The unintended benefit, though, is getting to see a fast-forward progression of the season’s offerings over the course of the summer. First we have the haul from June 26:

Lots of classic indicators of early summer here: snap peas, garlic whips, porcini mushrooms, asparagus and strawberries of the particularly fragile and incredibly delicious ‘Hood’ variety. The latter are identifiable by their diminutive stature and the wet spot on the pint container where one of them’s gone squishy from the bike ride home.

Now contrast that with last weekend, August 21:

Peaches and tomatoes! And huge piles of each at several stalls. It’s almost as if Oregon is apologizing to us for running out of strawberries. That white orb-thing hiding behind the basil is a tiny orange-fleshed honeydew melon, which was nice but a little disappointing. Best leave those to hotter dryer places, and we’ll stick with the berries and stone fruits.

It doesn’t show up that well, but the fluted thing resting on top of the purple artichoke is a variety of zucchini that my friend Tobias at one of the market stalls (he’s also an industrial designer — cool, right?) recommended so emphatically I had little choice. It was fantastic. Whatever this variety’s called, it’s uglier than a normal zucchini, gets way bigger without getting woody, and tastes twice as good. On the other hand, he also recommended that strange dark green jutting out above it, which is apparently an ancient predecessor to broccolini or something. It tasted like twigs.

It honestly does my heart good to see the progress of time in my shopping basket, especially when one joy gets displaced by another in this way.

On the other hand, ask me again in February after I’ve filled my tote bag with parsnips and rain for the ninth consecutive weekend and maybe I’ll have something different to say.

Bit of a redundant haul photo this time, I’m afraid: bread, fish, beer and strawberries as per usual, with the addition of an astonishingly good 12 dollar pinot noir from a small winery that sells exclusively through farmers market stalls. I owe that discovery to a co-shopper who prefers wine to beer, lucky me. The conversation with the winemaker was extra interesting–wine, along with just about everything else, owes more of its price to the distribution and marketing than the actual making, so a 12 dollar bottle like this would probably run closer to 30 if he were to actually jump through all the hoops needed to get it on a supermarket shelf. Also available through the internet for a few dollars more, if you’re interested.

Clockwise from left: strawberries, lacinato kale, beer, romaine lettuce, beets, green garlic, black cod, carrots (topped), torpedo radishes. Center: Fleur de Lis demi baguette

Slightly less ambitious haul this week, partly reflecting a busy week that left less time for cooking. It’s not all bad–every evening spent not cooking was spent elsewhere in good company–but that’s meager consolation for the stack of magnificent collards slowly wilting in my fridge.

A few new and notable things in the basket this week. Black Cod from Linda Brand, which sadly ran out before I could score any last week. Enlightening tidbit from the conversation with the stall guy: black cod is a mostly Pac NW thing, and enjoys nowhere near the notoriety it ought to considering that it’s likely the world’s most delicious fish.

Green garlic is a new one for me, but I fortunately have Alice to guide me on this one. And the beets, while not new, are enjoying a newly increased standing in my estimation, after having stolen the show at last week’s British Telly Night with the neighbors (Spaced, The Office (UK), homemade mac and cheese, and lightly pickled beets).

Captured By Porches continues to evolve their distribution scheme, and now has two taps in the stall, one with a Kölsch they don’t bottle. This is to encourage folks to bring their growlers in (less glass to haul back and forth to St. Helens), and also to add visual impact to their petition to allow pints to be sold at the Hollywood market–this is apparently already permitted at the Interstate one.

One interesting outcome of their reusable bottle policy that I just realized is the undeniable proof of former ownership left on the stopper:

This little bit of rust, it seems to me, is a fantastic object lesson in the diverse ways consumers can interpret visual indicators. To me, it’s beautiful: a patina of character on my brew, and proof that human hands made it. But to someone else it might indicate carelessness, or poor hygiene, or low standards. To be honest, if I saw this bottle among a gang of them at the supermarket, and the rest were pristine, I’d probably avoid it.

The opening of the Hollywood Farmers Market in Portland ranks as one of the most exciting days of the year for me; whether this is a sign of how wonderful the food is here or how boring my life has gotten, I can’t really say. Probably both.

But I was there May 1st, an unusually chilly day for a venue I tend to associate with summer. The pickings were good, enough to convince me to invite the Communication Design department over for dinner the following week, giving a reason to shop with purpose the following Saturday, May 8th (the market’s just on Saturdays). To entice them, I shot the picture above.

Food photography is a specialized discipline, I’m aware, and I’ve read through enough cookbooks to know that lighting, composition, mood, framing and all of the other things we associate with portraiture are just as important when shooting broccoli. My personal favorite example of the art is undoubtedly Nigel Slater’s Appetite, a gorgeous cookbook crammed with full page elegantly disheveled still-lives, of food the way we wish we were eating it: lush and chaotic and indulgent, tightly cropped to suggest bounty, with crumbs and wrappers and well-loved wooden utensils scattered around.

There are some shots of sausages simmering in gravy, and roasted chickens, but also messier and more charming ones of the seedy underbelly of the culinary process: grease-smeared carving knives, stain-spattered aprons, the burny bits left on a grill pan post-grilling. I sigh and coo when I read this book, and well up with gratitude toward my friend Alex, a food writer with exceptional taste, who gave it to me as a present very many years and meals ago. The small sampling visible on the book’s Amazon page hint at its glory, but definitely miss the best ones.

I will never, ever shoot photos like these, and that’s fine. This is the work of a pro, or more likely a team of them, wielding several thousand dollars of equipment and decades of collective experience. Working in the design field has left me with a deep sense of how much effort goes into making something look both beautiful and approachable; it’s the hardest thing, I think, to create something that excites and entices and also leaves you thinking “Hey, I could totally do that!” No, you couldn’t, unless you’re dedicated enough to try it 10,000 times and learn something from every attempt.

It makes a good project though, and one I think I’ll enjoy. The parameters are as follows: every Saturday I go to the farmers market (Hollywood, most likely, though I’ve been known to occasionally cheat and hop the Green Line to PSU), which will be most of them this sumer, I lay out my purchases on the dining table, shoot them as artfully and lushly as possible, and describe them briefly. That’s it.

Today’s:

Clockwise from left: baby Willamette Valley onions, early season strawberries, Russian kale, radishes, half baguette from Fleur de Lis, carrots, parsley, Hefeweizen and IPA from Captured by Porches Brewing, snap peas, biggest collards ever, black morels, Olympic Provisions cacciatore salami

The strawberries disappeared down my pie-hole less than five minutes after the photo–all of them. It felt greedy, but the $3.50 I spent is the price of a good beer at happy hour, and I enjoyed these at least as much.

Captured by Porches is based in St. Helens, an hour or so outside town, and the only brewery to set up shop at the Hollywood market. Fortunately, they a) use reusable bottles, and refund you a buck if you bring yours back, b) fill growlers for eight dollars, which is good value, and c) make damn fine beer. Seek them out.

Olympic Provisions is a small salumeria in the Olympic Mills building in Central Eastside, and are beginning to give Salumi in Seattle a run for their money, IMHO. No wacky flavors yet (Mole Salami, I still love you though you’re irritatingly non-traditional), but very solid basics, and proud of it. The Cacciatore above is just pork, salt, red pepper flakes and carraway, and they sell from a small shack-like stand that says “Meat Here” on the front.

[time spent redesigning the site]/[time spent completely ignoring the site]

ratio of about 1:12. Which is undeniably pathetic.

If you were indulgent, you might give me the benefit of the doubt and suspect that it’s because I’ve been busy elsewhere, and you’d be right. Or you might have just checked my LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter status and discovered that I have a job. A writing job, ironically, and more specifically, a design writing job, for a firm called Ziba that looms quite large in the creative landscape of Portland, Oregon.

Perhaps it’s for similar reasons as the cobbler leaving his progeny unshod or the barista who drinks Taster’s Choice (er…excuse me….Via)(which my former boss referred to as “coffee sauce”) at home, but one of the initial side effects of writing for a full-time living has been a reluctance to do any for my own benefit. This has included lapsed and paltry email correspondence, I’m embarrassed to say, and reluctance to write journal entries, tweet beyond the bare minimum, contribute to friends’ experimental magazines, and participate in cool shit like 48 Hour Mag.

Well enough of that. Over the past few days I’ve taken a second look at this so-called writer’s fatigue and discovered a hidden inverse: once you’ve spent three months writing daily for other people, the process starts to get automatic, and this imparts a certain fearlessness to writing of the non-career-building sort. So while I can’t ensure anything particularly fun to read (this post, for example, has been about approximately nothing), I can make a decent promise that there will be words.

Next post: How I got this odd job.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Several additional feature articles. Not Created Equal: A Long (Loving) Plastics Primer might be my favorite (Bakelite = rad), but I got to interview Jon Winsor and Rob Walker for Stepmothers of Invention, so it’s kind of a toss up. Also, a hand at editing, most notably with Gray Holland’s Periodic Table of Form article, which we pushed back and forth so many times I thought it might never post, but ended up being one of the most enlightening, widely read pieces in Core77’s history.

Around 430 Core77 blog posts; it’s hard to get an exact number, since I sometimes posted under a group login, but close enough.

• First post as a regular Core77 Blogger: NY Times Goes to Renegade Craft Fair, Finds Ironic Cephalopods. June 2007.
• Favorite post about a physical object: Portland’s Top Coffee Roaster Dumps the Clover, and Why This Matters to Product Design
• Closest I ever got to breaking a story: Autodesk puts the fun in your pocket: Introducing Sketchbook Mobile. We missed being the first publication to review this insanely cool iPhone app by just a couple of hours, but that post is still on the first page of the Google results.
• Most devious use of vacation time as a source of blog fodder: Design in the Wild, Part 1 (before long hike) and Part 2 (after long hike).
• Best virtual company: Hero Shots, Money Shots and Process Pages: How to present your work visually. This was part of Core77’s “Hack 2 Work” feature, and got listed next to submissions by Michael Bierut, Julie Lasky, Tim Brown, Stephen Heller, Linda Tischler, and half a dozen other designers and writers I want to be when I grow up.

62 Creative Seeds articles on Coroflot, addressing the complexities of creative work and creative hiring from every angle I could think of, from October 2007 to September 2:

• Article that drew the most direct emails: Interaction Designers, and How They Got That Way.
• And in a related vein, article that drew the most flak, but also generated the most interesting conversation: Five Things Interaction Design Probably Isn’t. The comments are good, but the discussion it sparked on the IxDA boards is way better.
• This was a close second for flak: Questioning the Cult of the Sketch.
• Most fun to research: Seven Ways to Make Your Business Card Stand Out.
• Favorite lead image: Small Pond, Smart Fish: Why Young Designers Should Avoid ‘Design Capitals.’ Google Earth has lots of uses.

• The opportunity to visit, attend and/or blog about: 2 Pop!Tech conferences, South by Southwest Interactive ‘09, Maker Faire ‘08, IxDA Interaction ‘09, Autodesk University ‘08, Toyota’s Calty Design Center, the opening of the Ziba Headquarters, Design Green Now, 2 IDSA regional conferences, and 5 (count ‘em! five!) ICFF/New York Design Weeks.

Coroflot

Given all that, it might sound strange to say that writing hasn’t been my main task for over a year now. My Core77 and Coroflot business cards say Editorial Director on them, which is a nebulous term, but that’s on purpose. It turns out that anything involving an online community of 165,000+ users and 2 million images requires the completion of an enormous diversity of tasks.

Coroflot spun off from Core77 about 11 years ago, and has reinvented itself multiple times, as long-established websites tend to. The past two years, though, have been remarkable. The user community has grown, of course–the big news back in November of 2007 was hitting the 75,000 portfolio mark, a value that’s more than doubled since–but starting in mid 2008, a whole slew of new network-oriented tools rolled out, starting with the Me Likey image tagging system, and extending on from there. I explained it like this in a Jan 2009 Creative Seeds post:

…what we introduced in December, and what we’re continuing to develop, is a set of tools that aim to maximize [the Coroflot] network. This means letting Coroflot users (designers and employers, both) link to other Coroflot users, comment on each others’ work, collect portfolio images that they find inspiring and useful, and browse images through multiple types of associations, rather than just confining their viewing to one portfolio at a time.

Anyone who’s worked in social media can instantly see how much work this entails, to build user engagement, fix bugs, monitor traffic, and plan future improvements. That was most of my job. Specific tasks varied constantly, and new ones emerged, but fell under the heading of what’s increasingly called “community management”; a strange term, given that much of the community I was “managing” consisted of designers with far greater experience and expertise than me. Participating in the Featured Content selection process was particularly humbling, given the firm editorial eye I was training on work I could personally never replicate.

Still, it worked. Coroflot users now Likey images at a rate of 9000+ per week and leave 1500 comments per week. The number of portfolios is growing faster than ever. Users follow each others’ work, set up groups and use them to exchange images and ideas, and spread the word enthusiastically through their blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts–I know this because it was my job to pay attention. All this using a set of tools that, in some cases, are barely a year old. It was exhilarating.

The user research aspect was, if anything, even more fascinating. Perhaps it’s my engineering background showing, but crunching numbers for the Coroflot Salary Survey was a highlight of both 2008 and 2009 (Pivot Tables! Whee!). Extending this analytic eye to more in-depth investigation of user needs over the past few months was even better.

The most visible new thing for 2009 was the Creative Confab, a series of panel discussions and networking events that we introduced at SxSW to good effect, and decided to run with. It’s gotten plenty of coverage already, so I won’t bore you with detail, but I will say it was an extraordinary learning process, both in new skills (PR, panel moderation) and exposure to yet more interesting people. Interviewing 20 different hiring and design directors over a six month period is a tremendous education in the current state of the creative professions, and that leads me to the last part.

What I Learned

from dozens of interviews, and 4+ years at Core77, Inc.

1. Hiring creative professionals is a peculiar and little understood art. Finding the right skill set for a design position is only a fraction of the task; building a team that can work together is the real challenge. Designers tend to have an exceptional level of emotional dedication to work, user, and concept, and while that makes them good, it also requires close attention. The most effective teams are structured with these tendencies in mind, and put incredible effort into supporting new hires (see John Foster’s interview for more).
2. Everything looks easier from the outside. Of all of the new things I had to pick up over the past few years–user research, editing, interviewing, wireframing, project management, community management, you name it–not one of them was as straightforward as it initially appeared. Designers being told they “just need to make the logo bigger” are aware of this, but then, so is everyone else who does something that requires talent and practice.The trick is recognizing that complexity in other peoples’ jobs. The other trick is realizing that more complex also usually means more fun.
3. The only unforgivable sin is apathy. Emily Delmont, a recruiter for Google Creative Lab (far right in the photo above), laid this out in the last of the Confabs in San Francisco, but it reiterates something I’ve heard and seen countless times before. Skill sets can improve, strategies can change, and tenacity can make up for missing talent, but nothing takes the place of enthusiasm. One of the reasons Core77 is arguably the world’s longest running online magazine is that it’s a labor of love. I could say more, but Allan does a better job of it–if you don’t know Core’s early history, this interview on Design Glut is a fantastic read.

So, why leave all of this? It’s a long story, as you might expect, but is closely related to the above lessons. Core is a labor of love, and while that’s wonderful to witness and learn from, it’s not my labor of love.

I’m fortunate to have the luxury of a few possible next steps to consider, and some time to make the choice, but it’s not without wistfulness. Thanks a bunch.