I Still Have a Blog?

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

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.

Ford Has Finally Found a Voice

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.

Another path for design...

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.

Man Scented Candles

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

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.

Risk. A World of its Own.

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

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

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

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.

First Blog

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.