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.

Music & Sound Design stu­dio and PSST!3 col­lab­o­ra­tors Antfood recently asked me to help them out with a logo redesign. Here are the fruits (ahem) of our labor. I was just at F5 in NYC a week ago where Buck and Antfood col­lab­o­rated on the open­ing titles. Such great, fun work — check it out!

Here are frames from two upcom­ing projects that I’m very excited about. The first is for Com­mon Sense Media and the other for Har­vest. They’re both short visual essay films, and they share a few things, of course – but styl­is­ti­cally and tonally, they’ll still be quite dif­fer­ent. Look­ing for­ward to com­plet­ing them and being able to share them soon.

I just fin­ished a shot for PSST!4. The for­mat this year is slightly dif­fer­ent with each col­lab­o­ra­tor start­ing a shot and the oth­ers then fol­low­ing from that. It’ll be much more mixed-up and promises for some excit­ing combinations …

I am also NOT orga­niz­ing the project this time around, just par­tic­i­pat­ing. Nice change!

You may have noticed that there’s no more Grow Design Work. I’ve moved my port­fo­lio over here to brandoughertyjohnson.com. This was for two reasons.

One, I gen­er­ally work solo and on one project at a time. I want to stay small. There’s no plan for expan­sion, world dom­i­na­tion or enter­ing the inter­ac­tive mar­ket. No cre­ative direc­tor, art direc­tor, pro­ducer or busi­ness man­ager over here. It’s just me. When you call the office, I’ll answer. And I thought my site and iden­tity should reflect that.

Two, I want peo­ple to know and remem­ber my own name (I know, it’s a mouth­ful) not the vague band-esque sound­ing domain that I could actu­ally reg­is­ter at the time (I would’ve loved if it was just called Grow).

This is what I orig­i­nally wrote on the About sec­tion of my site, circa 2005:

Grow Design Work is the stu­dio of BDJ for the pur­pose of cre­at­ing inde­pen­dent work, doing free­lance design + ani­ma­tion, and achiev­ing gen­eral hap­pi­ness. My goal is sim­ply to do great work with under­stand­ing clients, sym­pa­thetic stu­dios and inter­ested agen­cies. I love super-graphic style, bold ani­ma­tion, cus­tom typog­ra­phy, and peo­ple with a desire to exper­i­ment and a plan for allow­ing it in their sched­ules.
I want to grow, design, and work. In that order.

I still believe all of that. 100%. None of the impe­tus for cre­at­ing my own work has changed one bit. But that was then, this is now. And now, I’d rather do it all under my own name. So good­bye, Grow Design Work. Viva Bran Dougherty-Johnson.