The Story of My Dealings with Andrew Weilgus and the National Trivia Association

As a designer/art director with a fulltime job, I don’t actively search for freelance work. I occasionally take a job that falls in my lap and sounds interesting, but it’s maybe once or twice a year. In the little amount of time I want to spend working outside of my 9-5 I’m usually wrapped up with helping out friends or family with little things rather than taking paid jobs.

I was recently contacted through my website by a man named Andrew Weilgus. As Andrew’s LinkedIn profile suggests he’s a Director at The Live Network LLC (which seems to be defunct) and the National Trivia Association based out of New Jersey. Before I even respond to freelance work requests I tend to do a bit of digging to both find out about the person contacting me as well as the company they work for or own. Andrew and his company sounded pretty legit, and he had what sounded like a really interesting project. We chatted via email but quickly moved to phone conversations to discuss how we might be able to work together. The conclusion we came to was that to start, he needed someone to fill a very basic consulting role to start. In a nutshell, it was outlining the type of team he would need to pull together for this project and the particular skillset of each team member. Think of it as the basics of what to look for in a person’s resume that he might be interviewing. As we went over the details of the deliverable (we settled on basic word doc. containing an outline of the functions and skills), I made sure this was exactly what he wanted, he reassured me several times, yes. I mentioned that I thought it might take me 4-5 hours total to complete the document… a few phone calls, some minor research and I’m done. Easy. Now, I’m not typically one to work without a written contract, but Mr. Weilgus was nice enough to offer me payment for the first 2 hours upfront which he delivered right away, and the project was short and pretty straight-forward, so I moved forward. I completed the document over the weekend and sent it off to him for review. After a couple of weeks of not hearing back from him I emailed him again to check in. This went on for a bit with no response, so I sent him a text message and got a response… something to the effect of “Hey, sorry, got married, have been really busy with my wedding stuff, I’ll check the document out and get back to you.” Little did I know this was the first excuse of many that would lead right up to this day, nearly 8 months later. They started with “I’ll send the money as soon as I have it in my account” and toward the end they turned to blame… “you over-billed me” and even a “I could have found this information myself.” For the record folks, in the age of the internet you can find any information yourself. When you hire someone to find it all for you that’s not a great excuse to then not pay that person that you hired. For a man that certainly tries to portray himself as big-time company owner/director in his online profiles, it turns out that Andrew Weilgus is little more than you’re average dishonest person that anyone would be smart to steer clear of in a business setting.
As only an occasional freelancer, I rarely have to put myself out there and potentially deal with this sort of nonsense. I mostly do work for friends and past colleagues that I trust. I know plenty of others that freelance on a regular basis and it’s a shame that we occasionally run into these types of people. Sure, there are things you can do when this happens… there’s small claims court, you can file complaints with the Attorney General’s Office in the state they’re based out of, or the Chamber of Commerce. These actions tend to work better as threats to get people to take action, but actually pursuing them takes time, and when you’re a contractor, time is money. Sometimes it’s just better to write a reasonably well search-engine-optimized blog post that you know will show up in the search results the next time someone wants to check up on someone like Andrew Weilgus from the Live Network and the National Trivia Association, to find out what kind of person he is, or how he conducts business.

In the end, it’s a shame when you deliver on your end of an agreement and others refuse to deliver on their end. Personally my reputation is worth more than a few hundred bucks, but sadly some people don’t feel that way about their own.

There’s obviously been a ton of talk lately about the rapidly changing face of the web, from new technology supported by recent versions of web browsers, to the evolution of devices that are changing the way that people interact with the web altogether. Of course web technology and internet browsing have been evolving since day one and I’m sure the evolution will only continue to pick up speed. As web designers we are constantly forced to deal with and to design around seemingly infinite limitations. Now more than ever, it’s important for us to remember that more of those limitations are disappearing every day. Technology is quickly closing the artistic gap between web and the rest of the design world. When you consider just the typography, layout and interactive capabilities that have come around the corner recently with HTML5, CSS3, web fonts, etc. it seems like the web, more than ever before, truly is on the verge of something really exciting. Tools like these will allow us as web designers to make the considerations we need to make in our work without sacrificing design. It’s only a matter of time before this technology is mainstream enough for us to use in any way we see fit (I currently blame IE for the hold up). In my opinion, it’s a really exciting time to be a web designer.

Mobile Mania – The Growing Importance of Mobile Website Optimization

Everyone likes a good infographic. Well, this one is particularly nice and has some great information on why the companies that don’t have a mobile optimized site are not only falling behind, but taking a great risk in their denial of the need for one.

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Source: The Growing Importance of Mobile Website Optimization Infographic

While I was at the HOW conference I attended an additional 3 hour session on brainstorming led by Stefan Mumaw (or “Brainsqualling” as he likes to call it). He’s the guy that wrote the books Caffeine for the Creative Team, Caffeine for the Creative Mind. The session itself was amazing, a ton of great new information to digest. Toward the end of the 3rd hour he told the room (about 150-200 people) that he had an assignment for those that were interested, but the rest could leave if they wanted. About a 3rd of the room stayed.

The assignment we were given:
Work with the others at your table (about 10 people) to create a fake charity. Over the next two days of the conference we were to work together to come up with a way to get people to donate money to our fake charity (all of it going to real charity in the end). The group that raised the most money got autographed copies of his new book and a nice signed letter press poster. The catch was, we had to tell people it was a fake charity and still convince them to donate. The only information we could offer up was that it was part of an assignment from one of our sessions. There was also a Ferris Beuller’s Day Off theme to both the room the session was held in and the assignment, which you might see hints of in the photos.

After a while of trying to come up with ideas, figuring we’d have to offer something in exchange for donations otherwise it would be the equivalent of begging for change someone mentioned selling something simple, like cheap candy…. or gum! Almost as soon as someone mentioned gum, one of the team members (Art Director Roiby Gonzales from the O’Donnell Agency) came up with a really strange but fascinating idea. He said “I really need a haircut (he had huge curly hair), why don’t we sell people gum that they can chew and stick in my hair for $1 each?” The entire table paused, knowing the idea was amazing, but unsure if he was seriously willing to do it. He assured us all that he was, and we all took small assignments away and met back up the next day right before the vendor area opened knowing we could ambush everyone on their way in. We got a range of responses at first, shock, horror, “Ummm, no way!” until one person was willing to break the ice. From there thing started moving really fast. Our team raised $70 in a little under an hour. Unfortunately only one of the team members was going to be staying until the very end of the conference, so the rest of us were unable to claim our prizes. The one team member did however catch up with Stefan, told him the story, and gave him all of our business cards. He contacted all of us a few days later, and said that not only did we win, but he said it was by far the most creative solution he’s ever seen a team come up with. He said he had our cards and he would gladly mail everyone their prizes this weekend.

This is easily one of the most memorable moments of my creative career and yet another reason why I wouldn’t hesitate to go to the HOW conference next year.

We helped cut the gum out of his hair when it was over… surprisingly, you couldn’t even tell his hair had been cut.

Let me start by saying the HOW conference was amazing, and I’m incredibly thankful that I had the opportunity to attend. There was a great response to the Vistaprint booth and the reaction to Vistaprint in general was overwhelmingly positive. I got a lot of “Oh yeah, I’ve used you guys!”

Anyway, For those of you that don’t already know, the HOW conference is apparently going to be in Boston next year. I would honestly recommend it to anyone in a creative field. I had always looked at these types of conferences as something that sounded cool, but I could never justify spending the money to attend. Now, having been to this one, it dispelled a lot of ideas I had about these types of things, and I can honestly say I plan on attending next year one way or another. It’s entirely worth the cost if your goal is to learn, re-energize yourself creatively, make contacts and of course get tons of cool free stuff. There was amazing technology on display, fantastic talks and workshops, live artistic performances, software demos, the best of the best vendor samples, and some insanely creative booths to check out. I walked around the entire vendor area 7-8 times throughout the days it was open, it never got old.

The sessions I was able to sit in on were amazing – Using the brand value pyramid by Shannon Carter from Cartis Group, and “Brainsqualling” by Stefan Mumaw were the two that really stood out from the rest.

Hopefully I’ll see some of the same great people I met this year at the Boston Conference next year, along with any new people I’ve convinced to attend.

-Nate