So I’ve seen this shirt in like a million places all over the interwebs. Pretty awesome, right? So it was only after wandering around on my super talented friend Ashley Dailey’s site Pop + Shorty that I realize that it’s not just a shirt she sells, it’s a shirt she MADE. That’s right. Ashley rocks and I’m one degree away from internet design fame.
…I’m actually blogging on a semi-regular basis! Or at least I’ve done it more than once. My pals over at Better World Books have a blog similar to this one, the main difference being that they update theirs pretty regularly. I’ve been lucky enough to contribute a post or two or three. My magic eight ball puts the odds of me blogging for Better World Books again before I update my own blog as “decidedly so.” And then I think I heard it snicker at me.
Good times and an even better cause! Yey for reading! And blogging!
Last autumn-ish, a group of my friends got into a heated and passionate debate over grammar, thanks to a popular song by hipster darlings Vampire Weekend. It began with comma use, then escalated to an argument over how many spaces should be used after each period. Like a 24 hour cable news channel, voices were raised, positions were laid out, struck down and reiterated, and everyone left with the same opinions with which they came.
Turns out, once you get away from diagramming sentences (something they never taught us in public school) and start focusing on the way grammar should be rather than how it actually is, suddenly everyone’s got an opinion. All of which is to say that I’m going to be guest blogging from time to time at Little Red Bird, wherein I will let the world, the internets, the AP Style Guide, MLA Style Guide and Chicago Manual of Style know the way it ought to be.
My first post is already on the site, and let it be known, I take no prisoners.
So my pal Jason over at Little Red Bird, just did a blog post about how he spent an entire afternoon coming up with the perfect shade of blue for a client. Nerd alert! Although, this is coming from the girl who was the ONLY person on our entire branding team to choose the wrong shade of red in a vote on color selection (and apparently among designers there is a “wrong” shade) so take that assessment with a grain of salt. Perhaps this is why I feel a special kinship with the Tiny Art Director, a four-year old who has been providing her father with art assignments and insight for fully half of her life.
To wit, the piece entitled “Duck Biting Dinosaur,” found here:
The Brief: A dinosaur eating a baby, like last time
Artist Negotiation: How about something other than a dinosaur?
The Brief, Revised: A duck. A duck biting a dinosaur’s tail.
The Critique: I want a goat and a piggie
Job Status: Rejected
In related news, My Kid Could Paint That is an amazing documentary that you should immediately rent from your local library or nearest Netflix shipping facility. It features a pre-k artist and her meteoric rise to fame…or does it? Dum dum DUM! Mystery artist theater! It’s also a fascinating study in psychology, family relationships and the sunk-cost fallacy. Psychology, art and dramz! Oh, my!
Good news, my mother now has a new place to stalk me on the Internet! My former (and favorite) Creative Director, the mustachioed Ron Randle and his pal Karen Bennetts started a brand development agency, Little Red Bird, a while back and it finally, FINALLY has a real live Web site. Jason Gammon (my favorite art director and Klondike cohort) also gets to hang out there in their office enjoying the abundance of natural light while doing aaaamaazzing work. Like winning Best in Show at the regional Addy’s this year for their Boats for Goats posters. Sigh. I was fortunate enough to get a VIP invite to hang out at LRB headquarters for two months, and thusly, some of the writing on their site comes from yours truly (as does a fair amount of the work I did with Ron and Jason in a past life). In any event, the site is in depth enough to account for at minimum 10 minutes of web surfing time, just in case you’re looking to add a bit of Internet adventure to your life.
It was probably all part of some elaborate scheme to help Ron Randle, our creative director, pass his Spanish class, but in the end, I think we all won. Or at least Juan Marin and I did! Woo! Our campaign for the Language Academy of the Carolinas took home a gold at the Charlotte Addy’s and, we just found out, snagged us a silver at the district Addy’s. Additional props go out to Senior Craig, the only client to tell us to ever tell us to do whatever we wanted and actually mean it, and Catalina Kulczar who took the awesome photo that appears on the “Europe” ad. Whoop Whoop!
First things first. Credit where credit is due, and lots of it! Many thanks and big ups (as the Brits say) to 1310 Studios for creating my Web site and blog with limited instructions (“Make it cool”). The illustrious 1310 Studios is Jon and Sam Aron, two amazingly talented graphic designers whose work is equaled in quality only by the chicken cilantro noodle dish they often bring to dinner parties. Unfortunately, you cannot eat their graphic designs. I hear they’re working on that. In any event, check ‘em out. They do all kinds of branding, identity design, interactive design, Web development, advertising and marketing collateral, and are what the young kids like to call “awesome” or “the bomb diggity.”
