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:

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.