Breaking In

Check out some great work from Fritz Frenkler.

AH: What kinds of portfolios get your attention these days? What brings in an industrial designer for an interview?

FF: We are an international studio, looking for talented people who are able to work in a team. We look to find young people who are able to work in multidisciplinary teams, to work hard and not just sketch, because bringing the product into the market is a difficult task. Still a lot of young designers think they can be a star designer immediately, but from my point of view, all star designers are not designers—they are artists. As far as I know, there are few schools and universities where you can get an experience learning about multidisciplinary teamwork. Nevertheless, there are still some young designers who can work in a team, who are intelligent and do not only believe in what they already know. It is important that they are able to learn something during the process. Those designers are hard to find.

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Soaric Dental Chair Unit for Morita. iF Product Design Award 2012, Gold Award. G-Mark 2012, Gold Award.

Fritz Frenkler, born in 1954, graduated with a degree in Industrial Design from the Braunschweig University of Art. He worked as president of frogdesign Asia, led the wiege Wilkhahn Entwicklungsgesellschaft and was chief designer of Deutsche Bahn AG. In 2000, Fritz Frenkler and Anette Ponholzer established f/p design deutschland gmbh, followed by the opening of f/p design japan inc. in 2003. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Kim Karlsrud.

AH: Your fairly young studio focuses a lot on ecology and social enterprise. Can you speak more about this path and why you have chosen this career direction, fresh out of school?

KK: Our work is extremely collaborative. My partner and I started working together right out of school. Danny’s background is in architecture and landscape, and I have a degree in product design, so right off the bat we are coming from different perspectives. We are very interested in melding our disciplines together and seeing what happens. We have shared interests in urban ecology, sustainable design, and lately social design, which is trying to understand what design’s role is on a local, community level. We feel that the work we’re doing is at the intersection of all of these points, trying to experiment with how all of them can fit and work together in an interesting new way.

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Kim Karlsrud holds a degree in Product Design from Otis College, and has worked in the fields ranging from consumer electronics to soft goods.  In 2007, she co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of Project H Design, a global social design non-profit. Since then she has gained extensive experience managing relationships and projects with a variety of private clients and non-profit partners. Her passion for social enterprise, her strategic multi-track mind, and perennial curiosity are at the heart of her approach and response to complex challenges. She co-founded COMMONstudio, a social design think tank, with Daniel Phillips in 2008. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Imré Molnar.

AH: What kinds of portfolios get attention these days? Which ones are employers gravitating to?

IM: This has always been the case, but increasingly the employers want to be able to glean a narrative that basically describes not only the solution, but also the rationale for a design and the thinking process that led to it. The notion that a portfolio is an album of pretty pictures of completed work is totally misguided. Rather a portfolio needs to be a pictorial narrative describing how various projects evolved, how each piece featured came to be. Telling the story of the project is tremendously important.

The other things people look for is evidence of teamwork, particularly working with and interacting with other disciplines. Evidence of having interdisciplinary team experience is tremendously important. Also important is project work that demonstrates that a student has had some international and/or diverse cultural experience and that he has a curiosity about social and lifestyle issues outside of those specific to the United States.

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Imré Molnar (1951-2012) was an inspiring designer and devoted educator and mentor. He was respected for his passion for knowledge and development of the next generation of creative minds.

After migrating from Hungary to Australia in 1957, Imré attended secondary school in Canberra followed by Industrial Design studies at the National Art School in Sydney (1970-1973). Later Imré completed his masters in fine arts, illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California (1990-1993).

Professionally Imré’s career started at Whirlpool in Australia and the New South Wales (NSW) Public Works Department as a designer on a range of consumer and industrial products in addition to freelance work in exhibition and graphic design. He was a founding partner of Folio Design in Sydney (1980-1985) with a client base that included IBM, Honeywell and government authorities. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Chris Bangle.

AH: What kind of portfolio catches your eye? What would bring an industrial designer in for an interview?

CB: I personally am very artwork oriented; if there’s good artwork you get grabbed. By that I mean the kind of artwork you’d want on your wall. I like to be impressed, to come away with the feeling I’d want to blow your drawings up big, print a huge poster of something to hang behind my desk. All design directors have this feeling that they need to fill the empty space behind them on the wall. They always want to do it with an amazing rendering or a fantastic sketch. Often the ones they appreciate most are the ones that are very, very simple. Not complex or colorful or overly rendered or photorealistic or anything like that. Just attention-getting and extremely skillful in execution.

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One only needs to look down the street for evidence of Chris Bangle’s ingenuity and farreaching influence. A daring designer whose work has provoked endless discussion, Bangle is best known for his tenure as Chief of Design for the BMW group, where he was responsible for bringing the designs of the BMW, Mini Cooper, and Rolls Royce into the twenty-first century.

After attending the University of Wisconsin and graduating from the Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, California), Bangle began his career at Opel in 1981, and then 4 years later moved on to Fiat, where he designed the brazen Coupe Fiat. In 1992, he was named the first American Chief of Design at BMW. Continue reading →

Check out some great work from Klaus Tritschler.

AH: What kinds of portfolios get your attention these days? What brings in an industrial designer for an interview?

KT: First, it takes one or two very strong, exciting projects that relate to what I’m looking for to catch my interest. Once I’m interested, I review for a good volume of varied work samples showing appropriate, well-targeted design solutions, plus skillful use of design tools: manual, 2D, and 3D digital. Those are my top-level requirements that bring in a candidate for an interview.

Beyond that, the best portfolio makes me feel that hiring this person will not only get the job done well, but will move us forward and bring a unique, desirable quality or character to our product. I review portfolios first for skills, then for experience and then personality. For a junior position the candidate’s interests—are they into power sports or airplanes?—and the unique character in his/her work can be more important than specific experience.

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