By Gerry Shih
SAN FRANCISCO, April 13 (Reuters) – Five years ago, Justin
Edmund arrived at Carnegie Mellon University, a floppy-haired
freshman, with artistic talent and dreams of joining a venerable
design firm like IDEO or Frog. But during his sophomore year, a
recruiting pitch from a Facebook employee turned his
head, and prompted a detour of his ambitions.
“It didn’t even occur to me that working at a tech company
was something I could do,” Edmund said. “I switched my
trajectory completely.”
So, in 2010, Edmund interned on Facebook’s burgeoning design
team, and, after graduation, landed a job at Pinterest. There,
at just 21, he has played a central role in building the virtual
scrap-booking site into one of the hottest startups on the
Internet.
Edmund isn’t alone. Inspired by the legacy of Steve Jobs and
lured by the promise of the current tech boom, young designers
are flocking to Silicon Valley, where they’re shaking up a scene
long dominated by engineers and programmers.
The new breed of “user experience” designers – part sketch
artist, part programmer, with a dash of behavioral scientist
thrown in – are some of the most sought-after employees in
technology. Entry-level interactive designers at startups are
commanding salaries easily topping $80,000, almost twice the
median pay for primarily print designers of about $45,000,
according to a recent survey by the American Institute of
Graphic Arts.
IN-HOUSE TALENT
Top venture capital firms, from Google Ventures to
Andreessen Horowitz, are hiring in-house designers to help the
young startups in their portfolios. One angel investor has even
established a Designer Fund to identify startups driven by
design talent.
To feed demand, new digital design programs have sprouted
over the past two years, at both elite engineering universities
such as Stanford, and art schools like the California College of
the Arts. The School of Visual Arts in New York has seen
applications for its digital design program soar by 43 percent
since its inception in 2009.
Indeed, the flourishing of digital design reflects the
Valley’s evolution, entrepreneurs and investors say.
In the latest generation of innovation, heavily concentrated
in applications for mobile devices and social networks, and
relying on ever-cheaper cloud-computing services, success
depends not on whiz-bang technology, but rather, on a subtle
sense of how to make features useful and engaging.
The most recent example is Instagram, the slick
photo-sharing app that was snapped up by Facebook earlier this
week for $1 billion. The 12-person company’s founding duo
includes Kevin Systrom, who majored in Management Science and
Engineering at Stanford, and Mike Krieger, who describes his
background as “Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience.”
“There’s a growing recognition that it’s critical for a
company’s first employees to be people with great design sense,”
said Eric Feng, founder of Hulu and Erly, an evite- and
photo-sharing company, and a former partner at venture capital
firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers. “That’s true even if
you look at larger companies like Google and Facebook, who have
moved in that direction.”
To be sure, engineers still occupy a rarefied perch at the
top of the Silicon Valley hierarchy, and are the target of the
fiercest recruiting battles.
VISUAL APPEAL
But even Facebook, famous for a culture that glorifies the
“hacker way,” now talks of integrating “design thinking” into
its products and has steadily beefed up its design studio.
From her team’s brightly-colored studio in Facebook’s Menlo
Park offices, design chief Kate Aronowitz dispatches designers
who are paired with an engineer, a product manager and sometimes
a researcher to conceive new products or improve features such
as user profiles or messages.
The embrace of design starts at the top with CEO Mark
Zuckerberg, who has stressed the importance of building a crack
design team, Aronowitz said.
In a highly competitive recruiting climate, it’s not
uncommon for even Facebook to encounter top design talent
playing hard to get. For the toughest cases, Aronowitz plays her
trump card: She asks Zuckerberg to place a personal phone call.
“When they’re not returning my email, that tends to work,”
said Aronowitz, who herself was poached by Zuckerberg from
LinkedIn in 2009. “I’m lucky to have that in my back
pocket.”
The spotlight fell squarely on the design team last
November, when Facebook credited Nicholas Felton, one of its
data-visualization experts, with conceiving the Timeline
interface which has become one of Facebook’s most significant
overhauls in recent years.
For fledgling startups, it’s even more critical to
understand how design affects user behavior, said Dave McClure,
an angel investor who cited the example of Mint, an online tool
for managing personal finances acquired by Intuit in
2009.
Jason Putorti, the startup’s designer founder, lent the Mint
interface “much more warmth,” which was crucial for a startup
that dealt with sensitive information, McClure said. Design, he
added, “made the app feel trustworthy, comforting, functional.”
Last year, McClure put down money to create the Designer
Fund, a program that identifies entrepreneurs with strong design
backgrounds and offers seed money and mentoring from experienced
founders like Putorti and Chad Hurley, of Youtube. The fund,
headed by Enrique Allen, a 25-year old graduate of Stanford’s
design school, has partnered with more established venture
investment firms like Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and
Kleiner Perkins.
“We’re reshaping a lot of how you build a company,” McClure
said. But, he added, “there’s still a resource and talent
shortage” for interaction designers.
SCOUTING FOR ARTISTS
Finding exceptional design talent, though, is not a simple
matter. Last year, Kalvin Wang, the co-founder of Ridejoy, a
service that arranges carpools, said he spent several
“incredibly hard” months recruiting an interaction designer.
Dirk Cleveland of Riviera Partners, a Silicon Valley
headhunting firm, said startups have trouble finding a design
“unicorn” – the rare designer with the interactive digital
skills that many app startups require.
“It’s literally the toughest position to fill right now,”
Cleveland said. “That equation of supply and demand is out of
balance. Engineering education has progressed, and startups have
learned to do more with limited resources, but I don’t think
that’s the case for design.”
Even though he sifted through 150 resumes, Wang said, “There
are so many startups and so many tech companies that are
snapping them up. It’s slightly ridiculous.”
Ridejoy interviewed candidates from Toronto, New York and
the Midwest, and ultimately hired a Parsons School of Design
graduate living in Omaha.
“You do really have to look outside Silicon Valley,” Wang
said. “For Bay Area designers, they have literally hundreds of
options and they’re going to work at a place where they know
people, or a big name like Google.”
The sizzling job market hasn’t escaped the notice of design
schools across the country.
Liz Danzico, founding director of the School of Visual Arts’
masters program in Interaction Design, said the original goal
was simply to understand where the new innovation economy field
was going. “Experience is now the material, not ceramic or
plastic,” she said.
Still, Danzico expected most graduates to stay in New York
– the traditional hotbed of design. She was “really surprised”
to find, in a survey of her first graduating class, that almost
half ended up on the West Coast at companies including Apple
, Facebook, Twitter and Yelp.
Meanwhile, at Carnegie Mellon, Kelly Lau-Kee, a junior
industrial design major, said “there’s huge buzz generated by
the students, the employers, even the professors” about the
prospect of work in Silicon Valley.
On any given day, Lau-Kee said, she’ll spot pictures on
Facebook and Instagram shared by friends currently employed by
startups. They paint a heady picture of life in California, of
snazzy workspaces, hip coworkers and sunshine spilling into
every frame.
“A lot of people like the mentality of work and play, which
the startups advertise really well,” she said. “It’s a culture
we really want to check out.”
Wayne C. Chung, the chair of Carnegie Mellon’s industrial
design program who taught Edmund, the young star at Pinterest,
said the new economics of the profession was evident on college
grounds. Traditional design firms, buffeted by the last
recession, have noticeably cut back on recruiting, while tech
companies have maintained a visible presence on campus, he said.
After this semester, Chung expects another sizeable
contingent of his graduates to make their way West to Silicon
Valley.
“In their hearts and eyes,” Chung said, “they don’t see
anything else as nearly as exciting.
