Hey man, look. I’m glad you’re trying out the whole blogging thing, really.

You began a huge campaign over the last week wherein you’re letting the world in on 40 snippets of mostly great design advice. I’m enjoying it, truly. But hey – quick note: Consolidate! You’ve got your personal brand all over the place and it’s become really, really confusing to handle. It’s the internet equivalent of repeatedly moving your primetime TV show to a different time slot on different networks.

Lets get down to it: for the love of god, stop using Cargo Collective as your blogging platform. It is not one. Pick a (real) blogging platform and stick with it. As of this writing you’ve got the “Lent Marathon” running on a Tumblr blog, iframe’d into an increasingly long Cargo Collective entry.

While this is a little bit deceptive (who uses iframes anymore, anyway), its mostly just confusing. I’ve got your feed coming in through my Tumblr dashboard, and that seems to work alright. I also subscribe to your old & busted RSS feed, which you seem to be migrating your posts back to. I mentioned this to you a while back, but your posts are still coming through in my RSS reader as enormous walls of text.

I realize that this may be a small use case (RSS readers and all), but I’m trying to look out for you, man. Down the road, when you want to show your kids your 32 totally hilarious blog posts about design ideas, wouldn’t it be great if they were in some sort of reasonable format?

With love, your friend, Paul.

In the interview, I was told this after showing my own portfolio and explaining how much went into it. Despite being diametrically opposed to this way of thinking, I smiled politely and continued try my hardest to get the job.

There were several factors in play at the time that made me accept these flaws. These factors centered around fear. Fear that I needed an internship to graduate. Fear that for some reason this is my last shot at doing so. But hey, I said, maybe they will let me illustrate sometime.

Spoiler alert: they won’t.

I walked into the position being okay with working in Flash, even though I knew I didn’t enjoy it. To be fair the first 3 months were about 70% Flash, 30% XHTML. Out of the gate the projects were not what I anticipated, and involved very little creative contribution. I realize that many internship positions operate this way, and that I’m in no position to complain. What I’m getting at is that I have no one to blame but myself.

If I have learned anything from this internship, it is that I should stand up for what I believe in during interviews. Since taking this internship in August, I have interviewed at two other places around Minneapolis. The first was a total train wreck, but the second went exceedingly well. Instead of swallowing my pride and saying I was “alright” with working in Flash, I stood my ground.

“No thanks” I said, “I’d prefer to stick to web development.”

This six-pack of beer was just put together as an assignment for Graphic Design 3. It involved compiling, printing and putting together 7 bottles and the 6-pack they’re sitting in.

The entire idea behind this fictional beer was to take the “this beer is cold” schtick and run with it. I always thought it was hilarious that beer companies advertise how cold their beers are while in reality, that part is up to you. On the back of the bottles the copy goes on about how the beer was brewed in Antarctica, which is completely impossible.