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.