I Heart Art

Just sayin’

When only an inflatable elephant will do.

 
Meet Tyler. The Talk elephant.
 
Tyler is a mascot for a campaign that I am working on to help flush the elephant out of the room. The project is meant to get people talking about anything. About faith, habits, names, travel, celebration, etc.
 
And, so today I got the opportunity to help set up Tyler with Jamison Merrill, an eccentric and aspiring planner and copywriter who is one of the account leads on the campaign. I say “help,” but, in reality I just sat back with my Flip cam and watched the silliness unfold.
 
Each day, for five days leading up to our festival, we’ve been inflating Tyler and puting him in a different location on the University of Oregon campus. He’s gotten a lot of attention over the week and had drummed up serious enthusiasm for Talk Fest 2010. I can’t believe it, but people are genuinely stoked about our inflatable pachyderm friend. Today, while setting him up, I could see people walk by and smile. Those who would walk by on the phone or with someone would instantly begin talking — wow, it works.
 
It’s days like this that make me excited to be in a field where this sort of thing just happens. I love the production of ideas. I love waking up early or staying up late to work on random projects … like buying a $500 inflatable and installing him all over a college campus. I can only imagine what sort of work I will be doing when my client’s budget is counted in the millions. Real elephants on campus? One can dream.

10 Minutes with Stephen Landau & Peter Yesawich Jr.

Continuing on the path of trying to interview some of the innovative thinkers in the ad/design/creative field, I wanted to post my newest set of interviews. I was able to meet up with Stephen and Peter at the University of Oregon Portland campus where they spoke to a group of about 30 of us bright-eyed ad students. Both Stephen and Peter have fairly extensive working knowledge in the digital and interactive fields and are incredible thinkers.
 
Takeaways from the day with with two and from the interviews are simple:
• Learn how to filter all of the information out there
• Look to everything for inspiration including friends and designers from other creative fields
• Realize that I am not going to be an advertiser — I am going to be an educator
• Plan for the future with what exists now
• Don’t be afraid to fail
• Ask for help & Find a mentor
 

- February 2010

Stephen Landau is a creative director and the co-founder of Substance, an interactive brand strategy agency located in Portland Oregon.

Februrary 2010 –

Peter Yesawich Jr. is a Digital Strategist & Digital Creative based in San Francisco, California. He is a motivator and visionary within the digital advertising, marketing and media space.
 
He works with some of the largest brands in automotive, financial, consumer product goods, technology, hospitality, travel, tourism and entertainment.

 
You can get more information and join their conversations on their sites.
Stephen via the Substance Blog
Peter via the Digital Buzz Blog

All kinds of minds. I’m just one.

 
I love TED. The videos are always so relevant to nearly everything that I am researching at the time. This one hits me especially in the self-doubt department — the part of my brain that says, “You should be good at everything, but you’re not.” You know that little voice?
 
It’s been a great past few years in college. I have taken everything from ceramics to math, from web design to cultural anthropology. And, with only a few months remaining, I am realizing that the greatest lesson that I have learned in school is who I am and what I am good at, which essentially equates to deep analytical thinking. What I’ve found is that I am not good at everything. I am the visual thinker that Temple Grandin mentions in her talk. I, too, think like a human Google images catalogue. I see colors and pictures, where others see patterns or words. I tried to play music and I failed at it. Not because I did not try repeatedly for years, but because it simply made no sense to me or my body. I tried to be a journalist, but I could never fit pieces of a story together painlessly. I think in pictures. I reference things on a visual timeline.
 
So what does all of this mean? It means that I am learning to be happy with the way that my mind innately works. It means that I am happy to share the load in a given project. If a campaign requires witty commentary, then I find a great writer. If it needs a media buy schedule, then I find that person, and so on. But when it needs a sharp, critical eye on design, photography or videography then I want to be that person. Of course everything requires practice and experience, but design, photography and videography is something that I love to be learning and feels natural honing that skill.
 
This does not mean that I can’t do all of the other things or that a musician can’t also be a accountant. It means that we have to find out how our mind works, accept it, and then find ways to use that potential to the fullest while letting the other minds handle the rest. It means letting others in who are great at what they do. It means that a team can make a product or project immensely better than usually just one person.

If ever there was a goddess of type …

 
This would be she.
 
In the German promotional movie Write here, right now, which was made to promote legal graffiti walls, Gemma O’Brien aka Mrs Eaves was set into the world of type stardom with her hand-drawn-type covered body. After this campaign, the FontShop invited her TYPO 2009, the 14th European Design Conference in Berlin, where she spoke and then did some more body art for this video.
 
I love the concept and execution of the movie. I think it does a great job of showing just how much she loves type. I found this video though simple searching of type sketches that people have made since lately I have been doodling a lot in my various sketchbooks. It also made me realize that over the past few years of sketching type and letterforms that I have become so much more aware of movement throughout letterforms and type.
 
It’s also made me realize what makes being a type nerd so great: you can sketch until your heart’s content and have some really great drawings without actually knowing how to draw. At first, it’s the non-artists art form in a sense. It can be flowy and ornate or solid and ridged, but it still is a letterform that basically everyone knows how to draw at first. But like anything else, the further along you go, you start to see that it really is an art form once you leave the beaten path and begin to explore and accentuate lines and curves or terminals and spurs.
 
Who knows? Maybe one day I will be good enough at sketching letterforms that I’ll have the confidence to draw them out on my body. If only I was as sexy as Ms O’Brien.