The Blank Slate: Your First Design Job

When I first graduated from art school, just over 10 years ago, the bottom had fallen out of the "dot com" bubble and finding work in the digital design world was next to impossible. I was able to land a few freelance gigs here and there, but that was difficult for a student with basically no professional experience. After months of searching I finally landed my first full-time gig. Accepting the job meant moving from Austin, Texas to Tulsa, Ok (which I had absolutely no desire to do), but it was a REAL design job. Of course looking back on it now it hardly seems "real" at all. My first job was for a small 5 person agency/print house designing and authoring interactive CD-ROMs using Macromedia Director and Authorware... both programs don't exist anymore, to the best of my knowledge. You have to realize this was early 2000-2001 when CD-ROMs were a big deal and DVDs were just coming into play. I learned a lot about CD-ROM development, which I haven't put into use since, but luckily the the small firm was also a print house, so I did learn some valuable lessons in print working along side a veteran designer who had been working in print back while I was still playing with GI Joes. Thinking back to my experience, it brings up a good question...

What was your first design job?

Tell the community about your first real design job. What was it doing? Was it good or bad? What did you learn from it?