Dayan D’Aniello: The Agency Helped Launch My Career

Dayan D’Aniello led the creative efforts of The Agency beginning the year it was founded. In this role he took on responsibilities that far exceeded his experience, leading a motley crew of graphic designers and copywriters, and building an awesome portfolio that helped land him in his current role as a junior designer at Guerilla Suit, the uber creative design studio in Austin, Texas.

Self-described as a “Curious collective,” Guerilla Suit is the perfect environment for Dayan, who describes himself as “A goofy guy with a keen eye.”

Dayan’s trajectory is a shining example of the desired outcome of The 100 Project, an initiative to place 100 percent of The Agency’s amazing Team members in equally amazing jobs.

Following are Dayan’s reflections about how his experiences at The Agency helped prepare him for a career in the fast-paced world of design.

— Jim Harrison, Creative Director

It’s been a little over nine months since I left school and with it, The Agency. There I learned what the textbooks couldn’t teach me. I learned how to evolve brands, juggle responsibilities, design an app, work with clients, lead a team—the list goes on.

Though it took a lot of elbow grease, it paid healthy dividends of experience. I put many hours and late nights into making sure everything ran smoothly and The Agency put out nothing but quality design work. As in a lot of things, you get out what you put in. This had never more apparent to me before. Being in a position where a lot is asked of you yields two likely outcomes: the friction and newness of responsibility pushes you to excel and achieve or, well, you fail. But if you do, you fail well and you learn from it.

Being in school is the ideal environment for this trial. In the college bubble you are gifted with a safety net of minimal real-world pressures at a time when there is so much potential for growth. The Agency allowed me to capitalize on that growth period while bridging the gap between education and the “real world”, softening the blow that would follow graduation.

While interviewing for design jobs fresh out of school, people took notice of the practicality of my portfolio. It wasn’t littered with school projects or hypotheticals but real things that were made for real clients.

This is largely what set me apart from the hundreds of other people that applied for the internship I landed just out of school—at a small design studio in Austin by the name of Guerilla Suit. Now, nearly a year later, I’m happy to report I’m still there working on dream projects like rebranding a brewery and helping to put on an entirely new music festival.

It’s an incredible experience I quite possibly couldn’t have landed without the experience I gained at The Agency and the relationships I established with the professional leaders and my peers.

— Dayan D’Aniello