I was perusing theFWA today and I came across this link for an open Designer position at Fantasy Interactive. The link took me to one of Fantasy Interactive’s (they now refer to themselves as ‘f-i’) newer endevours – Kontain.

Instead of merely posting a job description for a designer, they included a video description of the position featuring the founder of f-i, David Hugh Martin. I’ve never seen a company post a video for a job opening, and think this is (potentially) a great suppliment to a text description and can give the person applying a better feel for where they’d be working. Video job postings fit in well in a world where there’s lots of talk about corporate transparency and employees are encouraged to create company-related blogs (on the flipside, you can just as easily create corporate opacity with videos through the magic of editing).

But this post isn’t about the innovative aspect of video job postings. This is about what was said in the video with regard to the age old discussion of style versus design.

The problem I have with the video is that it’s for a designer position, but the whole video revolves around stylistic attributes of f-i projects. The take-away i got was if you are all about details and can mimic this style, then come on board.

First off, let me discuss the positive point of this video, and one that I think all designers need understand – the details. David talks in great, um, detail about the details in the visual elements of projects. Bevels, shadows, reflections, edges, colors – all the effects that make projects ‘juicy’. For anyone familiar with f-i’s work, you know that have a distinctive visual style, one they are very good at.

There’s no talk in the video about problem solving, although there should be because that is what design is. After watching the whole video, my understanding is that I could start work at f-i, with my arsenal of Photoshop effects that I’ve perfected over the years and get to work on stylizing a problem that has already been solved. While I would be solving the problem of how to make the project feel ‘juicy’ and clickable and lovely, I would be solving stylistic problems …not that there’s anything wrong with that.

At the beginning, David says something very interesting:

“I want everything to feel like it was made by Apple”

As anyone who truly understands Apple knows, they are much more than the candy shell on their products. If the iPhone merely felt ‘juicy’, but served no function, it wouldn’t be an Apple product. While I agree with David and love how Apple creates products, he’s responding to the visual style of their products – not the design. The design of an Apple product is the conceptual aspect of it.

Perhaps I’m being a bit too harsh on f-i, but when I look to designers on my team, I’m looking not only for people who can excute beautiful visual designs, but who also know how to think about a problem. What’s the goal of this project? When someone arrives at this webpage, what action do we want them to take? Companies are all structured differently, and for f-i, they obviously have a system that works well for them and they have a great portfolio to prove it.

It was a very smart decision to create a video for this position because if I were to merely go by the text description, I would be under the assumption that I would need conceptual skills to complete my projects. That would be called on to design a solution, not merely stylize one.

I would have been wrong.