Like anyone who has ever dipped their toe in the shallow waters of a new career, hoping they might cross the riverbed of ‘confidently knowing stuff’ to the green banks of ‘consistent adult employment’, only to find that their toe has been ripped clean off by what was in fact a raging, not-at-all shallow and in fact quite aggressive, piranha-infested river — there’s something about underestimating the difficulty of something and having your toe bit off that makes you question how you got to be so confident on the topic of crossing riverbeds.

I have learned that to get into graphic design for film, you need to employ a strategy called ‘just being everywhere and keeping busy all of the time until someone eventually hires you/takes pity on you, a weary skeleton.’ And from the outside looking in, it looks like that’s all there is, just endless busybodying, but actually from the other side, there is a mysterious logic to it. It requires some emotional discipline and, contradictorially, some ‘prior knowledge’ of a job you have not done before to make it make sense, but I’m going to talk about that stuff in later posts. For now, it’s tip time. Behold, seven tips on getting your start in The Industry.

For as long as I can remember, I have been collecting vintage ephemera. While this has sometimes proven incredibly impractical – lugging boxes full to the brim with various bits of paper up and down stairs for every house move – every time I visited a new city, I couldn’t help forging a connection to that place via its dustiest abodes. I would rifle through flea markets, worm my way through rickety bookshops in the back-end of nowhere, and hunt down bougie hipster cafes for their loyalty cards.