I’ve been off of Face­book for a few months. If you want to do it too, I can tell you how in 1 easy step.

Step 1. Delete Facebook.

You’re wel­come.

Cus­tom typog­ra­phy, an Out­siders ref­er­ence and a banana. Boom.

When I did the intro video for Social­pakt last Fall, I let them know that I’d also love to be con­sid­ered for a shirt design. Hap­pily, they quickly took me up on my offer and paired me up with Arts To Grow — a non-profit that makes edu­ca­tional arts pro­grams avail­able to kids in NY and NJ. This shirt design for was inspired by the idea behind their mis­sion — that a love for learn­ing can be taught through expo­sure to the arts. Check out Arts To Grow here and go buy a shirt to sup­port their mission!

I just did a folk / space rock mix for my friend Brian Gosset’s music blog: Since78. Check it out!

John Knefel’s arti­cle for Salon – My 37 Hours with the NYPD – con­tained a great line. I decided to make it into a quick poster.

The Motion Design Asso­ci­a­tion has issued a Stan­dards of Pro­fes­sional Prac­tice doc­u­ment, ask­ing all Motion Design artists to adhere to a pro­fes­sional eth­i­cal code in order to make the indus­try that we work in fairer and more equi­table for every­one. A sim­ple list of the rights we expect every­one to adhere includes: con­tracts, over­time, on-time pay­ment, get­ting credit on jobs, and being able to use work in your port­fo­lio. There are expec­ta­tions of design­ers as well: to do your best work, act in the inter­est of your client and rep­re­sent your­self accu­rately in your port­fo­lio. We also ask that no designer take on spec work. We encour­age design­ers to do pro-bono and vol­un­teer work for orga­ni­za­tions they want to help out.

It’ll take you 5 min­utes to read. So go. Read it now.

You may be ask­ing your­self, “Do we really need a Motion Design Asso­ci­a­tion?”, “Do we even need pro­fes­sional stan­dards?”, “I’m an inde­pen­dent designer, why do I need an orga­ni­za­tion to stand up for me?”.

I think if you look around your work­place and hon­estly assess the work­ing con­di­tions and stan­dards that we all begrudg­ingly accept, you’ll find the obvi­ous answer. How many of you plan to be in this indus­try for 10 more years? How many already have an exit strat­egy already planned out? How many times do you work with­out over­time? How many jobs do you work on that are under-budgeted or uncom­pen­sated at all? How many week­ends are you asked to work — at the last minute, as you are ready to walk out the door? In this indus­try the dead­lines get shorter and the bud­gets get tighter as the scope of pro­duc­tion grows. Some­thing has to give.

Over­time is designed not to reward the worker who stays late and pol­ishes their work until it’s just right. Over­time is sup­posed to pun­ish the employer who can­not man­age jobs on-time or on-budget and uses the brute force of extra hours to com­pen­sate. These costs should drive the costs of pro­duc­tion up and should also be borne out in expanded bud­gets for expanded pro­duc­tion needs. We urge our mem­ber motion design­ers not to accept spec work and we urge the pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies in this field not to accept uncom­pen­sated work as well.

These issues are what the MDA is seek­ing to change. No longer should Motion Design solely be the dis­ci­pline of the young and inex­pe­ri­enced. No longer should it exploit the gray areas and gentlemen’s agree­ments that no one enforces. No longer should it be accepted that every­thing will always get done, no mat­ter how late we stay. No longer should we accept that we work for months with­out any­thing to show for it. Who bears the brunt of that labor? You do. Your fam­ily does. We shouldn’t have to sac­ri­fice our health for our jobs.

Let’s make this indus­try more sane and respon­si­ble so we can ALL have healthy, long-lasting careers.

You in? Sign up for the mail­ing list and we’ll be in touch soon.

Thank you.

Bran Dougherty-Johnson, MDA mem­ber.
Cross-posted at MDA

“Super excited to share the news that the video you cre­ated has been the cor­ner­stone of our most suc­cess­ful back to school mar­ket­ing effort ever. We already have more than 5x the reg­is­trants we attracted last year, and many of our busi­ness and pro­mo­tional part­ners have asked to share the video on their sites and point back to our toolkit page. Very excit­ing for us!”

- Emily Esch, Direc­tor of Edu­ca­tion Mar­ket­ing Com­mon Sense Media

It’s so nice to hear good things back from a client. Espe­cially when what you’ve done really helps them. And espe­cially when the job you did with them was a plea­sure in the first place. Watch the video I did for Com­mon Sense Media — Cyber­bul­ly­ing – right here.

Hap­pi­ness, the project I did for Elec­tric Pro­jected, was posted on Motiono­g­ra­pher last week. Then Drawn put it on their blog and Vimeo made it a Staff Pick. So… it’s had a lot of views in the last week! Pretty amaz­ing to get so many pos­i­tive com­ments and feed­back from col­leagues and friends about it. Makes me very, well … happy.

Elec­tric Pro­jected is an art project that Cary Janks and I are orga­niz­ing. Gonna be cool, I’m exited to start work­ing on it! Check back at the site in a few weeks for more info …

The Sun­dance Dream­states films are now live online and air­ing on Sun­dance. I designed and ani­mated one for Mike Gor­don of Phish, whose story of tun­nels under the hills and woods of his boy­hood home near Boston is the dreamy state he some­times reaches dur­ing a jam. Trippy, right?! I cre­ated a very naive and cos­mic ani­ma­tion of what that might look like, which was edited with an inter­view of him speak­ing about it …

Cole Gerst of Option-G, who worked on PSST!3, was respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing the whole series of films and did one him­self as well. Check them all out here, espe­cially my favorite, Nes­sim Higson’s Quest­love piece.