Jack Cusumano

As you know, I’ve been trying to think of new strategies for upping my visibility and, ultimately, landing a job with an animation studio in LA. My latest two strategies have been taking out ads on comic/animation websites and posting a new character design every day on my blog. Wanna know how they’ve been working out? Take a look at these handy stats for my blog. Notice anything different in the past couple weeks?

Increase visibility? Check! Now I just need to land a job. Back to working on my portfolio!

-Jack Cusumano

As some of you know, I recently headed to the west coast in search of getting my start in the animation industry. I’ve spent most of my time since earning my animation degree flirting with graphic design and motion graphics, allowing me to pick up some unique skills, but at the end of the day I realized I still just wanted to draw cartoons for a living.

It’s a bit of a challenge gaining visibility, earning a reputation and getting your feet on the ground in the industry, however, which is leading me to try out some creative techniques in my career quest. The latest idea? Placing banner ads on my favorite webcomic site in order to direct viewers to my work who may not otherwise find it. Kinda silly, on one hand – what are the odds of someone from the industry both noticing it and deciding to contact me based on what they see? But so far it’s actually been successful in raising traffic to both my portfolio website and this blog.

I’ll leave it up for a couple days, but so far this experiment hasn’t been a total bust. I’ve got more traffic!

-Jack Cusumano