Finding Her Passion, an Introduction to The Design Shrink

Born into a typical middle class family in Rochester, New York, Shari grew up to be an average student, with a general lack of interest in everything and a complete lack of direction for her future.   Even with her lack of interest and average grades, she was accepted to study at the State University of New York at Cortland College.   Although she was accepted to a university, her lack of direction was still apparent.  Shari’s mother decided it was time to force her to find a direction by choosing a course of study.  She brought Shari to the public library, opened a book listing all of the possible majors that she could choose from and asked Shari how she felt about each one.  For an hour her mother listened as Shari explained why she didn’t like one after another of the majors listed.    Finally her mother landed on a major that Shari didn’t have anything good or bad to say about, Communications.  She didn’t have anything to say about it because she didn’t have a clue as to what it was about.  Fed up with the amount of time it took to narrow the list, her mother said “Well that is it.  You are choosing Communications.”   Shari wouldn’t know for some time to come that the course of study she chose that day would eventually become her passion.

Finding her passion began during Shari’s freshman year in college.  A fellow Communications student was begging her to volunteer with the campus television station, and with the same general lack of interest that she carried with her from her childhood, Shari agreed to accompany her friend to the meeting.   Little did she know, by simply attending the meeting, she had signed herself up to be one of seven volunteers working for the station.  Four years later, Shari was elected president of the station and wound up spending most of her time petitioning for better equipment, recruiting new staff and producing ridiculous campus television shows that no-one ever watched.   At this point Shari thought she had found her passion, but sadly she would be proven wrong.

Shari landed her first job in the field of television production 2 years after graduating.  She was the proud new employee of a local television station in Charleston, South Carolina.  The job was from 12am until 7am as a Master Control operator.  Excited that she had finally landed a job, Shari dove into her work.  However, she quickly found out that the night shift as a Master Control operator was not as glamorous as she hoped it would be. Exhausted from not being able to sleep during the daylight hours, and bored with airing 1980’s style infomercials at 3am, Shari reluctantly quit the job and moved back in with her parents. Disheartened, she drudged on looking for work in Columbia, South Carolina.  She landed a job as a production technician with the NBC affiliate, WIS-TV.   For three years she worked for WIS-TV as a Chyron operator, airing graphics during live news broadcasts.   She loved the job, but realized that television production required a passion strong enough to motivate someone to work during holiday’s and weekends, for very little pay.  She didn’t have that kind of passion.   It was during her stint with WIS-TV that she perfected her skills using graphic design programs and found herself applying for positions outside of the television industry.  9 years later, she is working as the Art Director for a printing company in Charleston, South Carolina.   Even after 9 years Shari wasn’t convinced that print design was her passion.  Having gained a wealth of knowledge about print design, she began to teach herself website design and realized that her passions might lay in a different direction.   Perhaps her early passions for television production could be combined with her knowledge of graphic design.  At 33 years old, she found a Master’s of Interactive Media program being offered at Quinnipiac University.  She is now working towards that degree with a passion she has never felt before. 

From a student with no direction, to a student knowing exactly what direction to take, Shari is now following her newly found passion into the wonderful world of Interactive Media.

Argument for The Design Shrink Blog

Considering my 12 years of experience in the graphic design industry, I consider myself fully qualified to grant advice to those designers who find themselves ruled by their egos.  I don’t consider myself a great designer, I am lacking the artistic genius that very few designers truly posses.  I do believe that my attitude towards clients and criticism ensures that my customers believe I am a great designer, which in the end is really all I need to be successful. 

Through the years I have come in contact with thousands of customers, each requiring a different version of myself in order to successfully complete a design project.  Some customers prefer a designer that will create what they have already envisioned, and if the designer strays from that vision, the customer may shut down completely.  Other customers give designers free reign to create a design from scratch, however at times those customers who give that freedom might take it away if the designer goes too far with the design.  

Not only do designers have to read customers in order to be successful, they must also, at times, put their egos aside and accept the fact that not everyone is going to like what they create.  I have always said that to be a good designer means you have to have a very thick skin. Being able to accept constructive criticism, without lashing out in response, is not easy.  I have found myself biting my tongue all too often, but have rarely lost my composure.   I have heard horror stories from customers of designers who refuse to work with them due to the designer’s inability to accept the criticism in the right manner.  I have also been on the receiving end of criticism from customers who are not schooled on how to properly convey constructive criticism making their suggestions seem degrading and harsh.  Harsh criticism can really bruise a designer’s ego if they have put their heart and soul into a design. 

As The Design Shrink, I hope to help designers cope with projects that have gone awry, with customers that don’t say the kindest things and with their own egos that can sometimes bring a design to ruin.

Writing Sample

The Wonderful World of Television and the Internet

I was 21 when I received a letter from the Nielsen Company.  I was one of the chosen few that had been selected to participate in the Nielsen rating system.  Unfortunately, being young at the time I never responded.  I look back now and wish that I had responded.  I think that perhaps my taste in television might have been a deciding factor in keeping some of the science fiction shows I loved from being cancelled.  The blog post The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows by Craign Engler in January of 2011 was an attempt to explain the Nielsen rating system and why it is still relied on for networks decisions when it comes to cancelling or continuing certain television shows.  However, after reading the full article, I found myself wondering if the Nielsen system might be a bit out of date and poorly constructed.  In the article it states “Nielsen looks at a sample of households around the United States, and from that sample they make a statistical estimate about what everyone else is watching.” According to Wikipedia.org, “…in 2009 of the 114,500,000 U.S. television households only 25,000 total American households (0.02183% of the total) participated in the Nielsen daily metered system.”  I do know that they use other methods of tracking views besides their metered systems, however to me .02183% of the total households sampled using this method is not by scientific standards a good sample size.  Unfortunately the cited link on Wikipedia to that statistic is no longer available so I don’t know how accurate the information is. I went to www.nielsen.com to try to find the information that I was looking for but only found the following statement “We measure more than 40% of the world’s viewing behavior – hundreds of channels, thousands of programs, millions of viewers.”  That statement left me wondering how much of the US’s viewing behavior is actually measured.  It also seems amazing to me that at the time of this article written in 2011, Nielsen was just changing their tracking to include online and mobile device viewing as well.  Considering that online content service providers like Hulu and Boxee had already been around for some time, Nielsen seems to have been a little late in changing their tracking strategies.
The rise of internet television content providers like Hulu and Boxee had a significant impact on my household at the time that they were struggling to structure their business models in television content distribution, a field that has a long history and is reluctant to change. (Braun, J.A.)   Before discussing the impact that those businesses had on my household, I must explain the nature of my husband’s television viewing.  When I first met him in 2005 he had a negative view of television content.  He had gone for 3 years without a television and had only recently just purchased and began to watch television again.  Television for some reason had garnered a reputation for providing content that was somehow considered less valuable than other media. It has been argued that the availability of television content in online file sharing sites could have been the key to this shift in the valuation of television. The argument assumes that the option to watch shows consecutively on-demand rather than only once a week, has had some effect on how people value television content. (Newman, 2011) Although my husband’s argument for his change in views of television as a whole was the availability of better content than he had previously been privy to, the idea of watching shows consecutively became a valued aspect of watching television as we began to experiment with internet content providers.   In 2007, after our cable bill had risen to well over $250 per month, we decided that we didn’t want cable, and since we didn’t see much content that held our interest we decided to “cut the cord”.  I called Comcast, our local cable company, and told them we didn’t want to pay for cable but still wanted our internet connection.  When they asked me the reason for this I mistakenly told them it was because we were getting better content from online content providers through the use of our Xbox than what we were finding on cable.  Less than two days after making this decision we started having issues with our internet connection that we hadn’t had before.  Shows weren’t streaming well and sometimes dropped out altogether.  We had been using these internet content providers such as Netflix previously to dropping our cable service on the same internet connection with no trouble up until then.  I called Comcast numerous times to have the issue fixed but the issues kept happening.  I suspected that Comcast was purposely interrupting our bandwidth usage in an attempt to drive us back to purchasing cable service.  I can’t substantiate that accusation with any solid evidence, but I consider myself somewhat tech savvy, and there was no reason for our service to be dropping on a regular basis since Comcast kept telling me that they couldn’t see any issues with our internet service.  We became so frustrated that we switched to ATT DSL internet access and miraculously were able to watch television content online with no interruptions.  After having read Going over the top: Online television distribution as socio-technical system by Joshua Braun regarding the struggles of Hulu and Boxee in regards to cable service providers in the years 2007 to 2009, my suspicions of what had happened to us in 2007 seem less like a suspicion and more like a reality.
I have noticed that the act of dropping our cable television service did have an effect on how we watch television. We have become part of the catch-up viewing audience.  We love to watch shows consecutively, and love being able to re-watch previous episodes prior to watching the most recent episode of a television show.  Although we did cut the cord for 3 years, after those 3 years we began to realize that we were missing newer episodes of the shows that we had become interested in by viewing them only online.  Since then, we have subscribed to ATT U-Verse cable television service which allows us to have a good balance between immediate content and past content.  We can re-watch the previous episode to a series using internet content providers just before watching the latest episode being aired in real-time on the cable provider.
I believe that cable service providers should revise their business models to become online content providers paid for with a subscription.  This would allow customers to log into their feed anywhere at any time and watch the shows broadcast in real-time.  All they would need to do is alter the boxes they put into houses today to feed online content, or sell televisions with a modem built in that can connect to the internet.  I feel that their reluctance to move in this direction has a direct link to the service area models in practice today.  For as long as I can remember cable service has been divided into areas, much like telephone companies and electric companies, in an effort to keep one company from creating a monopoly on too large of an area.  If they move to online streaming this would open their services to more competition since the choice would be in the hands of the consumer. If all of the content available on cable was offered to me as an internet service, I would have the option of choosing from more than just the 2 or 3 providers that I can only choose from now.  In my neighborhood the only companies I can choose from are ATT U-Verse, Comcast, and Direct TV.  If all of the service providers across the country were made available to me online, I would have a much better set of options to choose from.  The first company to move in this direction will become the leader in television content provider services and I hope that one day this is the direction the industry will move, since I would directly benefit from the competition.   The competition would serve to create better services and pricing for the end consumer.

Engler, C. (2011, January 20). The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows. Blastr.
Braun, J.A. (Forthcoming.). Going over the top: Online television distribution as socio-techical system.Communication, Culture & Critique.
Newman, M. Z. (2012). Free TV: File-sharing and the value of television. Television & New Media 13(6), 463–479.