Sometimes you just gotta say fugget and swing.

It was autumn of 2006, I had been in Portland for about a week and change. I still had some client work I had brought with me from Chicago, but all of that had a finite scope and I knew the time was short for me to see something happen in my new city. This was when I was just starting to make my first ever round with the agencies here in town, some incredibly starched shirts and a portfolio leaving a lot to be desired.

game face

Instead of one of the big, reputable names I was hoping for, my first ever agency callback was for a sad little iteration of Korpi Talent. I was navigating through some pretty industrial sections around Lloyd Center, following my handwritten notes on getting to the interview. The building looked like it was still under construction. A long spindly stairway like something out of a Tim Burton movie. A totally unfinished office, primer on drywall.

We ran through a list of the Things I Can Do and Things I Can’t Do. As this was just before the iPhone came along, I was happily deluded in thinking my future was in Flash development, and was really trying to get jobs that would help me to grow in that role. To be honest, I was a little snobbish and smug, I definitely carried myself with an air of “I should be doing *this* kind of thing yaknow…”

The interviewer clicked and clucked as she worked her way down the checklist with me, clearly not the first smug Young Lion that had come through her office.

hard times when I landed in pdx

“Well Mr Cruzat, there is something here that you might be a fit for. How do you feel about working for Apple?”

Beginner’s Luck

I need to frame this scenario so you understand it correctly. I came to PDX with a few hundred dollars in cash and two suitcases. This was the same period that saw me shoplifting food (necessities) and selling the absolute cheapest web work the world has ever seen on Craigslist. I had to call my brother in Chicago to arrange the sale of a punching bag and a condenser mic as each one was worth about $60 that I needed desperately. The struggle was very real.

Now how do I feel about working for Apple? Well that feels like an endless valley filled with chocolate covered orgasms. That sounds fucking amazing.

“Okay Mr Cruzat,” cluck click, “we can put you forward for this job, it’s handling some Apple work through Razorfish. When can you have your portfolio ready?” Confusion.
“What’s wrong with that link there?” I had just put about three weeks into reworking my portfolio and thought it was amazing.
“It’s okay, but it’s not Apple-good. If we’re going to put you in front of Apple, you need to be Apple-good.”
“Fair enough.” I was not going to argue, not if I wanted to be Apple-good.
“Okay, so we can have you ready to show next week?”

Panic.

The last portfolio had taken me three weeks. Grueling weeks. Now I had to put together something in five days, something totally new. Oh, yeah, and it has to be Apple-good.

“Yeah, I’ll have something up for you to show.”

Floating down the long, spindly staircase, back through the odd tracks and warehouses, back to the relative sanity of Lloyd Center Mall, back on the train riding back out to my sad little rented room in Beaverton, the entire time my mind racing with this opportunity.

I could work for… Apple?

Challenge Accepted

let's do this

Some of my homies and I have co-opted the term Pepsi Challenge for any crazy shit that you know you are capable of doing but you probably should not do. It started when Meathead #3 would throw on extra weight for power lifting, and there’s nothing like peer pressure to take a bad habit in one and make it a bad habit in all.

Here I was in a new city with a professional Pepsi Challenge: Design and build an Apple-good portfolio in five days. Or as we say in South Evanston, fuck yes.

I knew that the frame had to look very good and clean. I decided to pander to the audience and make the whole thing look and feel as Apple as possible. A landing screen that looked like the front of a G3, repeating mesh grille background and a big juicy power button in the middle of it. Hit the button and you got the green light AND the classic Mac wake-up tone. I included a little introductory exposition on who I am and what I’m about, using the classic Apple font that we all know and love from the first Macintosh.

power button goes ding

The frame came together and looked great. I still had plenty of time. But then in taking stock of the new layout, I realized the only work that I had to show were all of the pieces in the existing portfolio, it was annoyingly up to date and there was no super recent work to include. This was problematic because A. We all loathe redundancy, if they clicked through to my other site and saw the same work twice it’s a buzz kill B. Everything I had to show at the time was very small potatoes, no real brand work.

It was going to take more than mixtape covers and basic brochure websites.

Reinvention

I decided to expand the graphics section and include a lot of pieces from my non professional side. At the time I had a music page up on MySpace, I included all of the thumbnails i had designed for different songs in their media player. I included different desktops I had made over the years, odd doodles from all night Photoshop battles with my brother. Any random design assets I had kicking around… Then I sat down and sketched out a few new pieces specifically for the new folio.

a new face on things

To be honest, it was a lot of fun and I got to switch off my “appropriate or not” filter. One piece was a plate of cocaine with a bloody razor, behind it I added a Chinese character set for filial piety, I called that one “The Cost of Triad Loyalty”. Another was a blue/white monochrome silhouette of a woman’s midsection, just above the pubis I added a handgun pointing down, that one was “Gestation”, or similar.

I gave myself license to be a pretentious asshole, and it felt amazing. I got to break our of the box I had imposed on my presentation for myself, I was forced to improvise and come up with a new approach.

A for Effort

For those of you roasting with expectation, I will cut to the chase; I didn’t get the gig. And as much as I wanted it, as much work as I put into it, in the moment I knew I wasn’t going to get it. I had hope and hunger (literal malnutrition) but I knew deep down in my heart of hearts they were going to pass on me.

the full macintosh

That is not the point.

Two months earlier I’d been in a crappy back room, almost three thousand miles away, negotiating website terms with a rapper you’ve never heard of, less than two weeks in this new city and I’m pitching for a spot on an Apple project. Regardless of whether I landed it, just being part of that conversation felt like a huge step up — and it was. My first peek into a larger world.

This was also an introduction to the annoying side of that larger world. Yes, there are brand names, and there is prestige, and in the beginning that feels massive, but there are also agents at Korpi Talent that don’t really care about understanding the talent or the need or properly matching one to the other. You will find yourself getting amped up for things that don’t happen. There were a string of other not-jects that happened over the next two years, but the disappointment edges off. Eventually you’re not excited about anything that doesn’t have an approved SOW attached to it.

If it seems too good to be true, yeah.

Interestingly, when I was back in Razorfish two years later for a Microsoft project, the PM knew me as a “Flash kid with that really weird portfolio” and was surprised that I did HTML/CSS. So it seems that the hustle did pay off in the long, the improvised portfolio did the job it needed to and kept me in the candidate pool. So it didn’t get me the Apple job in 2006, but it did help me get the Microsoft gig in 2008.

Crazy world.