Leaving is not goodbye
And the new beginning at McCann Tirana
After one year full of adventures, hard works and fantastic experiences at tech consultancy team Collective68, I'm very excited to share that last month I've joined the office of McCann in Tirana. This is going to be significant growth for my career in the creative industry β working in the role of jr art director in large projects with professionals in design, marketing, and communication. A job in advertising agencies is a dream job for lots of designers. It is a great opportunity for learning new things, creating a network and exposing the best of you. Moreover, when you have to work for one of the top 4 marketing and advertising agencies in the world, with a presence in 120 countries, it is a very special feeling.
My last experience, at Collective68, was the first step toward very productive work. There I used to work with some talented, energetic, highly-skilled and ambitious young folks. I'll be forever grateful to them for the work culture they shared with me.
Due to that work culture, I learned at Collective68, I left behind my comfort zone of working individually from the cosy corners of my favourite bars. There, I've been engaged in several projects, where the most interesting ones remain Social Good Summit [1], Open Data Portal in KorΓ§a [2], and of course, our product Collective68 Cloudβββa ready2use open source cloud infrastructure which provides 12 encrypted instances for SMEs like task management platform, event organising platform, office platform, blogging platform, etc. (πππππ π»ππ ππ πππππ πππΆππ.)
When looking back, in one year as a lead interaction designer I've been skilled softly not only in design works. I am proud of many achievements like the acceleration of my technical and soft skills: the consultancy in open source software, the open source design, the culture of git [3], the sharpness of writing blog posts, and the meaning of being part of a FLOSS community [4]. I'm confident in doing a qualitative work with open source software and I am aware that only the small technology [5] can shape a new better world, NOT Silicon Valley. And it cannot be possible without open source culture.
But let's get back to what I can do best: Design. I'm thankful to McCann Tirana team (especially, to the creative director Gazmend Pinjolli) for their invitation and their trust on me, to work with one of the top brands of advertising. Now, it's the perfect moment to use in the upcoming projects all that I've learned from my last experience and go beyond it.
Despite my commitment of doing my best job for the new adventure at McCann Tirana, I'm pretty sure for two things: I will always be contributing to open source projects and I will always advocate the importance of open source technology. Let's hope the day of unethical tech abrogation is near, and everything is going to be open by default. Even in advertising, why not?
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CC BY-SA 4.0
Written with β₯ for open source culture.
Twitter: @kristicunga ___
References:
[1] More accessibility at Social Good Summit 2018 [2] The multidimensional importance of local open data [3] 8 Secrets Of GitLabβs Remote Work Culture [4] How to build an open source community [5] Small Technology ___