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In lugnet.people, Lindsay Frederick Braun writes:
> I only have one question, if you're at liberty
> to answer it: How did you land such a great job?
> Did they come to you, or did you apply, or...?
It was just about 99.44% luck, as much as I hate to admit it, and that's
with a .56% margin of error. I had never even really considered working for
Lego, the job just kind of fell in my lap. And here's the complete story!
By total coincidence, Lego was reactivating one of their concept studios
right at the same time that I was graduating from art school. They needed a
whole pile of new designers - I don't know what happened to the old studio
that led to its getting shut down, but my private and non-LEGO-endorsed
suspicion is that it was because they committed some kind of horrible crime
(*cough* Galidor *cough*).
But back to the story. During the last couple of days of every term, the
graduating students at Art Center put their work up all over the walls in a
big senior exhibition, and big companies send their executives out to fish
for talent. Our Product Design department is pretty solid, so Lego's
newly-appointed hotshot studio manager came out to check out the Product show.
Now I was in Illustration, so I was putting up my work in a whole different
section of the building than the Product show, but fortunately I'd spent
enough of my time at Art Center yapping about Lego that I'd gotten a kind of
reputation for it. The final stroke of good luck was that the Lego manager
ran into my buddy Jeff on his way out of the building. Once Jeff found out
that the guy was recruiting for Lego, he practically dragged him over to see
my show in the Illustration section. I was just finishing hanging about a
half-dozen Lego paintings, and was about thirty seconds away from heading
home to get some sleep, when Jeff brings this suspicious-looking character
up to meet me. The guy introduces himself, we talk about the Lego business
for about five minutes, he pockets my entire pile of business cards (each of
which had a different minifigure painted on it), says he'll be in touch, and
then takes off.
At that point my only thought was that he was some kind of advance scout for
the Lego legal team and that I had maybe two days to live. So I did what
any rational person would do in that situation, and went to Las Vegas. I
had a truly monumental weekend, thanks for asking, and when I got home there
was a message on my answering machine calling me in to the studio the
following morning.
So as it turned out, when I arrived at the studio it was not full of lawyers
with baseball bats like I expected. Instead, I got a perfectly congenial
interview with the studio manager, who gave me a whole bunch of Chips Ahoy!
cookies and a sweet job. The End.
So for everybody who wants to get a job coming up with new ideas for LEGO,
that's the process you need to follow. Especially the Las Vegas part.
> In any case it's a wonderful meeting of soul and
> vocation, and I wonder if we'll see the Mike Rayhawk
> "stamp" on anything from TLC in such a way that
> we'll recognize it.
If I see anything on the shelves in the next couple of years with the
Rayhawk stamp, or even the vaguest Rayhawk-esque nuance, you can bet I'll be
taking all kinds of credit for it!
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Great story and great luck Mike, it couldn’t have happened to a more worthy
guy. Did they at all review with you your dark side, or your panache for
mini-fig Mortal Kombat? I have always really loved your spin on traditional
mini-fig paintings. I just hope and pray that this all goes well, and that
you are not going to be the new painter in charge of the Galidor or Jack
Stone lines! :)
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In lugnet.people, Scott Costello writes:
> I just hope and pray that this all goes well, and that you are not
> going to be the new painter in charge of the Galidor or Jack
> Stone lines! :)
But just imagine if I were! You can bet you'd see a new spin on those two
themes. In fact I might just do a painting like that for fun, I'm picturing
that robot Jens glinching his arm into an industrial food pasteurizer and
jamming Nick's head into it. It probably wouldn't get a positive response
from Galidor's current target age group, but I bet it would be a big hit in
the "Boys 14-18" segment.
Fortunately the project I got assigned to is much more in line with my way
of thinking, I don't know what I'd have done if I got stuck in something
like Belville or Clikits. The other day I even found myself arguing that
one part of the play theme needed to be less lethal, if you can believe it,
but fortunately I caught myself before it got out of hand. I've set some
time aside to investigate the causes that led to that lapse of character, to
make sure that disturbing incident isn't repeated.
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