interview with DesignIsMyThing™

I recently did an interview with DesignIsMyThing™, check it out.

DesignIsMyThing™: Where are you from and what do you do?

Mike Mai: I’m originally from Canton, China. Now working in Boston as a freelance graphic designer.

DIMT: From your experience with the Emcee Hao project, tell us one secret to successful self promotion?

MM: Viral marketing and social media. Put your shit online… everywhere! Make as many viral videos (Gangster channel) as possible. Blog posts (Gangster blog) and tweets (Gangster tweets) will increase search results drastically. Wouldn’t it be cool to google yourself and see the first few pages of results all point to you? Yeah, I achieved that, and that’s without doing any search engine optimization. Oh, and don’t forget to actually go outside and promote yourself. Wherever you go whoever you talk to is an opportunity to sell. Hand out business cards or tag your promotions all over the city (you could potentially get arrested for this but the pay off is street cred and free media attention).

DIMT: Is there anything you wish you did differently when launching Emcee Hao?

I wish I had professional models with big ass booties to start with.

DIMT: What’s the biggest difference you’ve found between school projects and real world projects?

For school projects, you are your own boss, your own client, you oversee everything. There’s a lot of room for creativity. As for real world projects, you are dealing with clients who usually like ugly things mainly because they don’t know the art of communication. You need to use your expertise to convince them what works and what doesn’t. Your chance to be creative depends on that. But a lot of clients are from hell, so beware! Google “clients from hell”, funny shit.

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