Can I Use Your Portfolio?

This was a favor a friend of mine asked a few years back. She/he needed a portfolio because she/he had an emergency interview. I actually didn’t know what to say but my thought bubbles was screaming“Are you kidding me? ”

First, it’s my work, mydesign, my concept. If I gave him/her permission it will haunt me back, who knows, tables could turn and I could be accused of using someone else’s portfolio a few years down the line. I felt a little disgusted when I was asked that question. A straightforward NO was all I could spare.

The local web/design design industry is a small, small, small word. One should never take credit for a design that isn’t her/his own. It’s just wrong in so many ways. Here are two classic examples:

Bel of Greencapsule.org recently posted in her Multiply account about someone taking credit for her designs.

It’s not a case of web designs, this time.. it’s PDF portfolio ripping off. I honestly do take pride in how my PDF portfolio looks like, coz I have spent a lot of time doing it’s design, typography, colors, and layout just to impress employers or clients. Just this afternoon, a friend of mine who works in Lawton Yeo informed me that they just interviewed one Filipino guy (named Jay Patrik K. Elemento of http://xeoxile.cjb.net) through phone yesterday and was surprised to see that he used my PDF Portfolio as a template and have just replaced the texts and images on it. Everything looks the same.

The guy eventually apologized.

There was also a popular thread in Philweavers.net about a certain Voltaire Estrada. This incident is one for the books. The person involved used several flash portfolios that he claimed he worked on. He applied in one design studio. Presented his portfolio to a panel of interviewers, also web designers/developers — and in a funny twist of fate, one of the interviewees was the actual person who coded, developed “his” portfolio. CLASSIC! … And it gets better. I thought the name was familiar. It rang a bell. I remembered the person applied in my previous company. Guess what? He failed the basic HTML slicing and flash animation test.

Should they start teaching professional ethics 101 in design schools? Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re either a fresh grad or an expert in this design industry take into consideration the following:

• Never, ever take credit for someone else’s work.
• The industry is small world. The advent of the internet makes it’s easier for word to get around. You don’t want a prospective employer to Google your name and negative comments about you would pop in the results.
• If you worked on a project with a team, state that in your portfolio. This has been a common incident I’ve experience in the hundreds of interviews I’ve conducted. I’d see one portfolio by an applicant and wonder why it looked so familiar. Only upon further prying that I will discover it was done by team effort.
• Employers will blacklist you. In the case of Voltaire, it was just too bad for him that the complaint was posted in Philweavers. A site every headhunter/hr manager in the local industry visits to source for prospective talents.
• The old adage “face the music” rings true. You may eventually get the job by cheating but when push comes to shove and you need deliver a complicated project, how are you going to do it?

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but not in this case. Great execution means the real designers/developers have poured hard work, sleepless nights and unlimited cups of coffee to come with such results. If you want to kill your career as a designer then claiming credit for someone else’s work is the best way to do it.

Filed under: Work , design, ethics, plagiarism

Thank You, Adieu. George Carlin

1937-2008

Comedian and counter-culture hero. Best known for the saying the “7 words” you can’t say on TV/Radio.

There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is! 399,993 to 7. They must really be baaaad. They must be OUTRAGEOUS to be separated from a group that large. “All of you words over here, you seven….baaaad words.” That’s what they told us, right? …You know the seven, don’t ya? That you can’t say on TV? Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. 

Filed under: Work , cuss, george carlin, life, Work

TDP Send Off

Last Friday’s TDP send off was overwhelming. It moved me to tears — like a gallon of them and at least its not just me who cried Muchos Gracias to everyone who gave thoughtful farewell messages. Thank you for the cheesy “We cannot spell the Design People without D-E-S”. It was cheesy but in a good way. Everyone prepared and brought alcoholic drinks and I had to stay away for my own good. LOL. Thank you to my happy bunch, the Lunchies, specially J, who I know orchestrated the whole surprise.

I was trying to hard not to cry during the morning but when the clock striked 3:00 pm Beng started crying, kainez. Hands down the best part was the highlight of the gifts…I will let the pictures tell the story.

Is it a wabbit?

I hadn’t even opened the wrapper but one touch was enough to figure out what was the content.

Literally, rolling out the floor laughing and crying. I can’t breath. Kaloka.

Now what on earth is this? And who is Sister Guia?

What’s Sr. Guia got to do with it? With all due respect to this person who has been subject of this weird fixation.

For almost five years we always had our lunch at Megamall. Part of the lunch routine was withdrawing money from the ATM near the Food Court. While waiting for everyone to go through their transaction there is about 5-10 idle minutes to just observe. Unfortunately I always fixate my observation to a novelty store located just across the ATM machine. The store sells a lot of wooden novelty stuff that I would never put in my home. Haha. They had really cheesy stuff like avant-garde looking Disney characters, Last Supper frames and souvenirs with odd messages. Then there was this unusual wooden plaque with an image of a nun prominently displayed by the window. I was over analyzing it every freakin’ day and what it meant that it became part of my daily habit. Every now and then we would discuss and formulate the story behind the wooden plaque of Sr. Guia.

Who is Sr. Guia? Why would anybody want an award from her? Was there a saint named Sr. Guia (I was never good at saints)? Was this some sort of plaque of appreciation? Did she keep a stock of this so every time she wants to thank a person she draws out a trophy from her bag? It came to a point I seriously wanted to have one made for the TDP The Design Person monthly awards. I even took pictures of it and showed it to random people in the office and asked what they thought of the “design” of the new TDP trophy. Wouldn’t that be cool and fun in a weird way. Imagine the best employee awardee expressing…”thank you …but what the eff is this?”

Now I would like to commend among my Lunchie’s the brave soul who bought the wooden plaque. J, being the decent man that he is apparently said something along the lines of “tangina…I can’t believe we’re doing this”. He then excused himself and went to Fax and Parcel and had some collage printed. I think it was Preck who asked the sales lady how much was it. The sales person said there was minimum order of 50-100 pieces. Oh wow what to do with 100 Sr. Guia plaques?! HAHAHAHAHAHA. They initially thought they wanted a batch made and they were asked in great curiosity “Kilala nyo si Sr. Guia?” Hahahaha. The sales person was baffled why the hell they wanted to buy this wooden plaque when they had no association with Sr Guia or the institution she represents. Intervention had to be made, they had call the owner because they didn’t want to sell it. The persuasion worked and thus my gift. It’s now proudly displayed in my work table. LOL. Every now and then I should be prepared to tell the story of Sr. Guia.

Thank you J, Preck, Joyce and She to go through all that weird trouble and entrusting me to take care good care of our Sr. Guia.

Special thanks to Mike and Tiger for the food and drinks and for giving me the opportunity to work with The Design People. Did you guys know it was a choice between me and another designer. J didn’t want to hire me (you bastard). But I think god made it happen for a purpose. TDP will always remain an inspiration to me specially the story of its humble beginnings in a tiny apartment. It was wonderful that Tiger can still remember my interview and he said he remembered asking me that time where do I see myself in five years. I answered, I wanted to have my own business.

Thank you all the departments – AI, Dev, Designers, HTML/Flash, IMD, Night Shift Dept. and the Aquarium peeps.

I will miss many daily routines. Breakfast in the morning, monthly awards, drunken nights at Stir, design psychological warfare, manita ng late (LOL), my Lunchies, eating, more eating, TL meetings, Owtee’s morning greetings, cooking for my Lunchies, fashion anecdotes with Alex and Camille, crazy TDP Christmas parties (where there is always one drunken casualty), “solid with gradients”, yun crush ko, hehehe and just goofing around.

I will be jogging near that area (Gold Loop) so I guess I’ll see you around.

And in true spirit of Sr. Guia – in gratitude, xoxo, Des.

Filed under: C'est La Vie, Lunchie's Stories, Work , agentimage, friends, ode to tdp, the design people, Work