Yesterday I was inspired by my friends Bre Fern and Laura Canzono who run @BreakingAd_ on Instagram. They posted about Imposture Syndrome, which was something I could really relate to, but it made me think about what causes it. I ended up writing my own post about it on LinkedIn. I use two advertising legends as examples and one of them even left a comment.
In college I dual majored in photojournalism and sociology. Although my focus was on the photo part of journalism, I still had to take a large number of writing classes. My favorite was editorial writing with Conrad Fink.
Fink literally wrote the book on editorial writing as his book was used in college courses all around the country. It was an honor to have him as a teacher and I believe my time in his class allowed me to function as a copywriter as needed even though I'm primarily an art director.
Occasionally I still get the itch to put the pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards) because let's face it, I'm opinionated as all get-out.
Last night I was reflecting on my childhood, how the city I grew up in had an anti-billboard ordinance and how that shaped my perception of advertising. The end result was this.
The other week my friend Reilly sent me a photo of her elementary school teacher friend's classroom. If you look in the window, you might see something familiar.
The other month, my friend Sunita Deshpande asked if I could throw together a logo for her for a new podcast she was producing. The idea was to highlight the stories of anyone who wasn't part of the MadMen club (white males). As such, I threw this logo together for her to re-frame the classic MadMen falling man against the women who could take them down thanks to today's #MeToo movement.
The podcast will focus on the the stories these women and people of color have about abuse and mistreatment they received while working in the New York ad scene over the past 50 years.
This afternoon AdWeek did a write up about The Side Show. Sunita and I were interviewed yesterday so it wasn't a shock, but it's always nice to get recognized for work you've done.
You can read the story here.
A few weeks back I hinted at a project I was working on. Well, we officially launched it this morning. There will be more to come over the next two months, but feel free to check out the first ever Award Show and Creative Week focused on side projects of people in the advertising and design communities.
I have a great team working on this with me. Sunita Deshpande is my co-founder. We worked together earlier this year to create my alphabet book. We also pulled in Camilla Ciappina from Pimp My Portfolio, Bre Fernandez and Laura Canzano who run the Breaking Ad Instagram account and Maddy Kramer from inVisible Creatives to be our Board of Directors. As the project kept growing, we brought in some additional contributors as well: Yanci Wu, Andrew Thompson, Alex Escalera, Isaac Lee and Grettel Aguirre.
It's been a crazy month and I had no idea I'd be leading a team of 11 when Sunita and I first decided to go for it. It's been fun though and I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out a little under 2 months from now.
This morning I had a dumb thought and proceeded to post said dumb thought on Twitter. Then the director of the upcoming film "The Suicide Squad" actually liked it. Not topping this today, might as well call it a day.
I honestly had no intention of doing any more illustrations until my super secret project and freelance were done, but this weekend inspiration struck while while I was spending time with my girlfriend and her friend (who happened to be eating an ice cream bar).
Today I'm starting a new freelance gig at 180LA and last week I started working on a new side project that will hopefully be ready to reveal on September 1st.
That said, updates will be sparse as I'm fully committed to tackling these two items with everything I have and won't have time for the smaller art projects I tend to drop on here.
This lyric has been running through my head for the past few days, feels appropriate for everything that's going on in the world.
I posted Shower Sans on r/Graphic_Design and it became the top post with over 2,500 likes. Additionally, of all the up and down votes on Reddit so far, it was up-voted 98% of the time, which is pretty crazy (at least to me).
