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!

summer so far...

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Back in March I applied for the Summer Mentorship Program at Barkley, and after a "simple" interview process, I was chosen! A couple months later and after graduation for sure, I started my journey on June 6. There are 11 interns working at Barkley this summer, but only 3 of them are design interns. I'm actually working on the Blacktop Creative side of Barkley (which is a complicated story all on its own), while the other two interns are on the Barkley and Collective Studio side.

So far the experience has been great! It began a little on the slow side, but once projects starting kicking, I was being asked for all kinds of help. Some of the clients I've been working on are Applebees, Young President's Organization, Staples, and some small projects for Blacktop & Barkley too.

For Applebees, one of my Sizzling Entree Menu Inserts got chosen, so that was really awesome!

Everything I've worked on for the Young President's Organization has gone through print. I created a logo for this years "What's the Story?" theme, and it's getting printed on envelopes, hats, postcards, etc.
I was  chosen to help with a Staples pitch, and it was pretty funny because I randomly got an email to be in the PR room and I was like "I'm an intern....is this email right?" Even if it wasn't right, I would have showed up to that meeting anyway...and what an experience that was. We created this massive brainstorm on this cork board and shot an image of it. We used that image to pitch to Staples our ideas through Prezi, which I learned in a day...though it wasn't hard. The pitch required a lot of mock up work, but I really enjoyed the speed of everything. If anything, I would like to work on more new business pitches.

I had to create custom made Blacktop stickers that would reface Barkley USB drives haha.

I created Barkley's Slimdown challenge logo. (basically the rocket with muscles haha).

On top of all of the work, there has been lots of fun things going on as well. The interns and I recently put on an Intern Talent Show Carnival, which you can see the story here. There was a party one day that started at 3 to celebrate the 7 new clients they picked up. They had a different drink for each client (I only got through 5 of them haha). On the 7th of July we went to the Livestrong Stadium Sporting KC Park for a private tour, which basically consisted of us wandering around freely and drinking afterwards for about 2 hours. This was the start of Barkley's Good Day initiative. Every quarter Barkley is going to have a Good Day, which basically focuses on ideas where doing good has created change.

With less than two weeks left, I've started to switch focus to make sure I get hired after this internship. I've been working hard, staying late, showing up on time and making smart decisions. On Monday, Don, one of the creative directors, asked me to come find him. Well, apparently 4 people have told him that he needs to hire me! 4 people said that about me...wow! I was shocked and very very thankful for those people. Basically, the interview process is about to start for me getting hired on the Barkley side. I'm really looking forward to it as I really have come to enjoy working at Barkley this summer. The internship was a great way for me to ease into a position.

SOME IMAGES OF WORK TO COME!