Cannes - A - City!

It's that time again. That time when I feel the urge to update my blog on what's been going on in my life lately, design wise.

On June 20th, the Dice team over at Barkley got notified we won a Bronze Lion at this years Cannes Lions Festival. This is such a huge accomplishment for the Dice.com team as well as Barkley too. The project we entered was the Dice "Code Talkers" Outdoor campaign which consisted of billboards, bus posters (both inside and out), and bumper stickers. The concept behind this campaign was to create billboards that tech people understood, geek speak or code talkers. Tech people have their own culture and their own language (well multiple languages), and so we decided to create billboards written in code to speak to those users who can understand them.  Three distinct areas were targeted, Dallas (AT&T), Seattle (Microsoft) and San Francisco (Google).

 

Another recent thing that has happened was the release of a Starbucks tumbler design I created in time for the whole All Star game craze! Basically, Starbucks currently doesn't have any Kansas City pride within their stores. No city mugs, no city tumblers, or even barista bears! Those of you who are avid Starbucks goers are familiar with that of which I am referring to. So, in an attempt to change that, I was asked to design a concept that would run in stores during the All Star game activities. It is said that Kansas City is suppose to be expecting thousands of tourists for this event, and we wanted to take advantage of that. In my attempt to capture Kansas City, I would say there's a little bit of something for everyone. I wanted to illustrate the link between Kansas and Missouri, and also wanted this to be an experience. An I-Spy experience or "Where's Waldo?" kind of experience. I also wanted the design to be seamless between the paper break, so there are many elements that are free flowing around the mug. As for the color palette, I wanted to reflect the warm, inviting, helpful nature of Kansas City that I experienced when I moved here.

I am so thankful for each of these very different experiences. I hope these tumblers do well in sales and that there will be more creative opportunities to come!

I'm Featured!

So I haven't blogged in a while, and I feel like now's a good a time as any to write a new post. I'm still a little late on blogging this information, but oh well. On Sunday, February 26, 2012, I was notified that I was featured on the website Branding Served, and on Monday, February 27, 2012, I was notified that I was featured on a UK website blog called Design Defined. Two days in a row! I was featured twice, one day after another! Man, that blew my mind, and of course made my week a whole lot better. I'll be honest and say I haven't really visited either site, so their existence to me was not known at all. Branding Served basically features great work coming from the Behance Network, and I think that is also how Design Defined found me also, but I'm not posititve.

Even before these two amazing moments happened, I would honestly have to say that I've been extremely motivated as a designer. The whole notion of being out of school, working for Barkley, obtaining emails from people who I don't know who have been referred to me. It's all been pretty great. 2012 is going to be a great year for me, and this is proof. I have not lost my momentum for creating, and I'm so thankful for that, yet there's still not enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do.

That is all for now. Hopefully more to come in the future.