Boston Sports

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

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

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.

WPP Hiring Freeze

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

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

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.