Pro Practice. Career Goals and Strategy for Getting There.

My passion is information architecture, user experience, and interaction design, and my ideal job would be designing for the digital space. I've known this for quite sometime without realizing it. In everything I do, I crave order and reason with a splash of flare, including my design. I appreciate design where the content is the main focus with the design supporting it and enhancing it. "Clean" or "minimal" isn't always the answer, but clarity is. Though it seems that I always default back to "clean and simple" (hell I'm typing this post in iA Writer, what's simpler than that?), it's clarity and understanding of content that I'm striving for.

How am I going to get to this type of job?
I plan on using networking, researching, writing, and quite honestly, Twitter(and other social media outlets).

            I've already been in direct contact with some bigger-ish names in the design/news field through Twitter. That's why twitter is so awesome, it's direct and fast connection to people that we never had that type of access to before. Use Twitter well, it can help open up doors and start conversations between you and people you admire and look up to. But no, Twitter isn't everything because not everyone has it, but it's a helpful tool to use and harness. There are also other social media outlets that work well, and for someone who is interested in social media, embracing them is smart.
            I've also started researching what companies and people are out there that are doing what I want to do. I don't know what setting I prefer yet, whether it's more of a design firm, or something more specific like an in-house team at a company, or even possibly a startup of some sort. But if I can find a place that is in the realm of my interests, contact will be made somehow.
            But something that will help me both get in contact with people and initiate conversation with them is writing. I've already been doing this over the winter break and really loved it. It was over social media, news, and design, topics that really intrigues me and gets my creativeness in overdrive. Thoughts and ideas are, at times, more important than actual design work. If you have interesting and thought-provoking ideas, people will take note. But ideas and writings don't have to be ground breaking, the fact that you are typing up your ideas and publishing them to a space that people can readily access is great in itself. It shows that you have ideas flowing in your brain and that you want to share them, plus it can also show off your mad writing skillz (but even if you don't have them yet, the more you write, the madder they'll become). So being articulate on the subjects that I'm interested in is important to me. It helps me talk about them easier and with more confidence, and helps break the nervousness I get when talking about my personal ideas and stances.
            All of these things together are how I plan on getting where I want to go. This is all coupled with putting myself out there and contacting/pursuing companies and people that I am interested in.