Without the presenting and networking skills that Bautista has acquired, it’s doubtful he’d be where he is today. A recent Harvard Business Review study lays this all pretty bare. Without charisma, you can’t get funding and like anything it takes work and practice to get there.

Bautista has pitched publicly three times, at KidScreen, Venture Forum in Vancouver and Venture Prize and has won at all three. Discovery signed on to his project without a demo, getting on board based on the strength of the presentation alone.

He’s been to six or seven industry events a year for the past three years. To some people, that’s a slog but Bautista loves it. He gets a kick out of talking with his cohorts about what they’re working on and is very much a people junkie. Face-to-face networking is important but you can’t be everywhere at once. This is where online social networking comes into play. Bautista prefers Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

“From a business perspective, LinkedIn has been good. I get introduced to people and I introduce people,” says Bautista.

“Facebook is more ‘friends’ but it’s become more of that personal network. Makes it easy to keep in touch with people.”

He sees a link between being a good networker and a good presenter. When presenting, you’ll have a script. Talking points that include things you should return to when you get off track. But when you’re networking, you don’t use a script, that would just be weird and awkward. It’s in these networking situations that you can work on your off the cuff, unplanned talk about what you do. So, as Bautista puts it “You have to have this arsenal of stuff to talk about without sounding like a robot.”

The better you get at dealing with people in unscripted, unplanned discussion, the more natural your formal presentations will be.

Of course it’s rare that people find themselves with a microphone and a slide deck in front of hundreds of people. You have to get your practice in and Bautista got his from pitching his product from a very early stage. By starting early, he got feedback and gained a comfort level with the process. Every pitch he did helped him refine his message.

Bautista always goes into a presentation with a plan. “What are the one or two things they need to remember and then I craft my pitch around that.”

He wanted to get people to understand the mystery and the intrigue of his property as well as the multi-platform interactivity. During his KidScreen pitch, Bautista mocked up a crash screen and played it off like his computer had crashed during the presentation. People in the crowd were surprised, muttering to themselves. Then he got a phone call over the loudspeaker from one of the “agents” in the product he was pitching, telling him that there had been a security breach. He kept going through the pitch and came to slide that needed a password. He had planted a clue for the password under the judges’ chairs, and they were prompted to look there by another phone call over the loudspeaker.

“At this point the crowd is loving it.”

The Montreal headquarters of Switzerland Creative Services would make Ikea addicts cringe.

It’s not that the creative boutique, which boasts satellite offices in Toronto and the Bronx, N.Y., isn’t deserving of a second look. It’s just that operations director Ben Pobjoy and creative head Shawn Butchart favour an esthetic that leans toward taxidermy, vinyl LPs and a healthy assortment of vintage junk over the mass-produced, ergonomic furniture popular among firms who trade in type.

“There’s the stereotype of a lot of design offices that are really clean and modern,” Pobjoy says over the phone from the company’s Montreal workspace. “Our office tends to be a lot more Pee-wee Herman in nature.”

Antique tin cans pasted with yesterday’s advertising slogans, pop artwork, prints of old typography, photography and yes, stuffed animals, fill out the space, which doubles as an art gallery come summertime. “There’s a grouse on the wall, which is really wicked because it’s flying, and I think a mallard duck and a pheasant above where we keep cutlery,” Pobjoy says, rhyming off the oddities, which also include a set of mounted antlers (whether moose, elk or deer, he’s not sure).

The strange surroundings belie the hardworking set of artistic entrepreneurs – a graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and visual artist, respectively – that make up the Swiss team. Their current abode is a former ground-level loft that serves as the headquarters for three separate entities: Switzerland Creative Services, the Emporium Gallery and a software development venture called Red Tree.

Recent projects include branding and design work for New York City-based cinematographer Nadia Hallgren, whose credits include the 2008 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning film Trouble the Water, as well as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. 

Pobjoy says his firm’s clubhouse-feel – the office doesn’t have a boardroom, and there’s no secretary to mind the phones – and throwback décor are both intrinsic to the in-house creative processes. The relaxed approach also reflects a business model that’s increasingly nomadic, he notes. “Physical space is important for face-to-face collaboration, but I feel as though it’s less and less important in terms of its traditional use.”

Business these days is conducted wirelessly and increasingly in transit. “That’s how it’s evolved. [The office] is more of a place just to charge your computer than anything else.”

Still, there are pleasures unique to the Swiss digs. “We’re one of the few offices that have at least five or six hundred LPs on hand,” Pobjoy says. (The selection runs the gamut from Hank Williams Sr. to Run DMC).

What constitutes a typical day? “I would say a lot of coffee, a lot of vinyl, a lot of work and a lot of smokes would sum it up.”

At a showing of recently discovered films by the late Vancouver artist Kate Craig, I ran into a gang of girls who worked for Lululemon. I should have known. The screening, followed by a dance party, enforced a strict dress code of pink and leopard print all night. Lululemon design assistant Niamh McManus still managed to stand out from the crowd, hoisting a giant leopard print shoe that doubled as a seat over her shoulder.

VITALS: Niamh McManus, design assistant, Vancouver

Tell me about your job as a design assistant at Lululemon.
I work on the Run line. The line’s lead designer comes up with the direction for the season and I pull images and help create a theme. The lead designer then looks at all that trend info and decides what the direction is. Then we start production, and make samples and detailed technical drawings. After that, we collaborate with technical designers, pattern makers and product developers to create the final product.

Is working in fashion as competitive or glamorous as it seems?
There are a lot of people who want to be in the industry because of that perceived glamour. It’s hard for me to say because I was handed a good opportunity right out of school. Everyone works long days. It can’t be a nine-to-five job because you care – and that consumes your life. But I try not to think about the harder aspects of my job. One of my fears of working in fashion is the relentless pace. At the same time, you still have to squeeze creativity out. Creativity is delicate. I’m paranoid that if I’m not gentle with it, then one day it will just leave.

Getting hired out of school? That still happens?
I know a lot of people who have had a harder time than me. What I’m learning now is that design is only the tip of the iceberg in apparel. There’s not much room in fashion for designers compared to all the other people you need to create a product. For instance, there’s 17 of us on the design team at Lululemon. On the production side there’s around 60. I always thought during design school that starting my own line was my goal, but I think that I couldn’t be as successful if I had my own business straight out of school. There’s just too much to learn. U

Laura Trethewey is riding the train from Toronto to Vancouver and meeting regular Canadians along the way for our Job Training series. Every city she stops in she’ll ask one regular person about what they do for a living. Unlimited is posting the conversations on our interactive map.

Extreme Group’s Halifax headquarters – this marketing/multimedia firm also has a satellite location in Toronto – was originally in an old brewery that was, at turns, a firehall and dance studio. Before moving in three years ago, they stripped the space back to its bones and removed the mirrored walls throughout (maybe so graphic designers and account execs wouldn’t practise pliés during client meetings). “We wanted to put a firepole in when we redesigned the space,” King admits. Insurance adjusters quashed the idea.

They didn’t quash Extreme’s creativity. Campaigns include Great Reasons to Smoke, a series of commercials featuring the doofuses from the movie Fubar giving real people’s doofus reasons they won’t quit smoking. “We tried to make smoking very uncool by using unaspirational characters,” says creative director Shawn King. Example: If you quit, how will you meet people?

King, a partner, vice-president and closet Metallica fan, deconstructs Extreme’s “team lounge.”

Photo by James Ingram

1. The pool table used to double as the boardroom table; that’s why it has glass on top. It was always our agenda to make the space inspiring. People sometimes hang around on Friday nights or come in on weekends and play pool.

2. We got the slushie machine one summer because our old office wasn’t air conditioned. It got super-hot in summer. We used to have a Red Bull fridge, but we got rid of it. When Red Bull came and refilled it every month, it was empty the same day. People went crazy.

3. That’s a keg in the back. We have beer-o’clock Fridays at 4 p.m. We have a keg fridge underneath. In our executive lounge upstairs we have a pop machine filled with beer. We don’t charge for it. What kind of beer do we serve? Moosehead. They’re our client.

4. We call the shelves along the back the library. Those are mostly industry books on photographers or illustrators, along with awards annuals. On the right are awards. The regional advertising awards show here is called the ICE Awards. Throughout the office we have close to 50 ice buckets.

5. What you don’t see in the picture are couches and a high-def TV with satellite. People will come down and watch stuff at lunch. Usually big sporting events. There was a time when everyone was watching The Price is Right.

Things We Like About Extreme

Critical Faculties: Idea boards are posted throughout Extreme's office. Photo by James Ingram

+ The best things at Extreme are fun, but also functional. Take the magnetic dry-erase whiteboards throughout the office where staff post mock-ups of new work for people to critique or work by their competitors.
+ The gym. “One of the issues we have isn’t recruiting talent to the agency but recruiting talent to Halifax. We wanted to make the space more appealing, so we put the gym in.” (The only spot for a shower was in a former broom closet. “People seem to have gotten over that.”)
+ An open work area where staff are divided not by department but by client. Graphic designers, account execs and everyone else working on the same account are grouped together.
+ Brick walls, high ceilings and loads of natural light.
+ Extreme is a big-time agency located not in Toronto but in Halifax, which has one of Canada’s most respected design schools, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
+ Did we mention the beer-o’clock Fridays?

We’re standing in the showroom of every university student’s favourite Swedish furniture store. A faux marble countertop separates a mock galley kitchen from a mock living room, breezily adorned with Scandinavian books and framed photographs of winsome heterosexual couples. There’s an empty champagne bottle in a bucket and eight long-stemmed glasses on the counter. We must have just missed the party.

Shoko César touches everything, caressing shelves and cupboards with a wide, latté-coloured palm. He knocks the counter, middle knuckle of his right hand – knock, knock, knock, pause, knock, knock – head cocked, trying to guess the material. He spies a logo in the corner: Staron Acrylic Solid Surface, Samsung. The Korean electronics company? He laughs.

“The setup, this is brilliant, really,” César says, pivoting to survey the perfectly hip living space. “Who else does this?” He turns to a triptych of mass-produced abstract prints on the wall which are available downstairs in the “decoration” department. “This is what I hate,” he says. “They don’t need to do that. They have so much more to sell here and there are so many struggling artists out there. I’m an artist and I hate this.”

In the many hours we spend discussing culture, design, the environment and revolution, it’s the only time I recall him using the word “hate.” Kenyamashokoro César may have been named for his grandfather’s brother, a furious Rwandan warrior, but he displays none of his ancestor’s notorious aggression. That said, he lacks neither the conviction nor the rebellion of his bloodline. He just hates fake, especially fake art. But he’s a Bob Marley fan: it’s about the love, people.

A 28-year-old, multi-lingual, German-Rwandan industrial and graphic designer, Shoko César may just make Alberta famous one day for something other than oil and conceit. César and colleague Greg Ball, both graduates of the University of Alberta’s Department of Art and Design, won a Canadian Interiors Best of Canada award for a lamp inspired by the hoodoos of Drumheller. He has a vision for this province: homegrown style. Why buy the same flimsy Swedish lamp everyone else has and replace it five years from now when it’s out of style or falling apart?

Western society is addicted to cheap, disposable products, anonymously designed and remotely manufactured, he says, sometimes under shameful, inhumane conditions. César wants to change that by designing things – lamps, furniture, accessories – that are locally inspired, locally produced and made from non-toxic, even recyclable, materials, items that are energy-efficient, manufactured with minimal waste and built to last. He admits he’s a hopeless optimist. But get this: he’s a man with integrity and he’s making a living.

Back at the aforementioned big blue-and-yellow store that rhymes with Irie-a, César is groping chairs, tables and couches, explaining the difference between layered laminate (thin layers of wood bent and glued together – flexible and sturdy), particle board (fused wood chips often covered in veneer – cheap quality) and medium-density fibreboard (wood powder fused in resin – real cheap quality and leaches urea formaldehyde). He stands apart from the denim-and-Gore-Tex consumer throng with his tobacco-brown corduroy Trilby hat and paisley silk scarf.

“This is good design,” he says, arriving at a kitchen with gleaming, siren-red cupboards. It’s minimalist and colourful, two things he likes, but it’s too trendy. We pass by the desk section and he points to one he owns, a table with rear legs that extend to angle the work surface. Yes, he shops here periodically, just like everyone else. We come to the lights. “This is so easy. You can make this at home yourself,” he says about a wire-framed, Chinese paper floor lamp. He scans a display wall of lights with the zeal of a floor trader and walks directly to some glowing LED products. Light-emitting diodes or LEDs are energy efficient, don’t radiate heat and last much longer than incandescent bulbs, but they run on complex circuitry and they’re not as bright. César likes them and wants to design with them. He just needs to figure them out first.

César knows something about light and not just the kind that glimmers on the waves of Lake Tanganyika near where he grew up in Burundi. He spent two years dreaming of, sketching, designing, discarding, re-designing, choosing material for, badgering manufacturers about, and eventually, and painstakingly, assembling by hand a lamp made of corrugated plastic and a couple of light bulbs. The four-foot-tall glowing ghost, glued together from roughly three dozen die-cut pieces of coroplast, caught the discerning eyes of the Best of Canada judges. “There was a fair amount of discussion about that piece,” says one judge, Michael Taylor of Toronto’s Taylor Smyth Architects. “The jury was a little mixed. Some people felt it was too simplistic. Others liked the simplicity of the form and the innovative use of the materials.” Taylor was in the latter group. “It was a whimsical but compelling piece. I liked it.”

It all started with a coat rack César and Calgary-based Greg Ball designed a couple of years ago. A friend remarked the protruding fingers, upon which you hang your coat, looked like hoodoos. César was anxious to design something indigenous to Alberta and, eerily, it appeared he’d already done so. (Insert swelling strings and heavenly columns of light here.) He and Ball packed cameras, sketch pads and journals and took a roadtrip to the badlands. It blew his mind: the layers of pre-history pushing deep into the earth, the textures, the way the colours retreated in the rain and then gently returned to hue and brilliance under the sun’s coaxing. “You can’t fake it there,” he says. “You can’t duplicate it. It’s ancient…. For us, it was a discovery.” They camped at a friend’s farmhouse just outside of Drumheller and spent three days walking, talking, absorbing.

Back home, they worked through nearly a hundred sketches, trying to capture the essence of those ancient curves. Then they considered materials, imagining vertical layers of… something, hollowed out in the middle for the light bulbs. Coroplast, a lowly corrugated plastic often used in sign-making, was cheap, plentiful and allowed the light to leak out, giving the lamp an even glow.

Producing a prototype, let alone a series of hoodoo lamps, bordered on the absurd. In a nutshell, he couldn’t get the lamp manufactured in Alberta because no one, not even companies that cut cardboard, would work with coroplast other than to produce a couple of prototypes. They eventually tracked down a willing Ontario company which rolled the cost of start-up and about 50 lamps into one tidy sum – between $10,000 and $15,000. This was getting expensive. Exasperated and, frankly, a bit bored from labouring over one lamp for two years, they decided to turn it into a limited edition, $640 art piece. The company that produced the prototype agreed to cut a few more versions of the lamp and César assembles them by hand to order. (Most interest in the coat rack, which sells for around $60, comes from Collectiv, an art and design shop that operated out of Edmonton’s Highlands neighbourhood until mid-august and well reopen next month as a Winnipeg-based online retailer.)

Extensive research, design, development and local manufacturing means exactly what you thought: César’s products cost more than comparable items at the assemble-it-yourself furniture monolith. He explains it this way: when a product is really cheap, someone pays. If it’s not you, then it’s the poor labourer in Mexico or China who pays through her poverty wage. Anyway, as oil becomes more scarce, plastics, gasoline and shipping are going to cost more, too. We may have no choice but to start paying what things are actually worth again.