So You Want to Be a Product Designer — Areaware

LAURA ANN YOUNG, Creative Director

Hot-Blooded Youth
I prefer to work with young designers. They’re cranking out new work like they’re breathing. None of them are a hundred percent obsessed with one design, because they have 300 others in the back of their heads. There’s something really wonderful about the process, because there are never hurt feelings. It’s always “Don’t worry, I’ve got three million other things.”

Easy on the Hubris
I call it the “one-year itch”: when people get out of school and think they’re too good for every job, don’t think they should be assistants, and don’t think they should pay their dues. I understand their feelings, but it creates this bubble around them. I’ll send them an e-mail saying, “I like this design.” And they’ll come back with three million questions, and ask me to sign a nondisclosure agreement. I have five minutes to tell you I like this—five minutes to get it in the door—and you just gave me three hours worth of work. I get annoyed when a designer asks me to sign an NDA before they show me anything. Because 90 percent of the time, it’s like, “Gee, thanks for this poster with a smiley face on it. I really needed an NDA.” Filtering submissions is not an easy task.

Getting Noticed
I spend a ton of time looking at Tumblr, blogs, the Internet, and magazines. So getting any type of press is crucial. Social networking is huge. We have an e-mail address up on our Web site, through which we get tons of submissions each day. But it’s probably better for you to find me and create that forced personal relationship, so that I’ll always remember your face. I have a young designer in Philadelphia right now. I’m not interested in his work at the moment, but he was hounding me so hard on Twitter that I was like, “Okay, send me a trend report, and I’ll write you a note.”