Dumpster Diving, Demo Reels and Resumes

On my most recent dumpster diving score, I retrieved about half dozen CDs and DVDs of people's work. Look like Human Resources was doing some house cleaning and dumped a bunch of resumes and work samples. I didn't have any interest in reading resumes, but I figured I could have some fun looking at some work and at least use the jewel boxes from the discs.

I was really pretty surprised at the lack of consideration that went into a lot of the discs. The actual work on the discs ranged from mediocre to fairly professional. The bulk of it sort of made me ask, "what were they thinking?" So I feel compelled to put together some tips and reminders for sending stuff out.

1. Put your name and contact info ON THE DISC. Printed up on a nice label is best, but at the very least, use a marker. I'm sure some of these people thought they sent a cover letter or made a nice little booklet for the jewel case, not considering that the disc could somehow become separated from that info.

2. Once again, put your name and contact info somewhere IN THE CONTENT of the disc. This comes in handy if someone is reviewing your material, they don't have to hit the eject button to get the correct spelling of your last name or contact info. One disc I found was sent out by a school of the recent batch of graduates. A cool idea, but it failed to contain any contact besides the school contact info. I can't imagine too many potential employers calling up the school, "Hi, I've got this CD of student work. I really like joshua_04.jpg. and would like to call whoever did that in for an interview."

3. Make sure your content looks good. You may have done a beautiful 16x20 inch watercolor painting, but it looks horrible as a 160x200 pixel jpg. Make the jpg bigger or add some close up details of the piece. This especially goes for stuff like comics and things where text is important. The CD from the school had comic work on it. None of it was legible, begging the question, "then why send it out in the first place?"

4. Target your audience. If you're sending samples to a company that does cartoons for kids, don't put in a bunch of drawings of naked ladies or gangstas with guns. Try to send work that's relevant to what that company does.

5. General overall reminder-- Make it as easy as possible for the person receiving your samples to review it and get in touch with you. People are lazy. The easier you make it for them, the more likely they are to respond.

I suppose there's really nothing in the above that hasn't been said before, and probably better, but I figured it might help someone out. Sometimes just that little extra effort can make all the difference.