If length is any sign of success, our Ask a Pro webinar with illustration and design students coast-to-coast was a hit. Illustrators, animators, and designers logged on October 19 to ask questions of illustrator Ed Shems and design director Rebecca Blake, including entire classrooms from MassArt in Boston and the Art Institute in San Francisco. The webinar lasted over 2 hours – an hour longer than anticipated – and covered both questions submitted in advance and ones entered into the webinar chatstream in real time.

After the webinar concluded, the links and resources shared during the talk were gathered into a resource list. Additional links to articles, tutorials, portfolios sites, job boards, and recommended business tools were added to address all of the questions that were raised in the course of the webinar. The result is a comprehensive list of resources on copyrights, starting a business, self-promotion and marketing, pricing, productivity tools, service providers, and finding work. A link to the webinar, and the resource list have been published as “Ask a Pro! YOUR Q&A with a Graphic Designer and an Illustrator Webinar and Resource List” in the Guild’s Tools and Resources section.

The webinar was coordinated by the Guild’s New England administrator Carolyn Wirth, who reached out to MassArt’s Career Development Office to gauge interest, and Ed Shems, who developed the webinar and suggested its overall structure. The Guild also decided to make the webinar and resource list publicly available for free, in the hope that it would provide valuable insight into professional practices for students and newly minted professionals.