

update and New York City

we (my group) have gotten a lot done

In trying to keep things simple, it seems like we are not working hard enough. But the fact is that we are being a lot stricter with personal deadlines, out of respect for our group. That means less stressing .So thats interesting…

Solidworks model=done and 3D printed. Thats cool too. I hae to send some Dimensioned drawings tonightm and format the process book tomorrow. Should be fun, considereing the fact that I’ve never done one…

As for me, I’m in NYC with the GT band. We’ll be in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I heard that well be on TV around 10-10:15 AM ish.

Its interesting that we are doing a pedestrian project in studio right now, because it has really opened my eyes to the very pedestrian-friendly nature of New York City. People are walking EVERYWHERE! Sure, a lot are tourists, but a lot aren’t. Street vendors cater to the hungry walker. Big sidewalks accommodate large crowds (but still somehow overflow onto the street sometimes) and Times Square is ALWAYS lit up. I went to the Hershey’s Store, and saw the motherload of promotional products. I am again remined that Being a deesigner is a 24/7 lifestyle that permeates thourgh all my activities.

I guess a combination of the large crowds and the lights make me less scared than downtown ATL. somthing to ruminate on. Details on the trip may come soon if I have time… otherwise just wait for me to be tagged in facebook pictures.

design challenge!

can you figure out which car interior goes to which type of car?

All images are pulled from a 2009 Pontiac catolog

the three types (not in order) are

• Convertbile sports car (Solstice)
• 4-door coupe  (G6)
• SUV/ crossover (Torrent)

can you tell which is which?

I wrote the answers in the comments box, and what the visual clues were. Lots of comments on design in there…

more random abstract thoughts

this whole being a designer thing has really influenced my head. I’m thinkin in much larger abstract thoughts these days.

• here’s a thought- we are all just a big pile of cells, and every second, old cells die as new ones are created. That means that every moment you are changing. You are physically a different person than you were literally one second ago. So don’t be afraid of change.
• Because of the way currents in the Pacific Ocean work, there is a place in the ocean where water just swirls in a circle. Junk gets pulled in and trapped there. Over the years, this floating “garbage patch” has grown to the size of a small island. If you are a designer, please don’t add to this by “designing trash” more on the Pacific garbage patch
• if all life just kinda died right now, and millions of years from now aliens did some paleontology, they’d still find a ton of plastic, as it never really degrades. Would they think that our culture worshiped plastic? would they be right?