Another video from the San Francisco installment of the Coroflot Creative Confab series. This time, it’s the entire panel discussion, clocking in at just under 45 minutes. So while that’s a bit much for the casual browser, it’s a tremendous resource for anyone studying the art of creative hiring.

This is a fast-paced conversation with recruiters and directors from four of the most successful creative companies on earth, and they get quite specific about where they look for designers, how they assess their potential, and how they keep them engaged.

Left to right: Me, Steve Johnson (LinkedIn), John Foster (IDEO), Kate Gilman (24 Seven), Emily Delmont (Google Creative Lab)

COROFLOT CONFAB PANEL SF 10/21/09 // LIVE SHOOT BY : F/22

Once again, many thanks to Josh Couto and Drew Dorsey for a fine shooting and editing job in a tough recording situation. Their previously posted 5 minute interview video from the same Confab event is here. A summary of the discussion, and photos from the event are here.

'An Island Universe by Josiah McElheny' - sambarluc, Madrid, May 2009

I came across this Flickr tag, collecting photos by several contributors of Josiah McElheny’s “Island Universe” series while they were on exhibition at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid’s Parque de Retiro last year. This sculpture series is the culmination of several years of freelance modeling work I’ve done for Josiah, starting with “An End to Modernity” in 2004.

These cosmologically-derived chandeliers, photogenic to begin with, become positively breathtaking in this venue, bathed in natural light and reflecting the elegant curves of the Palacio itself, a massive glass house modeled after London’s Crystal Palace in the 1880’s and a monument to industry and modernism in its own right.

“Island Universe” photos on Flickr.

It’s not often that a break in career coincides with a holiday lull, but my departure from Core77 in mid-December constitutes just that: a three week break, though recent conversations indicate this is soon ending. I’d been planning on migrating my blog over to a more flexible platform for some time now, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

So: Presenting carlalviani.com v2. It’s on WordPress now, which is an obvious improvement over Blogger from my end, and coupled with proper hosting, enables far more flexibility than its earlier incarnation. Most immediately noticeable is the ability to install custom themes; the one you’re looking at now is Basic Maths, and I’m deeply infatuated with it.

One of the best parts about organizing the Creative Confab series for Coroflot last year was interviewing the panelists. Khoi Vinh, design director for NYTimes.com was perhaps the most enlightening, and I’ve followed his blog ever since. Among his numerous claims to fame is an instrumental role in the rigorous application of grid systems to web design over the past decade. When I heard he was creating a WordPress theme last November, I knew I’d found a solid reason to finally migrate my blog.

Learning Wordpress from scratch and installing the theme took the spare hours of a holiday week, and I’ve spent a bit of each day since then taking advantage of its flexibility to divide the content into something more sensible. This means my design projects now occupy their own Portfolio section, links to favorite writing samples get their own Writing page, and the brief story of how I got to my current state of professional affairs now dwells independently on the About page. Added content and organization is in the works, but in the meantime I’m looking forward to a blog that’s actually a blog. Twitter’s fun and all, but sometimes I’d rather write on a topic that doesn’t get full service from 140 character bursts.

While preparing for the San Francisco installment of the Coroflot Creative Confab series in October, a freelance videographer and AAU student named Josh Couto approached us. In exchange for free access to the event and a venue for showing his work, he offered to shoot and edit the event for free, going so far as to conduct short interviews on the subject of creative employment with three of the panelists: Emily Delmont of Google Creative Lab, Kate Gilman of 24 Seven, and John Foster of IDEO.

CREATIVE CONFAB SF 10/21/09 // COROFLOT • CORE77 // PRODUCTION : DREW DORSEY & F/22 from F/22 on Vimeo.

What we expected, to be honest, was a working document to record the happenings of the day. What we got was something much more valuable: a series of beautifully shot and sensitively edited discussions that get closer to the truth of the creative hiring process than anything in recent memory, told by some extraordinarily knowledgeable and qualified hiring experts.

This is the first of the videos. It logs in at just over 4 minutes, but ties together several themes that have recurred consistently throughout the past year’s research: the necessity of network-building, the difficulty of determining culture fit, and the crucial need for designers to demonstrate collaborative ability and dedication to their art. My involvement in this one is indirect: I assembled the panel and helped organize the event, but the interviews are all Josh, and his colleague Drew Dorsey. Nice one, guys.

As of this week I will no longer be working for Core77.com and Coroflot.com. I’ve been writing for and working with these two phenomenal design-oriented websites, in various capacities, since late 2004, shortly after I graduated from the Pratt MID program, and before moving to Portland. It’s no exaggeration to say that Core has been the one consistent presence that’s lasted my entire professional design and writing career.

This presents an unusually clear opportunity to answer some questions I’ve gotten over the years, about what it’s like to work for such an iconic publication, and what exactly I did there (quite a lot of it wasn’t writing, especially toward the end). From a professional perspective, it also seems like a good idea to document the range of things I did and learned, which is so broad even I have trouble believing it some times.

The Core77 Ping-Pong Squad, at ICFF 2008 with (OMG!) Konstantine Grcic. I'm in the back.

Core77

In 2004, I wrote an article for Core called American Design, Anyone? in response to some observations at that year’s ICFF; for a first-ever feature article, I still think it’s not bad. Getting this right worried me enough that I spent over a month doing research, and quickly realized one of the great perks of writing for publication: you get to talk to a lot of interesting people. For this article it was Jason Miller, Aric Chen, and Dave Alhadeff, three NYC-based furniture designers and curators, but in the years since, I’ve gotten to interview industrial and interaction designers, CAD industry leaders, branding experts, materials experts, design recruiters, design educators and journalists. It’s a humbling and fascinating part of the job, and more work than you might expect: for every hour interviewing, I probably spent two preparing, and another two reviewing.

In the five years since then, this has led to a body of published work far bigger than I would’ve thought possible, especially considering how much was produced while I was busy doing other things–industrial design and CAD until late 2008 (see earlier posts on this blog), and Coroflot editorial and community management thereafter (more on that later). Here’s a brief run-down:

I haven’t been uploading new work in a while for two main reasons. First, although I am wrapping up a couple of great product design projects (we go to tooling next month, most likely), they’re still very much under NDA, and therefore off limits. Have no doubt that I’ll be bragging my ass off about them once I’m able.

Second, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in Coroflot, which is in the midst of a fascinating but occasionally painful metamorphosis. Sort of like coaxing a butterfly from its chrysalis, but in this case it’s a social networking platform emerging from an enormous portfolio-hosting and job search site with 10 years of legacy attached to it. Fantastically exciting stuff, but slow and fraught with difficulty.

If you haven’t been there in a bit, it’s worth a check: we’ve got image bookmarking in the form of the “Me Likey” system, which a few enthusiastic users are running with at a rapid clip; there’s also a micro-blogging system that will eventually interface with your Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc feeds; and a completely new, image-oriented browsing system that lets users jump from project to project in search of new work — much of which doesn’t show up anywhere else on the web. Some of this requires (free) membership on the site, so I can’t link to it, but there is a detailed What’s New page that outlines the updates pretty clearly. More to come, too — trust me.

I’ve been working on and off with Brooklyn artist Josiah McElheny for several years now, doing some of the 3D CAD and fabrication control legwork for his spectacular cosmologically-based chandelier sculptures. The first, An End To Modernity, was one of my first major freelance projects out of design school, and still counts as one of the most fascinating, both in its intention and in the technical challenges it posed.

The most recent project in this series is entitled Island Universe, and features five different chandeliers, each expressing a pared-down aspect of the universe’s expansion. It opened on October 14th in the White Cube Gallery in London’s Hoxton Square, and photos have just been posted to the gallery’s site. They’re beautiful. More screengrabs after the jump.

Latest renderings of the Terrapod for Highgear. New color scheme, and slightly more realistic use of decal texture mapping on my part–one of the few aspects of Hypershot that actually takes a bit of trial and error to figure out.

Playing around with Hypershot, I’ve gone back and re-rendered some of the earlier versions of the Terrapod, a project I worked on earlier this year for Highgear. Details on how it works, what it does, etc are still near the vest, but this lovely form and color scheme are maintained pretty closely in the final. More to come.