Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

10 Tips on landing you an Industrial Design Job

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Thanks for visiting and please keep in touch? ~ D.T.

Originally published on 20 April, 2006.

Edit 1: Updated 25 Aug 2007

Edit 2: Updated 16 Nov 2008.

This has to be one of the “classics” here at Design Sojourn, and a post that got me noticed in the blogosphere! Here it is updated again for 2008! Actually this post was way overdue for an update as the original was badly written with poor grammar and sentence construction. Obviously, time and practice has made me a lot better at writing!

In my 3 years of blogging, this has to be one of the biggest topics I get asked advice for, especially from graduating designers. So I have decided to compile the 10 things they don’t really tell you in school or anywhere else for that matter! These tips are based on my own personal experience and from other design professionals or HR professionals that I have worked or and spoken to.

1. The 10% reality
I think this has to be the biggest tip in this deck, so it’s right at number 1. Sadly it is not positive, but a “reality check†that nobody likes to talk about. Here we go, only about 10% of any graduating cohort will find a job right out of school as an industrial designer. Many fresh graduates need to come to terms with this first before they can move on in life. How to move on? We’ll see below.

Many design graduates still do become successful but in other design or non-design related professions that better suit their skill set. I have designer friends who become owners of their own Interior Design firms or CAD businesses, or some even get into marketing. I also have ex-designers who are successful bankers, writers and even a musician somewhere. As you can see, you may not end up doing design; you still can be successful in whatever you do. An ID degree arms you with problem solving analytical skills vital in any organization or business situation.
These days, design management and creative thinking is in itself a very fast growing sub-set of our design profession. Something you might be interested to explore.

For the record, I was not in this 10% graduating cohort. I ended up just outside of it.

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A Good Design Makes your Mind BLINK!

(This post was updated and edited. The original was published on the 19 Dec, 2005!)

John Maeda, formerly from MIT Media Labs, and now RISD President, spoke about how “good art makes our mind blink”. John was referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink with his art comment.

This is so true, and if we further extrapolate this, I would say “good design makes our mind blink”. In a “blink of an eye” we intuitively understand it, we know what it does, how to engage it, and best of all how to use it.

Intrigued, I manage to get my hands on Blink, and while it often comes across rather academic at times, it does give a better understand of how to harness the power of intuition, or what the author calls “rapid cognition”, in decision making. Designers can benefit from this, especially when our ideas get weighed down by constraints that often makes our concepts drift listless from specification creep.

Via: John’s blog.

Here’s a link to Malcolm Gladwell’s site.

It is Design Sojourn’s 3rd Birthday!

Image: Happy 3rd Birthday by Laura-Beth

Wow I almost missed it yet again!

Yesterday, November 09, was Design Sojourn’s 3rd birthday. It has been 3 great years of blogging and to mark this event it I have been thinking about what I should do to celebrate it with you dear reader.

Oh before I forget, I would like to extent a big “Thank You” for all your support, comments, or just sharing this journey of design with me. Recently, I have not had too much time to really keep up with my commenting and keeping in touch with all of your emails, but fear not, I do make sure I read every single one!

Ok back to this celebration!

I had come up with a whole bunch of “hair brained” ideas. From drinks on the house, viral memes, link farming, practical jokes, crazy prize giveaways, and even collecting donations for charity. Many of these ideas, have been done before, and the result was always the same. Some kind of self-glorification short term traffic boost, which seems to me a pointless exercise and something against the spirit of blogging. Done often enough is something I find very annoying as it does not really add to the blogosphere but spam it.

A while ago, I had a discussion with an old design lecturer on the pros and cos of blogging. One of the points we though about was the medium was a chronological one and there was no way to really index or keep track of your work from the past. Blogs will be great education and learning tools if it only had a glossary of some kind!

With that in mind, I think what I will do this Birthday month is to look back at some of Design Sojourn’s best articles, created when the site was just a new seedling with very few readers, update them with new information or data, and republish it for all to enjoy.

So do stay tuned for some hard hitting Industrial Design posts!

Adobe Photoshop Print Ad: “as real as it gets”

“As real as it gets” by advertising firm, Bates 141 Jakarta. A very clever representation of, I dare say, one of our design software’s most recognizable user interface. Even the tag line is great. I love it!



Check out their production process and the full size (obviously photoshopped) final print image on their flickr site.

Via: Blankanvas