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