I wanted to expand my web design portfolio, so I hit up one of my friends who has been making low efforts at marketing his tutoring services. I sent Mike an email with a list of discovery questions like “What is the company personality – what tone is appropriate for your organization?” His visual brand is completely undeveloped, giving me an opportunity to shape his brand through designing the website. (I originally offered to design a poster, but I felt the first step for a company/business these days is to have a functional source of information about itself.) Using what I know about Mike, his interests and design aesthetics, I assembled a series of photographs (a mini-moodboard) and then I created the rest of the Style Tile. I used Subtle Patterns for my texture choices. I will present it to him and begin the next stage: revising the style tile to get the go-ahead from the client to start the layout.
Update: I received Mike’s imput. A strong “okay” on most of it. (You’ll find that many clients have no idea what they are looking at.) Style Tiles are far from the final product and it’s hard to imagine the stylings with better copy and usuable images. I’m going to change the display font on the logo (where it says “mike’s tutoring” in a font called “Dead History”) and present him with the site map.
Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending the first ever Square Tomato’s first Brown Bag Lunch. Larry Asher (Owner at School of Visual Concepts and Creative Director at Worker Bees, Inc.) was to speak about his app, an versatile multi-media, interactive book (App-book, Do or Die) and the future of digital advertising.
From my previous blog post: “Larry Asher and Clark Kokich answer the question: How will we, as advertisers, survive in this unfamiliar terrain?”
I will tell you the answer, but first a little backstory. Who is Clark Kokich and why should we listen to him?
Business is a tough story to follow. What I understood is that Avenue A becomes the company aQuantive that became (post-writeoff) Razorfish. (this is the article talking about the acquisition, and this is the one talking about the write-down, the first quarter of loss for Microsoft, if you’re into the business side of it. If you just want to know whos and whats: wikipedia article) Larry Asher’s presentation was an eye-opener for me. I hadn’t heard of these big players in advertising are and now I realize what a big tide is rolling in. Clark Kokich is the chair of Razorfish, now, one of the world’s largest interactive agencies. And he knows that advertising is changing in big way.
People are not reading newspapers, magazines, listening to radio, or watching television as much as they are plugging in to online content. The interactive nature of the medium changes how people relate to advertising. They don’t passively soak it up. Now, they can ignore it. Adblockers are creating an ad-free world for users. How will we, as advertisers, survive in this unfamiliar terrain?
the Square Tomato office building
The Do or Die mantra: it’s not enough to say something. You have to do something. In the age of Social Media, what companies have to say about their product is usually the last thing people turn toward when finding about the product. Recommendations come first, even if it’s from a stranger. It’s more easy to trust a lone stranger on the internet than a corporation. It’s important to demonstrate quality, community, and consideration. It’s not enough to say that you are a great company. You have to be one.
Larry Asher presented the Do or Die ideas with case examples. From the GTI car model’s game to Nike’s “Write the Future” campaign, Asher emphasized that technology will allow us as advertisers to target our demographics in a way never before realized, accomplishing more and for less money. Creating an interactive way to relate to customers and encourage them to tweet, facebook, and youtube, advertising is beginning to transform into a world where experiences are king and sharing them, its queen.
Our portfolios as creatives will rapidly change. It was brought up at the Lunch that we are in advertising. We make art and words, how can that be enough? Firstly, we are creatives and we sell thinking. Advertising is about words and pictures, but it’s also about compelling stories.
The disciplines of advertising and public relations will merge. We are not just flyer-makers; we are brand diplomats. Asher encourages his clients to brainstorm about how to improve their companies. We, as diplomats, can help facilitate changes. It takes a few hours and a committed team to generate ideas on how to create remarkable experiences. It can be small things like improving the building’s appearance (he gave the example of a hospital façade that needed a good spraying down) or handing out complimentary flowers, the kind of stuff that sticks with a person after a blur of similar experiences. Or making great videos that everyone wants to share with their friends.
The interactive world that media is becoming will change how advertising works. to the point where we can’t really call it advertising. Take the Wikipedia definition: Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to purchase or take some action upon products, ideals, or services. In the future, advertisers won’t be the persuaders. It will be your friends.
Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending the first ever Square Tomato’s first Brown Bag Lunch. Larry Asher (Owner at School of Visual Concepts and Creative Director at Worker Bees, Inc.) was to speak about his “not-exactly-a-book” book and the future of digital advertising. For me especially, this whole event was a testament to social media, down to the way that I heard about it. The invitation to attend this informal “book talk” at the office in downtown Seattle was extended to me via Square Tomato’s Facebook feed.
This book talk had two parts. The Medium and the Message. I use the phrase “book talk” very loosely here. Yesterday’s presentation was indeed a talk about a book, but also about books, publishing, media and the new changes and challenges we face in the age of nonbooks. A book is a bunch of paper pages bound to a hard cover. A book is a presentation of information and ideas. With the rising increase of e-books and digital media, we need to stop and examine what a book can be. Newyorker writer, Ken Auletta, says: “If the same book is available in paper and paperless form, Amazon says, forty per cent of its customers order the electronic version.” (Newyorker article) In the case of Do or Die by Clark Kokich, it’s an app, an versatile multi-media, interactive book (App-book Do or Die).
Larry Asher is one of the brains behind the app-book. He remarked how much the world has changed due to new technology, showing a picture of Pudong (Shanghai) and its transformation after a mere 20 years (1990-2010). He compared that to the Internet and digital media. How people get their news and entertainment is very different from how it was twenty years ago. In 2008, Charlene Li publishes Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and answers the question: How will we, as companies, survive in this unfamiliar terrain? She discusses how businesses can participate in the new social medium.
Larry Asher and Clark Kokich answer the question: How will we, as advertisers, survive in this unfamiliar terrain?
It’s fun to see what comes out of my noggin. I start with a reference photo and a palate of red, blue, yellow, white and black and end up with these things. An accident of how much pressure to put on the brush created a thick bold line that inspired more like it. Reminescent of Bob Dylan as rendered by Milton Glaser.
Day 2 of the 30 day challenge. The prompt: Draw Your Favorite Animal.
My favorite animal: dan. (that’s an animal, right?) by YokosoYoksurama by Dan Helton
The final design looks something like this. I replaced the company branding with “me-ipsum.”
Today, at the internship, I got an assignment: redesign a training course completion certificate for a heath care company. I was clarifying the verbal creative brief with my project manager. He relayed the mood adjectives and I made a mood board. It wasn’t so much a mood board as much as an answer to what does a certificate (specifically “non-academic”) look like?
I used three different programs to create this. I started with making vector shapes for the logo accessories. (These things are elements done in the brand’s style, but not the logo itself. Then, I used photoshop to get some embossing effects, then I put my images into InDesign then added the text. My design reflects corporate minimalism with attention to texture to give it an “authentic” appeal. I’m going to continue to play with it. It doesn’t have that “ahh…” moment. (That sigh of relief, when you thought you might fail and then at the end, it turns out you like your design.)
Thanks to the dryer machine effect of the Internet (the idea that you will never find that other sock and that you’ll never find the author of something that’s been circulating around so much), I don’t know who started this 30-day challenge, but I stumbled upon (using the discovery engine by the same name) Allison Lehman‘s design/photography blog where she starts the 30-day challenge. She found out about the challenge from a pin on Pinterest. So it goes.
I want to encourage everyone to start this with me. I know that people give themselves reasons not to create and perhaps it’s because a lack of an audience. Here I am (and a few others that have already signed on) to start the challenge with you.
The first “showing” is tonight. We’ll post our stuff and in the evening (I’d say by 11:59pm, but if you’re late, who cares?) and congratulate each other on another day worth living because we got to create. Each day there will be a different prompt (as listed above in the image). If you skip a day, you must move on to the next one on the list. If you want to join for a prompt you are excited about and only want to do a few of them, that’s fine. But, it would be better received on the anointed day when we are all comparing notes about our favorite words, or food or whatever.
You can email me your image at katarina@countissarts.com and I’ll post it up in the gallery post I’ll make on this blog.
Recap of the Rules:
Follow the prompt of the day.
Choose whatever medium you want.
Share (with your favorite social media) in the evening.
Day 1: Yourself. I’ll be looking forward to tonight’s showing!
Kismet Arts Tangent 