We’re looking to bring on a Director of Business Development. If you are interested, let us know. If you know someone else who might be a good fit, please let them know!

About the Job
Portigal Consulting is preparing to enter a new stage of growth and needs people who can bring the right set of skills to guide that growth. As with many small consulting firms, the key abilities we have in-house revolve around the consulting work, not the business of the firm. Indeed, we are asking for a combination of sales and marketing and business development, related but often separate job functions.

Although responsibilities will be customized to the strengths of the candidate, they will likely include a mix of (in descending order of priority)
* lead generation
* sales calls
* evolution of service message
* proposal writing

We envision a 3-month contract, with the possibility of extension or full-time, depending on results and interest.

Location is not an issue.

Qualifications
* Experience in a professional services setting (creative services such as design a plus)
* Experience in generating new business
* Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
* Excellent organizational skills
* Comfortable with Internet communication tools (email, IM)

About Portigal Consulting
Founded in 2001, we are a boutique agency, based in the coastal community of Montara, CA, 25 minutes from San Francisco, and 30 minutes from much of Silicon Valley.

Our clients come from a range of industries and include both B2B and B2C programs. Recent clients include: Avaya, BIC, Bosch, Chevron, France Telecom-Orange, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Nestle, SC Johnson, Shure, Sony, and WNBA.

Portigal Consulting brings together user research, design and business strategy to help innovative companies discover and act on new insights about their customers.

We conduct contextual research with target users in order to uncover their unexpressed needs. We then develop a suite of concepts that can address those needs. We also work with organizations to help them introduce or expand their customer-centric design and development processes, including training and facilitation.

Applying
Send a resume to hr AT portigal DOT com. Important: include a cover letter about yourself, your relevant experience, and what you would like to bring to the role.

A screenshot from the My Itineraries page at United. I’m trying to cancel a flight. Their FAQ suggests you can do it from their site, but I had all sorts of trouble on Friday and ended up sending them an email (nicely enabled from that part of the site, with automatic form filling with my ticket number and all that good stuff). It’s 5 days later and they haven’t canceled it or otherwise responded. So now I’m in limbo. Today I went back to check what itineraries they were showing for me. And here’s what I find – button and other interface text is replaced by labels in the code, probably variable names instead of their values.

Neither the bad service nor the poor attention to detail gives me a great feeling about United.

Last year Nicolas Nova blogged about element of public space that restrict usage – specifically skateboarding, and as one commenter suggested, lying down. Without remembering his post, I took these pictures the other day:

It’s still ugly, but there’s an emotional component (“cute” – “fun” – “neat”) created by the whimsical shapes that counteracts that reaction quite strongly. Many of the anti-sit installations appear as an afterthought, a post-design, without any integration into the original vision. These were probably added after the original design but there’s some attempt to retrofit, conceptually or visually. I’m sure the original planners and architects are horrified, but it kinda mostly works.

• Say It Loud
  With both Kermit The Frog and snot content, you’ve gotta check out my latest guest blog entry at the Sessions Design School blog!

One of our recent clients, MediaMaster

just launched their product, that “lets you store all your music on the internet and play it from any internet-connected device.”

Their path from idea to launch has been a fascinating one (and I don’t know most of it, I’m sure). They came to this with a hand-coded technology to rip (via a CD jukebox) many albums in sequence, sort of a mass-scanning technology for CD ripping. But if you are going to rip the same albums over and over again, it’s time- and cost-effective to simply already have a copy of them already ripped and rather than rip, why not just check liner bar codes for proof of ownership and download the songs already on hand? And since the songs are already online, why not tie it to purchase of a new CD, and why not keep the music online permanently?

They dealt with a crazy mess of technological afforandances, changes of behaviors, retail and other partnership challenges and on and on. We did an online survey with some concepts, and then took concept boards out into homes to talk to different types of hypothesized target customers.

The product development process deals with a lot of moving targets, but startup folks deal with an excess of that challenge, collating input and constraints from so many quarters, it must make them crazy.

I’m excited to see the product launch, and to see where they’ve ended up with it, given where we were at during those rounds of research. I don’t know their business model, since the service is free right now. It’ll be fun to watch what happens with it and see if they make it succeed.

My latest Core77 Broadcast has been posted, a great discussion with Nathan Shedroff (just call him Nathan) about meaning and design.

Check it out!

Someone else blogs about the design in Idiocracy. I think I have some different points to make, so I’ll get to that post eventually.

• Self-portrait (at Warhol’s grave)
  [Another guest post to the Sessions Design School blog]
  The New York Times writes about Andy Warhol’s grave located in quiet Bethel Park, PA. Imagining the design of memorial marker for any famous artist seems like a worthy conceptual activity (or at least a feature in MAD Magazine), but something about Warhol’s work itself seems to almost demand he be given an parodic (at worst) or referential (at best) headstone. Although Warhol did arrange for his grave to be maintained, if he designed his own headstone, it’s certainly unlike his other work. Fans, however, evolve and build upon the headstone, by adding items such as soup cans and (inexplicably) pocket change. More on his grave here.

• A community creates its own currency
  A community in Massachusetts designs and prints and uses its own local money. The edges of the system are still rough, but the experiment seems to reveal the costs, challenges, and benefits of a local alternative system.

• Thinking Big, Real Big
  One of my guest blog entries from this week