Type-Cast Designers

I remember in college a professor told us that you should ,"Be careful what you put your name on, it will follow you through your career.". What he meant was if you chose to take a paycheck over your personal or moral values and weren't mindful of the content you produced it could come back to bite you professionally and keep you from getting work.

Not unlike, Jennifer Aniston, you can become type-cast as a designer. Sometimes you just fall into it and maybe it aligns with your personality, which is okay. There are however times when you become locked in to a specific type of design world, specifically because of the work you accepted. The biggest example of this is the pornographic industry.

There are, however, other stigmatic design niches that can create a preconceived notion of you as a working professional. A few of these might be: Production work, Club promotion, Editorial layout, Pagination/printing press work, and work for any taboo industry such as dispensaries for medical marijuana usage.


Production work: This is considered anything but creative. This is a misconception in a lot of cases. What some people DO get right is that a majority of the work can be repetitive and less creative than a six-teen page insert for a clothing retailer that required coordination between an art director, photographer, designer (sometimes that's all one person) not to mention modeling agency bookings, set stage designers, key grips and managing permits for city owned backdrops. Let's face it, production work is just that, production, it's meant to be fast and cheap so it appeals to the masses as a marketing. Areas of design this work lends itself to?
Newsprint, shared mail marketing, variable data postcards, yellow page ads, lower end small run 2 color inserts and ROP inserts.

Conception: Unimaginative, dated, busy design that a trained monkey who slaps coupons and starbursts put together.

Reality: Stable, underpaid and unappreciated work that requires the designer to create art they don't always agree with and are always conflicted about. It's a simple case of uneducated clients lead by cut throat sales teams making promises that the designer then has to deliver on. This is why you see a full Chinese food menu on one side of an 8"x11", non-bleed product with 8 starbursts. The designers hate doing this as much as a future employer may hate looking at it. It's not all bad though, sometimes the co-workers are nice.


Club promotion: The dreaded promotion work is considered the lowest form of freelance work because it caters to those that typically are the antithesis of the artist. Those considered worldly, popular, cool and "fun" by the rest of the world go there. While the majority of artists I know would rather spend their time at a festival or book store or behind a computer screen creating kick ass artwork. The work is not completely unrewarding but it's not exactly a gold star on our resume. It's usually tucked down under our "freelance" section at the end of our experience when we're trying to pad some negative space to balance out a finely tuned one pager.

Conception: By some, trendy, flashy, sexy and in some cases lucrative.

Reality: By other designers? It would take a hell of a lot of Photoshop magic to trick us into thinking it's anything other than a really nice school project for the entry level portfolio.
However, it's a paycheck and when you need to make rent, you'll take anything to make ends meet. We've all been there. The struggle is real.

Editorial Layout: This is solid work and taken by a more intellectual designer that loves solving Rubix Cubes. Mainly you work with text and not the sexy custom headline/logo type text. Oh no, this is straight up columns of text and sometimes incorporates boxed images. In some cases you're allowed to push the envelope but it's really up to the creative look of the magazine/newspaper/advertisement.

Conception: It's a necessary evil, but unless you worked on a cutting edge experimental Swedish newspaper that revolutionized the editorial world, it's a blah stain on the resume that will only lead to more editorial work without the supplementation of some serious design chops.

Reality: Respected by their piers for their typographical knowledge and text spacing prowess. They are under the assumption that this is a niche and it is where that person should stay...because "real designers" don't like working with blocks of text day in day out and would rather apply filters to photographs and use text sparingly for impact.


Pagination/Printing Press: This is pretty self-explanatory. It's layout for a publication or printing press. It's Tetris using other works that have already been created instead of little blocks. It's the design of others designs. It's not a far cry from editorial layout but it requires a little more visual intensity since you're having to fit together not only columns of words but the entire layout of a magazine including any advertisements and page setup from a printers perspective vs. a readers perspective. The printing press work requires knowledge of different printing presses and plate generation and when working with items that simply need to plate together, not necessarily part of the same final product it takes on an additional layer of difficulty. It's a similar methodology but can lock one in to a lifetime of apprenticeship or a loss of actual common software use. This can create a layer of rust that's hard to shake.

Conception: You're the custodian of other designers and do the physically messy work that designers only read about. Okay, maybe they took a tour in college of a printing press, but a press check is as close as they want to get to you.

Reality: This can be the physically demanding portion of the design process and includes many facets of the design to print process that few designers consider during file creation. This information, if known would create a more efficient and consistent workflow from file upload to product delivery. It would also save money for all involved by saving time that goes into press work. For example, items that could be fixed at press with approval the client doesn't need to be aware of, press fixes that HAVE to be fixed BY the client while the press has been stopped awaiting new files. There is also paper cost and color corrections for reprints needed due to improper color usages going from a design in RGB that is ripped as CMYK creating color inconsistencies that had nothing to do with the pressman and everything to do with the uneducated designer who sent the files. Bottom line? These guys have info that can save everyone money, but no one wants to listen to them because they aren't the creatives.

The Taboo Design: Here's what we really want to talk about don't we? Porn, drug usage, vice design. It's sexy, it's wrong, it's legal some places, illegal in others. No matter what you do you're going to get dirty doing it and if it gets out that you made it, it could wreck the rest of your career if you decide to jump into mainstream. This is typically the most lucrative of design avenues but it can hurt your chances at other companies if they find out you put your name on something they might find morally repulsive. I remember a guy in my class came in late, stood up in front of the class, told us to "suck it!" slapped a copy of his $500,000 check he just got for creating a pornographic subscription site well before finishing his degree and just left.

Conception: Designers with this on their portfolio are obviously deviants who do drugs and hang out with the wrong crowd. They chose a paycheck over morality and didn't care how they got where they were. Maybe their untrustworthy? DENIED!

Reality: The pornographic and medical marijuana industries are booming nearly everywhere and are legal in all but a few areas depending on what you are talking about. There is so much money in these industries right now that they require a high level of skill to work for as there are security measures that need to be considered that rival any fortune 500 company. Skill-sets are high, cutting edge and sharp as a tack. These people should be hired on the spot and coveted for their particular insites into the abyss. They can think further outside the box than that girl with the dragon tattoo from Sweden.

So, what's the point to all of this? Well on one hand it was to open some peoples eyes to those areas of design that many seem to view as a type casting. There is value there, don't just write them off because you feel they won't transition into your particular marketing agenda or follow format. They are the treasures that will take your marketing capabilities to the next level and if you write them off you'll be shooting yourself in the foot if your competition picks them up and blows you out of the water.
On the other hand, it's a wake up call to those in these industries to broaden skill-sets. You can't help what other people think, no matter what blog they read or what they know vs. what they will actually do. It's a crazy, stupid world we live in, so keep sharpening those skills in other areas so you can become a jack-of-all-trades and become the water that will fit in to whatever glass you are trying to be poured into. Just remember, that guy I just told you about with the huge payday? No one has heard from him since that day. Word on the street is he blew through his money and was never able to find work outside of that niche market and doesn't even do design anymore because it wore on him how people viewed his choice of work. Not exactly something you can bring up at anyone's dinner table. Know what I mean?