It&rsqo;s officially going to be a full year since graduating from college last May. I don&rsqo;t know where the time goes, but it went by way too fast. Usually the basic plan for a young graphic designer out of school would be to get more experience at an internship (paying), get their masters, get a full time job of their dreams or even a freelance job for experience also. I obviously chose to garner more experience by freelancing and searching for my dream job. My lessons learned on this job search were that there aren&rsqo;t many African Americans in the design/marketing industry at all. I had a feeling, but nothing to that extent. After all these interviews I have been on in one year I have run into two African Americans working in this crazy world of design and I think it is ridiculous.
So moving along from that crazy stat I continued my search and went on plenty interviews, but most of the positions and companies wanted someone with more experience and some just flatly chose someone else, which only the lord knows why. So me being me I continued my search and looking up other designers and came up with some designers blogs. I read them extensively and basically followed some of their rules in getting started out of college. First thing I noticed was that every designer should have a website because it shows professionalism, you will have an official email address (you@yourdomain.com) and easy access to your design portfolio. Next is my science to the perfect craigslist search. For my best freelance jobs I always look to craigslist because I always get the first interview and chance I want with the job post I choose.
First everyone should choose firefox as their default browser for this task. Then subscribe to RSS feed of the job section of your choice by clicking on the orange RSS feed button on the right side of the web address bar. Now that is done the subscription should be in the bookmark bar section and have a live feed. Usually the feed updates itself, but I just right click on them and reload the live feed every five minutes during the day so I can see the very next job that is posted first. This way I am first or the first ten people to send my credentials to the job poster and most likely get considered for an interview. Or for you slow people I would just refresh the craigslist page manually every few minutes and do the same process. (Part 2 coming soon and check out my new work, which is coming along nicely www.shervoneneckles.com)
Here is a sample picture of the process:
