August 7, 2023

FreeLAnce Drinks

I've been working with Stephen Reidmiller to host a happy hour for freelance creatives in Los Angeles. Tomorrow is the first one and to that end we created some social assets to help advertise it. Whenever you're building a brand from scratch, no matter how small, it's an interesting exercise in figuring out what makes the most sense for the people you are trying to talk to. Especially creatives who are going to be ultra judgy about whatever you post.

The first post needed to be the most basic. It was a new idea and we were posting 2 weeks before the event so we needed to spoon feed what to expect a bit more. Whenever I teach classes I always tell my students that the journalistic 5 W's actually make a great brief: who, what, where, when, why. You don't need much more than that honestly. I employed it here as well.

Who: Advertising Creatives
What: Happy Hour Drinks
Where: Los Angeles
When: Aug 8th @ 7pm
Why: To meet other freelancers

As mentioned, since this was the first communication I made the decision to have the visual be more simplistic. Emphasize the drinking part of what we are doing and let the subhead be more playful.

I also wanted vibrant, bright colors to stand out on LinkedIn which tends to be more drab.

The second post gave us some room to play. With the idea already established and a week before the vent, we used the design language from the first post. Same fonts and layout which works well for LinkedIn's preferred aspect ratio. The preferred aspect ratio is important even though if you upload something different because when you share the post, it'll pull the image.

You aren't really dropping the image for the feed, you're designing for the share. If you're outside the aspect ratio, the image will get cropped which isn't great if you are trying to exercise the most amount of control over what you are making.

We decided to get a little meta with the visual, showing someone working at a bar on the graphic that is actually showing in the feed. And on the screen we can see they are working on the same in the same. Again, subhead is fun and should appeal to our target audience, freelance creatives who will thus understand what a day rate means and infers.

Our final post ran today, a day before the event. We wanted to reinforce the core idea that this is a social event while also playing with some of the absurdities freelancers are familiar with, requiring people to be on-site when it's not necessary most of the time. In this case, repurposing that language and showing the affect of what being remote to a social event would look like.

We'll see how many people show up but the response has been good. Honestly, my guess is 10-20 people. I'll be pleasantly surprised if more than that come but you never know.

October 10, 2020

Dog Lovers for Biden

Last week I got a message from TBWA\Chiat\Day NY President Rob Schwartz asking a favor, and when Rob Schwartz asks you for a favor it doesn't matter how busy you are... you do it. Despite it being our final week of our initial submission period for The Side Show, I told him yes.

He needed a black and white illustration of two German Shepherds wearing sun glasses in homage to Biden's dog Champ. They needed something for their social channels and I was happy to oblige. Below is the end result.