Hello World
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 ∞
You know what’s cool?
When you make a little website about you wanting to do a summer internship in a design studio but don’t really expect anything to happen and yet in the end, you get to choose whether you spend your pre-university summer in, say, San Francisco working for an exciting startup or in the Netherlands in a world-class design agency.
That’s pretty much what is happening to me right now. When I’m not on Skype hanging out with awesome people, I spend my time wondering if all of this is true. I hope it is, because I’ve already told my friends I won’t be here in Prague over the summer.
I intentionally didn’t target the website at Prague-based studios. No, they don’t suck. In fact, I believe they are among the best ones out there. However, the goal is to experience a different city, a different culture. I will definitely be sharing some of the stuff that happens to me along the way.
The thing is, I would be happy with even one studio showing interest in me. But the fact that so many people got in touch is mind-blowing to me. For a lack of imagination regarding how to accurately visualize them, I just put some pins on a map (multiple people at one location not shown):
The whole thing was to act only as a pitch to design agencies – until this tweet by Lukáš Kořínek about adding buttons for sharing on social networks. Adding social buttons seemed as kind of going against the original purpose - I didn’t want to make it look as if the goal was to get attention; no, the primary goal was to get work for the summer.
But I quickly changed my mind. The more people see this, the bigger the chance to score an internship. So I added the buttons and spammed a few designers with annoying email. This proved to be probably the most important thing I have ever done: when people like Erik Spiekermann tweet about you, you’re sure to get some traffic. Thank you guys, you might just have changed my life.
This kid knows how to sell himself: iwouldlovetoworkwithyou.com
— erik spiekermann (@espiekermann) March 4, 2012
How many people have those tweets brought to my website? Quite a few; on the day of Erik’s tweet, the visits went from about 70 to 2800. This shows two things:
- Famous designers rock.
- The internet is a wonderful place.
I cannot overstate how grateful I am for all the opportunities that seem to be coming up for me. So what’s next? I see two possible paths:
I could do the intership in a design studio as planned. This would allow me to not jump into things too quickly and benefit from all the amazing designers around me, while working in a relatively safe environment free of the risks of the business world.
Or, I could join a startup or a company where I would be one of the few designers and therefore my work would have a more tangible outcome.
Both options have their pros and cons; both are tempting; both are exciting. What I will end up doing over the summer, I don’t know. I can say though that this has already been the best experience of my life and it hasn’t even started yet.
If this isn’t what the internet is all about, then I don’t know what is.
