Fresh

Poster design is something very close to my heart. I got my start as a designer doing gig posters for my music-promoter-intern roommate after graduating college, and have been pumping them out in the evenings and on weekends ever since.

There are rarely any rules or design parameters when doing show posters, aside from including all the pertinent information and staying within the limits of basic printing capabilities. Poster design is a virtual designer’s playground where we are given license to experiment with typography, color, illustration and layout to express our visions; there is rarely any sort of creative filter or limitation.

Given the fact that I primarily contribute inspiration posts to Fresh, and I moonlight as a poster designer while not pushing pixels at eROI, this post will combine these two constants. I would like to share some of the work of Toronto-based designer and screen-printer brother-duo Andrew and Matt McCracken, otherwise known as Doublenaut.

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We love our neighborhood here at eROI.

Nestled in between downtown Southwest Portland, and the ever-classy Pearl District, Old Town / Chinatown remains one of West Portland’s neighborhoods that has held on to some of its history and gritty peripheral personality while it has changed over the years. It’s one of the last few neighborhoods where you might see a screaming crazy person, a crowd of folks eating at a fancy restaurant, and a DIY art gallery opening all within a few blocks of each other, and its residents take pride in this edgy diversity.  It’s a happening sort of place, and a lot of creativity and progression take place right under our noses, even if we might not be aware of it every day.

Image courtesy of Portland Ground

It is in this light that a committee of people who work in Old Town banded together in 2009 to create the Old Town Block Party. The concept was simple: to get businesses, restaurants, and all of their patrons and employees out in the open, share their work and culture with everyone else, have a few beers, and enjoy some good music – all for a charitable cause.  2009’s inaugural Block Party was a big success boasting over 3,000 attendees throughout the day and donating money to resurrect the historic Hung Far Low Cocktails sign, and this year’s party promises to up the ante. Killer food, drinks, and bands are only part of the reason that this free (What?! Free?!) event is going to rule this year.

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One of the most interesting things about working here at eROI is the variety of clients in which we deal with on a regular basis. On any given day we work with large national brands, and then turn around and help a start up company grow from the ground up. In both cases, it has become essential to have a comprehensive style guide for several reasons:

For the larger brands, it is a simple way for a client to communicate the essential elements and rules as they apply to their brand in a concise document. A large brand may have multiple agencies working on projects at any given time, and this ensures consistency across the board. This is especially important when working on projects with tight timelines; there is little time for brand misinterpretation. A good style guide will cover all of the major elements, which allows for a Creative Brief to be more focused on the project at hand.

For smaller companies, a style guide is equally important as it becomes the blueprint from which the brand evolves. A small company may not have the resources to employ a marketing/brand manager, and so a style guide needs to work that much harder.

While many companies are already familiar with brand guidelines that include things like logo usage and brand statements, I want to focus instead on what specific elements should be considered for the digital space and the screen.

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My contributions to this blog have all fallen into the category of inspiration – sharing the artists, designers, and even the tunes that drive me to be a designer and part-time aspiring artist. It all adds fuel to my fire, and I’m kind of a pack rat when it comes to saving images, bookmarking portfolio sites and subscribing to RSS feeds. Taking it all in helps me put out more creatively even though this process is quite the time-suck.

In this light, I am going to continue to share this time-suck with all you Fresh readers.

This post is a spotlight on Los Angeles-based designer, art director, artist, entrepreneur and skateboarder, Michael Leon.

I have been keeping up with the guy’s projects, brands, and aesthetic for the past few years, and am constantly inspired.  He has the ability to design simply and boldly while maintaining a certain whimsical feel-good quality, leaving me with a smile on my face and a warm, fuzzy feeling in my gut.

He captures fun, skateboarding, California, drawing, and all of the youthful energy that inherently comes emotionally packaged with these things into each piece. It’s honest and original — two of the hardest things to consistently embody as an artist or designer.

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I’m proud to announce that after almost 2.5 years at our 5th and Couch location, we have finally completed our street level signage and entrance design. When we relocated from the Alber’s Mills to Old Town, it had a profound effect on our company. We became a part of a growing neighborhood with a unique energy and flavor that paired well with our company culture. Old Town isn’t your average Portland neighborhood. It’s one of the few places in Portland where I actually feel like I’m living in a real city. It’s fashion, youth, small business, food, and art. All of this juxtaposed with a dodgy past makes for an interesting few blocks. When it came time to design a sign for our new office we wanted to make sure to acknowledge the roots of the neighborhood while adding our own piece to the mix.

When we first began concepting ideas, we needed to clearly define why it was we even needed a sign. After all, we aren’t a retail space or a restaurant where people are walking in off the street for their next online campaign. Most people that come to our office know who we are and are simply looking for a clearly marked street address. It’s more way-finding than anything. We had to take into consideration things such as public transportation and parking, so we could position the sign in a place that made sense. Once people found us they needed to be buzzed in, so we also included an integrated call box into the entrance.

Initial sketches

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Everyone tries to deny it, but when it comes to celebrity gossip, we can’t help but indulge.  At eROI we have been able to enjoy our celebrity guilty pleasure for months now thanks to an opportunity to partner with No Soap Radio Entertainment to help bring their creation, Starlicious, to life online. Do you know which Oscar-winning actress briefly lived in an NYC homeless shelter?  We do!

Starlicious is an original online game show combining the competitive and addictive nature of Jeopardy-style trivia with the subject matter of Access Hollywood and US Weekly.  We were tasked with designing and developing the online environment in which viewers could watch each of the 10 episodes, shown over the 12 week season.

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We’ve been doing weekly yoga at eROI for over 3 years now. As a company, we strive to provide a return on investment (ROI) to our clients. In that same sense, weekly yoga has been able to provide an ROI to the employees. It’s a way for us to unwind and de-stress from the day-to-day workweek. The time we put into the practice provides us with a healthy mind and body that, in turn, helps us in our efforts at work. We’ve had 2 amazing instructors, Tanya and Michele, through Recess Wellness. They offer great corporate yoga packages and wellness options for the community. There are many health benefits directly related to doing yoga. Some of them include: better posture, reduced stress, a strengthened immune system, and more energy. Additionally, WebMD mentions that “yoga can help improve relationships at work.” Yoga is a wonderful part of our company culture, and its a great way to promote health and well-being.

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I’m pretty on-again off-again when it comes to seeing live music; sometimes I will go almost a year without seeing a band, but other times it seems I’m going out all the time.  (Granted “all the time” for me is every other week or a couple times a month – I don’t know how you young whipper-snappers out there go to a show a week or more.)  So far this year I’ve been to a fair share of shows and planning on going to at least a couple more in the next month.  Portland is a magnet for awesome bands (those that stop here on tour and those that live here, too), so I’d be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t get out there and see some of them!

The first live show I saw this year featured one of the latter category of awesome bands in Portland (those that live here): Deelay Ceelay. I had just downloaded their music the week before a FREE show at Berbati’s Pan (and did I mention you can download their music for FREE also?) so I was pretty dang stoked. I hadn’t seen them before so it was quite a treat.  Two guys on drums, some crazy video visuals and a hell of a lot of fun electronic melodies.  Here they are playing at the 2009 PDX Pop festival:

Deelay Ceelay are taking a break from live shows now so they can concoct new audio/visual goodies, but I can’t wait to see them again once they re-emerge from the studio. (more…)

I was chatting with a designer friend of mine recently who was telling me that he isn’t allowed to listen to music at work – not even headphones on. Apparently this office policy was created because employees need to be able to answer the phone by the second ring, and headphones would distract from that.

Okay, maybe I’m overreacting, but the first words out of my mouth were “you need to quit that job asap.” And maybe I’m just a snobby agency person, but I totally meant that. How is it possible to get through 8 -10 hours of working 5 days a week without music? As a designer? I don’t get it.

Now I work in account management, which traditionally isn’t a job that most would see as one that needs “creative inspiration” to do well, but on the contrary, I believe music is incredibly important to being successful at what we do. For me, music is the primary provider of motivation and inspiration. Now that’s not to say that other things don’t inspire me. Great creative work inspires me. New, exciting projects inspire me. Seeing a project through completion inspires me. But you must remember, most of an AE day is writing emails, managing schedules, writing proposals, putting out fires. That’s when I need that little extra boost of motivation. And for me, that motivation is something only music can provide.

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When our long-time client, Wacom, approached us with a new line of touch enabled tablets, they were looking for an integrated marketing campaign that would drive sales and exposure for their new product. Wacom was thinking about abandoning traditional print-based advertising in favor of doing only web-based advertising, which was a major change for them. We took this opportunity to dive in as a team and come up with something truly different. What we ended up creating was a truly integrated marketing campaign that took one central idea and expressed it in several different ways. The results were more than any of us could have expected.

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