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1. Don’t pad your resume with BS
OK, so you are young and lack experience, and you want to give your resume a little “zazz”. I totally get it, and I’ve done the same thing. But if you’re interviewing for a graphic arts position (or any related field), don’t bother listing every tiny detail of your current position at Wal-Mart. I know what you do there, you stock shelves and run a register. Don’t tell me that you, “Provided professional and courteous customer support, as well as offered direction to solve customer needs.” Really? All you did was tell the lady where the diapers were, c’mon! Just say you worked at Wal-Mart and handled inventory, stocking, and register duty. That’s it. The rest is BS and I don’t have time for it I’m super busy! If you worked at McDonald’s, just say so! Don’t make it sound like you worked for Chef Gordon Ramsey. You flipped burgers! Guess what? I did too! We all did at some point. It’s OK.

2.Let your portfolio make up for your lack of work experience
You’re applying for a design gig, so regardless of where you worked, I need to see the goods. I want to know that you can sit down in front of a computer screen and get right to work. I don’t want to have to tell you where the brushes are in Photoshop. Your portfolio says to me that you know what you’re doing, and dammit you do it good! This will make up for any lack of work experience in your resume.

3. Only show me the good stuff
You might have four years worth of art to show me, but guess what? Nine times out of ten the first three years of art are junk. I don’t want to see it. I want to see what you did in the last six months, and out of the last six months I only want to see the absolute best of it. Your portfolio should not have fifty pieces in it, maybe ten or twelve but no more than that. Frankly I’d rather see five dynamite pieces than a dozen mediocre ones. Trust me, less is more.

4. OMG put your work on a CD-Rom
Once you widdle your work down to the best of the best, take photos, or scan them and put them on a disc. Please do not come into my office with a 5′x3′ painting of your cat, or a 40″x28″ print of your digital work. Put it all on a disc. My office is small and my desk barely fits in the room as it is. Leave that big stuff at home! I can just look at your stuff on my computer. Oh, and when you save the files, make sure they are jpegs, and please save them at a decent size. No tiny thumbnails or fancy carousels, just regular boring jpegs no smaller than 800x600px. Don’t make me think too hard because frankly I’m probably late for a meeting with the boss as it is, so don’t come in and make me learn how to look at your work, just present it. Fancy is not better, it is mostly just annoying.

5. Never apologize for your work
Under no circumstances should you ever apologize for your work. You are trying to show me that you are the best applicant for the job. If you tell me that “oh I’m srry my work is so bad I will gets better sumdayz” guess what? You don’t get hired. I’m not saying that you should walk in like the king or queen of design, but show some pride in your work! It will go a long way.

6. Have a website before the interview
If you don’t have a website with your work on it right now, I will not even consider hiring you. IMHO, you must have an online portfolio. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or expensive, but I need to be able to find your work online. Not on Facebook, but on a website designed to display artwork. There are tons of free online portfolio sites to choose from. I recommend that you go to WordPress.com and sign up for a free blog. Post your work there. It isn’t perfect, but at least your work is out there. Maybe I’ll be impressed and I’ll subscribe to your feed and call you back in six months. Without a website, you’ll never know. I guarantee that your paper resume will be in the trash by the end of the day.

7. Have a professional email address
Gmail is the current standard. Hotmail is not. If you have an AOL address, you are not right for this job. Don’t use your school email either. That will be deleted when you graduate, and then I can never email you again. And for the love of all things holy, if your email is vulgar, nonsensical, or just plain stupid, I will not hire you. Megasexkitten-at-someEmail-dot-com is a disaster. Change it immediately.

8. Clean up your Facebook page
Yes I will be searching for you on Facebook, Twitter, et all. If you have a photo gallery of you beer bonging anything, or flashing your inappropriately placed tattoos, or your profile pic is you making that god-awful “duck-face” that girls always make, I will not hire you. ‘Nuff said.

9. Take a bath
This is an office, you can’t be a smelly art kid in the real world. If you wake up the morning of the interview and wonder if you should brush your teeth, the answer is yes.

10. Relax
Look, I was a dumb kid with no experience once too. We all were. Don’t be so nervous! My resume was probably worse than yours is. Just chill out, be yourself, and things should go fine. We all have to start somewhere, right?

1. Start a Facebook Fan Page
OK, so now “Fan Pages” are just called “Pages”, and yeah people don’t have to become your “Fan” anymore, they just have to “Like” your page, but you know what I mean. If you have a business, be it selling your art, commissions, or promoting your comic or webcomic, YOU NEED A FAN PAGE! Keep your personal Facebook account ONLY for close friends and family. Your Fan Page is for your clients and fans that buy your stuff. I love my customers, clients and fans, but I do not want them to see photos of my children, or photos of me from high school that old “friends” decide to post and tag. That’s just not safe, or smart. Even when I break the no kid pics rule, I do so fully aware of the risk I am taking. Be smart.

2. Use Facebook Connect
Facebook Connect allows your website users to log into your site with their own personal Facebook account. They can post comments on your blog, and use their Facebook avatar, and have the option to post their activity on your site to their Facebook stream, in essence helping to promote your website to their friends, potentially increasing your website traffic. If the user just isn’t cool with signing into your site with their Facebook creds, then they simply don’t. They would have to click the connect button on your page to make the connection, so you are not infringing on their privacy, you are simply offering a convenience to make their experience on your site more interactive and familiar. If they choose not to use the Facebook Connect feature, they can still post comments and be part of the conversation, and maintain their complete anonymity. It’s a win win for everyone.

3. Incorporate Twitter
Guys, Twitter is here to stay. Sign up, use it, embrace it. Especially with all the problems and controversy over Facebook privacy lately. Twitter is the next best alternative, and it’s a great way to reach out to your audience. In my experience, I’ve also found that Twitter users are actually MUCH more social than Facebook users anyway. Let your users interact with you on Twitter, incorporate it into your blog, and tweet yourself silly!

4. Add a LIKE button
I think “Like” is sorta dumb, but what are ya gonna do? Facebook owns the web, and they want us all to “Like” everything. Don’t miss out on this minimal modification. Just add the Like button and let your users click it if they choose to. It will feed to their Facebook stream with a link back to your website. It’s a good thing.

Here are some links to the social media plugins I use on my website, CDowd.com. There are hundreds out there, so try using Google to find some others. Keep in mind that I run a self hosted copy of WordPress, so these may not work for you if you run something else.

WP-FBconnect Integrate Facebook and WordPress with Facebook Connect. Provides single-signon, avatars, and newsfeed comment publication.
TwitMe This plugin allows you to automatically post your new posts on the twitter website.
Twitterlink Comments Plugin to show a link to follow the comment author on twitter if they have entered in their username at least once in the comment form
Add a LIKE button Requires minor template hacking
Wickett Twitter Widget Adds a Twitter feed to your sidebar

Post your favorite tips & tricks in the comments below.

I want to publicly, humbly, and sincerely thank the folks that voted for my work in this year’s CCBC Digital Art Showcase. I admittedly question whether one can truly “win” at art, but I also admit that it is truly meaningful to receive recognition and adulation from my peers and mentors. Thank you all for your continued support and encouragement.

So I’ve lived with the “magical” iPad for about a week or so now, and I have to say I like it a lot…for what it is. As I stated in my previous post on the topic, the iPad is predominantly for consuming media, not creating it. However, after looking into it a little more closely, I’ve discovered that maybe the iPad is a bit more useful than I thought.

As an artist and designer, I always have a sketchbook close at hand, but what if all I had was my trusty iPad? Well with the help of a few apps I can actually use the iPad as a fairly reliable sketchbook. Now I want to state up front that the iPad is NOT a tool I would use for any final drawings, BUT, for those initial concept roughs, this overblown iPod Touch is a great little tool to have around!

I started with the free drawing apps, specifically Doodle Buddy. Doodle Buddy was easy to set up and get to drawing. You poke the piece of chalk, adjust the size of the line, and go crazy. You can also draw on photos and create device backgrounds, but my primary goal is not to review apps, but to review iPad as a sketchbook. Certainly Doodle Buddy makes the iPad a great "in a pinch" drawing tablet. There a quite a few other free drawing apps to choose from, including Adobe Ideas, which lets you draw with vectors! As much as I enjoyed the free apps, I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing something. Enter Sketchbook Pro.

Sketchbook Pro is an awesome drawing program. For $7.99 you can use the same app as Jim friggin Lee does, with some great results! There are a number of options including drawing and painting tools, a full color pallette, and everything you’d expect in a quality electronic sketchbook. The best part is that you can save the file with layers in .psd format! Then just export the image and open up in Photoshop on your work computer and you have a fleshed out sketch to fine tune all night long, baby! In this Bigfoot drawing, I actually imported the psd to Illustrator, and drew the vector lines right on top for a pretty good final drawing in a very short amount of time. Maybe not gallery worthy, but quick and fun.

Bottom Line: iPad is NOT for final art. At least not at a truely professional level. But, with a little research and trial and error, you can very easily use it as a great little sketchbook. The only real downside is that you have to draw with your finger, which kind of sucks. Hopefully iPad 2 will have a stylus. Are you listening HP and Google? I said "STYLUS!!"

What I find most interesting about the iPad isn’t the cool factor of being an Apple-ite(read fanboy), but the actual interface of the touchscreen computer, and the opportunity for interactive illustration in an industry that has been hurt by the demise of print. Is the iPad a device that we artists can use to create art? Frankly, no. The iPad is a new way to deliver your creations to an audience. It is very much a product meant for media consumption, and not for creation. But, as proven by the simply awesome Marvel Comics app, consumption on the iPad is great! Again, the screen resolution is fantastic, and the art looks even better than it does on the newsstand. The iPad offers us artists one more advantage that we didn’t have before, and that’s the chance to let the user actually interact with the art itself.

While it’s great to look at art, the most innovative aspect for me is the interactivity that I as an artist can have with my audience. The interaction is different than video games. With the iPad, and soon enough many other competing tablet PCs, the consumer can actually pick up the device, and hold it in their own hands. The Alice app is a perfect example of where this new medium is going. For any salty illustrator out there who thought they wouldn’t have a job in a few years, I encourage you to check it out. The creators have taken what would have been a stunningly illustrated book, and turned it into a stunningly illustrated experience. You can throw cupcakes around, turn the iPad upside down and make Alice grow, and do a number of other fun things with the characters.

Can you imagine how fun it will be for artists to come up with new interactive ways to explore their art? It’s so much more tangible than clicking things with a mouse. It really is a huge leap forward in tech, and a great new opportunity for artists of all types. I know I’m personally very excited about the future of art and illustration on the web and in apps. It all seems new again.

Thanks to all who continue to show support. You guys rule.

C