Rocket Ride

For those of you unaware, I live in the Atlanta-metro area.  Atlanta, as a design community isn’t really all as big as some other cities like Boston.  There are plenty of people who have worked together in one capacity or another at other agencies…in fact, that’s a common occurrence at the company I work for right now.  But…as a whole, we are not really a community.  Sure, we live in the same city/metro area..I’d say the six degrees of separation rule is more like 3 degrees of separation here in Atlanta..but, again,  we’re not really together.   This is unfortunate because we really need it.

Recently, this topic came up on 404collective.com kind of by accident.  But a few points were made which I’ll address:

• Lots of people managed to put there name/company out there…but never really participated in the community
• Other cities have more than one community. So was there another one out there that we didn’t know of?
• Are we just insecure and overprotective of our turf?

Atlanta could be a  good start for one’s career because we have a few design schools here and, as I’ve heard in the past, there’s quite a bit of short term freelance work to go around. There are many viewpoints on what could/should be done to build Atlanta as a hotbed for design, but it still seems to come down to community.  People have to want to gather and network, you can’t force them to do so unless you want to change the kind of government we live under..in which case I say, “good luck to you, comrade”.

To my knowledge, 404C at the time of it’s inception, was really the only community, so to speak. However, recently an effort by Eric Shoemaker has resulted in Atlanta Creatives.  This site has potential to become a cornerstone for the growth of the community and I’m sure, as more become aware of it’s existence, there will be more participation.  Eric, if you’re reading, maybe a little hot-linking to 404C would get the communication going.

I can’t say for certain if there’s any creative jealousy in Atlanta.  There’s always rivalry and competition…that’s the essence of a free market…competing for the goal. If anything, I tend to think that we could use more competitiveness but since the economy seems to balance on the edge of a knife these days, I can see why some clients would be less apt to taking risks……then again, now is the time to do so when you’re trying to market and advertise.  Something I would love to see:  small firm/independent builds website for a client which is major competitor for a local corporation (no names..just think of the big ones here) and this site makes a big enough impact that the LARGER corporation says “WTF?”  Maybe that would encourage the larger corporations to embrace the idea of pushing the envelope creatively?  Altogether different topic.

So, we have some factors to consider: overall involvement & collaboration…networking at multiple levels..a creative renaissance.  So many of us have blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and are members of other design communities in the real and online, there’s really no reason  for us to not be  in communication.

That being said, I want to see you folks twittering about the Atlanta community….I want to see you guys twittering about your own community..share the links and the love…be involved. I want to see growth…I want to put a picture of a scrawny little man next to a picture of a steroid-pumped body-builder with “Atlanta: Before & Atlanta: After”.