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.

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!

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.