The middle school kids at UCC Immanuel Church in Shillington designed these banners. Then we made a very big mess painting them. Then they carried them into church to mark the third week of advent (theme: peace). OK, so the peace sign is a little cliche, but they did a great job of uniting the four pieces (I guess I have "campaign" drilled into my brain) with a theme, and then executing each one imaginatively. Will upload photos of the actual things soon.
We (ad kids from Kutztown) recently visited a whole slew of generous, kind and talented people:
GrandArmy at the New York Art Director's Club, Richie Glickman at JWTNY, James Douglas Shields and Stacey Quick and all the crew at Sandbox Studio in NY.
And then Stacey Wiley and Josh Goldblum at Bluecadet, Bill Starkey (with some help from Ben McCool and a mystery Groundhog) at Red Tettemer, and Jenny and Doug at 160over90.
Wow. We learned so much. Funny how these themes seemed to recur:
1) You've got to do your own personal work to get to the next level. As a student, it might be taking on extra internships, doing work for real clients, or entering competitions - going above-and-beyond your class assignments is what pays off with a really stunning portfolio. As a professional, adding to your own workload (translation: nights, weekends, and days off) pursuing your own passion/interests/growth as an artist is what makes the great great and the good merely good.
2) The only way to accomplish the above is to have a supportive creative community around you. Whether they are your best buddies, mentors you admire, anonymous bloggers you strike up a conversation with, or people you meet at work, you need other creative brains around you both to push you and to console you. Find people who you think are talented and can be honest with you, and get them to look over your work. Seek out the best. Be nice to everyone. Be a good person to be around. Help your friends and they will help you back.
3) Over and over again we heard the importantce of not giving up, of continuing to refine your ideas or come back with better ones if they get shot down, of supporting your ideas with thoughtful research and thorough knowledge of the problem, and of the patience and emotional resilience it takes to shepherd even the greatest idea through layers of approval and revisions without losing sight of your goal: great work.
"It's hard!"
But it's also fun. And just seeing the amazing projects produced by all these talented people was inspiring. Thank you thank you thank you. I sure do feel lucky to have bumped into such superstars along the way. Meeting lots of people is a lovely byproduct of age!
Below: Seniors pretend they are Doug and/or Jenny at 160over90 (they wish!)
Great to see Ray Cruz last night speaking at Kutztown. What gorgeous work, and so cool how those 70's photolettering fonts and scripts are coming back around with type designers like Jessica Hische and the House team. Ray and I worked together at Y&R and later on a calligraphic treatment for Crayola. I think I was one of the people making him uptight by trying to get him to draw loose. It was so generous of him to gift his groovy Swinger font to the kids.
As all my senior students have been dispersed to the four winds this January, pursuing fascinating internships which you can read all about on DEsigners, and as this blog is hopelessly out of date, I'm seizing this moment to record my own little January adventures.
School was officially "out" on December 15th. On December 16th I started a quick little freelance gig at Nitro with this fantastic and dear writer friend. We worked on a big-brand-I-shall-not-name. The agency was in a hair-on-fire kind of crunch and had already booked a director to shoot a spot - the lovely and talented Terrence Williams. In the end the client-who-shall-not-be-named basically rewrote the entire spot and somewhere our original idea may have gotten a teensy bit lost. But we held our heads high and in the meantime I discovered some of the best chocolate (and perhaps worst service?) in Manhattan.
Simultaneously, almost, I also worked a few days at my "alma mater", mcgarrybowen on a pitch for a Pfizer product. My other fantastic writer bud was temporarily missing an art director and I filled her stylish shoes. This was a cool job because all I had to do was redesign/decorate the rough outline of an idea they had already come up with. So the brainracking was over and the color-choosing, font-picking, poster-designing was on. Sadly the agency did not win the pitch: allegedly they thought mb missed a strategic insight and the work was "too out there." While I hate to lose, losing on the basis of being "too creative" seems like a good way to go. Oh well. It was nice to be back in the well-run and cranking mb studio for a weekend.
And to make myself triply crazy, I picked up a small design job to create an identity and site design for an innovative new online survey company. More on that hopefully once it's up. And fourthly, they put me onto another quick-turnaround job to design some banner ads for this search engine. Which I barely pulled off with the assistance of a brilliant junior from my ad class (thanks Joey.) No, really: brilliant.
After all that writing and designing and shooting I was overjoyed to go home for xmas and see what the crazyfun bros and sisses were up to. And me mum.
Got a whammer of a piece of news from my her: new diagnosis of Alzheimer's. . This is really sad cause her brain is my mom's best feature, and one of the only pieces of equipment that hadn't already gone south on her. The good news is she is in very early stages (so early all of us actually didn't QUITE notice it, or wrote it off to just the general where-are-my-keys kind of degrading of the memory we all experience with age). But looking back on it there were some definite warning signs: more than the usual amount of hearing her ask the same questions over in a later conversation, and a couple incidences where she got really mixed up and upset about some things that wigged us all out. So, in a way, good to know what's going on, on the other hand, what a horrifying disease and one that my sister already witnessed firsthand in her mother-in-law - and it ain't pretty.
But we laughed, ate and drank (sometimes all at the same time) ourselves silly as usual. The nieces and nephews are near-adults all round and add another layer of interestingness to the lemonies. Brill Ize is now a research assistant at The Fed. Equally brill Hann is off to do an internship herself at a pediatric developmental psychologist in Indianapolis (who knew such existed?) and if you need a pediatrician in about 6 years - look her up.
Came back from that and wrapped up the Nitro job with a shoot and postproduction few days and then had to kind of exit prematurely to go on vacay YIPPEE.
To be continued.
