Advertising...it's not for everyone

I've never been so challenged as a designer until I took an advertising class (Art 445). In the 9 short weeks i've been taking Art 445, I am now armed with an appreciation for advertising that i've never had before Whenever I now come across effective ads, I can really appreciate the creativity and cleverness behind them. Just the thought of the time and effort the designers had to put in for ads I can't even imagine. We're only given a few weeks to come up with ads in class, I wonder what kind of time there working with, and is it just one designer or a team of designers. Anyhow, I find advertising a very challenging field which I probably won't get into, but when executed properly it amazes me. Kudos to advertisers.

I love this ad, its so simple and direct, yet clever.

(I could of thought of that!)

Living Social Commercials

I don't know if any of you guys have seen these commercials but I think they are very clever.
Coming from a theatre and design background I can appreciate the creativity they put into them. I love the continuous movement and effortless transisitions from scene to scene. It's definitely one of those rare commercials you can appreciate. Though I would have liked to seen more typographic and motion graphic elements incorporated into them. Either way, it's a pretty cool commercial thats visually eye catching and memorable. Because of these commercials I ended up becoming a member of Living Social. Great advertising, check it out on YouTube. I tried posting the link but it's not coming up.

Gauge presents John Coy

John Coy Lecture

On May 12, 2011 I attended the John Coy lecture in the Music Hall at CSULA. I had high expectations prior to attending the lecture. I had spoken to Michael Lejeune, the Creative Director at Metro Design Studio, if he knew about John Coy, and he mentioned that John probably wouldn't know him but he definitely knew John. He also mentioned that John was just recently awarded the AIGA/LA fellowship. So with that in mind I was pretty excited to attend the lecture. 

Aside from the technical difficulties during the first half of the lecture, John was pretty casual, as with most of the speakers. I found it interesting that it sort of became a question and answer session because of the technical issues. For about the first hour of the show before they got the projector to work I was getting a little anxious, borderline bored. I felt like some of the issues they were talking about were issues that I already understood. They were having conversations that I wasn't really interested in, but It was probably because that wasn't planned so something had to happen. What I was really interested in learning about was John and his career, which I feel we really didn't get a chance to discuss. When the projector finally started working he did show us some of his work. The first image he showed us was the Washington Mutual logo. That really woke me up and caught me off guard. I had no idea that John was the person responsible for designing the Washington Mutual logo. The logo is so recognizable all over the country and he designed it. I thought that was pretty cool. Other than that I wasn't really impressed by his work. He did create some interesting pieces but for the most part, his work was pretty decent. Another one of his pieces that I thought was pretty interesting was when he took images of flowers and scanned them, and created some interesting mirror images that looked like animal faces. It looked experimental but I thought it was interesting.

Overall my expectations were not well met. After the lecture I walked away feeling that I was given information that I already knew rather than getting inspired. Don't get me wrong, John comes across a very friendly down to earth person, and I'm sure he's accomplished a lot in his career, but I wish I saw more of his accomplishments. I wanted to discover his design thinking and find out what makes him love what he does. For a designer whose been in the field for so long I expected to see and learn more, however I feel like I didn't. On top of that I feel like his presentation wasn't that great, like he just  put together a bunch of photos for a slide show. But I do appreciate how he interacted with the audience and spoke to us about all issues design related.

Found this is Comm Arts

I came across this article in Comm Arts a couple of months ago. I thought it was pretty interesting. Living in LA it's pretty hard to miss these billboards, there all over the buses and the side of the freeways. At first I thought it was a pretty simple and clever campaign, and to the point. Now that I work as an intern for Metro Design Studio, this campaign is 9 years in the making. With Michael Lejuene as Creative Director,  which he was appointed in 2002, he's responsible for changing the face of Metro. With no change to the operation of the buses and rails, but because of Lejuene's re-branding, Metro's ridership increased to over 70%. This just goes to show the power of good simple design. It's great to be a part of. If any of you have seen Metro's "haiku" billboards, how do you guys feel about it?