I really enjoyed reading Michael Beirut’s essay “How to Become Famous”. He wrote that while most kinds of fame were based on individual merit, there are also trivial things you can do to up the ante on your fame potential. Those things, he says, have to do with competitions and speeches. He gave humorous and down to earth advice on how to approach these two areas.
It was very cool to have a behind the scenes glimpse in to what goes on in design competitions. Here are Beirut’s tips on how to win:
- People who enter design competitions put a lot of time into their work. But the judges decide in a matter of seconds whether they like a piece or not. So you have to make your work really cool looking. Don’t go for intricate, complex designs that take a lot of time to figure out (unless they’re so cool looking it doesn’t matter).
- Because of this quick time factor, don’t do clever things like elaborate packaging that takes a long time to figure out and unwrap. Don’t fill your envelopes with confetti.
- Big—enter big stuff. Small stuff doesn’t get noticed.
Giving good speeches:
- Basically don’t bore people. This includes reading from your notes, explaining what’s on slides (they already know what’s on the slides, Beirut points out, they don’t need you to tell them).
- Instead, when you show your (really fabulous) images, explain what design problem you were faced with, pause to give the audience time to think about how they would have solved it, and then tell them—or rather show them—how you solved it.
- Don’t show boring slides of annual reports.
- Again, just show really cool looking stuff. Preferably big stuff.
How to make really great design work:
- There’s a difference between design work that makes you rich or work that makes you famous. The complex problem solving work for clients tends to be different from the splashy work that makes you famous.
- For the latter—do lots of work. You only need 3 great pieces a year to be famous.
- Design as much stuff as you can—create your own stationary, homemade cards, beer labels, posters. Do a lot of freebies for organizations. Beirut recommends staying away from good causes (you don’t want to mix the sacred and the profane) and doing theater posters.
- Make your paying work be the best that it can be. Don’t do work you don’t like for organizations you don’t like. It’s bad for both morale and design.
Beirut’s final advice was perhaps his best. It comes from his mother, and all mothers: it’s nice to be important, but it’s even more important to be nice.