Book in the door - how to get your portfolio in front of anyone
I'm not very proud of this, but it works. I wouldn't have devised or employed this technique had I not been working in a pawnbroker, designed to rob the poor, whilst trying to bring in some cash as a young illustrator.
It's effective because it's not unusual for art directors and image buyers to receive packages from their reception — and because everyone likes to get something in the post.
It got my work on the cover of The London Evening Standard's ES Magazine.
- Find out the name of the person you want to see your work
- Write a letter to the person from (1), apologising for employing such a dastardly technique. Say you'll be back in a couple of hours. Put the letter in your portfolio
- Wrap your portfolio up to look like a package
- Try and dress like a courier
- Dash in to their reception. 'Urgent delivery for Mr/Mrs X'
- Dash out before anyone starts asking questions
- Wait for a couple of hours with your fingers crossed
- Go back and pick up the portfolio — and hopefully a commission
For those with a PDF or weblink to email to someone, but whose email address is kept secret, the following should work:
- Work out their domain, for example: www.example.com
- Try an internet search for @example.com. This might yield email addresses for other people in the same company, say: john.smith@example.com. As most organisations use the same pattern for email addresses, simply change the name to match your desired quarry
- If this doesn't work, you'll have to try trial and error. As malformed email addresses usually generate an error message from a mail server, just keep trying different name and surname combinations until you don't get an error (firstname.surname@example.com, surname.firstname@example.com, firstinitial.surname@example.com etc...)
Posted: 29.11.2006 | Comments: 1 | Add a comment
Comments
This is very cheeky Jim. Don't know if i have the balls for this. Your blog is very good.