- Available Worker
Last Friday, my buddy Evan and I decided to make some snazzy hats at work that we could wear so people know that we are available to help with any image searching, comping, mounting, cutting, printing, scanning, laminating, designing, coffee modeling, t-shirt making, proofing, errand running, cutter key finding or any other of the many things that an advertising studio does on a daily basis. I was able to finish mine yesterday. Yes, I can send an “Available” email, but wearing a funny hat is just so much more fun. The process of making the hat and the initial wearing of the hat caused enough of a stir to be featured on the W+K Studio blog:
- Who’s not obsessed with TED?
I am. Here’s the link if you haven’t visited it yet:
- The Girl Effect.
Check out the site.
- Designers and Plastics
I’ve been pretty intrigued by plastics lately. I think learning how bad certain plastics are for us is what sparked it. I finally threw out my beloved Nalgene bottle yesterday, even though I replaced it a few weeks ago. Portland is also changing it’s recycling program. Two huge new recycling containers arrived on the step last week. According to the pictures on the containers, we can now recycle a whole lot more than we used to.
So I was really excited when I found KT Meaney’s article “Greening the Grocery Store” on Design Observer. It talks about the confusing resin identifying code founded by the Society of Plastic Industry in 1988. KT describes a class that she has developed at North Carolina State University to solve the design problem.
For a more extensive look at the projects, go here.
- Brand Slogans
I am pretty into branding. I think it is very important. When I buy products, I am sometimes snobby about the packaging and branding design. So much so, that it affects my decisions as much as price and ingredients, etc. I tend to assume that this is how most designers function.
So what about the brand slogans? How important are they? Do they really affect the brands we use and buy? I took a quiz today on Brand Slogans, and failed. Some of the slogans were pretty suprising. And bad. At least in my eyes. So what makes us remember a brand? Do slogans even matter?
I started to think about things I use, and stores I visit and I realized that I don’t know many of their slogans. For example, what is Apple’s slogan? After doing a small amount of internet research, I still have no idea. Unless it is “It just works” from 2006. And even this is not familiar to me.
The one and only slogan that sticks into my head is “Just do it”. In school, I had the slogan hung above my studio desk. I would stare at it and I would be motivated to just get my work done, instead of complaining to myself about it. So there is a successful slogan.
Then I wonder … is a slogan successful based on it’s written quality or by how it is used and by how much it is used?If you would like to take the quiz go here.
- Flobots!
New video for Handlebars! Unfortunately, I can not embed it, so you’ll have to click on this link to check out the animation for yourself.
- Open House
Last weekend I was in Chicago and I attended the Illinois Institute of Technology’s open house. If you haven’t been on the campus, I highly recommend you go.
Mies van der Rohe designed many of the campus’s buildings, including the College of Architecture’s stunning Crown Hall. The work presented by the students of the College of Architecture is pretty fabulous as well. Here are some photos of what I saw:
