Garin's Random, Sometime's Advertising Blog

I Still Have a Blog?

2009-11-09T20:30:00.005-05:00

So I realize that I haven't posted of my blog for some time, and that is due to a few things.

1) This is a design blog, and over the summer I was busy working for a marketing firm that worked for the theatre industry. It was a great experience and I had an amazing summer, but none of the work that I needed to do was design work.

2) I spent a lot of time out enjoying NYC instead of at my apartment designing. I have never spent so little time in my apartment than this summer, which makes sense I guess. NYC kept me busy with theatre, the park, friends, just loving everything about it.

3) I never just found the time while interning full-time, plain and simple.

Now that I am back at Ithaca for my senior year, there have been a lot of things on my mind that I will be posting about in the near future. But I think the big one is graduation. What to do when it happens? Where to go? I would love to go to portfolio school, as I've talked about in previous posts. And awesome news, I got accepted the Creative Circus down in Atlanta! However, I would love to be able to get a job or paid internship in either NYC, Boston or Chicago for the summer following graduation. There are a number of agencies I would love to work for, so I am hoping that I can find something when it comes closer to graduation.

But in the mean time, I have done some design work. Because there is one agency, Spot Co, that I would love to work for, I am tailoring my portfolio for them because they specialize in theatre advertising. I have designed three new theatre posters, for two different shows. The first show is one of my all time favorite plays titled The Cripple of Inishmaan, by Martin McDonaugh.

The second play that I did a set of posters for was Dying to be Thin, a show about a woman's struggle with bulimia. While the posters are graphic, I think that the represent the shows graphic nature as well. It is not a "shock for shocks sake" design choice. It was done because it was appropriate for the show.

As usual, all opinions are welcome. I am trying to get a job in the industry, so I am just trying to get better. More posts will come about other design work, logo redesigns, portfolio school/job news and NSAC's in the spring!

District 2 NSAC Results

2009-05-06T01:39:00.006-04:00

This past weekend, Bento (or the Ithaca Advertising team) went to NYC to participate in the 2nd District of the National Student Advertising Competition. We have been working all semester on this campaign, which is for the Century Council (Anti Binge Drinking). This day of district two, after two teams dropped out, had nine schools competing.

After working together this entire semester, it was such an amazing feeling to present our ideas to this great set of judges. The judge panel included the founder of People, Ideas and Culture, an Exective Creative Director from Publicis, as well as a member of the Ad Council, a woman from Ogilvy and a media guy from another one of the big agencies. When it came time to present our ideas, it went over incredibly well. Than it was time for the Q&A section with the judges.

While the member of the Ad Council had one question, none of the other judges had any questions. They just told us how amazing out campaign was and how refreshing it was to not be any form of scare tactics. While most teams had the full 10 minutes taken up by questions and inquiries, ours lasted approximately a minute and a half.

Than three hours it was time to hear the results...Although not as high as we wanted, we got third. With Pace coming in at second and Syracuse taking the win. I wasn't extremely impressed with either campaign, but whats done is done.

Working as an agency, we did an AMAZING job. A great group of people, a refreshing non-profit client to work with, and so many other things made this class the best I have ever taken. It reminds me why I chose my major and why I want to do what I want to do. If anyone out there reading this wants to see our work, just let me know and I can send it out. At the same time, I received a great amount of contacts while doing this. And hopefully I can transition that into a job once I graduate next summer.

I still want to work for an ad agency as a junior art director once I graduate. So much fun. But I have another ad lab left, and hopefully we put together as good a campaign next year as we do this year. But it will be a new group of people and a new client, so we will see what happens.

Website Style

2009-04-11T18:04:00.002-04:00

So February of 2008 I registered www.garinbulger.com and did not use it for the next year. About a week and a half ago I finally signed up for hosting, and have since then, been building my website. Thus, below.

That is what I have so far for the main page. Simple. Very me. Very easy. Any comments?

Why I want to work for a beer client someday

2009-04-11T17:54:00.002-04:00

So this spot came out for Heineken a few weeks ago, and I think this spot should have been a Superbowl spot. It had that feeling to it. Short, simple, and outrageously funny. When I get out of school and go to work in the advertising industry, and I really hope to work for a beer client, because how much fun would that be?

Sold out in the UK

2009-03-12T10:49:00.003-04:00

The Sony Bravia sold out in Britain, and this commericial was downloaded from the website over 20,000 just 2 months after the spot aired. It is amazing.

Try downloading it in high-res, because this spot will blow your mind.

A Different Take of Advertising

2009-02-12T00:53:00.002-05:00

FRUIT CHEWS

CHARACTERS
JASON. A young art director, working at an advertising agency in the big city.
CHASE. A young copywriter, has been partners with Jason since portfolio school. He is a bit sarcastic and speaks extremely quickly.

THE SCENE
The curtain rises on the open floor of a highrise office building in New York City. Unlike typical building floors, there are no cubicles or squared off working areas. There are big tables with storyboards and art supplies thrown randomly on them. The walls are covered in framed advertisments, with a modern look to the entire room. The room continues off stage right and there is a door to an office on the back of stage left. Jason is sitting in a chair around the table looking up at Chase who is standing next to him.

SCENE ONE
JASON
This idea sucks. It sucks bad. I mean, wow, this is bad. If we should this horrible idea to the client, we will be laughed out of the presentation.

CHASE
No! It doesn’t! Come on Jason. This is a great idea! Fruit rollers, the fruitiest snack a kid can have!

JASON
The fruitiest snack?!

CHASE
Yeah! I love fruit. Fruit is great. Strawberries. Blueberries. Blackberries. Boysenberries. What’s wrong with fruit?!

JASON
Dammit, Chase!

CHASE
More of a meat guy, huh?

JASON
...I do enjoy a good steak now and than.

CHASE
Of course you do! Who doesn’t enjoy a good steak?

JASON
With some mashed pot- Chase, we need to focus!

CHASE
Right, right. Of course. So I still don’t see what’s wrong with the line we have now.

JASON
It’s horrible! What do you think people are going to think of when they see that?

CHASE
That it is an extremely fruity snack. We’ve been over this.

JASON
No! That it’s a gay snack! No one will eat it if they think it’s a gay snack!

CHASE
It is not a gay snack! It is a fruit snack for children. Kids like fruit, right? I loved fruit as a kid. I loved baseball too. Ooo, maybe we should give the fruit snacks a baseball theme!

JASON
We cannot give these a baseball theme! The product is already out, we just need to make the line a little less suggestive!

CHASE
(Getting more and more excited)
Ok, how about the best snacks under the stars. Moon! Sun! Galaxy!

JASON
Stop refrencing the snacks to outer space!! Chase, I would say you are off today, but that would be a massive understatement. You ideas are SHIT. Not even fair smelling, rich person shit, but the driving through the meadow with the windows down and smell the cows shit!!

CHASE
You are an interesting guy Jason. But we need to focus, try to think.

JASON
What the hell is the matter with you!!

CHASE
Woah, getting a little angry there? You are just being no help to this line re-write.

(beat)

JASON
I don’t know how to deal with you! All we need to do is re-write this line! Just do it! Got milk! Where’s the beef! Think Different! Come on. These are all great lines and we need to create something that doesn't carry an air of a gay fruit snack with it!

(beat)

CHASE
Melts in your mouth, not in your hand?

JASON
(Enraged)
M&Ms!!!

CHASE
(Laughing)
No, I’m just fucking with you. Why don’t we take the line, berrytastic, and build the campaign around it. Sort of the the Drinkability campaign for Bud Light, but for kids.

JASON
I...actually like that. A lot. WHY DID IT TAKE YOU SO LONG TO SAY THAT!

CHASE
We’ve been partners how long?

JASON
7 years-

CHASE
-7 years, and when do I ever give it away for free?

Worst Mascot Ever

2009-02-09T16:03:00.001-05:00

I loved Tony the Tiger. Love Frosted Flakes. I do love Cheetos, but I will never buy them again because of the creepiest character ever created. Why???

Superbowl Ads (Long Past Due)

2009-02-09T13:44:00.003-05:00

So I realize that the Superbowl was a full week ago, which is the single biggest ad day of the year, and I had yet to comment on it. Besides the ads, it was a GREAT game, besides the fact that the Cards lost. I really thought they had it at the end with that 7o yard Fitz sprint.

Back to what really matters, the ads. So looking at the entire game, there were some truly great and truly horrible commercials. Cash for Gold? No place in the Superbowl. Alec Baldwin and Hulu made an impressive entry into the ad world, giving the online TV site a personality and a face.

Another commercial that did creative a lot of buzz, but didn't really deliver with the actual ad was the Miller High Life commercial. About two or so weeks before the game, a commercial for High Life came out with a warehouse worker talking about how all he would need is 1 second during the game to create a great commercial. But after watching the entire game, I did not see the ad until the very end of the fourth quarter. But at the same time, I was thinking about it during the entire game and I just happened to be drinking High Life during the game.

I loved the Bud Light and the Doritos commercials. The Drinkability commercial where the board meeting is going on and the worker suggest not buying But Light and is subsequently thrown out of the window had me in tears I was laughing so hard. And the Doritos commercial where the magic crystal ball is being thrown around did the same thing to me. I think these commercials were the funniest, but the Doritos did not work to create or improve on the image of the brand. Drinkability is an amazing positioning campaign.

I hope Hulu creates more spots on their current positioning. I loved it. Superbowl 43, mild success. I hope I get the chance one day to creative a Superbowl spot.

Back For a New Semester

2009-02-03T20:20:00.005-05:00

So I am back again with a new round of classes. This semester I will be participating in Ad Lab, our senior advertising lab. As a class we participate in AAF's National Student Advertising Competition, which draws 120+ teams every year. Ithaca always does really well, its difficult because we are in District 2 which is the toughest District in the country with schools such as Syracuse, NYC, Baruch and approximately 20 other schools in the area.

This year, the client is The Century Council, which are the distilleries against drinking. Ridiculous, I know. And with a smaller client, its a smaller budget of only $10m. But it should be a great semester, as I am in the creative dept and I want to be the Creative Director next year.

So all we have really worked on this far in the creative dept was choosing our agency name, and I think we settled on "Bento", which is a Japanese lunch that includes everything in it. So the idea we are going with is we are bringing everything together. I have a few ideas for the logo, and I'm pretty sure we are just going to go with a text treatment or custom font.

Here's what I have so far.

This will the first post of many for this semester. So enjoy, and as usual, any critiques are welcome.

Yet More Stuff From Brand Design

2008-12-17T19:04:00.004-05:00

This final seemed like it was never ending, but I think I got a lot of good material from it. Part of the final was having to design an alternative project, anything I wanted, for the brand. So I decided to design a dive map, because it seemed like a logical direction to go. So here it is, comments are welcome.

Here is another random thing I had to design.

Annual Report Cover

Underwater Business Card

2008-12-13T22:13:00.004-05:00

Ok, so for part of my final for my brand design course, we had to redesign the business cards we originally did for our companies. I decided to take a completely different approach with this set, as you can easily tell if you check out my original one done.

The first one shown is the front, with the second being the back. I decided to take a distinctly underwater feel with these, and I really like how they turned out. I feel like they definitely convey what the brand is all about. A vast change from my first set.

History is Happening

2008-12-09T19:09:00.002-05:00

I firmly believe that when purchasing cable you should be able to decide what channels you get, and just pay per channel. If I had the option, I would purchase
1) NBC
2) Food Network
3) History Channel
4) Discovery Channel
5) ESPN

When the History Channel first started, it should have been called either the WWII Channel or the Nazi Network. All it aired were documentaries about the Nazi Party in WWII. Extremely entertaining, but a little limited in scope. But in the last few years, the History Channel has released a great number of shows that go all of over the place in terms of how long ago the events happened. So this campaign is my attempt to draw attention that the History Channel is not just airing WWII things, but that history is happening now and you can now check it out on the History Channel.

Wetsuit Design

2008-12-06T11:20:00.003-05:00

For our final project for Brand Design, we have been assigned to create an annual report and an alternative design project for our brand. My brand, Atlantis Diving, a custom dive shop, has been a lot of fun to work with this semester. And for the final project I have decided to create the staff wetsuits for our company. My first venture into fashion design.

At this point, I actually would love to be able to design my own wetsuit.

Ford Has Finally Found a Voice

2008-11-27T19:52:00.005-05:00

For years I really have not been able to tell the difference between Ford, Chevy, and Dodge trucks besides the logos on the front of the trucks. But at this point, with cable readily available while home for Thanksgiving break, a new campaign for Ford F-150's have rolled out and I am floored.

This great graphic style paired with the voice of Dennis Leary is amazing in my opinion. At this point I would never buy a truck, but if I did, I would go for a F-150. The way the type flows with the graphic treatment to it is so eye catching.

And honestly, the more you see the ads, the more you notice the little things that make you laugh when you see the spots. I don't know what agency handles the Ford brand, and I'm even more stunned that Ford has any money to advertise when they have no money to run their company. But that goes to show you, hard to sell a product without advertising for it. My industry will always be needed.

Bravo Apple

2008-11-23T22:10:00.002-05:00

Last weekend the FIT hosted the annual AWNY Student Conference in NYC. During the main part of the conference, students attended certain workshops that interested them in all the different areas of advertising. One of the workshops I went to was about interactive advertising and one of the things that stood out in my mind was when she said that interactive is no longer about banner ads and landing paged, its more. But for my brand design course, we are now at interactive and can you guess what we are doing? Banner ad and landing page. Fun. But here is a fantastic banner ad, and of course, Chiat/Day doing work for Apple.

Web Design, Attempt #1

2008-11-18T21:24:00.004-05:00

For my brand design class we had to create a home page for our company. My company sells high end, custom SCUBA dive trips across the world. This is what I came up with after a many critiques and just as many drafts. Comments are welcome.

Another path for design...

2008-11-14T00:24:00.005-05:00

So today in my branding class Hayes Roth came to lecture and have lunch with a select few of us. Mr. Roth is the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of Landor Associates, which is the largest branding company in the world. He showed us case studies on Smirnoff, BP and and the second largest bank in Brazil. It was amazing some of the work that was put out by Landor. They updated the logo from British Petroleum from an old, green shield to a modern and exciting logo.

So the idea that going into branding would allow a design student to not only design advertisements solely, but everything a company has to offer is extremely appealing to me. I am by no means turning my back on advertising, I still want to go work at an ad agency and be an art director, it is just very cool to see new options open up in the commercial design area. On the advertising note, I saw a very cool campaign. It's a campaign to encourage voting turnout, and I think is very creative.

Wiki Ads, how to learn anything about anything

2008-11-08T18:26:00.010-05:00

So I decided to work on a campaign for Wikipedia because I owe so much to it, and its fantastic free information. Honestly, half of the time I'm using Wikipedia is because I am playing a game my friends and I like to call "Five Clicks to Jesus". This is when you start by clicking the 'Random Article' button, and you now have 5 clicks to get the Jesus Christ page. I have never once not been able to accomplish this feet, it is a very addicting game.

Random Article:
Andrey Mizurov: A Kazakhstani professional road bicycle racer born in 1973.
January 20, 1973: President Richard Nixon was inaugurated.
His Democratic challenger was John F. Kennedy, and the race remained close for the duration.
John F. Kennedy was officially a Roman Catholic.
The Catholic Church defines its mission as spreading the message of Jesus Christ.

No matter where you start, you can always do it. And honestly, I feel like this translates into a good campaign that shows the dexterity and versatility of Wikipedia. Any and all comments are welcome.

Proud to be a Bomber

2008-11-05T17:40:00.003-05:00

So at last nights Obama rally at around 12:30, a camera was passed up to the highest point on the quad and you can see us all singing the National Anthem. At around second 12 or so, you can see me, my girlfriend Jenn and my friend Connor on the bottom right of the screen. I am wearing the brown jacket. This is pretty cool and I am very proud to be an Ithaca Bomber right now.

President Elect Obama

2008-11-05T11:14:00.005-05:00

Last night, after a two year campaign, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States. My friends and I watched election coverage from around 1pm until Obama gave his speech at Grant Park in Chicago. We just witnessed history from so many different angles, and I couldn't be happier. After donating time, money and effort, Obama was elected. And not on a platform of fighting or fear, but hope, change and challenging the status quo. I just want to say congratulations to President Obama, I am far more hopeful for the next four years than I had previously been, and congratulations to everyone who fought and voted for him and this election. Like he said in his speech, this was our victory and we will not forget this.

As soon as Obama's victory had been announced, students poured into the Ithaca College quad. Out of a campus of 6,500 students, where only 4,000 or so live on campus, I would say about 2,000 rushed to the middle of the campus and marched accros campus screaming and shouting. I have never been happier to be an Ithaca College student, or a college student in general.

Boston Sports

2008-10-30T20:10:00.003-04:00

I am not a huge Phillies fan, and in light of them playing the Rays (not a fan either), I am going to congratulate the Red Sox for winning two World Series in the last few years. At the same time, good job to the Celtics for winning the NBA Championship last year and to the Pats for just being generally awesome. Good job Boston sports at being the most dominant city in American professional sports in the current age.

Package Design

2008-10-28T17:08:00.009-04:00

I have realized that one of my guilty pleasures is package design, and in terms of drinks and alcohol, bottle design. I believe it has the most impact on a purchase because it is the last thing you see before you decide to put it in your basket, or cart, or whatever you may have.

Alcohol bottles, whether wine, beer or liquor, always seem to be the most eye catching. Color, shape and typography all lend themselves to creating these fantastic bottles. Half the reason I purchase any alcohol bottle over another is due to the bottle and packaging.

There is a reason that brands put a lot of money into making sure that these bottles look fantastic, because they can turn a customer off with bad packaging just as easily as they can turn one on with good. When I see a poorly designed package or bottle, I immediately either think poorly of the brand, or will never even consider buying the product.

When looking at this bottle, which is not rubbing alcohol, but a brand of vodka, I think about what kind of brand they are. It is not eye catching, and if anything, it makes you think of a medication bottle. I am personally a fan of very slim, simplistic designs. Anyone could tell this by looking at my bottle collection. Below are some more bottles that I enjoy looking at. Enjoy.

Man Scented Candles

2008-10-25T01:27:00.005-04:00

Last year I did a campaign for a fake company called Mandles, which is manly scented candles for men and perhaps the craziest creative concept that I ever put to ink. My attempt was to create a little bit of driving force to purchase because I believed this was such a novelty product. So I created a two sided ad campaign where the dotted line is perforated to create a coupon to create that driving force, as well as a sort of viral aspect to it because people can pop them out and either collect them or trade them.

Modernista! Here is the craziest idea I've ever done for the creative intern application.

Leaving Your Mark

2008-10-24T02:19:00.005-04:00

Last year while on the e-board for AAF, I headed a campaign for Imprint Magazine. Imprint is a Ithaca College funded magazine that attempts to keep itself distanced from the school and just cover college issues. They were tired of the boring, static brand that they had inherited from the previous generation and wanted a clean start. So we decided to design something fun for them, that could be seen all over campus. And here is what we came up with.

Leaving your mark. That is what imprint was all about. They didn't just cover stories, they lived them. And wherever they went, they left their mark so you could tell where they had been. All of these are 5"x5" window clings that were put around campus.

WPP Hiring Freeze

2008-10-23T20:53:00.003-04:00

So last week the holding group WPP ordered a hiring freeze for all of their agencies including JWT, Ogilvy, Y&R and Grey. These are four of the largest global ad agencies and this kind of frightens me a little. I understand that with the current crisis that all costs need to be kept at a minimum, but I believe that if you are not cycling in new staff than an agency will get stale. And where does this leave the new era of ad workers (i.e. me)? I know that smaller agencies will continue to hire and that if I search hard enough I will find something, but this is just not a good feeling with the real world so close.

Philips Universal Remote

2008-10-21T21:57:00.008-04:00

I recently bought a universal remote because I had three things running and no remote to control them. This got really annoying when trying to access alternate features of DVDs. So last night I was fed up, and at 11pm or so I drove out to my local Wal-Mart. I of course bought the cheapest one, at a whopping $7.95. It was glow in the dark, it controlled TV, games and DVD and that was all that I needed. So I brought it home, immediate realizing that I didn't have AAA batteries. But after begging certain friends I got the batteries and started trying to program the remote. Now to program the remote to the TV was easy, I didn't actually have to do anything. But getting the remote to work with the DVD player was beyond difficult.

I tried all of the regular codes that are supposed to work for a certain brand, but my TV, being approximately 75 thousand years old, didn't work with any of them. So they then suggested (they being the manual that came with the remote) that I should click setup, and then on Ch+ about 300 times, because that's how many codes there were.

So when I finally stumbled on the right channel, I realized why the punching in of the codes didn't work. When I hit 6, my TV thinks I'm hitting play. With 2, it thinks 1/2 speed playing. Every button minus 3 on my remote actually did something else. Some buttons did absolutely nothing, but some did complete opposite things.

So I am back at square one, where I can hit "6" to play, but I still can't click left, down, right, or up. I don't know if talking to someone at Wal-Mart would do anything, but this remote is one of the most confused piece of electronics I've ever dealt with.

Obama's Comedic Counterpart

2008-10-19T22:47:00.005-04:00

While flying back and forth to NH for fall break I bought two copies of Rolling Stone and was actually pleased with the level of good advertising in it. They were funny, well placed and vastly outnumbered the bad ones. But there was one that particularly caught my interested.

This was on one page.

Which was directly followed by this on the next page.

These were outrageously simple, but they stuck out the most to me in the entire magazine, which included ads from Old Spice, Absolute, Orbit Gum and Trojan Condoms. Bravo to whatever AD & CW team thought up these.

Adverteasing

2008-10-19T20:48:00.006-04:00

The game of slogans, commercials and jingles. 1980s.

Fantastically difficult game, but no one ever wants to play.

Meghan McCain

2008-10-17T15:05:00.002-04:00

'Live Free or Die' is the NH state motto. And Meghan McCain, while visiting Nashua said that if her dad won NH in the November election than she would get the state motto tattooed on her somewhere. Great McCain election tactic? Or great marketing for NH?

May I suggest?

Obama and McCain's Last Debate

2008-10-16T19:59:00.002-04:00

Last night on Wednesday night, Obama and McCain squared off in their third, and final debate at Hofstra University. I won't hide my enthusiasm and support for the Obama campaign, but this campaign was pretty much the same old thing. Obama is ahead in polls in the national setting and all of the swing states, so he played it safe. While McCain, behind in all of the polls went on the attack the entire time. The most interesting discussion was on negative campaigning.

McCain claims Obama is running the most negative campaign in history, while Obama claims 100% of McCain's ads are negative.

Both are wrong.

McCain has run positive ads in the past, but as of now all of his ads that are running are negative. Overall, about 71% of his ads have been negative in nature.

Obama has a lot more money at his disposal so a lot more ads are coming from the Obama camp. But at this point, only 63% of his ads have been negative.

I have never once seen a negative ad in my life and then thought better of the candidate sponsoring it. Shape up guys. I expect more from Obama, as I am voting for him. I realize my bias, and will at no point attempt to cover it up.

Risk. A World of its Own.

2008-10-13T23:44:00.009-04:00

I did a campaign last year for class and have been battling myself over whether this print campaign has any real promise or if it is just very...student work. I tried to give Risk a new look with males 18-24 by showing the energy and passion that goes into Risk when you play. It is not just a board game, but it is its own world. I showed this to an AD at Saatchi and Saatchi and he sent me a link to the award winning campaign for Risk that had the invaders occupying a major landmark of another country. Fantastic idea.

Any and all comments are welcome. In my opinion, the visual stand out a lot, especially when compared to a lot of other ads. But I am just not sure about them, whether they would be looked at as purely student work or not. Now I need to stop procrastinating and study for the remainder of my midterms, which include: Principles of Marketing, Brand Design and 20th Century American Drama.

Discovering the Undiscovered

2008-10-12T20:08:00.010-04:00

So I think I have finally finished my campaign for Atlantis Diving. Well, as much as I will ever consider it finished, I will always find flaws in my own work that need to be corrected. But here are all three, tell me what you all think. Any and all comments are welcome.

Just for class purposes I have to do a different layout on the moon piece, but I think the campaign is at a good point at this time. I do want to keep working on it and updating it so it will be good enough to go in my book eventually.

Portfolio School/Post-grad ideas

2008-10-11T15:16:00.009-04:00

Yesterday I got a rather hefty package from the Chicago Portfolio School in the mail. It had information from the school, a blue Sharpie with the school logo on it and an issue of the Chicago Reader, a free weekly newspaper in Chicago. This is a great way to get students interested in your school. I requested info from five portfolio schools in total and this was by far the most elaborate setup that was sent to me. The other schools included Brandcenter, Miami Ad School, Brainco and the Portfolio Center. Although I recieved really well put together brochures from Brandcenter and the Portfolio Center, the Chicago Portfolio School got me extremely excited about the prospect of portfolio school. I was actually looking up apartments in Chicago and was really pleased to discover that Chicago apartments are far cheaper than those in Boston or NYC (sidenote: Why are there no portfolio schools in Boston?).

So back to the main point of this post...With all of the work and portfolio building I am doing before graduating here at Ithaca, will I still need to go to portfolio school to get a job as a junior art director? I look at the books of students who are just graduating from portfolio school, and I can't really measure myself against them. I see some good work and I see some bad work. I am working hard right now on not only coming up with a bunch of new campaigns, but working with my professors and other creative students to make sure my work is worthy of going in my book. I have two campaigns in there already, but throughout the next three semester I should work on at least four or five more campaigns in class alone that will worthy of going in my book. However, this still bring me to my question of whether this will be good enough to be able to make it into advertising without having to shell out another $15-40k in school fees.

After talking with my creative professor, I have started searching for a summer internship for summer '09. I have already been in contact with Modernista! in Boston and have sent out several other e-mails to agencies such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Strawberry Frog, Cowboy and Wieden Kennedy. My professor told me that getting an internship would be the most important thing (besides a solid book) that would get me a job as a Junior AD. Hopefully this will all pan out and I will be able to get an internship, do some great work and after graduation get into the industry.

Dying to be Thin

2008-10-10T01:09:00.008-04:00

Sophomore year I did advertising for a theatre performance titles 'Dying to be Thin'. This was a one woman show about a woman suffering from bulimia and was a very moving show. It also happened to be directed by my girlfriend. When I did this show, I sort of took a different approach to the conventional theatre poster and created a campaign for it. I took lines out of the show and gave them characters. Seven in all. All of them had different themes and feelings, characters that were prevalent in the scene I had chosen. I wanted people to see all of the different emotions that afflictions like bulimia could have on a person. Although it was a one woman show, I created some of the characters as men so as to reach a broader audience. I don't know if I could ever put these in my portfolio being as they are not typical ad pieces, but I really like the idea I had and we attracted 320 people to two performances with maximum space of 400 total. This was for a performance associated with no theatre group on campus. We actually out earned all of the other student theatre groups who usually ran for three or four performances.

Any comments are welcome on these.

Dow -679 Points???

2008-10-09T19:49:00.003-04:00

WOW

The though of being able to get loans for school next year is becoming slimmer and slimmer. I mean, honestly, a degree means extremely little going into the industry I'm going into, but a college degree has always been a benchmark for what I need to be successful in life sort of. And next year I will be taking some amazing classes to help my portfolio. So I need to start working on a way to make sure I can get my loans for next year. Anyone reading who wants to co-sign a loan for me...might be my only option.

My Work and the Mi'kmaq Nation

2008-10-08T22:03:00.014-04:00

There are a bunch of things I love about Ithaca, but this is one of its huge faults. Ithaca is not a school for creatives in advertising. It's fantastic for the business of advertising, PR and marketing, but it does not have the classes or facilities designed to help students who want to go into creative. So I have sort of taken it upon myself to take as many design classes as I can, even repeating a few where I get to create campaigns, as well as designing my own senior workshop for creative portfolio development. So I have worked on a few campaigns for brands thus far, including: Fresca, the NFL, Risk, Mandles (fake candle for men), Atlantis Diving (fake custom scuba shop), and a few random pieces here and there. I'm going to put up one piece from my NFL campaign and my Atlantis Diving campaign here and any comments are welcome. I'm not going to explain them because that kind of defeats the point. An ad should be able to be understood by just looking at it. If it needs to be explained, its not good.

NFL

Atlantis Diving

Also, on a random note, I talked to my grandmother because I have been curious about my heritage. I'm taking a native nations class that deals a lot with various nations, predominantly the Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Nation. But my grandmother informed me I do have a little native heritage on her side from Maine and Nova Scotia. I talked with my professor and learned that that is 95% certain the Mi'kmaq. I think that is so cool, but I just want to learn more about it and I don't know how to go about it. I can look up their history all I want and it's easy, but finding out what they are up to now I think would be extremely interesting.

First Blog

2008-10-07T18:47:00.003-04:00

Hey,

so I thought I would give this a shot for a few reasons.
1) Don't see lots of family for long periods of time and this will give them something to read if they care to read.
2) There are a bunch of things I see around town and online that I feel like I should tell someone, and there are not always people around.

So at this point a week ago I started tearing ads out of magazines and putting them up on my wall. I read through a 200pg copy of G.Q. and although half of the magazine was ads, I found about four ads that I actually liked. There is a somewhat new campaign for Old Spice that came out by Wieden+Kennedy, which was a surprise because Saatchi and Saatchi usually handles Proctor and Gamble accounts. I especially love the campaign because a commercial and and a print ad featured Nell Patrick Harris...aka Barney from How I Met Your Mother and Dr. Horrible.

So I will try and update this with my own work, as well as my general ideas on politics, advertising and life.