Core77

Over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds Blog, Carl Alviani's got a thought-provoking piece on getting canned. Or rather, designers' resilience to getting canned. Here's how it starts:

All of Portland got laid off last week. That's how it seemed, anyway, last Wednesday evening, as a group of designers gathered around a pair of tables in a bar in the southeastern quarter of town. Once a month, for nearly a year now, a clutch of workers from across Portland's creative economy--15 to 30 of them--have been getting together after work to gripe about clients, enthuse about projects, drink IPA and and generally behave the way any other group of like-minded professionals might during happy hour. It's a remarkable group for its diversity within the field: there are interaction, product and graphic designers, students and educators, researchers, even the odd engineer or project manager, working in companies as big as Intel and Nike, and as small as a solo consultancy. On this particular evening, though, it felt more like a support group, with fully one-third of the regulars in attendance finding themselves out of work within the past few weeks. The culprit was a major technology corporation that had employed dozens of designers in the Portland area, and had recently cut creative staff as a cost-saving measure.

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